I sat down this afternoon to try and set up my replacement hard-drive - I've had it for over a week but the packaging was still unopened as I just haven't trusted myself to handle it safely while having a flare that was making my manual dexterity even worse than usual. After a couple of hours searching for a missing power-brick - turned out to still be in the other six-way socket block even if nothing was attached - I settled down to check the status on my various external hard drives and was stunned to find the one I thought I'd beaten to death against the edge of my desk, and the reason for the new hard-drive, is now actually working again. I'm not certain how reliably - so far so good, but in the longer term? - but I've been able to confirm that the only thing on there are my steam libraries and other gaming related stuff (I thought that was the case but wasn't 100% certain). So that means I haven't lost every save game from years of gaming, plus hundreds of hours of fiddling about with stuff. Plans were rapidly rejigged to ensure I have back-ups from that as first priority. The new drive will instead be used for rebuilding the Windows disk of my desktop.

Recent Reading:

The Wicche Glass Tavern, Seana Kelly

I'm still looking askance at the spelling choices, but mostly this book is about witch/werewolf hybrid Sam finding someone to teach her how to use her newly discovered skills as a necromancer, while simultaneously finding out that her homicidal aunt is back in town and set on driving anyone she can get her claws into to attack Sam at first sight. Oh, and Sam banging her vampire fiance Clive at every opportunity. There's a fairly ruthless plotting decision that I have problems with, not just because it is so clear an attempt to pump up the melodrama levels, but because it ultimately turns into an unseen deus ex machina that seriously undermines the climax.

Overall it's a fun series, but nothing earthshattering.

Blood Kissed, Keri Arthur

I'd not read anything by the author before, but OMG she's got a lot of books out there now I look! Her thing seems to be Australian-set urban fantasy/dark romance. This one is the first of the 'Lizzie Grace Series', with Lizzie being your typical underrated heroine with a complicated backstory. As the story opens she's running a newly opened cafe in the small town at the heart of the local werewolf reservation. Among the cafe's offerings are psychic readings, because on top of being a witch Lizzie has psychometry skills, and her business partner and best friend Belle is a witch, telepath, talks to the spirits, whips up a mean potion, and is also Lizzie's familiar (and human familiars are unheard of). And despite two set of rare talents and one absolutely unique combination they've been successfully hiding themselves since they were 18 or so. Hmm!

Despite having some suspension of disbelief issues with their backstories, I did actually like this a lot. Lizzie and Belle are relatively powerful, but they aren't killing machines, and they're both very personable. Lizzie and Belle just want a quiet life, that whole hiding thing, but they can't turn away a desperate mother who needs Lizzie's psychometry skills because her daughter has disappeared, even if it means Lizzie heading out to confront an unexpected vampire on her own. Unfortunately she's too late, and that means she's standing over a dead body when local Ranger (werewolf cop) Aiden turns up, he of the tall, rangy body and the dark blond, silver streaked hair. And as soon as we find out he hates witches its obvious he and not-currently-looking-to-date Lizzie are fated to spend the series orbiting each other.

Okay, there's a lot of predictable formula at work here, but it's well-executed formula. I only really have two quibbles - my issues with the back story, and the fact that this is an awfully white Australia. There's an Asian character who appears briefly before being put on a bus ambulance, but apart from that the only non-white character is Belle, who is described as 'ebony skinned', though it seems extremely unlikely she's Aboriginal. OTOH the physical description of the Australian bush seems pretty good.

I briefly looked at the Kindle samples for the first books in a couple of other of Arthur's series and there are definite common threads in the set-up. I'm not sure if they share a common setting or not, but it seems possible, and there are thematic links if not - Australia, a near future urban fantasy setting, and sexy werewolves. Worth a look if urban fantasy or dark romance are your things.

A Call to Arms, David Weber, Timothy Zahn (and Thomas Pope)

"Book 1 of Manticore Ascendant". So the foreword explains this is basically Tim Zahn writing in Weber's Honorverse, but should really have Thomas Pope's name on it as well, because he's Weber's continuity expert for the Honorverse, but it was left off as a marketing decision. Hmmmm.

The setting is the early years of the Manticoran Navy, and having beaten off one threat a few years ago so that Manticore can live in peace the Navy is now facing internal demands to build down its strength (despite most of that strength already being in mothballs), particularly from Earl Breakwater*, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a powerful faction leader in the House of Lords) who wants to subsume it into the Customs Service, which just coincidentally reports to him. Into this scenario wanders Travis Long, an 18yo who is deeply dissatisfied with the lack of discipline in his life. Yes, you read that sentence correctly, Travis is an 18yo who is uncomfortable because there aren't enough rules to restrict what he can do. Having unknowingly let himself be cast as the getaway driver in a jewellery heist, Travis escapes the consequences because they parked outside a Navy recruiting office and he wandered inside to ask what the Navy was like. He's not sure he's completely happy with the idea of joining the Navy, but he's definitely sure he doesn't want any part of the jewellery heist's mess.

So we get the standard boot camp montage, and while there are now more rules in his life, Travis is horrified because people aren't committed to following them. And there's more evidence of venial nobles, because the Navy aren't being allowed to feed the genetically modified part of their recruits enough to live on because some noble is convinced it'll somehow lead to enhanced team bonding. And an officer with noble connections is out to get Travis because he keeps reporting that the officer is letting people cheat in their exams (given those exams are on running drive systems he may have a point). And then there's Travis's half-brother, Gavin, Baron Winterfall, who is being used by the evil vizier, sorry, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to popularise his policies with the younger elements in the Lords, and who keeps suggesting compromises that the Navy can't avoid, but which ultimately further Breakwater's plans.

Breakwater's initial scheme is to turn the Navy's nine mothballed battlecruisers into eighteen Customs Service frigates by cutting them in half** - after all, they may as well take advantage of all those multiply redundant systems even if the resulting ships will look a little odd. Producing an initial prototype takes a year or two, and by that time Travis is in space as a junior technician and on the spot when first an asteroid mining ship has a time-critical failure, and then the new Customs frigate has an oopsie. At which point the rules-loving, flexibility-hating Travis suggests an out-of-the-box way to save both ships. And a couple of officers take notice, even if the captain won't.

Fast forward another year or two and that gets Travis dragged along on a mission to the Republic of Haven, and again there's a disaster and Travis the rules-loving technician gets dragged into the decisions by the actual officers because of his ability to think outside the box.

You can possibly tell I had a problem with the protagonist. I don't know what Zahn is trying to do with Travis, put him up there as a poster boy for all kids really want discipline? But it really didn't convince me. Okay, I'm psychologically predisposed to only thinking rules are important if they make sense, which is practically the opposite of Travis, but I'm really struggling to see where he wants him to develop, and there wasn't a tremendously clear character growth in this. The other thing to annoy me is that this more evidence of Weber recycling plots*** until they've been washed clean of the last fraction of innovation - this is a re-run of parts of House of Steel (the novella in the Honorverse companion) and of the build-down under the High Ridge government in the main Honor Harrington series.

It's an okay read, and the last third is genuinely good once it forgets about the politics, but.....

* Let's not make our nominative determinism too blatant.

** Back-End/Front-End, not lengthways

*** As another example he's done war with a bunch of religious fanatics following a falsified gospel at least three times over, (Crusade in the Starfire series, Heirs of Empire in the Dahak series, and the whole Safehold sequence).

So if you'll recall the last point in our ongoing story of woe, my desktop/gaming computer had barfed over a Windows update, leaving me with a trashed C drive, though the D drive in the computer (mostly used for games) was fine.

I've since confirmed that the C drive is readable with an evaluation copy of disk recovery software. Some folders are trashed, but only non-essential ones. Its even possible those are deleted folders and I'd moved that stuff onto the D drive. And I may even have a licensed copy of the disk recovery software on a really old laptop that'll save me buying it again.

So that brings us to this weekend.  I needed to set up to copy stuff off the trashed drive onto a new one. I have one drive enclosure to put C into, but needed another for the replacement, So I ordered an identical enclosure from Amazon and decided that the first thing I would do was check if there was space on the D drive for the recovered files - I still have to order the replacement drive, but an accessible copy of the files would be a useful first step.

So first thing to do is put the D drive in the new enclosure. And the buggering thing wouldn't open. It''s a sliding top - just like a big battery compartment - and on the one I have opens without much force. This one I couldn't budge, though my clear suspicion was that some of that stupid cling-filmy stuff they put on electronics goods to keep them shiny until opened had gotten stuck in the tracks, I was pushing, pulling and tugging at it for the better part of an hour, And I only finally got it open when I hammered a couple of jewelers screwdrivers into the barely perceptible gap and used them as levers to spring it free. Stupid cling-filmy stuff confirmed as the likely culprit.

So the open enclosure is sitting in my lap. I reach over, pick up the D drive, slide it into place, then reach out to put it down on my computer desk.

It's a left-handed reach to the only clear space. My left arm is the one with the neurological diagnosis of "something's clearly not right", and I've been pushing as hard as I can with that arm for the better part of an hour. Just as I get the enclosure up to the desk the muscles in my forearm start spasming, my arm starts twitching uncontrollably, and I rap the enclosure hard on the edge of the desk. Not once, but three times.

You can probably imagine my look of horror at what I'd just done,

*Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

I plugged it in, and nothing. Oh, shit. So I very carefully set it aside, and left it until yesterday when I'd finally gotten up the nerve to take a look at it. And it's pretty much confirmed, my D drive is dead, the computer recognises a drive has been plugged in, but says "please insert a drive" if you try and open it, The disk recovery software doesn't even get that far, it can't tell there's even a drive there.,

On the bright side, its only game stuff. On the dark side, it's every saved game from the last four years, tons of building in Ark and Valheim, dozens of hours of modding in other games.

Currently staring at my left arm thinking "You have betrayed me!"
 

The postmortem on my desktop continues, this week I've been stalled on getting the drives out. Not because I don't know how to do that, but because Dell had decided to be clever.

The D drive came out easily enough - undo cables, undo two screws, cage slides out easily enough, and then it's just 4 screws to get the drive out of the cage, and popping it into an external enclosure confirms it's fine.

The C drive was another matter, and what exactly is the use of a manual that says "we're about to switch to a blue plastic cage for the primary drive, if you come across one follow the instructions for using that" but doesn't give those instructions? Now it actually came out easily enough, just squeeze a couple of tabs and the cage slides out. But the drive isn't screwed into the cage, it's held in with four metal pins that are fixed into the cage and project into the screw holes on the drive. Even having googled "blue dell drive cage" to get the instructions didn't help, because they basically showed you flexing the cage in two sideways to pop the drive free, and my hands don't appear to be strong enough/able to get a good enough grip to be able to do that. Quite by chance I found a way to do it this afternoon, there's enough flex around the tabs to pop the pins free if you flex it one corner at a time. This is of course exactly the opposite of the instructions. Why Dell, why?

(It's probably one of those changes that saves them about 0.001p per PC because it's marginally quicker to swap the drives around in the plastic cages when they're installing Windows because the techs only need to squeeze two tabs, not screw two screws).

And of course when I checked the drive it isn't working, though as it's recognised as a drive and isn't making any horrible clunking noises I'm hoping it's recoverable and just needs rebuilding with the appropriate software (I did have some years ago and have done it previously, but I think I need to look up what's available and cheap currently - any recommendations gratefully received!).

So as I'm stuck with just laptop for a while yet I've just spent half an hour disconnecting the dektop from keyboard, screen etc and clearing space on my desk so that my laptop can sit there connected to them instead, because that means I won't be tempted just to curl up on my bed with it all day, which is probably not doing my body any good and is certainly not great for my mental health.

*headdesk* computers *headtesk*

I'm about to open up the PC to install a new drive (as the 2TB it came with is full). I've not opened up this one yet, on the one hand one of the reasons I bought it because the reviews all said it was brilliant accessible inside, on the other the last Dell I had was so badly arranged inside I swore I'd never buy one again (but did).

Of course sods law says I'll open it up, find I can fit it, but need a SATA cable.

if you don't here from me, it's not that, because I have three other DW-capable computers in the house!

When you're four days from a submission deadline, have vital changes to make courtesy of your beta (thanks Yoon!) , and the only computer with Word installed decides to stop working....

I knew my laptop needed fixing, the keyboard has been somewhat dud for months, but I hoped I could get this submission done using a plug-in keyboard before trying to repair it myself or sending it off for repair if I couldn't. (See 'only computer with Word installed' for why I was so reluctant to risk not having it). Only now the dud keyboard has decided rather than having keys that don't work, it'll have ones that intermittently decided to work constantlyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.