Monday, May 31, 2010

Kate Nash / Supercute! at Bottom of the Hill, San Francico, 8-May-2010

Oh dear. Kate Nash is a clever songwriter, vaguely in the Lily Allen genre. She doesn't have a strong voice so what she needs is a sympathetic backing. Unfortunately she seems to have fallen in with the complaint rock crowd. She has a stodgy backing band who can play (they keep switching instruments and roles) but don't know how to not play. Kate Nash herself gets to strap on a guitar and play loud but the whole effect is like having George Best on your team and putting him in goal. The best part is when she is joined by support band Supercute! who are surely destined for world domination.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Recovering a usb hard drive

I have a load of mp3s on an external usb hard drive. Before our office move I backed these up to another usb hard drive. At the new office the original disk was giving that distinctive clicking sound that indicates death. I started copying the other disc but then it too stopped working. I took out the disk from its enclosure and attached another usb interface adapter, but that didn't work either. Next I opened up my four year old desktop computer, hoping that it would have a sata interface. The discs weren't sata but I was able to pull out a dvd driver cable and attach that to the disk (see picture above). Now Windows saw the disk and chkdsk ran. Finally I have been able to spend the last two days copying files off the disk using rsync.

Thursday, May 06, 2010