Oh, I forgot to mention…

Yesterday I planned to clear up, wash the car and a number of other little things.

Well, I managed a little bit of the first thing but none of the latter due to being phoned up at 2:30 by Rob Newson. He continued to talk to me about Linuxy and BSDy things for 3 hours, by which time it was time for Time Team on the telly and it was getting dark outside.

What I did manage to do was fit the memory I’d got replaced the day before in my games PC. After a few hours trying to sort out why Windows 98SE was having problems I found the answer on the web.. Once the system memory (including any memory on AGP cards) goes above 512MB the calculated size of the system’s disk cache becomes bigger than the main memory, so you get the system crashing out with out of memory errors! The fix is to set a specific size in the system.ini file (after first removing memory so you can actually boot the machine).

Well, the machine is now fully working and runs far more quickly than it did before even though the speed of the porcessor hasn’t changed. This would be partly due tot eh faster memory and partly due to the faster hard disk with an 8MB onboard cache. Windows is really quite disk bound, especially when booting.

Oh, there is one thing.. Windows’ scandisk and defrag can’t handle 80GB hard disks.. they just stop working giving an out of memory error. Strangely, the DOS scandisk doesn’t have this problem. Hmm.

The first day of jury service.

After getting up at 6:30 am (blurgh!) I managed to get to the court on time.

For the morning session I sat in the juror’s waiting area, read my book,
looked at the walls and 3.75 hours later we were told that those of us not
picked for a jury so far could go to lunch and come back at 2pm.

Lunch was spent wandering around Oxford trying to find a cheapish place to
eat. I finally picked Aunty May’s Pasty shop where I had a very disappointing
Pork and Apple pasty which was mostly apple. This made me feel a little queezy
as I was already very tired from getting up so early and being litterally
bored sick.

I then popped over to Starbucks in Cornmarket to get some stimulant before returning to the court.

I then sat, waited and read until 3:05pm when I and 14 other people were
told that we had been picked as floating jurors for a case tomorrow and that
we could go home for the day. The poor people who had been picked almost
at the beginning of the day for a case had to still wait as all the stuff
before their case had overrun and overrun, so I was rather lucky.

Anyway, it seems that tomorrow I start being a juror properly.. that’s assuming
I’m picked for the final jury out of the 15 selected.

On the whole, today’s been a waste of time for all those who were called
for duty as only 12 people actually went into a court room, and they were
continuing a trial from last week!

I can see why the court system is gumming up with cases.