Friday morning catch-up...

I've been sneaking a page or ten of Sue Grafton's R is for Ricochet at odd moments over the past couple of weeks and find myself now two-thirds of the way through the book, in a strange situation.

Unlike many mystery authors, who try to smack you in the face with some serious action - typically, someone getting killed - within the first couple of pages of a new story, Grafton has woven a tale in which a lot of stuff has been revealed (money laundering, philandering, mind games), but almost nothing has actually happened.

So I'm wondering: Why do I keep turning the pages?

I have some ideas as to why, but if I can definitively answer this question, I think I'll be a lot further along in the writing game.

Cheers...

One out of two isn't bad...

I gutted the hard drives from a very old computer at the house in Pagosa, intending to hook them up to a USB doodad that would turn them into external disks for as long as it might take to copy the data on them, at which point the hardware would've outlived its usefulness, but I digress...

Hooking up the "master" disk caused webster to do a chkdsk on the drive on bootup, and apparently with success, but once the boot process was complete and XP was fully conscious, there was nothing discernable on the drive. It occurred to me that I possibly may have enabled the Microsoft "disk doubling" feature back in the day, which would've stored all the files on the drive in essentially one huge (for that time) file, where a driver in memory expanded data as it was read from the drive and compressed data to be stored.

The second drive was recognized immediately, a 2.39 GB drive with about 60 MB free, with all top-level directories stamped with the same date and time in December 2001.

I wonder what would happen if I tried booting from that first drive? If I could tickle one of the machines around here into the gig, what would the software on the hard drive (Windows 95? 98? Me?) do if the drivers failed to load properly? Hang? Drop into DOS?

Hmmm. It's been a while.

Cheers...