Mac Good News, PC Bad News

The Mac Mini survived the flight from the Southern Med to London, then synched up flawlessly with our London network. Plus it now has the splendid little Bluetooth mouse recommended by a kindly commenter. And the region-free HDMI DVD player arrived from Amazon, so we can now watch Region 1s while Hush evaluation proceeds.

The bad news is that my sick Toshiba laptop’s W2K recovery disk says it will reformat the hard drive – obviously “recovery” is one of those words (like “Yes”) with different meanings in English & Japanese.

So the new plan is to pop the hard drive out and connect it directly to Mrs. G’s PC to recover the data. An object lesson to back your drive up frequently.

UPDATE: Hacked the Toshiba back to life with the W2K install/repair option on a vanilla W2K CD (not Toshiba’s). Ran startup in DOS mode, identified the corrupt system file & reverted to an earlier .alt version of that file. Not bad – I last used DOS in 1992!

The BBC’s Alternate Universe

We flew in to London last night from the Southern Med, looking for cooler weather. Turned out the weather is hotter here, and we had to suffer a BBC “news” bulletin on the Heathrow Express into the city.

The BBC described the Hamas terror chief just whacked Thursday by the IDF as “a Senior Palestinian Security Official”, conjuring up a picture of a gray-haired type, neatly attired in blazer and slacks, making sure there are enough metal detectors at Arafat International. So the (admittedly diminishing) number of Brits relying on the BBC for the truth will never know this:

Jamal Abu Samhadana, a high-ranking officer at the interior ministry, died in an air strike against a militants’ camp in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Israel insisted that the camp, not Samhadana, was the target. Three other people were also killed.

The camp was run by the Popular Resistance Committees, a militia group. Samhadana was one of its leaders and the group, which has fired rockets into Israel, was suspected of involvement in a bomb attack on a US convoy in Gaza in 2003 that left three Americans dead.

A spokesman for the PRC vowed revenge with more rockets and suicide bombings. Samhadana was Number Two on Israel’s wanted list and had survived previous attempts on his life. He had been granted an important security portfolio by Hamas.

Firing rockets at Israeli civilians is a messy business, so I bet he never wore a blazer.