Blood will Flow

I got good news yesterday about my dead hard drive - apparently it must be a Winchester (or maybe the Dread Pirate Roberts) because it's alive after all. It was just a faulty cable, so it was only mostly dead and temporarily so. Phew!!!

Yesterday I took it to Norwich to have a proper seeing to by the Apple Store genius bar. The guy plugged it in and told me within two minutes that it was probably an internal cable fault (a known error) and not the disk. Sure enough, after leaving it with them for five and a half hours, they'd scanned every byte of the hard drive and it was FINE. Fucking fine. All that worry and expense was totally unfounded. Plus they did the repair under consumer law for free, as it was a known fault and I was within 6 years of purchase (though oput of the three year warranty period).

I went into our local shop today and complained to the manager - I have a full refund! Stupid boy, misdiagnosing my baby, I think he'll be gettng a bollocking from his boss when he comes into work tomorrow morning. I don't know what the hell Barrie (silly spelling) did when he ran his diagnostic, but he clearly didn't know what he was doing.

In October I'm going to take my machine up to see my Mac friend, Jim, who's going to fit my Samsung 1TB solid state drive for me, and then I'll have my old (intact and undamaged) hard drive as a backup. As well as Dropbox, and MyPCBackup (if they ever sort out why I can't see my own files on their system!) and my portable 2TB external drive, and my old iPod (which is a 160GB hard drive), and putting all my photos on Flickr - between that lot, I should be covered, don't you think?

Paranoid, moi? Never. LOL

Then I need to decide whether to upgrade my OS to High Sierra - and risk software like Photoshop not working. I'll leave that for another day though. This was all taxing enough for my poor brain. (And nerves).

In the meantime I'll just sit here and sigh with happy relief over my lovely bookmarks, and my passwords, and all my art files being there for me, and having my calendar back online so I know what the hell I'm supposed to be doing and when (well, as much as I ever do, anyway).

I just got back from being inducted as a volunteer Pig Trail Blazer (basically standing around town pointing people in the direction of the next pig), and I found out my Swinions pig is going to be slap bang in the middle of the town centre, on the Cornhill!!!! MY PIG! OMG! He'll be up on his pedestal in the one place in town where EVERYone goes, so everyone will be able to see all my wobbly lines and where I forgot to give one of them a snout. And my name will be on the plinth. I'm simultaneously freaking out and doing happy dances.

I can't believe it!

The project manager told us that there were 235 designs entered, from all around the country, and those were whittled down to 80, then the final 39 that eventually got commissioned. Apparently they had to drive blank pigs all over the place so the artists (most of whom are professional artists) could paint them - one of the artists was in Liverpool and I think he said another was in Scotland! At least I saved them petrol costs, LOL!

But still. The Cornhill!!
Just to give you and idea, here's the Cornhill on a non market day. That French-looking building in the centre is the Town Hall.

I think I am definitely losing count here - but I'll just run with whatever day I think it is, blow it. So Day 23's photo is the billboard poster in the pictures this afternoon, and today's happy dancing was due to finally getting to see Captain America, the Winter Soldier. And I was even happier that it didn't disappoint, given that me and my cinema buddy have been looking forward to this one for what feels like eons.

I liked how it didn't try and wrap up all the story lines, there was plenty of blowing stuff up and kicking arses, but there was quite a lot of thinky thoughts in there as well - and not so much that the momentum was lost. (Well in my opinion, anyway). I enjoyed the filling in of more backstory, I loved how Steve's integrity drove everything in the end, and how the film questioned the whole idea of overwhelming force as a deterrent.

I loved Falcon - how cool to have wings like that and hey, it didn't hurt that he is so very pretty too. On that note, aren't Chris Evans' eye lashes to die for?

Spoilers ahoy!!!
( Spoilers under the cut )
So anyway, I loved it, and will be buying the DVD. *Nods*

This is officially smileworthy.

Ok, I love Castle, I love Nathan Fillion but I am very happy they got the wooden spoon on this occasion!!
Another victory for the voting fingers of the SPN fandom....