I will start my monthly back up process tonight at about midnight. First I will copy and paste the past month's blog entries on all my blogs into word doc files. Then I will print them in hard copy. Then once these are saved I will burn CD's of personal data folders including these blogs.

I was able just this afternoon to update the ATI Radeon 7500 video driver. Also windows update checked my WinXP lisense this time with what they call a genuine windows checker or validator.

I successfully installed Firefox 1.0 and immported my Internet Explorer bookmarks. I am posting this using Firefox as my web browser.

I am ripping some CD's I got at a yard sale.

I am going to install the Firefox web browser 1.0.6. This will be my first use of firefox.

I put my PSP up for sale. I priced my PSP and everything meaning four movies and one game and the 512 MB memory stick at 400$ or 450$ CND. If it sells I might buy my self an iPod and portable DVD player/watcher.

I may be able to purchase a hard drive for the iBook but there is probably little chance of buying a large hard drive unless I buy one at Zellers rather than ebay. The plan is to get a 160GB hard drive and put it in a USB enclosure and then eventually get a Linksys ethernet hard drive connector box that allows the USB enclosure with hard drive to be accessed over ethernet.

I am probably not going to afford any hard drives this pay period. I usually buy something at ebay when I get paid but this week will probably not buy anything.

I must admit a business lesson here. I can not afford to buy a bunch of hard drives so that IBM thinkpad plan will have to wait for later. I should step back to completing the iBook planned upgrade or step back from that to the IBM 760 plan. I did get the base Debian 3.1 r 0 installed. Or even step back to the PSP stuff. The PSP is working fine but PSP UMD movies now take budget money. Seems I have been getting too far ahead with spending.

I should also do some more coding in C++ and also R's language needs reviewing and Grass needs learning.

I am shopping for various hard drives on ebay. My plan right now is to buy a USB pocket drive and use this for a massive back up of my IBM laptop. Then when that's backed up I will install a new 60 GB or 80 GB hard drive in the IBM thinkpad. Then I will partition the new drive into fat sections with about 40GB for winXP then install WinXP into this partition. Then once that's installed I will put the backed up data into it. Then I will run a Debian or Fedora install on the rest of the drive. Thus this is my plan to make the IBM Thinkpad laptop dual boot.

Tinkering

It would definitely be cheaper to buy a second hard or replacement hard drive for the IBM thinkpad than buying a second Thinkpad to run Linux. I wonder if I could run Linux off of a second hard drive in the laptop then use a firewire card I have to run a DVD burner to replace the CD/DVD drive that I would loose if I used the Ultrabay for a second hard drive. I think this is a good plan.

The iBook did not arrive at the end of the week so hopefully it arrives next week. My funds for fixing it up won't be available until the 11th of August.

With about 250$ or less for a larger iBook hard drive, a similar amount for the Thinkpad second hard drive, plus 100$ or less for an ultra bay hard drive holder, plus 150$ for more iBook memory; I am looking at about 750$ in computer expenses in the near future. Then might have to pay 100$ for an external DVD burner. But if I buy the hard drives on ebay I can save about 200$ and also I can save on the ultra bay hard drive holder maybe getting it for 30-60$. The memory cost is about as cheap as it can get right now so costs might be more like 600$ for everything.

As we use computers longer they get broken with software conflicts and less hard drive space. I was updating windows and did as I said get Intel networking updated but updating an IBM PM device software caused me to loose my stand by and hibernate functions on the winXP laptop. I was also not able to update the ATI radeon 7500 card. I am thinking of buying a late model pentium III thinkpad with CD burner to install Debian on.

In the past week I have been cleaning up my windos laptop. I deleted iso images and also deleted downloaded program install files for free software or software I can download again for free. I also defraged the hard drive and cleaned up the hard drive with disk clean up. I uninstalled the weather channel which got downloaded with Netscape and made for such a terribly slow start up. I also did a windows update but had installation problems with some hardware updates from third parties. My ATI Radeon 7500 video card in the laptop could not be updated. I was able to get new drivers for Intel 10/100 networking.

I finally got an email saying that my iBook 300 Mhz laptop has been shipped and should arrive at the end of this week. I had been worrying because the person who sold me this used computer had not contacted me for weeks. Now I can find some parts for it with more confidence.

I am starting to pick up some parts for my iBook which still hasn't arrived in the mail. Right now I am trying to win a 10GB drive in ebay.ca.

I am just completing my email transfer using dotmac to the eMac from outlook on my PC. I also found my "lost" netscape email and copied that over ethernet to my Mac and imported it to Mac OSX mail. This means most of my received mail from March 2001 until today is now on my Mac.

I listened to David Suzuki on the bus. His lecture was colourful but he admits to taking a purely scientific world view. I am against this. I am not against good science I just believe Suzuki does not crtique science the way it should be these days. The basic knowledge needs more thought. Also science as a world view and as a way of knowing nature is not really the only or best way.

I heard a Yukon artist on the TV arguing that we could not have a pure state of nature but we could temper our use of resources and justify our use and control and use less of nature and still survive. I like this view better than Suzuki's.

Suzuki is very famous and has probably done a lot of good.

I downloaded some mp3's from www.oneworld.ca David Suzuki spoke recently at the National Farmers Union Convention held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He spoke about biotechnology. I just downloaded his lecture as mp3 files. The mp3's were provided by http://www.makingthelinksradio.ca

I am just about to burn some back ups of my own computer files and email. I will also be burning some CD's for a community group I keep records for to give to other members on Saturday at our monthly meeting.

My computers are working fine now. I kept some minutes at a meeting today on my Palm W and emailed them to the office upstairs from the meeting. I have yet to do my CD back ups but I have read all my paper hard copy back ups of my blogs. They seem ok.

I have now transfered all my outlook express mail from 2001 April to 2005 March. This is not all the email I received. And I have yet to transfer sub folders and sent email.

I printed my blogs out in hard copy for the month of June. This was three blogs. I also saved the entries for June on all three of these blogs as word 97 files using Open Office 1.1.4.