Every now and then, between major projects, I like to take a bit of time out and tidy up my poor laptop and its busy hard drive. This process can take as much as a day, and involves:
- Compressing old VMs on my external hard drive, clearing out space on said drive and defragging it
- Copying over old (but still used) VMs from the laptop to the external (tidy) drive, clearing out old files, then defragging it with as much free space as possible
- Copying back stuff from the external drive to the PC that I'm likely to need (VMs!) and hoping that the external drive doesn't die on me while I wait for the copying process to complete! (it has a habit of just turning itself off!)
It's a very slow and tedious process - much akin to watching paint dry. Except that the paint causes everything to slow down while it dries. I now have to sit here and wait 30 seconds to change focus from one window to another, or to do anything else at the same time... At times like these, when there's not much else you can do, I have a bit of a surf.
Imagine my surprise to find that, firstly, London has won the 2012 Olympics! I never thought we'd have won it, but there you go... in seven years time, athletic people from all over the world will come over here to play games while we watch. Wonder if Wembley will be finished by then...
And then I saw the news that the EU Parliament has rejected the software patents bill by a massive majority of 648 votes to 14 (18 abstentions)!
I should clean out my PC more often.