prep

Considering the nice fluffy snow falling when I left the Newsroom it would have been an interesting meet-up if it had taken place at the Mosque Kitchen like all the others. As it was the pub staff did their best by leaving the air conditioning switched on the cool setting as if they were expecting the function room to be used for dancing or something equally unsavoury, They also appeared to be debating whether or not to turn the music up to excruciating levels when they switched it on but left it tolerably low so that most people could hear most things most other people were saying.

After yesterday's activity most of the earlier part of the day was spent doing little except preparing for travelling tomorrow, fishing out all the bits we;re meant to be taking down and scrabbling to find things I thought it would be handy to have but which weren't vital. I hadn't appreciated that the new external hard drive I'd bought to copy the contents of my existing external hard drive to in order to leave an extra backup in my parents' loft was formatted stupidly until I started getting maximum file size errors, nor that it would take about ten hours to format properly. The result is that both source and potential clone off-site backup drives will have to be taken down and the copying done down there, meaning that the packing of the car will have to be done extra-carefully to make sure that all the delicate magnetic-based data storage devices are as far as possible from the large speaker in the amp which will also end up in the left, though as far away as possible to prevent mis-hap.