Long kayak trip

I went kayaking this afternoon. It was quite a long trip because I had nobody with me to make sure I didn’t do something stupid. The Google Maps Pedometer (sometimes you have to fiddle with it to get it to show my course line) shows I went 5.7 miles.

It wasn’t the most exciting trip I’ve ever taken, but the creek was sure different after the Katrina-spawned rain we got a few days ago. Not a lot higher, but way, way faster. Going up stream, there were places where I was paddling as hard as I could and barely making any progress at all. Lots of people on the river today because of the great weather and the Labour Day holiday. When I got into the bit upstream of Browncroft Boulevard, the bit I’ve never been to before, there were a lot of people in the park, most of them throwing sticks and balls into the river for their dogs to retrieve. Luckily none of them mistook me for a stick. One person did annoy me by throwing the ball right to the opposite side of the creek just as I got there, meaning that both I and the dog had to take evasive action to avoid hitting each other.
On the way back, I stopped to take some pictures of a couple of swans that were preening and feeding. One of them did a big display, unfortunately I paniced a bit because I thought he was going to come after me, and didn’t get the picture.
 
Later on, I met another couple of swans, one of whom had a neck tag. Man, those things must suck to carry around.

By all means, Paul, fsck with the hard drives

This morning, as Vicki was about to leave for work, she dumped her laptop on me, saying it wasn’t booting. It was stuck on a blue boot screen, with nothing much happening. So I did a three finger salute and forced a reboot, and it went to the OpenDarwin login prompt. I put in her userid and password, and it said “Invalid login” and started doing a normal graphical boot. Then it popped up a warning about something wrong with the Tablet driver (which is odd, because we don’t have a Tablet). I acknowledged the warning, and it booted some more, and then it went back to the OpenDarwin login prompt. After a few attempts at different userids and passwords, I remembered how to boot these guys into single user mode (splat+s).

In single user mode, it gave me an error with replaying the journal. So I did an “fsck -fy”, and after it said it finished fixing everything, it sort of hung again. So I did another boot into single user mode and another “fsck -fy” and it didn’t find anything wrong, so I booted it normally and it came up fine.

So I pulled out the external firewire drive and copied her entire /Users/vjrnts directory over to it. Good thing it’s still under AppleCare.