On the first day of Christmas

my true love gave to me
a David Angus stainless steel fife in D.

It's a real corker of a fife, loud and clear straight from the first blow and a pleasure to play, and will be making its live debut tonight at the Powderkegs Christmas party.

The intention is that this will become my main 'workhorse' fife, enabling me to retire my rather battle-scarred and careworn Sweet D piccolo which has been the faithful mainstay since 1996.

In that time the Sweet D will have performed over 400 public stands with Chorlton Green, Shake The Dice, Freaks In The Peaks, Rumworth Morris, and Powderkegs (the piccolo never made a niche for itself in the Trebuchet repertoire for no particular reason), not to mention innumerable practises and sessions.

The thread lapping has been rewound several times, there are at least three noticeable dents in the bodywork, and the varnish has completely worn away around the mouth hole and the edges of several finger holes. I've been looking for a replacement for a while and hopefully this Angus fife will do the business!

Rauschpfeifery

You wait ages for a blog update and then two come at once ...

I've updated the images section of my rauschpfeife mini-website, to include Richard Peach's cartoon of me assisting in the search for Osama Bin Laden - http://www.lesession.co.uk/rauschpfeife/images.htm

Goyt Valley Mummers at Glossop Labour Club

A new mummers team is born - after weeks of frantic preparation (well, a couple of practises anyway) the Goyt Valley Mummers made their debut at the Glossop Labour Club last night to wild acclaim, booing, hissing and general amusement.

Photos are up on Picacsaweb at http://picasaweb.google.com/sfmans/GoytValleyMummersAtGlossopLabourClub.

The next performance will be at the Dog and Partridge, Bridgemont (near Whaley Bridge) on Boxing Day, as a part of the first annual Powderkegs lunchtime dance-out there.

Cruft and Detritus

Mentioning cruft and detritus in my previous post lead me to look up Verity Stob's splendid Beaufort Scale Of Cruft.

Although XP seems a lot more resistant than previous strains of Windows, it still holds true. You can find it here.

131068Mbs? I don't think so

After a hard disk failure (easy to diagnose, it went meep, meep, fizz), unfortunately coupled with a dodgy Ghost backup DVD, I've ended up completely rebuilding my system - probably a good thing to get rid of all the cruft and detritus.

I had to start from my original XP disk, pre-SP2: I'd always meant to do a slipstreamed disk but, well, never got round to it.

So I fire up the box booting from the XP disk and ... it could only see the hard drives as 131068Mb. That's considerably less than I've got! What? What What?

I had forgotten, but before XP SP2, Microsoft couldn't cope with drives bigger than 130Gb. The trick is therefore to create a partition in the 130Gb that you can see, install XP and then SP2, and once SP2 is in place all your disk space is recognised and available. Easy when you know how - see this KB article for more details.