I think the technical term is ‘whoops’.

So, I managed to stay up ’til 4:30ish, which is pretty good for swinging my bodyclock round. Distressingly the big-sheets of cardboard behind the curtains had too many holes in (or it was too sunny), so I think I’ll have to put a little more effort into stopping light ingress. But still I managed to sleep, on and off, ’til 12:30, which puts me in a relatively good sleep balance for tonight. Or today, as I’m willing my brain to believe that it is. It’s just a very gloomy day :)

Fortunately, there’s very little in the way of window-dom in the ED in which I work; and thus I am dependent entirely on other cues to know what time of day it is – and hopefully I can force my body into a sembelance of awakeness for the night; but at the moment I’m wanting to go to sleep and it’s only 1630, which doesn’t bode well.

Body, let me introduce to my old friend Caffine. Caffine, Body. Here, let’s get together.

Anyhoo, I did this by a process of watching Carry On Films and Red Dwarf. The Carry On Films aren’t really as good as I remember them being, but they’re funny – at least the old ones are. It’s funny though, I’d never really noticed how weak some of the stories are, or indeed non-existent. I thought there was *some* sort of plot to them all, but I don’t really think that ‘Carry on Nurse’ has a plot at all.

Red Dwarf season 3, which is where I’m up to, is kind of the pinnacle of the series, I think. 3 and 4 definitely were my favourite seasons, although Holly (female) isn’t really as funny as Holly (male).

Aaanyhow; so, today I kinda mooched about. I discovered Operator Please (particularly ‘Just a song about ping pong‘ (myspace link for those who like pain)). For some reason I can’t stop listening to Just a Song About Ping Pong (although I’m still also very into Remi Nicole’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and Late of the Pier’s Space and the Woods; Axe Girl is also still floating my boat, musically speaking :) ).

Then I had a genius idea. I’d been debating updating the Mac to 10.4.10, and there was the download glowing at me like some ethereal mac spirit guide, beckoning me to come into the light. But, having checked it’s not really suitable for my AMD based HackinMac, so I hunted out a 10.4.9 update. Oh, I’m so clever…

Having checked everything; 10.4.9 should run on my Athlon 64+ (which apparently has SSE3, although it’s not listed in ‘About this Mac’). So there I am installing it, and it runs thorough the updater before ending with ‘there were errors in this installation. Try restarting installer’; so I tried. It wouldn’t restart. Suspecting that the poo had already been flung and was preparing itself for a fan-type impact I attempted to shutdown the Hackinmac. After about 5 minutes of disk churning it sat silent with the blank Mac desktop staring at me. “J’acuse” it said, it’s icy blue glow reflecting on the murderer of the machine.

I lent down, hitting the power button. After a brief pause it restarted, the screen filling with loading messages… fingers crossed I watched and read…

…and then it started. Firewire failed to initialise properly…. The network card failed to initialise…. The audio wasn’t working *before*; but it was shedloads of not working now. And then we got into about 5 minutes of failures, before the machine decided it was not going to load OS X and would instead like to be dead.

Whoops, I believe is the technical term.

I tried to recover it using my original install disk (which, by some thankful piece of good thinking I put in the OS X box! I mean, who’d’a thunk I’d’ve been that organised. OS install disk in the OS box). But no, so now I’m trying to obtain 10.4.9, which hopefully I can install over the borked install. I’m thinking maybe I want to remove the old install? Hey; mac people. Broken mac with a working emergency partition – do I delete everything that’s not work from the other partition before installing? Or do I just see if it’ll install over it? Will it be quirky and unreliable if I do that?

Anyhow; it gives me something to do for the rest of the week that isn’t watching videos… :-/

Anyhow, I best get showered and up :)