h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Gosh, this university is shoddy in organising this diploma course . Today there was a tutorial about how we should organise our work on the first of our projects (e.g., to give the top-level structure: analyse, design, implement, evaluate). therefore, these past few days, I've been preparing for that. Last night I find that we students have been sent an e-mail saying that the web pages we were to study, in order to learn the finer details of the requirement specification, have been removed ! A new project specification will be e-mailed to us on Monday.

Anyway, the tutorial went as well as can be expected, and we were out in time for me to home for lunch. Now to see how to make Excel behave like a DBMS. One tech problem is achieving atomic update of an entire row, which in turn entails a command for "copy these from sheet A to the row below the current bottom row of sheet B, whichever row that is", etc.).

I bought a CD- and DVD-recorder, which, if it works , will become my main backup storage device. To get the old drive out, I had to unscrew it from the "drive cage" (a metal subchassis that sits on the chassis and surrounds some of the drives for removeable media). This in turn entailed taking the front panel off and the drive cage out. My PC has never been dismantled so far for the 6 years I've had it, so it was 6 years' worth of fluff I vacuumed from off the front panel while I was at it. (That's another thing. For the last few months, the on-button has been iffy. In response to someone else's query, Peet replied to the effect "Open it up and give it a good old vacuuming. In 80% of cases, vacuuming the fluff removes the problem". It seems that this is another of the 80%! Good ol' Peet. )

Note to self. If I want yet another internal drive for removeable media, there's a bay for it, but I'll need a 4-way E-IDE connector. That is, if 3 E-IDE drives can sort out a master/tweeny/slave hierarchy among themselves.