Octopus's Garden Issue Twenty-Eight

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Colophon

HELLO, good evening and welcome to issue 28 of Octopus's Garden, the subzeen with its very own new hard disk. An html version of this subzeen is available on the Web at http://www.manorcon.demon.co.uk/octopus/index.html. It's also sent to the TAP mailing list, which you can join automatically by sending the message 'subscribe tap' to majordomo@igo.org. The message 'unsubscribe tap' sent to the same address will get you off the mailing list.

Round 8 (RR 1549 FR)

"MILLARD FILLMORE"

Railway Rivals (France)

8) (@6-46) Spain -- St. Etienne
1st TBNS 20-1+3 ; 2nd LFffCC 10-3-5-3-1 ; RAVEL 0+1+3+1 ; FREAK +5.
9) (34-65) Reims -- Toulon
1st FREAK 20-4-1-1+1 ; 2nd RAVEL 10-1+5+4 ; LFffCC 0-5+1 ; TBNS +1.
10) (23-15) Rennes -- Rouen
1st CANCAN 20-1 ; 2nd LFffCC 0+1.
11) (13-@2) Paris -- BeNeLux
=1st RAVEL 15+4-2 ; =1st CANCAN 15+2+2 ; FREAK 0 ; TBNS 0-4-2.
12) (66-24) Nice -- Nantes
no entry
13) (42-55) Mulhouse -- Bayonne
1st FREAK 20-10+2 ; 2nd TBNS/CANCAN (joint) 10-2 ; TBNS +10
14) (52-32) Limoges -- Dunkerque
1st FREAK 20-3+1 ; 2nd TBNS 10-2 ; LFffCC 0-2-1+3 ; CANCAN +2 ; RAVEL +2

Builds:

Little Froggy FooFoo ChooChoo (LFFfCc) [orange] (Neil Hopkins, England)
(M17) - L17 - K18 - J17 - I18 - H17 - H16 - Toulouse.
=-11.
French Rail Emperors And Kings (FREAK) [purple] (W. Andrew York, TX)
(Orleans) - Z16 [-3 orange] - Y16 - Y10 [-1 orange] - Z9 [-1 orange] [-1 green].
=-9-4-1=-14.
Conrad's Absurd Names Create Acronymic Nausea (CAN CAN) [green] (Conrad von Metzke, CA)
(M11) - Bordeux - I12 - I13 - H13 - Lourdes [-2 blue].
=-11-2=-13.
The Blue Nosed Special (TBNS) [blue] (John Colledge, Scotland)
(J10) - F12 - Lourdes [+6] ; (Z12) - U10 [-1 green]
=-12+6-1=-7.
Railways Asserting Very Egalitarian Lines (RAVEL) [yellow] (Berry Renken, Netherlands)
(W21) - W11 [-1 blue] [-1 purple] [-1 orange] - U10 [-1 green].
=-12-1-1-1-1=-16.

Scores on the Doors

       b/fwd   8   9  10  11  12  13  14 builds c/fwd 
       -----  --  --  --  --  --  --  -- ------ -----
LFffCC    66  -2  -4  11               0 -11+5    65
FREAK     63   5  15       0      12  18 -14+1   100
CANCAN    62          19  19       4   2 -13+3    96
TBNS      89  22   1      -6      14   8 - 7+3   124
RAVEL     78   5  18      17           2 -16     104
       -----  --  --  --  --  --  --  -- ------ -----
         358  30  30  30  30   0  30  30 -61+12  489

Races for Round Nine

Nothing from Pitt Crandlemire, so Neil Hopkins takes over as LFffCC. Note that FREAK and TBNS build to Y12 simultaneously, and TBNS and RAVEL build W11 - U10 simultaneously. For Round Nine, you may enter four of the above races, then build up to 10 physical points (i.e. excluding all payments to others, known and unknown). Orders for Round Nine by 23:59:59 Greenwich Mean Time on FRIDAY, 4th SEPTEMBER, 1998, to Peter Sullivan. E-mail : octopus@manorcon.demon.co.uk PGP key available for the paranoid.

Late, as in the late Dent Arthurdent...

This issue is rather late. The PC on which these words are writ started to get all sorts of hard disk problems from the middle of July. A week or so of Scandisk-ing didn't seem to help. As it was just out of warranty, I though I'd ring the manufacturer. Unlike the average viewer of Watchdog, I didn't expect them to replace it free of charge, give me free pizza vouchers for the rest of my life, and have the managing director shot at dawn. However, they could have been a bit more helpful than telling me a new 3.2 Gb disk would be £150. Plus £26.25 Value Added Tax. Plus an unspecified postage and packing fee. (To be fair, they probably would have specified, but I'd rather lost interest by this point.) I discovered an equivalent drive at PC World for £120, and was humming and harring, until I saw a local computer fair advertised. A quick 15-minute cruise and I was the proud owner of a new 3.2 Gb disk for £70.

Of course, there was still the issue of fitting it. I've delved inside PCs before, but usually only to plug in a modem. (The one exception being my first ever foray, installing an extra 256k memory in the old Amstrad 8256. Those were the days when you got the actual, individual, chips to plug in. None of this cissy SIMS nonsense.) However, the main problem was getting the old hard disk out. With some assustance, I finally managed it. I've probably shorted every circuit in the thing in the process, but since it's dying that doesn't really matter. Putting the new one in was a snap.

Of course, at this stage I should regale you with tales of how I've had to reconstruct all my files, retype the address list from a paper copy retrieved from my Auntie Mabel, etc, etc. However, I am one of those incredibly smug people who actually take regular back-ups of data, and all the software was on CD or floppy disc anyway, along with the emergency boot disk. Actually, the back-up was about a month old, but as soon as I started having problems I went through and took a fresh back-up of anything that had changed since then. And by reloading the software, I've had the chance to configure things how I want rather than how it came pre-loaded.

And the first thing to do after restoring everything is, of course, a fresh back-up. "There is no such thing as too careful."

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