Daynote ,Svenson

MM-ii     Sunday

2000-01-02

A bit warmer (7°C) and a byte drier. But just as gray as yesterday.

My father goes to hospital in a day shift like last week, next week he is back on the normal pattern. The result is that I didn't go running.

One consequence of all the food yesterday (and today) is that I didn't do anything interesting. I'll be well rested tomorrow.

Some months ago the BBC ran the series "Walking with Dinosaurs". This is a series in their great tradition of natural history films, handling about dinosaurs . Nothing special at first sight. But ... In stead of an account about fossils and geology and ecology of the period they used simulations and computer graphics in the style of the Jurassic Park films. Only just a tad better researched and executed. So what you get is a kind of documentary on an environment a few hundred million year ago in the same style as a documentary about, say the wildlife of the Everglades or a Great Reef exploration. As expected there is a lot of controversy about the scientific value of the content. It is based on discoveries but also, for a large part on assumptions and theories, not all of them even plausible. But a great series anyhow.

So some months ago the BBC ran it but I missed the first episode. Today the VRT (our national broadcast ) started the series as well so I picked up the first episode, 220 Million years ago, Triassic period. Translated in Dutch it misses some of the character of the original though.

I noticed that Stone, the old 386 box, is not year 2000 compliant. When I started it yesterday, to check the date it indicated 1998-07-20, off by a few years but that didn't surprise me. It is off so long that the CMOS battery has run out a few times. If that happens I let it auto-detect its hard disk and then leave it running a few days to recharge. Now I did change the CMOS date but whenever I reboot it resets to 1980/01/01. I changed the date via the DOS Date command and that seems to fix it. Something is obviously wrong with the BIOS program, preventing the change but accepting it when set by DOS.

Adios