October 8th

We got up early and went over to the airfield to fly to Sutter for the Ragwing Roundup.  Gary left in his Pietenpol just before we did, but he was headed over to the river, and we flew pretty much straight there.  He beat us there.  As did Bruce, who wasn't even at Lincoln when we left :o)  After lunch, we flew back, and it was a lot bumpier than the way there - this is why I don't tend to fly at lunchtime.

At home I've been thinking that the problems with the HTPC seem like a hard disc problem, and I was thinking I'd try swapping in another disc, even though Windows said there was nothing wrong with the disc every time I checked it.  I fired the HTPC up (out of sleep mode) to shut it down properly, and found that Windows now thought that there was a problem.  I pulled the HTPC apart and hooked up a spare disc and fired up Acronis, only to find it didn't want to talk to my wireless USB mouse and keyboard.  I don't have a wired mouse and keyboard any more, as we have no spare PCs at the moment (2 of our PCs are home built, and the other didn't come with a keyboard), so I went out to get a cheap mouse at the very least.  Fry's didn't have the mice I'd seen on their web site that were supposedly in stock at Roseville, so I went to Best Buy, where a mouse and keyboard wasn't that much more than just a mouse, so I got both - it's always useful to have spares.
At home, the HTPC running Acronis still wouldn't see the mouse and keyboard.  I figured it was a "problem" where the new Z170 motherboard wasn't driving the USB ports the way the Acronis software wanted.  It was time to put the drives in my old Z97 desktop.  The first time it booted I couldn't see the CD drive to boot Acronis because the SATA connection had come undone in all the shuffling.  The next time it couldn't see the CD drive because the weight of the extra hard drive hanging out the side had pulled the power connector off it.  Once I got that fixed, it wouldn't get past the POST because the drive was throwing errors (so it's probably the controller rather than bad sectors).  I turned off the SMART testing, booted Acronis and cloned the 1.5Tb drive onto an old 750Gb drive.  I put my desktop back together, and it still works.  I put the HTPC back together and everything seems a lot better - I watched something I'd recorded in the week and there were a couple of drops, but that was down to problems with the recording, rather than the system hanging.  I reckon it's time to get a new drive.  With start of all the Black Friday nonsense being 6 weeks away, I'll wait and get something then.  And go through a lot of this again to get everything cloned again :o)