(Thursday 8th January)Well, I achieved what I set out to, I suppose (I usually do), but at what a cost! January seems set to be a turbulent month.....
At the end of each year, I always look back on the 12 months just gone and reflect on the unexpected events which couldn't in a million years have been predicted this time last year. Always there'll be some and 2003 was no exception. It's just as well we can't see into the future!
I now have a dual boot system nicely installed on the laptop, Mandrake and XP. There's a lot I still need to sort out on Mandrake, but I'm pleased with progress (which has included successfully networking the aol connection) so far.
(Tuesday 6th January)Suanie, I'm sorry!
That is excellent news, congratulations PCWriter! At last, a human being for an admin! Congrats to alt.don too, all round a big improvement to SFDC.
And more good news, well done Louise! Congratulations on passing your driving test!
Louise really does not have much luck with Easyjet! Last January, after failing her driving test she told check in staff she had a bomb in her luggage. This time, she's managed to send off her driving licence, forgetting she'd need it to fly to Stansted tomorrow (and doesn't have her passport here). Sadly, there's no way Easyjet will let her on the plane, so it looks like a long bus journey.
(Monday 5th January)If these massive site views continue, I'll have no option but to move somewhere like Polarhost where I can place php scripts on every page blocking certain IPs. It would be a pain, but there's no point in having a site I can hardly ever work on because it exceeds its data transfer limit after about 5 minutes.
(Thursday 1st January)HAPPY NEW YEAR! Today I did what I've always wanted to do on New Year's Day - bathe in the North Sea! We went up to Embleton hoping to sledge, however the recent snow had all but melted, so we went in the sea instead. Thanks to Neil for taking some pictures, click on the thumbnails for the full size photos.
Need I add it was errm ... bracing, to say the least :)
(Saturday 27th December)I had a look at the Geocities site stats and under "top search words" for this page was the info that 42.26% of visitors had typed "m3du54" into Google to get here. So for anyone looking for information on Medz, here is a link to an interview he gave on Don Parker's blog.
Just in case certain people are not aware of this problem: this is a free website. It has a data transfer limit of 3gb a month! Massive page views (and I mean massive, ie 2,334 in ONE visit) will quickly mean the site exceeds its data transfer limits and becomes temporarily unavailable (annoying when I want to work on it).
(Friday 26th December)After a lot of login problems, it's a relief to be able to access the site (and my yahoo email). That's the trouble with *good* passwords, if you pick something complicated, change it often and use a different password for each account, there's much more scope for things going wrong. Having had to reset my yahoo password thanks to a bug in AOL communicator, I later found it wouldn't recognise anything I entered. Worse, the information I was putting in their password reminder "didn't match" what yahoo held. Even then, if I'd been able to remember the answer to my "secret question", things would have been OK. Again, I deliberately chose a question I thought would be secure and that certainly proved to be the case.
I have to say that after cursing yahoo, by the time this was sorted out I had nothing but praise for them. This is a free website and a free email account, yet the customer service was on a level with anything I receive from services I pay for. I was pessimistically expecting it would be well after the xmas break before I got any response, yet my emails were answered promptly even on xmas day and the help I received was impressive.
Well, christmas is over for another year (thank goodness). I suppose there are a lot of nice things about the day itself .... particularly the chance to be surrounded by a large family, which doesn't happen often enough. A pity Derek had to work most of the day - while I can accept the emergency services are needed, I do think people could have one day in the year when they don't have to fly. The people at Britannia who arrange these flights are never the people who actually end up working on xmas day, and whilst the pilots may get paid enough to compensate, the financial rewards for most other people are just not enough to make them want to swap a fantastic xmas dinner and time with family for many hours on a motorway and hanging around airports.
(Tuesday 23rd December)The last morning session till after New Year, yippee. The water wasn't very nice to plunge into ... 26°, which is cold! Seems the City Council had turned the heating down (or off) in anticipation of a warmer spell of weather. Surprising what a difference a few degrees can make, 30° is too hot to train in, although quite nice for public sessions.
Some people have a great way of handling complaints. They just immediately clamp the person making them and avoid addressing what they know are their own shortcomings. It's not a bad system ..... it means all you ever receive are compliments. Personally I'd rather listen to what someone has to say, even if it is criticism, they might just be making a valid point.
If you respect people, the chances are they'll respect you in turn, if you treat them like shit, that's what you can expect back.
(Saturday 20th December)I'm coming to the conclusion this laptop is a lost cause. I accept the general opinion that some unknown process is stealing CPU cycles, but can I hell find it. What started as a winamp problem has now turned into what may be a good time to try linux as an OS, although how I'm going to install it is another matter as the only CD writer I possess is on the laptop and I don't fancy using it to download knoppix. It works, but is frustrating to use - and I'd love to know why the whole system momentarily freezes every few seconds. I'm just surprised I didn't notice it earlier, the screensaver makes it blindingly obvious when the flying windows keep pausing.
Perhaps I should hand the laptop to the computer crime squad and give them something which actually puts their forensic equipment to the test! (Unlike what they've been given up to now.)
TDS is a cool program (although like everything else, it wasn't any help). I enjoyed the greeting though, when I ran it on the laptop, "Good evening Moira, go home. The weekend is here."
As I've said before, I'm loathe to remove comments (rather like re-writing a diary to record what you wanted to happen rather than what did happen) but I did it anyway.
(Thursday 18th December)This time next week, christmas day will be all over bar the shouting. I finally went into town tonight to buy as many presents as I could find, hoping to avoid another lengthy trip next week. What I particularly hate is the children's "xmas stocking lists". Every year I tell them I'm not going to bother, they're getting too old for this, but I always relent - Emily in particular still seems to get real pleasure out of unpacking a pillowcase on xmas morning.
However, trailing round town looking for the various items they've put on their lists does my head in! They're so specific - Emily wanted some biros "nice, but not too posh" and a few phone covers "no dodgy ones". A ring binder "plain but not boring".
(Wednesday 17th December)One thing I am learning about proxies, they are sloooooooow! Chaining proxies is all very well, but the appeal wears off remarkably quickly when everything takes so much longer to connect ....
(Tuesday 16th December) I was writing out my xmas cards for various neighbours today and I have to say I was embarrassed that I didn't know the names of either of our immediate neighbours. They've both lived there quite a few years now too, and although we're quite friendly if we happen to run into each other, normally we barely see them.
Maybe it's just a consequence of modern life, where you can spend hours exchanging personal details with people who are essentially just text on a screen and live hundreds of miles away in far flung countries, yet not even be aware of who lives in your own street!
(Thursday 11th December)Just been talking to Louise, who's "off to the library, to study the question of 'I am not responsible for what I am, so how can I be responsible for what I do?'" An interesting concept, somehow I don't think it would hold up too well as a defense strategy at the moment.
(Wednesday 10th December)Our channel on the holics server is being taken over by bots :) We have two very active ones now who talk to each other (mainly nonsense!). It's becoming hard to get a word in edgeways. There's a third (blessedly silent) bot who is there to produce the channel stats which is very useful - no complaints about him.
I'm beginning to see networking AOL as a mixed blessing. Puzzled as to why the gateway machine could see the laptop but not the other way round, it eventually dawned on me that I hadn't added the laptop IP to the trusted zone in zone alarm. Zone alarm having been a necessary addition to prevent the IRC network scanning my PC for open proxies. However, the proxy is running in closed state and a further k-line was probably due to having ended up on some blacklist which will necessitate having my machine rescanned. As I have a dynamic IP, most of the time it connects without problems, but this IP is obviously blacklisted.
I discovered another advantage of being on AOL's dial-up rate - I can access the net from anywhere (normally via my laptop) with an 0800 number. Normally BB customers would have to dial 0845 if they wanted to use a dial up connection away from home (as well as paying £27.99 a month for a 512 connection. For the moment I think I can live with a broadband connection with free dial up if needed, all for the price of dial-up :)
(Thursday 4th December)Just learned I won a bronze medal in the 1500, at the recent Scottish Masters Nationals at Tollcross - almost makes the drive up to Glasgow and back worthwhile! Opened my email when I got home from work tonight and was delighted to see a message from Heather, which brought back happy memories of my time spent working at Northumberland County Council, specifically for NSP, which I wrote about here shortly after I left.
(Monday 1st December)Had a good weekend in Leeds ..... stayed with Anne and both of us did the Leeds Abbey Dash yesterday (a 10k road race). Added another couple of pics to the photopage from Christmas last year. I must get some more digital photos on the page instead, as the quality is so much better.
(Thursday 27th November)I began to wonder whether it was even worth going to bed last night ..... when it got to 1.45 am and the alarm was set for 4.40. Of course I meant to catch up on some sleep today, but it never happens.
I heard about a new php vulnerability here. I wonder if PCA have patched against it? As someone on IRC commented "I'm sure they have. They are very quick in dealing with these things. If they havent patched it yet, they are bound to patch it within the next decade."
I don't know why my earlier comment about Simon Wells was thought to be aggravating anything .... sure, I'm pissed off with what you did Simon, but it was my fault. I trusted you.
(Sunday 23rd November)This forum admin position is taking all my time up! I can't thank the server admins enough for the help and friendly welcome we've been given with the channel - even supplied us with a bot who will produce up to date stats. Something else that's occupying all my time, but it's satisfying to see how much everyone's enjoying it and settling in. Again thanks to all the server admins, particularly Zone-MR for making sure the channel had a regular number of active members right from the start. Compared to the service Freenode provide ..... well, there is no comparison.
(Thursday 20th November)K-lined from the Freenode Server! This proxy is a mixed blessing .... suppose I should have bound it to my gateway PC before opening mIRC, instead of running it in open state.
(Wednesday 19th November)Every cloud has a silver lining! I finally networked AOL, sharing the internet connection using AnalogX. I can only think that something within my last setup was preventing any proxy from working - at any rate, I could hardly believe it when after typing in a few IP addresses and port numbers I was able to browse web pages on the laptop!
Got a shock on Monday afternoon! Discovering I couldn't sign on to AOL, I eventually learned that all the passwords for our screen names had been scrambled as a security measure, after my account had sent out over 1,000 spam emails to different people! Presumably the work of a trojan (?) I still can't understand why I was receiving this mail from other aol screen names as well as apparently sending it (although it wasn't being sent from my computer). Never mind, everything's back to normal now, but I apologise to anyone who received a copy of "Exiting New Information About Your Home!" I didn't knowingly send it.
To read more archive weblogs, click here which will take you to the previous archive, which in turn contains a link to the one before that.
