(Wednesday 5th May)Yet another XP install well underway, a job I hate. I can just think of so many more things I'd rather be doing than reinstalling windows from scratch, with all the installation of programs and customising settings that is so time consuming. Never mind rather be doing, ought to be doing ...... Having inadvertently interrupted SP1 during its install and ended up with a computer that continually rebooted, never quite making it into Windows, the whole process has had to be repeated twice in as many days.
Continuing on the theme of communicating on the internet, I had an interesting chat with Zone-MR about this. He made some good points .... if IRC is capable of producing such strong feelings of hate and unhappiness, surely the opposite must be true, ie real feelings of friendship can result as well? The point is, both of these exist, but what you're feeling isn't real, it's an artifact. I still maintain you can't form a real relationship with someone you only know through email/IRC - there's just too much context missing. That's not to say you won't meet people who eventually do become very good friends (I know a couple who met in an IRC channel and eventually married), but at some point it has to be taken further than simply exchanging bytes of text.
Zone-MR also made a good point - people chat on IRC because they want to, and if they're not feeling like chatting, they don't have to, unlike real life where however much you would rather not talk to someone, you very often can't avoid it. However, this only illustrates how little real responsibility people on IRC have towards each other, and as such it is a very fragile link indeed.
(Friday 16th April)There's nothing more totally frustrating than a complete breakdown of communication with someone. That despite a huge investment of time and effort, they completely fail to understand where you're coming from. Maybe it's because IRC is a flawed method of communication, maybe the language/culture differences play a part. Lack of intelligence is certainly not the problem in this case, nor is lack of persistence on either side, which makes it even more frustrating. I guess at the end of the day, there are times when you simply have to admit defeat.
I've added more IPs to the php scripts on the blog pages, so if anyone can't view them and feels they should be able to, let me know. And that's not as daft a statement as it sounds - I realise someone with their own IP address banned, coud read this using a proxy.
(Friday 9th April)Once again, thank you Krusty for the free hosting .... so far, it's very efficient and problem free.
One of the more interesting facts to come out of my recent "soft skills" SiteL training, was the breakdown of different methods of communication. For instance, in a face to face conversation, only 7% of what you're trying to get across is communicated by the words you use. The rest is something like 38% tone of voice and 55% body language (I forget the exact figures). In a telephone conversation, the importance of the actual words used rises to 14%, with tone of voice making up 86% of communication. So by the time you get to email/IRC/online forums, it's easy to see how reliant we are on what is actually a very bad way of communicating. Useful for quickly getting across factual information, text alone is too lacking in context to avoid misunderstandings or to form fruitful relationships.
Good luck Rosie! I spent Wednesday helping my 19 year old daughter move out into a flat she's sharing with a friend. I don't think I ever want to see flat packed IKEA furniture again! The sheer quantity of stuff that had to be moved was unbelievable and I realise how fit and strong delivery men are who do this all day every day.
(Monday 5th April)Again, this proves that when something seems too good to be true .... it usually is. Hopefully, transfer of the domain name will be a fairly speedy, trouble free process - have emailed Nominet for the relevant forms.
(Sunday 4th April)Well, DNS propagation seems to have gone through very efficiently, so hopefully everyone typing in www.moiraatkinson.co.uk should now see the site. I'm very impressed with the way mywebfolio have automated everything, changing nameservers has been a far less painful process than I anticipated.
(Saturday 3rd April)Yet another new home for the site ... many thanks Krusty. I'm rather shocked to discover that after all this time moiraatkinson.co.uk doesn't actually belong to me, even though it was supposedly transferred nearly 2 years ago. If this remains unresolvable, I'm going to ditch the domain and buy something else - indeed, I've recently thought how much better it would be to have a site that only people I'd given the URL to could read.
(Monday 29th March)I've added a family photo to the photopage, taken yesterday at my sister's house where we were celebrating Mum's 80th birthday.
Thank you gus, that was a nice gesture last night.
(Saturday 26th March)Equal Opportunities .... a phrase we hear a lot now, particularly from good employers when they recruit staff. I took equal opportunties to mean that everyone was given the same chance, in other words, if you could do the job that was all that mattered. What a naive view! There is no such thing as Equal Opportunities - not in any employer I've encountered anyway!
(Friday 26th March)Thank you Nick, I am so grateful for your "no questions asked" response to this afternoon's out of order request. There are times when you just don't need more hassle and this afternoon was one of them. It was another November 5th last year, another 19th and 24th September 2001, and another whatever day it was in June when I went into CISV for the last time.
(Saturday 20th March)One more week of training before "Quorum 2" goes live .... oh dear. The best advice I could give anyone right now would be to redial and with a bit of luck they'd get someone from Dundee/Merry Hill/Livingstone/Peterlee etc who might know a bit about tax credits! I suppose I should be pleased the government decided the IR should administer such a complicated system because it's created the need for 700 jobs here in Newcastle.
(Monday 15th March)HAPPY BIRTHDAY PHILIP AND ROSIE! In fact, these greetings are somewhat late ... Philip's birthday was actually the 9th March and even Rosie's was now yesterday, but it's been a really busy week. I have spent the weekend organising a PC for Rosie for when she moves out in April and installing a router which makes sharing the AOL connection a breeze compared to using a proxy, which allowed IE to browse web pages but did little else.
At this point I must add that I have nothing but praise for AOL and after slating them for the damage their AOL 9 beta CD did to my system, I feel compelled to redress the balance a little. I needed to phone their technical help twice while I was trying to configure the network and on each occasion I made a freephone call, during a Saturday evening, and didn't have long to wait before being put through to someone who was able to solve my problems. What more could I have wanted? As an aside, I do rather wonder whether AOL's internet connection could have been shared all along with a router, if they'd been willing to share the secret as to how it was done (or I'd been knowledgeable enough to work it out).
This was my first week at work for the Inland Revenue Tax Credit Helpline, which consisted of "soft skills" training at the Quality Hotel in Boldon, delivered by SiteL. This week we get our technical training on site. It has seemed rather strange that I was recruited by a recruitment agency, NRG, and am being trained by a training agency. I haven't really come into contact with the Inland Revenue yet! I can tell that I'm going to enjoy this job. What a difference to be working in a "good" job, where employees are really looked after. Even little things like knowing I'll be able to get paid time off for a hospital visit instead of having to fit it into my leisure time, are going to seem a huge improvement on anything I've ever known in recent years.
The start of my second week training today, in the contact centre for the first time. Everything is brand new with the latest equipment and I can tell it's going to be a really nice place to work. I'm going to get completely spoilt! I got off to a good start mind - broke a chair and managed to get logged out of the system after 3 unsuccessful attempts to enter my password, and it's a real hassle getting my login validated again (apparently). The machines run i2k and the security is like fort knox because of the confidential information we can access. Two more weeks before we're considered ready to be let loose on the general public and the centre goes live.
(Sunday 7th March)A few photos of a school reunion Robin and I went to last night. What made it particularly interesting were the number of teachers who had come along too. One guy in particular had seemed ancient when we were at school, 60 at least, but I guess now he was only in his forties. At any rate, more than 30 years down the line he was still going strong and didn't look any older at all! Another teacher who had probably only been a few years older than us at school, but appeared "remote" at the time, was still happily teaching and seemed completely of our generation now. In fact, I was struck by how well all the teachers looked, people who I hadn't expected to still be alive were not only still with us, but looking very fit and healthy.
(Saturday 6th March)Well, had my last day at work! I'm looking forward to starting this new job with the IRS, but I don't think it's quite registered yet. It was very strange finally leaving the Wintertons after 6 years, but it'll be an excellent reference, as these are doctors who've trusted me with the run of their house and my own set of keys, and will tell anyone I was honest and reliable. As Ian put it, although they have someone else starting next week "she couldn't be better than you" which is really nice. I got a lovely bunch of flowers from Sandra and they both came home at lunch time to say goodbye.
Contrast that with my last night at FDS and I don't think any of the supervisors had even been told I was leaving. In any case joining and leaving is commonplace there. Whilst it was rather sad driving away from the Wintertons, I felt like celebrating as 9pm approached at the call centre. Of course I hadn't been there anything like as long and I do acknowledge it was useful in a lot of ways.
IRC is evil! The trouble with some people who own networks {and forums}, they start to think they're God and believe they can just mess with people regardless. As they get used to people generally boosting their egos, they end up unable to hack it when someone points out a simple spelling error.
(Saturday 28th February)Lots of snow here! Although it was a pain for Philip, coming back from Dublin on Thursday night. The plane took off more or less on time, but due to heavy snow, couldn't land at Newcastle and they circled around overhead for over 2 hours (along with a plane load of Newcastle United players, who ended up at Manchester). Eventually they had to make an emergency landing at Leeds/Bradford, which was closed, as they were running out of fuel. The coach to take the passengers back to Newcastle didn't turn up till 4am so they were all left in the deserted airport for several hours (the Ryanair staff having quickly disappeared). He got home at 7am - 10 hours late from what should have been a 45 minute journey!
Started two evening classes this week - the computers there (on a school network) are fairly restricted and generally don't allow access to IRC, but I discovered a useful tool. CGI:IRC is "a Perl/CGI program that lets you access IRC from a web browser, it is designed to be flexible and has many uses such as an IRC gateway for an IRC network, a chat-room for a website or to access IRC when stuck behind a restrictive firewall." Very handy, and yet another way to access whichever channel I choose.
I'm still annoyed that AOL don't warn their beta testers of the potential dangers of installing their software. I had another look at the Known and Fixed Bugs area and there is no mention of the kind of problems I experienced. You'd be forgiven for thinking the risks from AOL 9 were fairly minor:
I can live with that! I suppose if they said:
(Thursday 26th February)Finally getting back to normal ... rather ironic that I had to format the computer that had a new install of XP on, while my other PC is crying out for a reinstall, which is the last thing I feel like doing right now! You don't realise how many settings and how much data gets lost on these occasions, everything from mIRC slap scripts to remembering to turn debugging off in IE (thanks to the many debugging error notices on John's site for reminding me).
AOL 9 has a lot to answer for. When I contacted their beta team and complained that their CD had left my computer unable to access any web pages, run mIRC or use MSN, this was the reply:
Thank you for your email.
This area is currently under development and is a known problem. It should be resolved for the final release client.
Please refer to the Known and Fixed Bugs section at AOL Keyword: Thailand Beta to see the full list of known issues with the software.
Kind Regards,
AOL Beta Team
Now I had a look at the "known and fixed bugs" section and there wasn't a mention of any of this .... I would guess nobody would test out their software if they thought it was likely to result in a complete reinstall of Windows! True, my own efforts at solving the problem by trying an over the top install of XP were what finally left me with an unusable computer, but being left with a PC unable to connect to the internet wasn't an acceptable solution either.
They're going to "resolve it for the final release client"?? I should hope so! The very idea of internet connection software should be exactly that ... not something that puts the most effective firewall you've ever come across on your computer!
(Wednesday 25th February)Had a delightful walk in the Cheviots on Saturday. Unfortunately we saw one rather disturbing sight, which thanks to John, is now being dealt with by the authorities. It is more proof that the countryside is cruel! No wonder the Countryside Alliance can't get steamed up about fox hunting - killing is unfortunately a way of life and I suppose it has to be said that it keeps the balance of nature. However, we came across two bird traps, one of which had caught a crow, who thanks to us, now has his freedom. Although these traps are not illegal, they are meant to be inspected daily and the door left open in winter. This had obviously not been the case as the second trap had in it a dead bird of prey.
Three more pictures from Saturday's walk.
(Monday 23rd February)I had a freezing cold swim at lunch time - apparently the heating had been diverted from our training pool to the 25m pool which had just been refilled after it had a leak repaired, so that it could open to the public tomorrow. The water temperature was only 22° - and given that a channel swimmer would expect a sea temperature of 19°, and a public session is normally heated to 30°, it gives you some idea of what we had to endure! I've just about got a system back together again, what is particularly annoying is that this was a new install of Windows I had to redo, when the network PC is crying out for a reinstall, but that will now have to wait.
(Friday 20th February)When I have time, AOL 9 is going to get slated. I thought SP2 was the ultimate lesson in why testing beta software was a dangerous business, however AOL 9 has stormed into the number 1 slot. For now, I'm busy trying to recover data from a computer that won't even POST let alone boot into Windows .... more details later.
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