(Wednesday 13th July 2005)Moderating a forum is a thankless task. I felt quite honoured when I was asked to moderate a very busy forum I hadn't been a member of for very long. However, it didn't take long for me to realise this wasn't all it was cracked up to be. For starters, I lost the freedom of speech and gained the responsibility of wading through endless posts each day. Even this was a pointless activity, as the forum didn't want a moderator who actually moderated. As I tried to field numerous posts from trolls who suddenly discovered a reason to turn into massive time sinks hell bent on self destruction, I began to have sympathy with voluntary workers everywhere.
I enjoy responsibility and moderating a forum I have an interest in. But if it begins to take up too much of my time, I'm not going to do it. If I was paid to take ignorant abuse like the police, that would it be different. But this is my free time and right now I can think of better ways to spend it than go back to my childminding days, where the urge to smack a misbehaving youngster was frustratingly out of the question.
Work is going well and I'm enjoying the new job. I wish I could think of something positive to say about Learndirect but it remains a fact that my IT student has learnt more thanks to their frustratingly difficult to work with software, than anything the organisation is intentionally teaching her.
(Monday 4th July 2005)Horrified to see I haven't updated this site in what looks a long time. I really need to archive another page of entries, which tends to put me off updating. There's been quite a lot happening - a new job and the Chevy Chase at the weekend, for a start. Emily is now in Ireland working and Louise will soon be moving to Bath.
(Wednesday 22nd June 2005)Congratulations to Louise for her excellent 2:1 degree from Oxford (maths with philosophy)! Congrats to David Moore for his 2:1 as well - a relief to both students after a stressful wait. And Happy Birthday to Derek! for yesterday.
(Friday 17th June 2005)MY BIRTHDAY! Recently back from a few days in Oxford, which was more or less our last chance to spend time at the university. One more visit next year for Louise's graduation ceremony and then Oxford won't feature in our lives at all. We visited Blenheim Palace on Tuesday, being able to get around more now Louise has a car, as well as doing all the usual things like formal hall and JCR tea. On this visit we saw the ritual of finishing exams, where after their last exam, red carnationed students are met by friends bearing champagne, balloons and confetti etc. Links to a few photos of our visit:
JCR Tea
Formal Hall
Louise and Derek at the Winston Churchill exhibition, Blenheim Palace
Blenheim Palace: The Marlborough Maze
Our Game of Chess - Checkmate
The Garden Challenge (managed to get on a live TV show)
The Mushroom Garden
The College Rooms
Before Exams
Finishing
More Finishing
And Another
The Top of Carfax Tower
(Friday 10th June 2005)Well, this has been a rather sad few days, since hearing on Monday that a diver off Coquet Island had disappeared while exploring a deep wreck. The shock of subsequently learning this was someone I knew well from swimming and had trained with for the best part of two years, as well as knowing his mother from masters galas was hard to take in. Why do these tragedies always seem to happen to the nicest, most intelligent, highly qualified, "everything to live for" people, rather than the scum of society we could easily do without?
(Tuesday 31st May 2005)Spent a considerable time making changes to the code used to display pages of photographs. Many thanks to SEVENtwentyfour.com for their invaluable advice, which has solved a puzzle that has irritated me for some time. It's another example of how forgiving IE is with sloppy HTML and how using Firefox has forced me to tidy up code which IE would manage to interpret as intended. Back from an awesome trip to Embleton for the weekend.
(Saturday 28th May 2005)Forgot to mention I now have a channel bot, Isis :) I don't think I could have organised this had I been working, as compiling and configuring an eggdrop running on somebody else's shell (thanks phych0!), using Putty, was a fairly time consuming effort given that it isn't really a useful way to spend time. It so far has two TCL scripts uploaded, a !seen function and a talkz script. It's getting quite a large vocabulary (unfortunately some of it an unrecognisable foreign language) and it picks up more colourful phrases from people as they talk to it! Strangely, it isn't always welcome in certain irc channels ..... its owner protect function doesn't always go down too well and #adsl don't seem to go for it either. Can't think why :D
(Friday 27th May 2005)Thanks for the positive guestbook comment, whoever you are! Another Moira ..... For a brief account of our cruise to Norway click here.
(Monday 23rd May 2005)BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOUISE! On a cruise to Norway when Louise turned 22, I'm afraid this web entry got rather overlooked on the day itself.
Some photos from the Norway cruise here.
(Sunday 15th May 2005)The latest in a long line of call centres to go to India, this report in the Register was interesting. "Some workers handling printer support calls are reported to have gotten up from their desks and taken off to the pub" - I can believe that! While I don't normally feel kindly disposed towards companies who relocate to India, I think our call centres sometimes get too hung up on "procedures" and don't give enough priority to what the customer actually needs. After all, India can send out an email with a link to a web page "help" document that the customer doesn't want, just as easily as the UK can.
Looking forward to a cruise to Norway on Wednesday. I don't think the weather forecast is all that good - and the sea looks like being choppy, but it'll make a pleasant change.
(Tuesday 10th May 2005)Many thanks to Paddy Macdee from Radio Newcastle for finding two songs I'd been wanting to identify for some time. Originally recorded from his afternoon show some time ago, I could neither remember the artist nor the title, all I knew they were from the late sixties/early seventies and remembered a smattering of the words. We exchanged some emails - one song he identified straight away, the second one took a little longer as my recollection of it was pretty vague! However we got there in the end and this particular song was played on his show last night. I got a long mention which was *so* good :))) Paddy has also played Morgan le Fay tracks for me in the past and we have met in person at a variety show some years ago in aid of Children in Need (although I'm sure he won't remember me).
(Sunday 8th May 2005)Hello Jo, thanks for signing the guestbook. Not entirely sure which Neil you're talking about. If it's Neil from the photopage, then I doubt it since he lives local to Oxford. Neil my nephew is 15 and (obviously) hasn't worked for M & S either. Email me if there's another Neil I haven't mentioned :)
(Monday 2nd May 2005)Some stats for the channel here. They'll get better once I organise the full feature program and include all the logs - these were done quickly last night and a few logs are on the other PC. Obviously it's a bit skewed, as it can only parse logs I've got (obviously) and doesn't include the rare times I wasn't in the channel. It's interesting though!
(Saturday 30th April 2005)Enjoyed Newcastle Falcons' last game of the season - or last home game anyway. A win and favourable results elsewhere have got us a wild card place in the play offs for next season's Heineken Cup, to be played next Saturday away at Gloucester. Not sure I'm entirely convinced by the mascot - looks more like the grim reaper than a falcon!
I`m not surprised Kustom doesn`t want to be associated with #kustompcs.
Everyone behaves like children. It`s owned by a petulant, tantrum throwing n00b who believes the way to attract members is to mess around with people and his way of saying thanks to members who have actually tried to do anything good there is to throw it back in their faces. For months the channel was dead. It`s not hard to see why. Any decent members who were tempted to try it again have been subsequently put off by the constant bitching and instability of the person who was supposedly in charge.
So Dave and I decided to set up an alternative room where everyone is welcome, particularly Kustom forum members. It's on the quakenet server, channel name #kustom. Or click this link (just have an irc client installed, doesn't even have to be open):
irc://irc.quakenet.org:6667/kustom
(Saturday 23rd April 2005)Second PC is becoming a right pain and I'm fairly unimpressed with Abit motherboards. To regain the lost speed, I splashed out on a new processor for Emily/Philip only to discover one memory slot became totally unusable. No matter what was fitted, the PC refused to load windows and constantly rebooted, yet the same memory worked perfectly OK in my computer. Leaving the slot empty was the only option (other than trying to RMA the mobo). So that PC now has 512MB RAM plus 512MB from my PC, while I manage with 750MB until an extra stick arrives from Crucial - hopefully Monday. Quite why one memory slot should become faulty at exactly the moment a new processor is fitted is anybody's guess and I'm not entirely convinced.
(Thursday 14th April 2005)Finally got my second PC back to normal, but it turned out to be rather more complex than I would have wished for. Firstly, after fitting the new motherboard and connecting everything to it again, the boot process got no further than the BIOS and sometimes not even that. That was finally tracked down to not seating the memory properly, however the next obstacle wasn't so easy to overcome and I've only got round it by the installation of a bog standard PCI network card, instead of using the onboard LAN port. The symptoms were basically a total inability to access web pages, although sites could be pinged OK. Nothing would resolve this, not even rebuilding the TCP/IP stack and the Winsock chain. I did get a message popping up complaining of an incompatibility with a device that "was no longer physically present" and my guess is that there's some conflict between the nvidia LAN port the old mobo had and the VIA port the new one uses. However, it's hard to uninstall something Windows keeps saying isn't there. When I've more time, I'll delve into the registry a bit, but I think the only real solution would be a reinstall of Windows.
Another disappointment is the inability to overclock the processor, as this BIOS has locked the multiplier and it would never take an increase in the FSB without lowering this. Beforehand, we had a nice overclock of the duron, with a multi of 9.5 and an FSB of 175 (up from 133). Still looking for ways to overcome this, at least the machine now has an extra 512 MB RAM.
And lastly, the law's an ass when it comes to drugs and so are most people's attitudes which are right out of the dark ages! I can never see why binge drinking and cigarette smoking are considered totally acceptable, while other (quite legal) drugs like these would surely attract maximum disapproval, although a lot less harmful. After all, how much more violence does drinking cause and how many more deaths do cigarettes account for?
(Tuesday 12th April 2005)Spent the last two days doing Learndirect courses at PP Training, where Philip works. There are cash incentives for completing courses which is welcome.
Needless to say, Emily hadn't backed up any data, which was her A level coursework stuff. So I had to swap secondary hard drives within my SFF (not easy with the lack of space inside these things) and attach hers as a slave. Fortunately it went like clockwork and all her important work is now safely sitting in a folder on this PC. Although I image the drives on both PCs regularly, the latest image was on a partition on her hard drive which wasn't any use! Which all goes to demonstrate the importance of backing up because you never know when windows will suddenly become inaccessible.
(Monday 11th April 2005)Bad news the other night - Emily's PC "died". I noticed last thing Friday night that although it was switched on, the screen showed nothing. However, it was late and I left it until the next day. Swimming at Tolcross most of Saturday, I didn't get round to investigating until that evening. Essentially, although the PC would turn on, after a brief moment of hard drive activity, only the case fans were active. Nothing on the screen, not even booting as far as the BIOS.
To cut a long story short, stripping the PC down to its bare essentials, then on Sunday morning replacing one part after another with the help of Michael and his useful spare components, we came to the conclusion the motherboard must have died a death. By some stroke of luck, it was the last day of its two year warranty, but a replacement would necessitate being without that PC for over a fortnight, while a replacement came from the Netherlands. So a new motherboard has been ordered (along with more memory) and if I do bother to send off for a replacement, I'll probably sell it on Ebay. Frankly, it may not be worth the hassle, particularly as Epox are haggling over who pays for the return.
I've added a password protected facility at the bottom of this page. Anyone interested in some photos of my last trip and some info on the site which made it all possible, email for a login.
(Friday 8th April 2005)Received a pleasing email from Michelle just before I set off on Wednesday for a trip to Embleton, which was an enjoyable opportunity to get totally away from it all for a couple of days. Finally, I have passed the last of the Advanced ECDL modules, Powerpoint (my least favourite!). This means I can become an Associate member of the British Computer Society and also claim an ECDL Expert Certificate, having gained all four advanced modules. It does seem slightly ironic in view of the latest job situation. Takes the edge off being told by Michelle "You are our first student to achieve all four modules". Oh well ....
(Friday 1st April 2005)CONGRATULATIONS EMILY! on passing your driving test.
(Wednesday 30th March 2005)Reflections on the swim. And continued thanks to Krusty for hosting this site. In a world that often seems to be full of fickle people who make promises they don't keep, or who attach conditions and expect paybacks for every favour, it is a relaxing change to have an arrangement with no strings attached, no fuss, just a reliable connection I have no right to be lucky enough to have secured, because to find someone prepared to give and not expect anything in return is indeed rare, more so in that Krusty is someone I don't even know in real life.
(Friday 25th March 2005)Finally got round to updating the site ..... it's been a distracting week! An exam on Tuesday and now I'm down in Leeds with the prospect of a 10k swim tomorrow. I've only done this once before and I well remember the boredom of 200 lengths of Leeds International Pool and the best part of 3 and a half hours in water. Last week had two memorable events which merited a separate page, The Musical on Thursday, and Uncle Noel's 90th last weekend.
(Wednesday 16th March 2005)Greetings Pernilla! No, sorry I don't know Richard Hunt from Dunswell, Hull, but it's not too far away from where I live - 100 miles or so at a guess. I did find this link to the town though, which you might find interesting.
(Monday 14th March 2005)HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROSIE! No longer a teenager .... and Michael sends greetings as well.
(Wednesday 9th March 2005)HAPPY BIRTHDAY PHILIP!
(Sunday 6th March 2005)Some photos from our recent weekend away in Melrose.
Along with quite a few other people, I thought I'd got the bargain of the year from Ebuyer. A flat widescreen digital 28" TV with integrated Freeview and a cabinet to match, being sold at $999 on Ebuyer's US site, was being advertised in the UK for £28! VAT + post and packing made the total cost £39. The news predictably flew round mailing lists, irc channels and msn, resulting in their entire stock being sold in an incredibly short time. My payment was taken, the order went to picking status and I was given a confirmation of delivery on 10th March. Unfortunately, even somewhere as dumb as Ebuyer were likely to pick up on their warehouse suddenly being inundated with xxxxx orders for a particular of TV, and realise they'd omitted a zero somewhere along the way. Sadly, 24 hours later everyone got an email saying their orders had been cancelled! I guess that whilst their cockup over dual layer DVDs (where they advertised a whole pack for the price of one) was something they were prepared to honour, this was a mistake which would have cost them a fortune!
Two nights out in a row with work and although I forgot my camera on Friday, I brought it along the following night. I uploaded a few of the photos, a couple can be seen here and here.
(Saturday 26th February 2005)Some fantastic news was waiting for me when I got in from work today - I passed the Advanced ECDL Access exam :))))) Off tomorrow (well, today) for a weekend in Melrose with Derek, it'll be a nice excuse to celebrate and also climb the Eildon Hills I've always fancied going up.
Clint are you for real ??? This l33t webdesigning genius seems a nice enough guy, with a similar sort of blog and family photo website to all the numerous blogging sites on the net, including my own. Looking at the code, I'd say it was constructed using some kind of web authoring software, which basically allows someone to create a site with little knowledge of html (at least these sort of blogging sites anyway). I well remember the day I held a gun to Clint's head and told him that unless he visited my site on a regular basis and at least read the latest updates, he was dead meat! Judging by his guestbook comment, he's finding that being unable to avoid coming here is rather a strain. Why not cheer Clint up by leaving a comment in his guestbook? And if you read his guestbook you'll see that no, this isn't a slanging match, when I visit someone's site out of choice and leave a comment I have the good manners to be courteous :)
(Thursday 24th February 2005)HAPPY BIRTHDAY ASHLEY! And bad luck Emily, the bad weather meant her driving test was cancelled for today, which is an anti-climax after building up to it and then it doesn't happen. Probably for the best though, as her instructor had cancelled the pre-test lesson, which combined with the rather slippy side roads, would have increased her chances of failing. Driving tests are difficult enough to pass without outside influences making them even harder!
Many thanks to SEVENtwentyfour for the explanation about my spoof link and why it doesn't work in Firefox, sending users back to my home page instead. I'm really impressed with this company! I quote:
(Monday 21st February 2005)There are an awful lot of spoof emails doing the rounds just now, inviting people to enter credit card details and logins into fake ebay/aol/paypal and other sites. This link demonstrates how clicking on the URL for Paypal doesn't necessarily take you where you think you're going. Although this is a blank page with little more than a link, it could easily be an email, which if the link is followed, leads to a fake form designed to harvest financial information from anyone not very clued up. Try it! Since I couldn't get this particular code to work with Firefox, this is also yet another reason not to use IE as a browser - it's inherently so much more insecure, even fully updated and patched against the latest vulnerabilities.
New job is great! It's good to be once again working in a technical environment. It's been a busy week, 6 days work then the Scottish 5k championships at Tollcross where I swam in the category event and was lucky enough to come away with a bronze medal. Unfortunately this meant a very early start, so for Sunday I pencilled in "sleep" and thoroughly enjoyed staying in bed till 1.30pm!
I'm heartily glad to have finally sorted out the networking problem I was having connecting Suse on the laptop to the shared folders on this PC. Even plugging in the RJ45 cable seemed enough to trigger an "allergic reaction" in the router, which immediately started to block all traffic (even though I had none of these problems with the other desktop PC, which continued to keep its stable internet connection and Suse could see files and folders over there with no problem at all). Many thanks to demon and others in adsl channel for what amounted to an awful lot of help - I couldn't have sorted it without them.
(Tuesday 15th February 2005)In fact it's Wednesday ... I had my last day today at Penny Plain and look forward to starting a new job in the morning. The Musical is coming back to Newcastle for one night on 17th March, being performed at the same venue as before, Newcastle Arts Centre. Anyone interested in finding out more or buying tickets for the show, can email the-musical@the-musical.co.uk. The show did really well at the Edinburgh fringe, and got a lot of good reviews when Ashley and Chris performed it here last year. Apparently it's undergone a few refinements and is better than ever! I'll be looking to see it again during what will probably be its farewell tour.
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.