(Monday 6th February 2006)I'm reinstalling Windows. Again. The fast user switching problem I had with the SFF was becoming more time consuming than it was worth trying to troubleshoot. I'm once again cursing programs as I install them. I opt for the "complete install" of Office 2003, so what does it do? Not bother install the VBA Digital Signature Tool, which means I have to find the disk again and install it separately. And that stubborn copy of Paint Shop Pro, which never did install on this PC has survived intact on the D drive over on the other computer, despite the Windows partition having been formatted.
Last week was marked by a horrible bug that saw me take my first ever sick day off at this job. Still, at least it was last week, not spoiling my holiday in Shetland with Anne on Friday! I don't think we're going to need to pack many T shirts, having seen the 5 day weather forecast.
(Tuesday 31st January 2006)Just returned from a few days away in Bath, which were very enjoyable, if cold. Louise now has a car to run around in and we managed to do quite a lot in the time we had, including open topped bus tours of the city (in sub zero temperatures) and a visit to Stonehenge, which as someone in the US I sent the photos to has just remarked, is one of the Windows XP desktops. Below are a few photos from the weekend.
I'm heartily sick of all my computers at the moment. This one has been refusing to copy and paste text from Firefox or Thunderbird. It seems OK now, but altogether it's cost me many hours of time posting on forums etc, and I have no idea what's changed or if it's going to last. The Biostar has had to be restored to an earlier Acronis image as something's gone wrong with Fast User Switching, which breaks the internet connection after more than one user switch. I have no idea if it's even worked. Needless to say, that useless piece of so called functionality built into XP, System Restore, once again failed to roll back the computer to any of the restore points. And the laptop with its wonderful new long range wireless PCMCIA card was taken down to Bath and failed to pick up even one wireless network, despite a couple appearing on Louise's laptop without any effort or special equipment on her behalf.
(Monday 23rd January 2006)I seem to have been made aware of the issue of taking sick days off work in the same manner as holiday recently - ie, booking them as paid leave to do exactly what you fancy with the day. Techrepublic have had a discussion about it and it's a constant problem at work too. Techrepublic users come out with some choice quotes: "The employer agreed to offer us as part of our compensation package something called “sick time” which we use at our discretion." LOL - perhaps I'm missing something here, but I always thought sick time was for using if you were actually sick. He goes on: "sick time is a form of compensation granted to us by our employer in exchange for our valuable labor. It *is* payment! Use it and budget it wisely as the resource that it is." With employees like that, it's no wonder a lot of companies go out of business if they start handing out sick pay, which means of course that the genuinely ill employees have to suffer. Maybe one poster had the right idea with: "PTO (aka Paid Time Off) in lieu of Holiday/Vacation/Sick Time. An individual is granted so many days, and what that person does with said days is at their discretion."
(Sunday 15th January 2006)So far so good for Rosie. At least the operation is done and everything appears to be going very well indeed. Already she can drive without glasses, although it's a bit too soon for her to be given a proper eye test. With a bit of luck, she can look forward to a good many years liberated from the need to wear contacts/glasses all the time.
So much for booking another trip to Shetland next month with the hope of seeing the Northern Lights. A recent newsletter from AuroraWatch stated the following:
Oh well! We'll just have to go back in June/July and experience the "summer dim" instead!
(Tuesday 10th January 2006)One week later and I'm still working on what I seem to have been doing for the last 10 days - reinstalling Windows! In an attempt to create an image of Windows without Norton Systemworks on, so I could roll back to 12 months of subscription updates without reinstalling XP, I ended up with 168 virus infected files after downloading torrents and p2p programs!! A cautionary tale .... and a format/reinstall of Windows. I then installed a copy of Vista onto a 20 GB partition on the C drive alongside Windows, and found myself unable to get back into XP, so just when I had everything set up perfectly for the second time, I had to reinstall again. I thought a repair install had worked, until I discovered I had no optical drives recognised in Explorer (there is a helpful registry fix for this, but I had neither of the values to try deleting). So here I am, onto the third install of XP on my new dual core PC.
Meanwhile, the SFF needed a fresh install of Windows - while there was nothing wrong with XP, it had been year since reinstalling, so I rolled back to an image taken in January 2005. Understandably, there had been quite a few changes to the PC since then, so there was still a lot of work to do. However, the scanner drivers managed to wreck Windows so I had to start all over again on Sunday. That's 6 installs of Windows in just over a week (including Vista)! Not bad for someone who absolutely loathes the job!
On the subject of Vista, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. It is quite simply miles off being a usable operating system, most things just don't work at all, and to take advantage of the fade in/fade out menus and other graphics effects, you need better than onboard graphics, however good these may be for normal computer use. At the very least, I would have had to tweak video memory to see anything like the effects an earlier copy of Vista had produced on the other PC (which does have a decent graphics card). I had massive problems caused by the boot.ini file and in conclusion, this 7 GB heap of rubbish is something I will stay well clear of for a good while yet.
Best of luck to Rosie on Thursday, as she has laser surgery to correct her eyesight.
(Wednesday 4th January 2006)I'm enjoying a new dual core PC - but how I hate reinstalling and setting up Windows from scratch! Every time, it seems to throw up the most unexpected and irritating annoyances, and until I've got everything just how I want it, including a lot of customisation, I feel as though I've lost an arm. However, it's getting done. I need a new version of Vista to set up as a dual boot and a few remaining stubborn programs installing. The administrator login needs customising. When I'm sure I haven't missed anything, I'll try rolling back my original SFF (now relegated to being the kids' PC) to its first Acronis image (taken pre norton so the 12 months of live updates would restart). Having had windows installed for a year now, it could do with refreshing. Still a nice computer, it's now got a much better graphics card from the previous PC, which will eventually upgrade Emily's computer in Belfast I hope. I'm waiting for a couple of pieces of hardware to arrive, namely a PCMCIA card for the laptop and an audio splitter switch for the dual core PC.
Booked another holiday in Shetland in February with Anne! I can't wait to go back to a place I could happily live in. Derek and I have also got a few days in Bath coming up at the end of the month, when we visit Louise on our wedding anniversary weekend.
(Thursday 22nd December 2005)A page of photos from Sarah and Jenny's 21st party at Stereo, which also saw Peter awarded the Senior Squad Swimmer of the Year trophy - well done Peter, a popular choice of Geoff's! Peter maintains the City of Newcastle Masters website and has been a loyal member of the club for years.
Louise is back for Christmas, Emily returns from Belfast tomorrow. It'll be nice to have all six of us together for a few days over christmas.
(Friday 16th December 2005)I'm unexpectedly impressed with AOL's beta LinkToPC software. Having found the built in Remote Desktop in Windows XP flakey at best, and really only used it to connect to my LAN machines, this is the first time I've ever really succeeded in working on my home PC from a remote location (although to be fair, I've no reason to think XP's remote desktop wouldn't work, and have enabled the necessary router configurations to give it a fighting chance). But this is so easy! Like their new Explorer style browser, a rather unexpected direction for AOL to take in their software development. As long as the remote PC has LinkToPC running and is connected to the internet, a simple login from any PC will connect you to it, and allow you to work as though you were sitting at home in front of your own computer.
Christmas is starting to accelerate now and I'm really having to address the idea of present buying, decorations and christmas cards. Higher up our street now resembles Las Vegas, as ever more houses display increasingly gaudy lights and flashing santas each year. I'm afraid my own decorations consist of just having plugged in the fibre optic tree tonight - at least it's easy to dismantle.
(Tuesday 28th November 2005)I can't believe it's taken me 6 weeks to write something on Shetland but I finally got round to it!
(Thursday 17th November 2005)Nice to have finally got to the bottom of this mysterious "not enough storage space to process the current command" message when trying to open Network Places on the other PC. I think I was initially led astray by thinking it related to the machine giving the error. For anyone else experiencing the same problem, try increasing the IRPStackSize.
I spent the coldest 80 minutes of my life last friday at the rugby game between Newcastle Falcons and London Irish in what turned out to be an enjoyable evening but not without the odd hitch. Rosie was taking part in a touch rugby tournament as part of a Domnick Hunter mixed team, then we were both going to the televised match, Rosie with a free ticket to the north stand and me to join Jennie as near as possible to her season ticket in the west stand seating area. Rosie had to be at a practice at the Blue Star football ground by 4.30 - well, we got lost and ended up there late. The weather could hardly have been worse, it was bitterly cold, the rain started coming down in horizontal sheets and the wind strength increased to gale force. I lasted 5 minutes watching from the edge of the field, then retreated back to the car. I never saw her play yet, but when we met up later, I gathered they hadn't got very far against some of the obviously more professional teams who had entered - and a referee, who in her opinion had "made some bad decisions"! Don't they always when you're on the losing side?
Back at the game, Jennie had bought 8 flags for us to wave around. My seat was a short distance from hers and after a few minutes she came over and said two friends of hers who had 4 season tickets had two spare that they hadn't been able to use. So I went over and sat beside her, which lasted about 10 minutes until a man came up claiming I was in his seat! It turned out the Pegram's had sent their spare tickets in for reselling ..... still, he was happy in a vacant seat two along from me. We watched cheer leaders, fireworks, and had a minute's silence for Armistice Day. Shortly before the game kicked off, the man whose seat I'd taken tapped me on the arm and said that unfortunately someone had come along whose seat he was sitting in, so he would have to have his own seat and as I was sitting in that, I was going to have to move! So I had to uproot quite a few people in row G to find what was eventually a genuinly empty seat.
Rosie meanwhile, had fared a bit better. Taking a walk around the ground before kick off, she and a couple of friends wandered into what they thought was a bar, but was actually a privately booked hospitality suite given over to an awards ceremony for some people completely unknown to them. They coolly bought drinks and sat down at an empty table, where they stayed unchallenged and in the warmth for the rest of the match, which they mainly watched on a giant screen, venturing out for about 5 minutes to watch Johnny Wilkinson convert a try. She literally bumped into the referee while searching for some loos, and from her description, Jennie and I were able to work out that instead of the £10 ticket for the draughty north stand she'd been given free for taking part in the tournament, she had instead enjoyed corporate hospitality!
I will gloss over the actual score :( (Newcastle 20 London Irish 23). The flags very quickly became more trouble than they were worth. A good idea, but draping them over one of the exits, while a good way of not blocking anyone's view and perhaps making them visible to Sky's cameras, saw them catch every gust of wind and we made many hasty grabs at them as they looked ready to take off. Still, it was a great night overall, a gate total of over 10,200 (ground capacity 10,200) and the pitch has never looked so brilliantly floodlit! When Sky come to film, they insist on the illumination that Kingston Park ground generally try to avoid in the interest of economy. I still don't know how the mobile cameramen, grips and microphone carriers don't all end up in a tangled heap with the ball boys and linesmen but it all seems to work.
(Saturday 5th November 2005)It sounds like a war zone out here! Interesting comments from Mary in the guestbook, but I can't work out what she's referring to. Taken from 24th September apparently, I didn't make an entry on 24th September. Mary, if you read this it would be good if you could clarify it!
(Monday 24th October 2005)Some photos from Shetland to look at.
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.
