(Thursday 18th May 2006)HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOUISE! Spent hours tonight, finding and uploading the inevitably missing photos after the data on the site was irretrievably lost when it changed servers. From now on, I'm keeping everything backed up in the same place, because while I more or less still had all the photos, they were scattered all over my PC and weren't necessarily labelled the same as on the site. I never want to have to spend so much time doing this again!! Looking forward to Saturday and Louise's graduation at Oxford, which will probably be our last trip down there to the university - the end of an era.
(Monday 8th May 2006)The site has had some major downtime due to krusty moving all his accounts over to a new server. Unfortunately this meant no email to moiraatkinson.co.uk for quite some time without me realising, as well as the discovery that a site backup in one location on the PC would have been a good idea! As I couldn't get back onto the old server to retrieve all the files, in the end I had to just bite the bullet and upload everything again to the new server. I did have all the data, but the pictures in particular were spread all over my PC. I'm expecting a flurry of broken link reports from SEVENtwentyfour as missing jpegs are discovered.
(Saturday 6th May 2006)Now I'm busy once again installing Windows - on the new drive which is finally working after a visit to Michael to see if we could discover what was preventing the SFF powering up at all. We never did discover the exact cause, but his midas touch has it functioning as a computer again. I'll never buy another small form factor PC! Far too fiddly to work with, particularly if you plan on fitting multiple drives and a reasonably large graphics card.
Went to the last Falcons match of the season this afternoon at Kingston Park. I've never seen them score so many points in one game! I've never watched live while someone got stretchered off the pitch either, and unfortunately this happened twice during the game. Overall, it was a great afternoon though. Pleasantly sunny, I bought the new strip and watched two really spectacular tries, plus Jonny Wilkinson play for almost the full 80 minutes and convert 6 of those.
(Tuesday 2nd April 2006)Sorted out the blue screens on here, but what a performance! I eventually discovered that Acronis wasn't recognising the hard disks because the version I had was too old to work with SATA drives. By this time I'd tried fitting the C drive from my SFF in here, hoping to check that the problem wasn't hard drive related. However, the SFF hard drive installed so little hardware, it didn't turn out to be much of a test, and on putting it back in my other PC, it refused to even power up. Taking it out seems to have been the final straw for it, so I've now ordered a 250GB replacement SATA drive and will have to install Windows (again) over there. I upgraded Acronis and attempted to restore my last backup, taken at the end of March. Amazingly, this worked as the actual images taken with the older copy were OK. As this PC has been completely stable since, I'm coming back to the idea of the windows updates being to blame. Maybe they didn't install correctly - either way, the BSODs started straight after the update reboot and are now gone, having rolled back to before that time.
(Saturday 22nd April 2006)A couple of photos taken with my phone at the Labour Club just off Percy Street on Thursday, when Chris Cook had a party to celebrate considerable success at the commonwealth games in the breastroke events.
(Thursday 20th April 2006)Well, the idle time of both PCs appears to be doing nothing much more than adding to our electricity bill right now. First, I've learnt that a major programming error in the climate control program has all but rendered the data acquired so far, useless. Then on this PC, I read about an updated, much more efficient version of the enigma client, which I duly downloaded - and it wouldn't run. From a newslist, I may now have discovered why, meanwhile I'd restored the original (far less efficient) client. BSODs continue and it's a long haul to methodically test every possible cause, but it seems less and less likely to be hardware.
(Wednesday 19th April 2006)One thing I cannot stand is hypocrisy and double standards. It happens all the time in life, but I've particularly noticed it at work this week. And I'm sorry, it's taking the p1ss to suggest it's on a par with reading magazines - for a start everyone has that choice, not everyone has the choice whether or not to break this particular rule which was hammered into us in training as a complete no-no. It makes a joke out of separate logins with passwords for a start and it's a potentially much bigger issue, with a very real danger of opening quite a lethal can of worms. That's not my problem however - I just like a level playing field, not somewhere with a policy of "if your face fits".
Back to maxdsl, and it's settled down a bit since what looks like interleaving has been put on my line. The pings aren't all that much higher (I'm no gamer anyway) and the line is more stable. It's still all over the place compared to my rock solid 2 meg though and hopefully there will still be noticeable improvements. It's meant to "intelligently test" my line for 10 days, but people regraded earlier haven't noticed any earth shaking events happening once the magical 10 days is up. Still, all in all the speed is faster and for the same subscription it's a better service.
This has been somewhat clouded by a series of frequent BSODs, the cause of which I haven't been able to track down yet. Only happening on the dual core PC, it's no doubt going to mean a battery of tests unless it magically stops (and this is wishful thinking). It doesn't seem to be related to RAM, I doubt the CPU is an issue, nor have any new programs been installed and there aren't any suspect drivers installed from what I can tell. It coincided with installing the 3 latest M$ updates, but even I can't really blame this - and in any case, the other two computers are fine.
(Thursday 13th April 2006)Oh the joys of maxdsl! If I can stay online long enough and grab a few moments before another BSOD, I might just get this updated posted. I might even get round to putting a photopage up of our meal on Monday night, to celebrate Rosie's 21st birthday last month. For now, click here to see a photo of all of us at Poon's Palace in Gosforth.
Since turning the router back on Monday afternoon when I got in from work, the first problems were apparent, ie the down speed still throttled at AOL to 2 meg, despite a line sync of 6.6 Mbps. The upload which is fixed, is the only thing which has remained stable in all this. However, by the next day, this cap was gone and my line started 10 days of "learning" what will be my highest stable speed - which in reality has meant frequent disconnections, mega problems in irc channels (banned by my own revolving door script on qnet!) and speed tests fluctuating wildly between 1 and 5.7 meg. During the night, it's a total fcukup and this evening alone, I've had 5 BSODs for no logical reason. I could mention so many problems and issues since I had this regrade that it would fill a page on its own :( ah well, it will be worth it in the end, I'm sure (?)
(Saturday 8th April 2006)Made some more stats for two irc channels I spend time in, #adsl on chat.adslguide.org.uk and #tor on freenode. #adsl stats here and #tor stats here. It has to be said they're somewhat skewed - although I idle more or less 24/7 in these channels, there are inevitably times when I'm not there and of course the stats are only generated from my logs.
(Monday 3rd April 2006)I'm delighted to have discovered a way round waiting for AOL to do a bulk regrade to maxdsl. I should now have it on 10th April - speeds up to 8Mb! A lot better than the end of June, which was the sort of time frame I'd been looking at. I can't believe I've now got an open order pending on the BT account, just hours after being advised of this alternative regrade option.
(Saturday 25th March 2006)As I read an email from 123 reg informing me that moiraatkinson.co.uk would expire in 15 days (unless I renewed it), it made me realise I've had this website for two whole years. In fact the reason I started it and the very first page is still there - Thomas. It makes me think I should maybe ditch some of the older articles - how relevant is my opinion of SP2 beta now, for instance? In fact, how relevant was it then? But especially now I have so much server space, it seems pointless deleting stuff.
I'm off to Leeds shortly to do the Swimathon. I'm sorry there isn't a 10k swim this year, since the only challenging thing about this event is surviving the boredom of churning out lengths while avoiding a lane full of "non swimmers". At least the Scottish Masters 5k is a proper race (but I was in Shetland this year), and the 10k swim generally ensures being in a lane with at least semi serious swimmers. Still, when I finish 100 lengths of Leeds 50m pool tomorrow morning, I'm sure I won't be regretting not having another 100 to do.
(Tuesday 14th March 2006)HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROSIE! 21 today!
I've enrolled my two desktop PCs in research programmes which will give them something to do in their idle time and contribute to important and/or interesting projects. One is taking part in a climate prediction study, while my SFF is helping to crack unsolved Enigma messages from the war.
(Wednesday 9th March 2006)HAPPY BIRTHDAY PHILIP and I forgot to acknowledge Emily's on January 19th.
They come up with some truly awful "special days" but this new one in the US is about the worst I've come across (especially the cheesy video). March 9th is Get Over it Day, which "is a new holiday taking place on March 9th (exactly midway between Valentine's Day and April Fool's Day) because EVERYONE has SOMETHING to get over!" Maybe I'll get over having a son who is 24, which makes me feel pretty old ....
(Saturday 4th March 2006)Well, back from a trip to Belfast with Michael to upgrade and sort out a few issues with Emily's network. Halfway through the morning I began to wonder if we were going to achieve anything. The disconnecting wireless hadn't dropped off once, the Sims had crashed once and refused to do it again, and although the physical upgrade of a new processor, extra fan and dvd drive had gone smoothly, the new setup was actually running slower than before. The BIOS refused to run the Athlon XP 2600+ at the correct FSB speed of 166, although the memory didn't have a problem at the same speed. Securing her wireless network with WPA had proved impossible as Ryan's networking card in his laptop didn't support it, and downloading drivers which supposedly fixed the issue had caused the network to disappear altogether. Rolling back to the previous drivers, the best we could achieve was WEP and MAC address filtering, along with a unique network name and not leaving the default router password set. The processor was more of a problem. A BIOS flash wouldn't first of all download, then when it did it wouldn't run either from floppy or hard disk. Eventually we found a different location and updated the BIOS successfully, but the processor still stubbornly locked the FSB at 133 MHz. In the end, searching forums provided the solution that a jumper setting needed altering on the motherboard. Of course we didn't have the manual, nor indeed an accurate idea of the exact motherboard make and model, and this had to be googled and a copy of the relevant page of jumper settings printed out.
Eventually it was running at the correct speed AND showing up as the correct speed in the BIOS. I guess the jumper setting would have fixed the speed issue but not shown the Athlon 2600 for what it was in system properties. We can only hope that a router firmware upgrade and a Windows restore on the laptop fixed whatever was causing the internet to disconnect frequently, but I'm not holding my breath. Still, we couldn't fix what wasn't broken, nor could we do anything about the lack of WPA support. The only folders I could share between the two computers were shared documents, possibly due to the laptop having XP Home and simple file sharing as opposed to Emily's XP Pro with advanced permissions set, but at least they can both use the printer. I'll just have to hope the Sims is OK but at least there is now a dedicated fan over the graphics card to help with cooling.
There was quite a bit of snow in Belfast, indeed the whole country seems to have had more than we have up here, although it's been bitterly cold.
(Monday 27th February 2006)At the bottom of this page are some links to photos and a brief account of the recent holiday Anne and I had in Shetland this month. Or click here for the first page and navigate backwards and forwards from there.
(Wednesday 22nd February 2006)Big news is I've drastically upgraded the hosting package on this site and I now have a good deal more bandwidth and space. Many thanks Krusty, you've given me excellent hosting for the past two years and I look forward to what I know will be unbeatable service for the foreseeable future. Expect to see a lot more Shetland photos appearing over the next few days, now that my storage space is is about 20 times what it was!
(Friday 17th February 2006)Since I started this website, I've always thought how much better it would be to have links opening in a new window, then if they were inadvertently closed, the person viewing the page hadn't lost the site altogether. I've just been told how to get links opening in a new window, and I can't believe it took me this long to add a simple addition to the anchor reference. Many thanks to David Moore - a recently qualified aerospace engineer - you certainly know your stuff!
(Thursday 16th February 2006)Well, back from a wonderful holiday in Shetland. In due course I'll get round to uploading some photos and maybe a report. It's such an anti climax being back at work though, it makes me wonder whether holidays are a good idea - you just get used to a great life, then it's back to reality and down to earth with a bump.
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.