I’m Moving:

Following on from my mate Barry's lead, I have set up a Wordpress blog on my own site.  All the posts from my Blogger.com account have been imported, and I am still playing about a lot with the 'Look and Feel' of this new site - http://boffinsblog.redbreva.co.uk

Irene Griffiths

By Violet Bright

I was just under eight years old when Irene was born.

Irene did not have an easy life; she was only 2 years old when our mother was killed in the blackouts at the start of WW II.

She was only 5 years old when dad married again – this was not a happy time for either of us, dealing with three step-sisters along with our own three brothers.

I left home as soon as I turned 16, and stayed away. When I returned home again, Irene was a teenager with a boyfriend. They seemed happy, and were looking at houses, but suddenly – out of nowhere – she had a complete breakdown, was very poorly and split from her boyfriend!

It was quite some time before she returned to work, when she did she found herself with a new best friend: Joyce. The pair of then got on really well, and went on holidays abroad together most years – the warm sunny weather worked wonders on Irene’s Psoriasis and helped her get thro’ the winter months.

In 1967 when my husband walked out on me and our two children, she was a pillar of strength, and during that time I got to really know my sister.

She was living with and looking after our day, till his death in 1979, and when Joyce died suddenly in 1993 she was left feeling rather lonely.

By this time the Psoriasis was getting worse, her mobility gradually reduced over time, she had two hip replacements in ’84 and 86 but she was still struggling with really bad ulceration of her leg, till it was finally amputated in ’97. During all of this, she made no big fuss about things and tried to carry on her life as independently as she could. Life was not easy, but she never showed it, and her sense of humour carried her thro’ even when she had the second leg removed in 2001.

As long as she had her ‘ciggies’ and her TV she was happy – and you were given a very sharp response if you dared to phone her or visit during one of her soaps!!

Over the last year or two, my own mobility has decreased, and I have seen my sister less and less.

I am glad I got to see her at the hospital in the last days before she died, and that she passed away very peacefully.

Good Bye Irene,

All your bad years are behind you, and you are at peace at last... I love you now and forever...

Violet.

Tempus Fugit!

Has it really been almost 3 weeks since the last entry?  Ok time for a catch up (in brief)

Bad:
ManU lost the Champions League final to Barcelona, comprehensively outplayed even…

Bad:
Bike failed MOT, needed front tyre and complete new exhaust, coupled with the annual service - £815

Good:
Amy went to her “Supercar Driving Experience” where she actually drove a Focus ST and a Ferrari (Allegedly a certain David Beckham was the previous owner), and I got a good chance to play with the Nikon SLR.

Routine:
Work is much the same as ever, but with even tighter budgetary constraints, and more people (that you know) than ever leaving the company.

Bad:
New computer failed to wake-up this morning – it had been up and running / sleeping for almost 10 days prior to that.  Spoke to Tech Support at PCSpecialist.co.uk and after disconnecting all peripherals and resetting the BIOS (By removing the battery) it came back up.  Broke again latter once everything was plugged back in, but seems to be related to the Printer.  Bit more digging required there :-(

Mediocre:
Played 18 holes round Halesowen on Monday, in 27 degrees!!  It was one of those round where I actually played quite well, but my score was cr@p! You know, chip shots that almost land on the green and roll towards the hole, but land 1” short and roll back into the bunker!!

Misc:
Finished “Sword of the Shanara” on audio book, just started “King of Torts”

And even better…

By drawing 0 – 0 with Arsenal this afternoon, Manchester united have been confirmed as Premier League Champions for the third successive season.

Finally some good news

Yesterday afternoon, my new PC was delivered..!

It didn’t take too long to remove the demo crapware that had been pre-installed, install my applications, and copy all my data files over the network.  I even remembered to de-register the old machine in iTunes before trashing it ;-) I decided to leave it on Vista 64bit for now at least, I may upgrade later in the year after it has been released, and I am sure that AV software etc is compatible…

A couple of hours this morning to get Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Outlook etc configured, and tweak all the icons, menu’s etc to match my old machine, and I am now up and running…  there are 8 cores showing in the CPU monitor – Cool!

I will leave my old PC for a day or two to ensure that I forgot nothing, and then wipe it and re-load ready for Amy.

What a long week…

Well, for a start I will have been at work for 7 days on the trot..

Monday AM, eye test etc.
Tuesday to Friday AM in the office,
Monday to Friday 14:00 to 18:00 “Death By Slideshow” from home, the 20 hour Tech Transfer for Nortel’s new Contact Centre 7 system – It was hard work, both in terms of some of the technicalities involved (SIP routing, integrated Predictive Outbound, Real Time Call Blending etc.) and in terms of staying awake for 4 hours!
Saturday 20:00 to Sunday 08:00 Covering a ROTA shift!

Still no glasses

Popped into D&A this morning to collect my new prescription sunglasses, only to find the frames were scratched, and have to be sent back…

Still no bike…

I have now had an entire week of public transport, and still no idea of when the Bandit will be ready to collect!

Ouch! (Updated)

Not just once, but twice!!

Took the Bandit in for it’s annual service and MOT this morning, had call from shop this afternoon – New exhaust and front tyre required to get thro’ MOT. 
Seems a ‘road legal’ Scorpion muffler at £190 is the most ‘Cost Effective’ replacement, add on the £117 for the front tyre, the cost of the service and the MOT… well not expecting any change out of £500 :-(

Update: Once they got the downpipes off today, they found that those too were scrap!!  So on top of everything else I now need a new set of downpipes - £300!!  At least they will be Stainless Steel rather than the originals (Chrome plated Mild Steel)

Between leaving the bike, and getting the bad news, I went for an eye-test.  It’s been almost two years since the last one, and I am finding my current glasses a little “underpowered” now, either the glasses are ‘wearing out’ or my eyes are!
No surprises for guessing, new specs required £230 for bi-focals, but I do get a *FREE* pair of prescription sun glasses!

17 Years and counting…

Yesterday was our 17th Wedding anniversary, and a full day packed with activity it was…

Out early to Merry Hill for Breakfast and Coffee and Amanda brought a new dress, then shopping at Tesco’s – Well I never claimed to be romantic!

Alex had a Golf lesson early afternoon, and then Amanda and I left Amy in charge, and went to the cinema. 

Which Rom-Com or chick flick did I take my wife to see? ….  Star Trek!  It was really good, and we both enjoyed it.  It was then a meal out, followed by attending a 40th Birthday party for one of Amanda’s mates from school.

Finally back home at 23:00.

Just the three holes

It was “Rammed” at the golf club this morning, seems Tuesday AM is the ‘Seniors’ time on the course…  In the end I only played the 5th, 9th and 12th but was quite pleased with my driving, and my putting was spectacular!  If only I could get some consistency with my long irons on up/down hill lies!!  I know what I need to do, I just don’t always manage to.

1 step closer

I received an email today from PCSpecialist, my new machine has been built, and is now entering the testing and quality control phase ;-)

Should be here late this week, early next with a bit of luck.  Still undecided if I should put Win7 RC on there… I have 32 and 64 bit versions, but am a little concerned about anti virus compatibility at the moment.  Looks like most of the major Av vendors are adopting an attitude waiting till final release to confirm what will and won’t work, although interestingly, the forums for Norton 2009 suggest that it is fully working on Win 7 64 bit, and that it’s only the 32 bit version that has issues!

New PC on the way

Finally conceded and placed an order for a new PC from www.pcspecialist.co.uk and I have gone well over the top with the spec:

Core i7 940 (4 x 2.93 Ghz)
6 GB Corsair DDR3 1600 Mhz RAM
300 GB VelociRaptor 16 MB cache (10,000 RPM)
1 TB HDD
1GB Nvidia Geforce 9800 GT
64 bit Vista Home Pro
all in a Black Trigon Case.

Total Spend £1,500 (inc VAT)

Delivery is about 7 to 10 days ;-)

Grand Day Out

This morning at 08:30, I met Neil Sankey at Halesowen Golf for the first 18 holes of the year.  The weather was fantastic, bright and sunny but not too hot, and the golf was actually not too bad, at least until we started to tire, and from then on it was not very good at all!

The GPS tracker showed that we actually walked 7.8 miles, and the course length is only about 4 miles!!

Link to The SportsTracker Data for the round

Panorama taken on the 5th Fairway, with Neil just leaving the 12th Green

Panorama taken on the 14th Tee

All pictures taken with the Nokia E71 phone

Seriously Cool

This guy makes art from a sheet of A4 paper by “materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form”

You really should check this site out: A4 PAPER CUT

On my bike

Cycled to work and back today – and now, I am totally foobar’d.

http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=836614

had the sports tracker running on the E71 for the journey back home, and the above link should take you to the data.

Even Shorter Week

You know I like my 4 day weeks whenever possible, well thanks to the combined delights of a Rota day and Easter Bank Holiday, coupled with 1 days leave, I get two 3 day weeks on the trot!  Wooooot!

Winner!

Turns out the horse I picked in the office sweepstake for the Grand National - “Mon Mote” actually went and won…

Looks like I will be picking up my £20 winnings in the Morning.

Knackered!

Went to “Rutland Water” today, with Alex and Amanda. Alex and I hired two mountain bikes for the afternoon, and rode approx 11 miles back and forth around the perimeter of the reservoir, by which point I was completely knackered, my “Numb Bum” just edging out the “Screaming Quads” in the discomfort stakes.  It was good fun tho’.  Alex on the other hand was disappointed that we had to stop!

Amanda simply walked the route, and did a pretty commendable 6 miles, but was completely knackered when she finally got back.

The only real downside of the location, is that it is a 2 hour drive there and another 2 hours back!  That makes it a pretty long day!

Audio Book update:

Just finished “Devil May Care” the James Bond book written by Sebastian Faulkes. – Excellent!!

Just started “Sword of the Shanara”, a book I have previously read, but it was some time ago, and I am really enjoying getting it read to me.  This may take some time to complete, it is in excess of 23 hours, and it’s only the 1st book in the trilogy!

Bike

Today I took the plunge and have bought myself a ne push bike.

Nothing spectacular, it’s from Hawk Cycles in Cradley Heath, and it’s a “Hybrid” style road bike: 27” wheels, road tyres, alloy frame, deep rim wheels, Padded Gel saddle, 21 gears and mountain bike type handlebars.  Original list price was £299, reduced in the sale to £190.

I have fitted the bike rack on the car, and will collect it tomorrow.  If the weather is nice, I will cycle back home on it, but as the forecast is for cold and rain, I may just clamp it on the back of the car, and drive home.

The downside is that I have had to spend a couple of very dust, sweaty hours this afternoon, clearing the rubbish in the garage to make room for a second push bike, whilst still being able to get the motor bike in and out.

Well Done Alex

Last night was the AGM and Presentation evening for Alex’s Scout group.  The amount of work being done by the Howley Grange leaders with regard to re-building the scout hut with limited funds is quite extraordinary!

Alex gained 7 new badges last night, including the Chief Scout's Silver Award which is the highest available award in Cubs!  Well done Alex.

I managed to find that I had agreed to help out with the committee, still not quite sure how that happened!

later on that night, I spent about an hour and a half sewing badges onto Alex’s sweatshirt, all according to the strict positioning guide.

Audio Book Update

earlier this week, I finally finished “Cross Bones” by Kathy Reichs (6:10 hours).  Once again, found the amount of technical detail harder to keep on top of with an audio v written book, but enjoyed it anyway!

Just started “Devil May Care” by Sebastian Faulks: writing as Ian Fleming (8:21 hours), about 2 hours in at the moment, and although nothing has really happened yet, it is still a “Must Listen” at lunch time.  So far, so good.

Alex’s Mothers Day Poem

You’re a hero, every day
You feed me, Care for me, Love me.
You clean the house till it’s clean
and sparkling.
You are special in every way.
You make me smile every day.
I will always be with you

From Alex

OMG!! 2

Oldie but still amusing

OMG!!

Amy’s school had their “Comic Relief” show tonight – Earls Amped, and Amy and a few of her mates decided to get fully into the swing of the event…

Car Window Update

Took the car into the dealers earlier this week, seems the “regulator” has failed….  £320 to supply and fit a replacement!!!  Well, bugger that for a game of solders!

Asked them to disconnect the rear window, leaving it effectively locked in the up position, and I may or may not get around to getting it repaired at a later date.  I can’t actually remember the last time we opened the rear windows, so in no rush to get it sorted.  If I do, you can get a replacment unit for £75, and it’s about 1 hours work for a local service station to fit, so probably about £150 all in.

Seems that this is a common problem with Megane and Scenics!

Carbonite update

In 23 hours since starting the backup, I have uploaded 3.5GB of data, consisting of 8,225 files.  At this rate initial backup ( =user profile minus video and music or 20GB) will be complete by Thursday.

In addition, I just found out that I can have 12 months free subscription to Carbonite by registering by LaCie network Store device!  Waiting on a reply from carbonite support how to transfer that free subscription to my existing account.

If anyone is interested in taking a carbonite account, let me know, if I refer you, we both get an extra free month ;-)

Backups

Now that the NAS device is on the network, and contains a set of Documents, Music, Pictures and Video’s with over 700GB still fee, I have freed up 120GB on my 2nd hard drive.

Call me paranoid, but I am still keeping an occasional backup of Music and Pictures on this drive in addition to the network backup…  Well, both the laptop and Amy’s computer have full access to the backup, so I can’t be 100% sure that they won’t delete something accidentally…

But then just to confirm my paranoia, I have just signed up for a 15 day free trial with Carbonite, who offer “unlimited online storage” for $49.95 per year, which even with the terrible exchange rate at present is only 67p  per week.  The initial backup may actually take most (or more!) of the 15 day trial to complete: My ‘user’ folder is 192 GB, well it will certainly test their “unlimited” claim ;-)

Twitter

I now have an account on twitter, you can see the last 5 updates over to the side of my blog page, but why not get your own twitter account and follow me, then tell all your friends to get a twitter account and follow you etc.

See the “Getting Started” FAQ at twitter.com

Strictly Come Dancing - Live

Today was the day to take the Girls to the NEC to see the penultimate SCD Live Tour show (last one is this evening).  The travel arrangements were complicated slightly by the car window issue, but we arrived, by train, at the NEC in plenty of time for a ‘Danish and Coffee’ at BB’s before getting to our seats some 5 minutes before the main event started.

The show was excellent, the dancing was fantastic, and the entertainment value was thro’ the roof! Julian insulted the judges magnificently, and after telling everyone that “Dancing is my life”, then proceed to claim that he was in fact a local but from the Lozzells area of Birmingham, and the fact that he has been know as a ‘Brum Bum’ for years was just more proof!!

Judges Scores for Ballroom
Tom 40
Gethin 39
Jill 39
Rachel 38
Cherie 37
Jodie 36
Kenny 32
Julian 29

Judges Scores for Latin
Tom 39
Cherie 38
Kenny 24
Jodie 34
Rachel 39
Gethin 37
Julian 23
Jill 40

Total Score:
Tom 79
Jill 79
Rachel 77
Gethin 76
Cherie 75
Jodie 70
Kenny 56
Julian 52

Result of Audience Vote, and therefore Winner:
Julian and Lilia
Runner Up
Tom and Camilla

After arriving back at Brindleyplace to collect the car, we visited the “Mash House” and had Sausage and Mash… fantastic!!  Finally arrived back home at about 18:10, only for the car window to decide to close itself!!

Damn!

Out this afternoon, parked up, locked the car – rear window opened!!

Seems the rear nearside electric window has decided it wants to stay down in the door all the time.  Unable to leave the car, I had to drive around to try and find a mechanic – at 16:00 on a Saturday??  The man at Halfords did have a look, but was not able to do anything in the available time (they close at 16:30).

So tonight, the car has a black bin liner taped over the opening, and the car is parked on next doors drive, really close to their wall. Good job they are away tonight!

Worst part of it is, that we are going to the NEC tomorrow afternoon (Strictly Come dancing – live), and won’t be able to take the car, as I am not happy about parking it up with an open window, so we have to go out even earlier and try to catch the train from New Street to Birmingham International, and then walk.  At least I can drive into Birmingham and park in the secure underground car park at work – otherwise we would have had to caught the bus into town and back!!

NAS Drive – Soon!

Had an e-mail this morning… The NAS drive is back in stock and was despatched Friday.

It is currently in the DHL depot at Sandwell, that's only about 5 miles from home, so with luck should be delivered Monday ;-) Just hope I'm actually in when they try!!

Back Massage

I spent a very enjoyable hour in a Chinese  herbalist store today having acupuncture. Massage and ‘Hot Cupping’ on my back in an attempt to relieve some of the pain in my back, neck and shoulder.

All in it cost £40, and not sure how much good the acupuncture has done (yep, I am a bit of a sceptic) but it was damn relaxing!!  The hot cupping was ‘weird’ and has left a number of circular bruises on my back, but was not unpleasant.  The massage, however, was to die for!!  Really deep powerful work on a couple of really tight muscle groups left me feeling great afterwards.

Overall verdict: Well worth the cash! (I really want my new mattress!!)

The Credit Crunch explained

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

OK, back to XP…

Had to concede defeat on the laptop running Windows 7.  Don’t get me wrong, loved the OS, but just could not handle to pathetic video performance.

Even games like Solitaire were unplayable, utube vids were 1 fps (or slower) etc.  in short the machine was close to unusable in any meaningful definition.  Problem is the video hardware was obsolete even before Vista came out, and no  drivers have been produced for anything newer than XP, and they failed to load correctly in Vista.

Re-formatted the HDD last night and reloaded the original ACER factory build from the recovery CD’s.  Tonight I need to connect it to the interweb and download a shed full of updates, but I think I will download the ‘offline’ XP SP3 to the thumb drive, and at least install that first…!

Audio Book Update

Finished Kathy Reich’s Cross Bones It was all a little confusing at times – keeping track of all the Jewish names etc. but pretty good: 6.5/10

Started Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, read this one before, but fancied another listen as I can’t really remember the details of the plot.  I have remembered getting rather annoyed at the authors mixing of 64 bit and 64 character keys as being the same thing… but have decided to ignore that fairly major technicality and pretend that it is the same thing, just to let me concentrate on the story a bit more this time…

Summer Break booked

Nothing too exotic, The RedHouse Hotel in Torquay for a week at the end of August.

Finally – Snow gone

After what seems forever (about two weeks) the estate roads will be safe for motorcycle riding in the morning…  No more Public Transport WOOOOOT!  Bloody buses were costing me a fortune: £3.40 per day.

The only good side of catching the bus is, I have been getting thro’ the Audio Books quite well.  Finished Frank Herbert’s “Children of Dune” – Unabridged at 17 Hours, and I am currently 4 hours into the 6  hours of Kathy Reich’s “Cross Bones” Abridged, but still a damn good read.  Back to listening for an hour a day at lunchtime for a while again.  I still have over 30 hours of ‘un-read’ Audio books on the iPod, so no panic about running out just yet!!

New mattress

After *waaay* too many years on the current mattress, we have taken the plunge today and ordered a replacement.  it is a “Reactaform Deluxe”.

Sales Blurb: A luxury combination of foams, with an EXTRA deep top layer of the finest Reactaform, exclusive to Bensons. This model features air-zone Reactaform to aid air-flow for cool comfort throughout the night. Reactaform Memory Foam responds to heat and weight to conform perfectly to your body contours for optimum levels of comfort and support.

£499.99 Ordered from “Bensons beds” with delivery of next Saturday.  At the same time I finally found a pillow that is *exactly* the right height for me – Typically it’s not cheap!  £40!!!

Sales Blurb: “The Serenity Pillow”, A luxury latex pillow providing shallow gentle support. It always keeps its shape, stays cool and fresh and is beneficial to allergy sufferers. Complete with a zipped, removable washable cover.

Ah well, doing my bit to boost the economy, and hopefully get rid of the back/neck/shoulder pain that I have suffered every morning for the last 6 months!

Windows 7

Today I installed Windows 7 Beta on the Acer Laptop, in the past I have had issues with this laptop’s wireless adaptor, so have left it running XP.

After initial install, the WiFi was not recognised, but a wired connection back to the HomeHub, and several downloads later all the hardware (except the video card) is recognised. I have now managed to download the XP driver and persuaded Windows 7 to load it, but the Experience Score (See Below) performance really seems to be no better afterwards!

Once I removed the network cable, I managed to connect successfully to my Wireless network, with only minimal fuss… so another positive result for Windows 7.

The Windows Experience Score is a rather disappointing 1.0, but that is down to the VideoCard, and I don’t seem to be able to find a Vista/Windows 7 driver.  The CPU is 2.5, RAM is 3.1 and HDD is 1.9  Having said that, the PC itself does boot up quickly, and is generally running “better” under 7 than XP.

Alex is pleased, as he finally gets access to Mahjong and Purble Place ;-)

JMJ – In Concert 2009

I have Tickets to see Jean Michel Jarre in concert at the NIA Birmingham on 24th May 2009

From http://www.jeanmicheljarre.com/

With his forthcoming "IN-DOORS" World Arena Tour, Jean Michel Jarre invites the audience to journey into his singular universe; to immerse themselves totally in his world of timeless music and vision, in place and time. He promises with this unique and brand new super production to share the energy of his macro concerts with the emotions of an arena experience.

With the fusion of analogue synthesisers, cutting-edge digital technology, oversize HD video projections, spectacular lasers design and lighting choreography, Jarre has conceived a show that encapsulates his signature expression and talent for creating milestone events.

Jean Michel Jarre is an innovative artist who has entertained and thrilled millions of people live and has broken several world records with attendance figures. His electronic music and singular performances have travelled the globe and left their imprint on major landmarks from Houston's Skyline, to China, to London's Docklands to the Pyramids of Egypt, to Moscow and...

He has just concluded a sell-out tour of Europe celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the release of his break-through multi-million selling album, Oxygene.

For his upcoming "IN-DOORS", World Arena Tour, he has conceived a spectacular high-tech production especially tailor made for arenas where he will perform music from all of his best selling albums.

Jarre revolutionised the out-door concert format with his city-scale events. For this "IN-DOORS", World Arena Tour he aims to break new ground and deliver yet again a unique concert experience.

Back to British Gas

After 18 months of getting billed for my Gas and Electric by Eon, I am switching back to British Gas.

One of their guys phoned me up last week, and after running thro the costs etc. based on my last four bills, we determined that there was less than £30 per year between them, with British Gas actually being the more expensive, but I switched anyway!

Why, I pretend, I can hear you call?  because I will save in the region of £30 per month on my Direct Debit payments!  Eon have grossly overestimated my fuel usage, and demand £170 per month leaving me currently at £341.08 in credit for the year.  There is no offer to return the balance, or to reduce the payments for the next year.  British Gas on the other hand review your payments 6 monthly, and automatically return any positive balance to your bank account after the January bill.

Working From Home

After the snow yesterday, with the forecast of more overnight, it was suggested that we take laptops home last night, and work from home today.

It’s been nice to have some background music on all day, but it seems like a very long time since 8:30 this morning!!  God it’s boring sat on your own all day.  Work has not been to busy, mainly because many customers have stayed closed, and those that were open couldn’t always get an engineer to site!

The technology worked quite well, softphone (Nortel i2050) on the PC with a USB headset, connecting via VPN over the home wireless network and out over broadband. Voice quality was good, and network speed was almost as fast as being in the office… mind you, I think that says more about our servers than the quality of the BB connection!

The weather has actually been quite good today and a lot of the snow has cleared, but I doubt our road will be clear enough for me to take the bike tomorrow, so it looks like it will be the bus again.  On the plus side – gives me another hour+ with “Children of Dune” audio book ;-)

Another Casualty

Seems that my external 250GB external USB drive got damaged too with the Power supply/rebooting type issues recently.

Ah well, it’s an excuse to get rid of it – it was just too bloody noisy in normal use to leave switched on/connect all the time, and did have an habit of not coming back on line if the PC had been suspended for any length of time.

So today I have ordered a LaCie 1TB NAS from the BT shop, for about £120 (delivered) I get a 1TB store, with a Gigabit Ethernet connection.  Should be enough to hold everything several times over… for now at least.  Not in stock at present, so that should be about 3 or 4 weeks.

IE8 RC1

I installed Internet Explorer 8, Release Candidate 1 last night, you can get a copy at www.microsoft.com/ie8.

So far, nothing really to report, it feels similar to IE7, a bit prettier, but most importantly – nothing is broken this time.  Last time I tried IE8, too many pages just didn’t work.

So far, so good!

£1.12

The cost per day in fuel to travel to work and back on the Bandit 650 is approximately £1.12.

The interesting fact that can be extracted from this snippet of information is that with the heated grips on, I get about 20 miles less to  a tank of fuel, which mean that the cost of running the grips in cold weather is approximately 14p per day.

New Monitor

Today I took delivery of my new BenQ G2400WT 24” Wide screen monitor (1920x1200) from CCL, and it is completely magnificent!

My ‘old’ 20” Monitor is now in Amy’s room, and here 19” CRT Monitor with the dodgy red gun has been taken to the local tip.

Basically, since the PC is running so much better now after new MotherBoard, HDD and Power Supply I have decided to hold off on the new PC till much later in the year, so now seemed like a good time to get a new monitor.

Audible.co.uk

I have today started a membership at Audible.co.uk, for approx £8 per month you get one free book per month, and – it seems - a free book for joining.

I have just downloaded “Children of Dune” by Frank Herbert, (17 Hours – None Member price £17) and “CrossBones” by Kathy Reichs (Unfortunately the abridges version at 6 hours – Non member price £11.70)

So… First month: £28.70 worth of books for £8.

Back Working (Again!)

I am getting much quicker at this re-installing Windows lark, from start to working system , all common utilities loaded, all major apps loaded, and probably 90% of all my normal ‘tweaks’ completed – a fraction under 5 hours!

Lets see how long it runs for this time!

And so it goes on…

Got a 570Watt supply from Maplin’s this morning, 1p under £40, but with all the connections I need – 4xSATA 4xAUX etc.

Took it home and fitted it, and that’s when I found that the HDD was not even spinning up!  Took it out for a look, and saw that some component on the controller card was blown out!!

A trip to PCWorld at Birmingham, resulted in an Hitachi 750GB SATA drive (£90!!!!), It is bloody fast tho’  Copying 81GB of MP3’s across from the backup drive was an impressive 45 to 51 MB/Sec, the previous Samsung drive was 28 to 32 MB/Sec, and I had been impressed with that!

Ah well, lets re-install windows again :-(

Oh Crap!!

Afetr running really well for a number of days, yesterday, my PC rebooted in mid use, and on powering back up - Invalid Boot device etc.!

After several failed attempts to reboot, removal of the 2nd SATA HDD, removal of the ATA DVD ROM drive - still nothing... Then Bang/Flash/Smell of burning.

I am assuming that the power supply is the problem, and will replace it today with one from PC World - I just hope no damage has been done to the Motherboard :-(

Woot!

Motherboard arrived (well was collected from CityLink) last night, and after a hour of intensive surgery, the machine powered back up.

Vista 64 is running quite well on one of the partitions at the moment, and a ‘Windows Rating’ test show that my memory speed has increased from 4.2 to 5.3 for the same DIMMS!  Looks like the new Mobo is an improvement!

The Vista install took from about 22:00 to 00:00 last night, but most of the ‘Utility’ class apps are now on, and the first two waves of windows updates.  Bit more ‘Tweaking’ to do, and then get down to installing  Office, Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

Argggggggh!

The Desktop PC is pretty well toast again at the moment. It keeps locking up whilst in use, reboot by itself, and losing contact with the Disks... Looks like the 500 GB drive may not have died after all!

Spoke to CCL Tech suppprt line yesterday, and we came to the conclusion that the Motherboard is faulty. Bearing in mind I want a complete new machine soon, I really don't want to spend too much cash on getting this one working again, but it does need to be a worker, so that Amy can have it.

Turns out that for £25+VAT I can get a suitable replacment Abit MoBo, that will support up to 2.4 GHz CPUs, only support 4GB RAM (DDR2 533 max), only take two SATA drives, only has 1 ATA port - but guess what? That is exactly what I need to fit back onto it!

Ordered it yesterday, should be delivered on Monday, so yet another Windows rebuild to look forward to next week.

Oh Bugger!

Yesterday I finally conceded defeat, the 240GB HDD I have been using with Vista 64 is just too small and too slow.  I need to replace the drive.

I purchased a 750 GB Samsung drive (7200 rpm, 32 MB Buffer, SATA II) for £65 from PC World, and when I got home installed it into the PC.

I then downloaded a trial copy of Acronis True Image 2009, as it is supposed to be a fully working version for 14 days, and has the capability to ‘clone drives’

After I installed it, a reboot was required – BSOD Boot Loop!!

After a lot of messing about, I have started re-installing Vista (32 bit this time) on the new drive.  Last night was a late one, but I am almost back up and working, OS updates, Office, most of the Music, Pictures and Video files are back over.

Still on the ToDo list:

Photoshop & Dreamweaver, restore ‘My Documents’ and configure Outlook.

No doublt I will find other stuff to put back on over the next few days, but for now it’s looking pretty useful.

Windows 7 Beta

I have downloaded the .iso image, but given the recent problems with my desktop PC, I am not prepared to risk it on there, and not too sure if it will work properly on the laptop – Vista fails to load working drivers for the wireless!

May have to wait till I get new PC and I can try it on the newly designated “old PC” ;-)

Warming up

I thought the external temperature gauge in the car was broken this morning… the – sign was missing from the front of the number! 

In fact I will be turning the central heating back to ‘timed’, it has been on 24x7 for well over a week now.  I have found from previous winters, that it is actually cheaper to have it on continuous but with the thermostat turned really low, than on timed with the stat turned up.

But sods law looks to be in force again, I was hoping to go golfing tomorrow, but the forecast is for heavy rain and 20 mph winds!

Interesting software…

If you have a Canon compact digital camera.

Ever waned to be able to save in RAW format from your compact, or have a live histogram?  What about exposures up to 64 seconds, flash sync at 1/60000th or exposure bracketing !  Then you need “Canon Hack Development Kit”  You can even script your camera to fire on motion detection!!

Check http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK for full details, of features and supported models.

Unfortunately, my “IXUS 85 is” isn’t supported yet, but development is proceeding apace, and there should be a functional port within a week or two.

Getting there

As the week progressed, call volumes have gently increased, and the boredom level has dropped and the temperatures, whilst still low are now at least higher than zero.

The one thing that has not got better is the traffic.  The road works on the Hagley Road have re-opened after their xmas break, and it is complete chaos again.  Even on the bike, the ride home is terrible, and a good 5 minutes longer than ‘Normal’, I just hope they finish soon.

Today is my first ‘Long Weekend’ of the year, and due to the remaining frost, the golf course is mostly closed, and it is forecast heavy rain for Monday!

Amy’s new handset arrived on Tuesday evening, and I requested the old number be ported, that is due for completion today, but the 3 PAYG SIMS that were supposed to be sent, were in fact SIM only Monthly contracts.  I had to call Orange and cancel those, and an now awaiting delivery of the re-ordered PAYG SIMS.

So Much for Normal!

I had hopes that Monday would mark the return to ‘Normality’ – traffic, meal, work etc.  No Such Luck!!

Monday morning was –4C with almost an inch of snow, and whilst the mains roads would not be a problem, as usual the estate was not a good place to try riding a powerful motorbike.  So with great reluctance I used the bus.

It took 40 minutes to travel the 5.5 miles to work, and then we had no work!!!  Only 5 calls between 7 people all day.  I watched Rambo (2008) and Hancock to pass the time!

The journey home was equally great, 55 minutes for the 5.5 miles, stood up for the first 20 minutes.

No wonder there is a reluctance to leave the car at home, and use public transport – 105 minutes for an 11 mile round trip (6.3MPH!!!) and to add insult to injury, the prices have just been increased by 12%. £3.40 return!!!!

This morning is still frozen over, but I am going to risk the bike for the 200 yards to the main road.

Panto

Yesterday (Saturday) afternoon we went to the Hippodrome in Birmingham to see Robin Hood starring John Barrowman (Capt Jack from Torchwood / Dr Who)…

Verdict – Excellent.  Apart from JB, the only other well known (to me at least) face was Don Maclean (Friar Tuck), but everyone was pretty darn good, and Titan the Amazing Giant Robot was fantastic!

It seems that the exact same show will be running in Cardiff this Christmas, so if you are in the are, check it out ;-)

2009 already!

Well the year has started off rather chilly, and I have not done much today, apart from top up the bird feeder in the garden, I hope it is a little warmer in the morning, negative temperatures on the bike are not fun, even with heated grips!

After a rather late night out at Jackie & Pete’s, I had a rare ‘lie in’ this morning – 10:30!! and even so, am still rather tired, so it will be an early(ish) night tonight… back at work in the morning.  Meals have been a bit random again today – a combined lunch and breakfast at 11:30, a piece of cake at 13:00 and finally tea at 19:00…  Not much chance of things improving tomorrow either – We have a 40th birthday party at 19:30!

On Saturday, we have a couple of missions to accomplish in the morning – Latin dance shoes and a bus pass for Amy – before heading off to the Hippodrome in Birmingham for the Panto.

I am almost looking forwards to next Monday, with normal traffic, a reasonable workload to pass the time, and proper meals at my normal times!  And yes, you did read that right, I am at work on a Monday!!!  I have gone more for the Friday to Monday 4 day weekends every other week for the start of the year.

The next thing I have to get sorted out is the mobile phones, Amy has been nagging me for a while to replace the Samsung D600 with a Samsung U900 ‘Soul’ in pink, and as my BT Mobile contract has now expired, I can do something about it. Looks like we will be going to Orange, where I can get a Soul in pink for free on sub £20 per month contract (200 minutes, unlimited texts) and two PAYG SIM’s with a bonus 300 text messages for free.  Even if I take out the ‘insurance’ on the phone (£6 per month – covering damage, loss, theft etc) it is still a saving of £20 to £25 per month on what I am paying now!

Still been sorting out little bits of PC config etc., and have made sure that I have backed up again after every single change!!  Nothing like bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted eh?