Arggggghhh!!!

My hard drive failed over the weekend, it is not even seen by the BIOS reliably, so not much chance of recovery.

I have now switched back to the smaller (250GB) drive that I recently installed Vista 64bit on, and after several hours of updating AV programs, Windows, utilities etc (who would have though there were so many updates in just 3 months?) I now have a vaguely working machine.  Fortunately, I did refresh my backup on the external HDD just three weeks ago, so not too much data loss, but it is still a pain!

OK, now to see if I have configured 'Live Writer' correctly...

Katherine Piccys

I was quite surprised by how well some of the pictures from my little canon iXUS 85 turned out.

Set to 'Night Snap' mode, and flash turned off.  Only a little re-touching (levels, vibrancy and cropping) in Photoshop and they are now available for all to see here:

http://photoalbums.redbreva.co.uk/KJ-12122008/index.html

Katherine Jenkins 2008

Not long got back home from the NIA in Birmingham - Public transport really is shocking for a major city on a Friday night - it took over 1 hour to get a bus 5 miles home! - Anyway...

Really enjoyed the show, not as much as previous shows, not Katherine's fault, I just don't think the NIA is anywhere near as good a venue as Symphony Hall.

Blake were as good as I expected them to be - but a bit louder!!  (One of the joys of a front row seat in front of a speaker)

Faryl Smith was an unexpected, and very welcome surprise - she really is a VERY good singer - but needs some work on 'chatting to the audience' - she forgot the name of the 'Big London Show' she attended last night (It was the Royal Variety apparently)

Finally, William Joseph was a pleasant surprise that should well find at least some of his work on my iPod before too long

Finally special thanks to the nice gent in Block A Row B Seat 2 for the sweets he handed round during the interval ;-)

Will have a look at my photo's in the morning and see is any of them are worth posting.

Good Month For Music

It’s been a good November for New CD’s this year:

Dido : Safe Trip Home ***
Katherine Jenkins : Sacred Arias ****
Hayley Westenra : River Of Dreams ****
Alesha Dixon : The Alesha Show ****
Enya : And Winter Came ***
Anastacia : Heavy Rotation **
Jewel : Perfectly Clear ***
Seal : Soul ****

Plus, Three new Audio Books from http://www.wholestoryaudio.co.uk/

Dune by Frank Herbert (21 Hours)
Bare Bones by Kathy Reichs (9.2 Hours)
Monday Mourning by Kathy Reichs (9.5 Hours)

I had forgotten just how good Dune was, pity they don’t have ‘Children of Dune’ or ‘Dune Emperor’ on there too…

Unfortunately, the concert with Hayley Westenra was cancelled at short notice due to illness, so we will have to wait till early 2009 to see her again, but should still be OK for Katherine Jenkins at the NIA in a couple of weeks time.

Been having a play

With my CCS based website redesign.

Not too much of the new design working yet, just http://startfromhere.redbreva.co.uk/ and My Page (via the ‘My Family’ link).

The rest of the pages are there, either looking really rubbish, or just as place-holders.

Not sure yet though’ why Firefox shows a dark space under the pictures in the Family menu table, it look OK in IE 7.  Hmm bit more digging required into the CSS attributes there I think!

Typical…

Coldest morning of the winter so far – frost on the ground, changing to sleet, and the central heating boiler decides to have a lie in!

The nice man from British Gas came at about 10:00 and found that a fan assembly was seized.  he lubricated it with WD40 and managed to get it running again – sort of, but it’s a bit noisy and needs changing.

He will be back on Tuesday at about 09:00 to replace the faulty part, just hope it keeps running till then.

In the meantime the advice is to leave the heating on as much as possible, because if it stops, it may seize up again!

New GPU

Fitted the new video card this evening, and re ran the windows performance benchmark test.

The 2D figure increased from 4.3 to 5.9

The 3D figure increased from 4.4 to 5.5

But best of all, Photoshop CS4 now uses the GPU on zoom, panning, colour translations etc. to run faster and better.

1st Upgrade in a while

I recently installed the new CS4 edition of Photoshop, which supports hardware acceleration from supported video cards.

Seems my Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT is not one of those supported cards!  Mind you it is a pretty old card now – almost 3 years old and it was only £65 new…

NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS
Texture Fill Rate (Per Second) - 2.2 billion
Maximum Memory Bandwidth       - 6.5 GB/s
Memory Size                    - 256 MB
Supported DirectX Version      - 9.0c
HDR Lighting                   - 64 bit

According to Nvidia’s web site, this is a card in the “Business User, Casual Gamer, Home PC User” category, and the best card in that group is a 9500GT DDR3 (£38 +VAT)!

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT (GDDR3)
Texture Fill Rate (Per Second) - 8.8 billion
Maximum Memory Bandwidth       - 25.6 GB/s
Memory Size                    - 256 MB
Supported DirectX Version      - 10
HDR Lighting                   - 128 bit

So, it should be about 4 times quicker, not bad for less than £50, may even manage to run “Microsoft Flight Sim X” at a reasonable frame rate now ;-)

Skittles Evening

Last night was the annual skittles evening at Howley Grange Scout hut.  There were 36 people in attendance, split into 9 teams of 4. Amy & Beth managed to get onto the same team as each other, Alex & Josh also managed to get into the same team (I suspect some cheating!), But Amanda, Jess and yours truly were all in teams with three strangers.

It was a good night, very entertaining, and plenty of food and drink available, and to top things off: My team came first (Bottle of Wine each) and Jess’s team picked up the wooden spoon (Packet of Shortcake Biscuits each).

A good evenings entertainment to £3, we will definitely consider going again next year.

22 Years !!

On the 9th October 1986, I started working for BT.  Tomorrow will be the first day of my 23rd year in their employ!

I will be spending it in Stockport with one of the guys from the Genesys support team, with a view to getting a new job!!

New Toy…

Well, a new toy for Amanda!

The door of the oven recently broke, and it could not be opened more than 45 degrees, so a trip to Comet was in order yesterday, and this afternoon I should be taking delivery of a new Indesit FI31K cooker – a snip at £199 delivered.

Possible new job?

An e-mail was circulated around the office this week from the head of the Genesys support team, looking for interested people to join them.  It’s two grades higher than my current post, but seems to be a similar job, just on a different platform.

I have had some experience working with the Genesys guys, as their kit frequently connects via the Symposium platform we support.

I spoke to one of the engineers in this post, and it does seem to be an interesting change of direction, and they seem to work well as a team. So I registered my interest.

Yesterday, the manager of the team called me, and after a long chat, I was asked to spend a day working with Sandy, who is based in Stockport, to see if I fancy the job.  There are 7 people interested, but apparently I have the closest match of skills to their ideal.

I called Sandy, and after a chat we agreed on 9th October.

The grade carries a “business needs” car, an annual “on call” allowance (1 in 5 possibly moving to 1 in 6), and an end of year bonus.  I have the option of working from home, or taking a desk in Brindley Place (I would prefer a desk, home working is a little too quiet for my liking), but you have the flexibility of hours to avoid travelling in rush hour traffic.

It’s nice to get a bit of excitement back into my working life again, just hope I can get the job now!

Finally...

After years of trying to get Alex to ride a bike, he finally decided that it was time... I suspect a not inconsiderable amount of "peer pressure" was responsible.

It only took about 1 hour, and he was peddling away quite happily. Cornering, starting off, and stopping safely still need some practice though'.

To celebrate, Alex is now the proud owner of a nice chrome plated BMX bike - £80 from Hawk Cycles

Happy Birthday to me

47 Today!

BTW, this is one of the first photographs taken on the new IXUS 85 ;-)

Well, not a great start to my 48th year… My back is killing me this morning!  Not sure if it was the golf, or the gardening yesterday, but either way its no fun getting older!

Update – X64 Vista

Took longer than I expected, I thought I had a dual X86/X64 version of Vista, but mine was x86 only!  So, I have borrowed the MSDN subscription copy from work for testing.

I have installed Vista Ultimate, but without using the Product Key, so I have about a month to play with it before it expires, but that should be long enough.

The HDD I used was actually a 250GB unit, so plenty big enough to install a few applications as well for a more complete appraisal.

Initial reaction? Well all the hardware works, so drivers are no longer a major issue, performance seems to be just ‘a tad’ slower than the x86 version, but that may be down to the fact of it’s running on a slower disk drive.  When it was first installed it was really slow, but that was sorted by installing the latest graphics drivers (GeForce 7 series) from Nvidia’s web site

Update – Wireless Networking

The BT HomeHub2 arrived this week, and installation was just about as simple as it could be.

The main PC was back on the Internet, with no obvious changes in minutes.

The Laptop within a further 10 minutes (I had to change the security on the router from the default WPA/WPA2 to WEP as that is the only thing the laptop understands)  Signal strength is now 5, was 4.

Amy’s PC took another 10 mins to install the Belkin 802.11n USB dongle, and get connected. Her reported connection speed has doubled from 32 to 64 mbps, and the signal strength has increased from ‘1 or 2’ to ‘4 or 5’

Conclusion – Result!

Update – Foot / Golf

managed to play 9 holes at Himley today, at the end of the round my foot was rather sore, but not painful.  So it seems that it’s just about healed.

The golf on the other hand, well it showed that I haven’t played for almost a month!  The only good thing to take away from the game, was there were no ‘truly awful’ shots, just a lot of ‘not quite good enough’ ones.  The putting was terribly too, three or four on every hole.  The alignment was quite goo, I just could not judge the weight of the shot.

X64 – Time to Try It?

I have been reading with interest the every increasing numbers of people running X64 Vista as an everyday work machine, and am now ready to give it a try.

One reason, is that I hope to upgrade/Replace my existing machine in the next 6 months or so, and as I would like to fit a lot of memory into it, X64 is the way to go…  But only if it runs OK for me…
Plus, apparently, the next version of Photoshop will be available in a X64 version…

So, I have found out my old 80GB HDD, and am going to install a copy of X64 on that drive in my existing PC, install a few of the basic ‘Essentials’ on it (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Office 2007) and run it as a test for a few days.
I hope to do that sometime over the bank holiday weekend ;-)

BTW, seems the reason that X32 cannot see all of the 4GB of RAM you install, is that the “Total” address space is 4GB, so the more memory you have on your Graphic Card(s) the less RAM you can actually use…  Thought it was odd that a 32 bit OS couldn’t read 4GB of RAM!

IXUS 85 it is….

 

After a little shopping around, I have just ordered my IXUS 85 from Amazon.co.uk and a Canon soft leather case to suit for the grand total of £179.

There were a few cheaper places, but they were either small sites that I don’t have any experience of, or larger name sites charging £7 to £10 delivery!  In the end Amazon was only £3 more expensive, and is the same as the “in store” jessops price – Without a case.

Should be here early next weeks – Bloomin Bank Holidays!

MUTV for Three Months

Just had a call from Sky, and have taken advantage of a half price MUTV subscription for three months at £3 per month.

Seems the channel has just re-launched… so time to have another look, before cancelling again mid November ;-)