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A bit of a nightmare . . .

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I opened up my laptop this morning as I had a couple of things I needed to do before R*** came home. To my total surprise and annoyance, there was that little box at the bottom right of my screen, telling me that my computer needs to restart to complete the update process. I thought it sensible to do it straight away. After about 10 minutes, the system began to start-up again. But what was that? A pop-up message telling me that my profile had failed to install and was advising me to sign out. This was duly done and the start-up continued. My laptop is always slow to start so I wasn’t worried.

That is when the trouble started. My desktop screen had changed. All my usual icons had gone, only to be replaced with some random ones. It actually made to screen less cluttered which is not a bad thing. I then had to check that a document had been scanned and I needed to print it. This is when the real nightmare began. All the documents I had saved seemed to be missing. Everything for the funding review had gone! Months and months of work were nowhere to be found!

I headed straight to Google, but that produced nothing helpful. After about an hour of frantically pulling out what little hair I have, I decided to search for one of the documents. To my amazement, they were still on my machine, only in a TEMP folder. It seems that when the profile failed, any saved stuff was moved into this temporary folder. All I now needed to do was to move the files back into the main part of the storage area. This is going to take some time.

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After a lot more hours on Mr Google things are still not right, but better than first thing. I’m not holding my breath that everything will get back to ‘normal’, this is Windows after all.

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I continued with the Googling and profane language when some of the basic apps just wouldn’t work. then hidden on one of the Microsoft ‘help’ pages I spotted something. It appears that I was signed into my machine with a temporary login. The puzzled look on my face got more and more contorted as I scrambled about looking for my normal login. I found it and signed in using this profile, and everything opened up as normal. Everything I had lost was back in the correct place.

I have to admit that the foul language did not lesson very quickly and I was still more than a little angry about the whole experience, but all is good again (until the next time!)

An interesting day . . .

/ Tony / 5 Comments

Everything was happening yesterday. My granddaughter, S***** had her 2nd birthday and came around for lunch with her parents and other grandma. And the youngest R***, came home for the weekend. He usually comes home every other weekend, but the dental work he had done upset that routine.

He got home around 11:30 and as usual he took himself off to his room to use his laptop. I went up about 10 minutes later with a drink of water for him and everything seemed fine, although I did notice that his TV was showing no signal. He was listening to a music CD through his DVD player and didn’t seem to be bothered. I went up to tell him his lunch was ready and saw that although the satellite box was on, there was still no signal. So while he was having his lunch I re-booted the box. Nothing changed. I then did a reset and still nothing. by this time he had finished his lunch and was back in his room, asking me to “Fix Sky!”

I spent a while looking through manual, and Googling the problem but nothing seemed to work. We told him that we would have to ring the ‘engineer’ to get it fixed fully believing that he may need a new box.

Meanwhile the lunch party was in full swing downstairs. Everyone was having a good time but because one of his autistic ‘quirks’ (for want of a better word) R*** didn’t join in. He is not very good with a lot of people. I was up and down most of the time, trying various other Google solutions, with no effect.

I was about 15:00 when something clicked. When he played a CD before, through his DVD player, the track listing came up on the screen, but this time there was still no signal. I then thought, that the HDMI cable to his TV had come loose, but it couldn’t as it was a fixed cable. That’s when it hit me. I picked up the TV remote and clicked on the ‘Source’ button, which by it’s very name is the place where you decided where your TV feed is coming from. The screen lit up and showed that the source was set at the TV’s default which was Freeview. Now as this box is not connected to an external ariel, Freeview is not available. I scrolled through the option, then knowing that I was looking for the HDMI-2 feed. Once selected the screen started to show all the programmes it should show. Everyone was happy.

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Back downstairs and the lunch party was nearly over and little S***** was starting to open her presents, of which there were many. to say she is only 2 years old, she certainly knew what to do, and soon the room was filled with torn wrapping paper and scattered presents. She is fascinated with books and with a TV character called “Hey Dougie” so most of the presents seemed to on those lines. Her other grandma left around about 16:00 and her daddy told us that K***’s father was going to pop over with a present, which was a nice surprise all around.

Initially, the idea was that the ‘Birthday Party’ would have been today, but she had been poorly with a throat infection which meant cancellation. However, given the effectiveness of the antibiotics the doctor prescribed I think the party could have gone ahead as planned. But never mind, I think it all went well.

Random tech problem . . .

/ Tony / 6 Comments

© Microsoft

I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my OneDrive. I have two laptops. My main one is downstairs but when I bought it, I decided to keep the previous one upstairs as a kind of back-up machine. It is a bit slow, but it was a good machine. I did want to try and connect both as a home network, but that doesn’t seem to work with Microsoft Home edition. I had ‘misplaced’ a couple of files that I now need to use. They were not big or even complicated files, I just didn’t want to re-write. I thought they were on my OneDrive, but I could not find them. I then had the idea that they may just be in the documents folder on old laptop. And they were.

© Microsoft Office

I copied them into my OneDrive, along with some video files that I had forgotten about. Must have spent a good couple of hours opening, and copying the files, or so it seemed at the time. I shut down the old laptop and trotted off downstairs ready to work with these newly found files. But … they were not in the OneDrive I was accessing from downstairs. I ‘ummed and ‘ahhed for a while before deciding that I must have two OneDrives. Seemed reasonable as the Office package on the upstairs laptop was Office 2013 and downstairs it is Office 365. All I need to do is copy the files I wanted onto a Flash Drive and then onto the downstairs machine. Problem solved … or not.

Try as I might, I could not get the files copied and was receiving an error message:
Error 0x8007016A: The Cloud File provider is not running …
Restart after restart would not cure the problem and in the end I gave up for the evening.

© SanDisk

This morning, after a lot of Googling, it came to light that I must not have signed in to my OneDrive on the upstairs Laptop. In fact, the service was not even running, I must have disabled it in Task Manager. More clicks and reboots ensued and finally I was able to copy the files to the Flash Drive and onto the main machine. Then I found that they had synchronised and so all the copy and pasting was a total waste of time. Thankyou Google and all who sail in you. If the fact that I was not signed in to the OneDrive upstairs reason had been one of the first in the Google search screen, I could have saved a lot of time and unnecessary brain work!

A few pics and a bit of writing …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I have recently been updating my ‘Google Sites‘ page. It’s a strange thing, but until a couple of months ago, I had forgotten I had the site. I have been asking one or two ex-colleagues and they tell me that we all created one as part of our departmental social network. It was back in 2009 and I never really used it at work, in fact I didn’t put anything on the site until the middle of last year when I received an email telling me that the site needed some maintenance. All that meant was that I needed to add a recovery email.

It’s not as intuitive as Google Blogger and like the way WordPress seems to be heading, content is created in blocks. Since I have the site, I thought I might as well use it, but I didn’t know what I would use it for. It then struck me. I do a little bit of ‘creative writing'(?) and was tending to put little bits on my Google blog, but it’s a quite boring site and I don’t really know what I can do there. With having this paid blog on here, it didn’t really make any sense to use Blogger. But I didn’t want to post my writing attempts on WordPress, as I thought I would have to create a new page to put the musings, to keep them separate and I didn’t want to do that. I think some blogs can look a bit messy with many pages.

So that’s what my ‘Google Sites‘ is going to be used for. Because scrolling through a long page full of text may be a little tiring, I have interspersed the writing with some of my photographs. All the writing is my own, and one day I shall bundle them all together and publish my own book, although it will probably be some kind of eBook. It is still a ‘work in progress’ but I will keep updating it (when I remember.)

A bit of a pain …

/ Tony / 5 Comments

It’s been one of those annoying days with my tech. It started, or at least I first noticed it today, when I was working my way through some news items on MSN News. I mostly use the Google Chrome browser these days, as it tends to be just the first one I select and I’m used to it. I’m not keen on he MS Edge browser and Firefox seems to getting far too bloated. Opera would be my second choice, but I’m digressing.

So, there was one item that was about someone trying to do wheelies on a motorbility scooter, that looked to be quite funny. But unusually, there was no ‘play’ button on the video. I thought it must be an error when it Resetwas uploaded and moved onto the next item. Once again, there was a video with no obvious way of playing it. This was a job for a Google search. There were a number of results, most of which told me to ‘update Flash Player’ which was wrong, because Flash is no longer supported or to update Google Chrome. This was also wrong as that was only updated on Thursday, so I suspect that the update may have corrupted some of the files. The only other suggestion that seemed to have any merit, was one to reset Chrome to it’s default.

The reset explained that it would clear all my cookies and temporary data, but would leave my passwords and bookmarks intact. It was as good as its word, uptown a point. One of the things I had forgotten was that sites where I request to ‘keep me logged in’ relies on cookies to remember. Now that the cookies had been cleared, I had to re-log in to all those sites.

I eventually managed to get everything back to ‘my normal’ but it took most of Saturday.

Ridiculous pricing, From Then to Now and other things …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Unfortunately, my From Now to Then series has had to be put on hold for a while. The friend I ask to ‘proof read’ the posts is not going to be available for the next few weeks. He is in the process of changing jobs which has resulted in him emigrating to Canada. So for the next few weeks or so he only has internet access on his smart phone. Once he is settled, he has promised to continue helping. After all, I need to be as accurate as my memory serves me and it needs to be libellous free. Hopefully it will be not too long as I still have a few things to tell.

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Recently, I was asked by a friend if I could do a bit of shopping for him. All he wanted was some blade for his razor. He has a famous brand of razor that uses multi blade cartridges. They are disposable Razorand simply click into 2 Bladethe handle. Very popular as they are supposed to give a very close shave. I have never really found them to my taste as I was put off by those horrible two blade disposable razors that were becoming fashionable in the mid 1970’s. I found them very uncomfortable to hold and use, and could never get more than two or three shaves before they were put in the bin.

But to the point of this moan. I went straight to a well known supermarket and sought out the ones my friend had asked for, only to find that the pack had eight cartridges and cost just over £22. I thought that they must be cheaper than that somewhere. I tried B**ts and they were more Shaving 1expensive there and the price in Sup***rug was the same. I was very shocked to see that the packs also had security tags to prevent theft. I bought some, but vowed never to buy them for myself.

This is my wet shaving setup. The soap-mug was a present, so I don’t know the cost. The soap was bought from the previously mentioned supermarket and was about £4.00. But the real bargain was the razor and the blades. The razor was bought Bladeson eBay and cost me £2.99 postage free. I came with a pack of 5 double edged blade, an comes with its own storage box. I also bought a pack of Astra blades. They came in a box of 10 packets, each packet had 5 blades. Price, including postage £2.00. But the real bargain was the soap brush. I had originally priced them up as around £6.00 for a ‘genuine badger’ bristle. The ones I got are natural bristle and there were 10 for £6.50, and they are just as good. I usually wet shave twice a week and have an electric razor for the other days, as it is often quicker.

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At the beginning of last week I noticed a new bird in the garden. It was small, rounded, grey with a few white spots and a Diamond Dovered ring around it’s eyes. I did a little probing around the internet and discovered that it could have been a Diamond Dove. This seemed a ridiculous notion as the bird is native of Australia. Now I know migratory birds can travel huge distances but this thing seemed far too small to travel very far. I took a picture and used, what I now know is Google Lens to try and properly identify the creature. Google Lens confirmed that the bird was in fact a Diamond Dove. I can only assume that it had been in somebodies local aviary and it escaped. It was with us up until around Thursday waddling around on the ground picking up seeds that the Starlings drop from the feeder. It now seems to have gone, which is a shame.

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September sees races in the UCI World Cycling Championship being held in Yorkshire. The main racing takes place between the 22nd and 26th, but on the 21st one of the YorkshiBuntingre 2019 Para-Cycling International legs is starting locally in Wetherby. A local Knitting/Craft shop has been  given permission to have knitted bunting both sides of a 1/2 stretch of the route. So a call had gone out for local knitters to create some bunting in the right colours. I managed to knit 20 triangles making 4 sets. I could have done another five, but was running short of a couple of the colours.

Problems might just be gone …

/ Tony / 1 Comment

For a few weeks now, I’ve been having performance issues with one of my Windows 10 laptops. I’ve uninstalled software that I rarely use, but the issue seems to have remained. What happens is that I’ll be using for example Microsoft Word and suddenly it hangs with the message “Word is not responding” and this will happen three or four times during the session. I end up having to restart Windows and hope the problem has gone away. Often this fixes the issue, but occasionally it doesn’t.

Today, while I was looking at the Task Manager application, I noticed something called ‘software reporting tool’. I had not seen it before and so I ran an online search and discovered that it is a program that checks to see if any software is going to affect the Google Chrome browser. There were reports that it has a high CPU usage when checking and the check often takes 20 minutes or so to run. The date on the file is 4th October which seems to coincide with the second time I had problems. Things seemed to improve after I removed my other printer, but then problems re-emerged a few days later.

The sites I looked at (and I always check a few to see if they say the same thing) told me that the process is not necessary and can be stopped. They also said that Google may restart the process again whenever the Chrome bowser updates. It gave instructions on how to prevent it running and how to prevent Google from restarting it. The instructions for this can be found at https://www.ghacks.net and searching for ‘how to block the Chrome Software reporter tool’.

It may not fix the problem, but the tool sends scan information back to Google, so there may be privacy issues here.

We shall see if there is any improvement.

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On another point, this was written using the WordPress editor on an iPad Mini. I had not thought of that as an option, but it seems to work quite well. I do need to understand how the HTML style tags work for formatting, but there must be a tutorial out there.

 

A little bit pear shaped …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Last week, K*** suddenly noticed that she could see ‘floaters’ out the side of one eye. She had just started a new prescription for her contact lenses and thought at first it was that. But it got worse and she was experiencing a bad headache. Called the optician on Friday, who told her to come straight away. They sent her to the eye-clinic at the hospital, and it seems that the gel that surrounds the eye had become damaged, causing a bleeds at the back of her eye. They told that it should just clear up in the next few days, but she has to go back in a fortnight for check. Now, it would have hard anyway, but we had invited K***’s parents for lunch that day and we couldn’t really put them off. So I was ‘entertainments officer’ for the day. K*** thought she would be home by half past one, but it was nearer five when she got back.

To top it all, whilst I was out on Monday, I think the wind got into my eye, as that has been sore since then. Feels swollen and is a little uncomfortable when I blink, but not to the same extent as K*** has suffered.

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My laptop has started to play-up a little. It’s seems to have been happening since the last major update to Windows, but I think it is just a coincidence. What is happening is that my Wi-Fi connection dropping out. Does not happen to any of the other devices we have connected though which kind of proves it is not the router. My other Windows 10 machine does not have the issue (although I don’t had it powered up as much) which may be another pointer away from the issue being down to Windows update. I did Google the issue, which led to a lot of possible reasons. The main reason seemed to point to an issue with the network card in the laptop. I’m awaiting a reply from the manufacturer as to what can be done, but I’m of the opinion, that I may have to live with it. I can connect directly with an ethernet cable and it’s not too inconvenient, but I will see what happens.

The issues with K***s emails reoccurred again yesterday, just over a month since the last time. The mail app on her iPad stopped  delivering any emails. They could be viewed on the website but were not being ‘pushed’ the the mail app. I could not get them on my laptop, which was the same as the last time. Turns out, that it was an issue with Yahoo (Sky email provider) which was exactly the same as last time. No-one at Sky or Yahoo seems to care about it. Both say they are sorry and are working on a fix. Maybe it’s time for Sky to have a rethink!

(Update: emails on her tablet are now coming through. some 24 hours after the issue started. Not good)

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Well both K*** and R*** are still in bed, and I think I’ll let them sleep longer. R*** has been a star over the past two days. I don’t know, but he seems to kind of know when K*** is not well and it tempers his behaviour for want of a better word. We have has no issues with him at all, not even when my laptop dropped the Wi-Fi.

I’m just going to start on the ironing , which shouldn’t take too long. I actually love ironing and have sort of ‘adopted’ the job as my own, which suits us both. Someone once told me that we all have some minor Autistic tendencies, and I think ironing must be one of mine.

 

A little bit techy …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

For a few months now, I have had a problem with my calendar. My primary email account is a Gmail account, and the application that use to read and write my email is Outlook 2016. Here was the problem! Outlook has its own calendar, but I can only see that calendar on my laptop as that is where the data is saved. My tablet and phone cannot pick up that calendar, but can see my Google calendar. So, my work around was to have an application that synchronised both calendars. After much ‘Googling’ I such an application and it was successfully installed. It ran without issues for a good few weeks, but then I noticed that although it said it was synchronising, it wasn’t happening. It was assumed by the software company that produced it, that the latest Windows update was causing a problem. There was no apology or offer to investigate it was just ‘A Windows 10 issue’ and was left at that.

Much more Googling and expressive language followed, before I found the next answer …add my Google calendar as an Internet Calendar in Outlook and use that one only. Brilliant …and so easy to do. Job done and me now a happy man. But wait a minute, I don’t seem to be able to delete an entry from that calendar. What is going on? It seems that the Google calendar is read only in Outlook. I’m now beginning to lose it a little bit. More searching and another application is found. This one seems to work. It synchronises every hour, I would prefer every 15 minutes but can live with the hour restriction. Back to the ‘happy man’ status again. I then notice, that my Outlook calendar is showing duplicated entries! My language is getting worse. I looked at some of the help forum and it explains that this is one of the issues and the only way around, is to delete all entries from both calendars and re-enter them in one calendar only. Not going to happen. I have now consigned that application to the recycle bin along with the others.

So I’m now left with the only option I appear to have. I use the Google calendar and have it as a read only calendar when I’m using Outlook. Not ideal, but seems to be the only thing I can do.

First successful Blogger post …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

     I have been trying for some time to get Open Live Writer (OLW) to work properly with Google Blogger. I could actually connect and post, but one of the best features of OLW is the facility to download the blog theme. This enables you preview your post in draft mode, before you finally upload to Blogger. I use this with my WordPress Blog (unashamed plug there) and it worked without any issue. However I simply could not get OLW to download the relevant files. I tried raising the issue with the OLW forum, but that did not help. The answer came in an unorthodox way!

     I had a problem with my Google account password. Somehow it needed to be reset. I managed to reset to a new password, but then found a problem with Outlook 365. I was now unable to connect Outlook to my Gmail. Every time I tried to enter the new password, it failed. No passwords, old or new were being accepted. I tried removing my Gmail account and re-adding it, without success. I securebegan the process of adding Gmail to my Outlook.com. It took a Google search to find out the issue. It seems, that back in 2014 Google started to block, what it considered to be unsecure logins. This was the problem and I needed to amend a security setting. I needed to “Allow less secure apps” to be ‘ON’. Problem with Gmail/Outlook sorted. The relief was massive. I really did not want to have to use Outlook.com as my main email client for many reasons.
     It then struck me! “Hmmm,” I thought. “I wonder if that is the problem with downloading the theme for Blogger?” It seems that it was. So there we are. All sorted.

Another week done … finally

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I don’t know why, but it seems to have been a long week. By the time Wednesday had arrived, it felt that it should be Friday.

An issue I had at work, with one of pieces of software we use was resolved. It was a simple setting that, for some reason had become ‘unset’. Now it maybe that this setting only need to be ‘set’ when certain jobs are being run. I don’t know, but I think I need to check with the people that manage the software.

The major upgrade to another piece of software went as well as could be expected. There was a couple of issues, but with this project there always is a couple of issues. It’s just the nature of the beast.

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The eldest son and his girlfriend/partner got the news they had been waiting for. The completion date for the house they are buying came through and it’s around the time they were looking at. Both are really happy about it. I’m not too sure that they fully realise how hard it is going to be over the first couple of years. They have got lots of plans and both seem to be quite sensible with money, but neither is on a fantastic salary at the moment, so it’s a bit of a worry.

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Last week I bought a new shower head from Amazon. The old head was not working as it should, mainly down to it’s age and use. The new one wasn’t a cheap one, but equally, it Head 1wasn’t the most expensive one either. It arrived in good time, before the expected date and last Sunday, I attempted to install it. It was a simple ‘remove old – fit new ’ operation and there was no problem with it. That is until I came to test it. I could not believe it. Water was pouring out of the the ball and socket joint. I thought hHead 2ad done everything right and checked by refitting it. Still the same. I had no choice but to remove the new one and put the old one back. Not feeling very pleased about this, I contacted the seller for their advice. I got a reply within about 12 hours, which I thought was good, but their resolution did not work. A couple more emails back and forth ensued, and each time, the resolution failed. In the end, I emailed back advising them that the issue was still there and requested a refund. A response was duly received (again within less than 12 hours) explaining that I needed to contact Amazon for a refund together with a thank you for my custom. Amazons return procedure is very good, and the unit is now all packaged and labelled ready to return.

Now whilst I could not recommend the product, I could find no fault the the company selling. Communication was prompt and courteous and they were good to deal with. Shame about the product though.

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On a last note, I’m wondering if anyone has had the same problem as I found yesterday. K*** asked me to forward an email on for her, as I had the address on my computer and it as easier. I opened the email, selected forward and clicked on the ‘To’ button to insert the address. I was shocked to find that all my contacts had disappeared! The Outlook address book was empty. I scanned the computer trying to find the file, but it was not there. Google searches provided no help except the person who said that it was probably an update that did it.

No problem I thought, I would reinstall it from a back-up. Not as easy as it sounds. After a lot of messing about, I found that the back-up must have run, after the address book had gone. Only alternative was to try and reinstall the address book from the Outlook on my old computer. That was done with some success.

I’m confused as to how or why it happened. I am blaming updates as there had been a big one on the 9th which covered a lot of stuff. Annoying though.

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And so to finish.I got the end of writing this post and thought to myself ‘it’s over 700 words’ which I think is quite a lot and possibly a little boring? So my aim now is to go for the ‘little and often’ option, rather than a weekly digest. See where we go with that idea.

A quick explanation

/ Tony / 2 Comments

I’ve been trying the publicise option with WordPress to get my efforts to a wider public. I have managed to get Twitter under my belt, but wanted to get it out on Google+ also. I thought I had managed it but they were all posting as private. Not even going to my Circles.

After a bit of Googling (appropriate or what) I found the settings I needed. Job done.

Google + What is it

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Well I think the title says it all really. Just what is Google+ ? I was invited to join about a month ago, and thought why not. The word was that it was going to be bigger than facebook, and that everyone and their mother would be on Google+.

I have now deleted my Google+ profile !!!! I cannot see the point of it at all. After one month, I had four friends, three of whom I had never heard of. They just followed me on the back of someone else. I just about understand the Circles business, but Sparks and Hangouts ???? Am I missing something ? Am I getting too old ? I don’t have a problem with facebook, Twitter or MySpace. Even Bebo (should I admit to that) was quite simple to use. But this new one leaves me cold. In fact, it ranks, in my opinion, along side with that other Google network, orkut! Does anyone still use that ? I checked my account recently, and I’m still live on there, but ……….

No let up ….

/ Tony / Leave a comment

   Mrs H still in pain, although I think we both slept a lot better last night. She said that she only seemed to wake up once. The trouble I’ve found, with dental pain, is that it is so intense, that you don’t really notice that the pain is getting less. Then, you wake up and it’s just a background ache. Mind you, I have never had the trouble or pain that Mrs H has, when she has had invasive dental treatment. Even when I had all my top dentures fitted and eight teeth extracted, the only pain I had lasted a couple of days.

   Youngest seems to be doing well with his medication reduction. He has only been having a third of his daily dosage, and he seems to be quite settled with that. I don’t know how school is coping with it. They have not indicated that there is a real problem, except that he seems to take a long time with his lunch. They should see how long it takes at home sometimes!!

   Now, here is a ball ache, Microsoft Internet Explorer !!! even thought I never use IE, I have to apply the latest patch. This will fix the ‘vulnerability’ that allowed the Chinese to hack Google. The problem is that IE is so deeply embedded into the Windows operating system. I can see the next ‘Patch Tuesday’ will try and get me to install the latest version, IE8.

Who’s the Daddy then??

/ Tony / Leave a comment

   I am the hero of the moment. Well thanks to the internet and its IT forums, I am. The thing is, that the youngest is currently into Noddy. Not the lead singer from Slade, I may add, but the Enid Blyton favourite character. He has been into this for some time now, and his brother managed to get 10 videos, from eBay for him for Christmas. Today, he decided that he wanted his Noddy CD Rom installing. Now bearing in mind, that this was a state-of-the-art piece of software for windows 98 (not 98se mind you), and his PC is Vista Home Basic, it was never going to be easy. Of course after installation, it would not work. It just would not autorun the start file. Tried in Win 98 and Win 95 compatibility modes, and nothing.

   So, a compromise, I thought, I’ll install it on my Windows XP machine. Not much better. It complained that I needed a minimum 3mb of virtual memory (it’s set a lot lot higher than that). So I was beginning to think that this would not happen, and we would have a bad day. I tried looking for an XP or Vista patch, but to no avail. As a last resort, I typed the whole problem into Google and hit ‘I Feel Lucky’. A games forum page came up, with the advice to install DirectX 9, which apparently runs side by side with DirectX 10 on Vista. Off I toddled to the MS website to download the file, only to find, that the download was a stub file, that opens the correct MS webpage, and installs from there. That was no good, youngest lads computer is not internet connected. Eventually found another site, and downloaded the correct files. After a little tweaking, the program ran. Hero am I (today at least).

Is there a point ….

/ Tony / 2 Comments

   I have begun to question the relevance of this blog. I started it on here with good intentions. I had previously had a Google Blogger blog, but found that a little too restrictive, in the fact that you had to login to your account to post. I then tried the Microsoft Live blog and found that too simplistic. When I found WordPress, I thought this is one I can work with. I use Windows Live Writer to post, and now can post by email from my smartphone, which is pretty cool.

   I intended to post everyday, and to post on a theme. The theme notion quickly went out of the window as I could not think of a theme that I felt I could write about. However I am still thinking on that one. It quickly developed into a kind of online diary and a place to have a whinge.

   How do I take this further ? Do I develop a theme on which to comment ? Do I stick to what I have been doing ? Do I become a ‘social commentator’ on the issues of the day ? Or do I just pack it all in ? Any ideas ?

   I would like take this opportunity for a little moan. Well not so much a moan, more a frustration really. We have started buying white bread for my pack-up, from a northern baker based in Bolton. This bread comes wrapped in waxed paper, as opposed to the usual plastic bag.

   It started when, I saw it priced at 2 for £2.00 in Asda. I bought 2 loaves and also a granary loaf wrapped in plastic. After about 4 days, the plastic wrapped bread was hard and starting to mould a little, but the white bread was still quite soft. I remember from my college days, that one of the tutors used to say that plastic causes bread to sweat, hence the mould. However, bread wrapped in paper breathes and as a consequence, keeps longer. I’m not sure of the science around this, but it seems to be true.

   So lets bring back bread wrapped in paper.

   Was that a moan or a social comment ?

Another weekend over

/ Tony / Leave a comment

   Not a bad day, all round. Youngest has been in a good frame of mind for most of the day. He has only had one lot of medication, which is very surprising. However, he seems a bit tense at the moment. we shall see what happens.

   I had a strange problem with my mobile phone today. I only noticed it when Mrs H rang. The ring tone was distorted. The sound seemed to be rising and falling in volume and slowing and speeding up at the same time. I ran a Google check on the forums, but there was nothing there. I tried updating the firmware, but it seems I have the latest. In the end I reset the factory settings, and that seemed to work. A bit strange though, and I’m blaming the free ringtone I got from the internet.

A successful day

/ Tony / Leave a comment

   Today went pretty much as expected. I managed to get nine PDA’s installed and back into service. So I’m the hero of the day again. Then to top it all the remaining thirteen PDA’s came back from repair. I’ll put another seven into service tomorrow, which should mean more praise. If only I took it serious. I must get those renewals done tomorrow though. It’s getting urgent now.

   We got to talk to S**** on Skype tonight. The video and audio was not brilliant, but that could be down to a number of things. Connection, network speed etc, etc. I’ll do a Google and see what it comes up with. I think though, that it could be my PC and the processor speed. We also tried a video call with messenger, but that was just the same as last time. I think Mrs H expects it to be a lot better than it is. Only one contact on tonight (at the moment), although N*** is probably hidden.

   R*** has been remarkably calm tonight (fingers and things crossed). He kicked off a little first thing, but that may have been leftover from last night. Mrs H said he did not have his medication this morning. He did not need it, so only two doses all day. We thought he was going off earlier this evening, but it came to nothing at all, and he seems very content at the moment. Mind you we have had this before. Little devil lulls you into a false sense of security then bang !!! and all the theories go out the window.

   I played at being Captain Stupid tonight !!!! We were watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and the viewer question came up. I quickly noted the number and the answer down. Pulled out my PAYG phone and texted the answer. Three minutes later, the acknowledgement came back. It was then that I realised, that we were watching a recording from yesterday !!!!! Thankfully, it would appear that I only paid a standard text message charge, not the usual £1.00 entry charge.

   Oh, remember me saying that the biog I’m reading did not have any endnotes ? Well it has !! Lots of them, but unusually none of those irritating subscript numbers embedded in the text. I always feel I should look to see what the note is. It is then so frustrating, when the note refers you to another book !!!

   I finally worked out how to update Twitter from my phone. It would appear, that I have to use the mobile web version. Otherwise I pay 15p each update if I use a Twitter app. Now, go on, ask me how often I’ll use it. Well about as often as I use facebook on my mobile, about four times a week !!! But still it’s there when I want it.

It mostly went well ….. (I think!!)

/ Tony / Leave a comment

This mornings meeting went as well as can be expected. Toby was in his usual ‘salesman’ mode. I have got to admit, he does know his stuff these days. He still gives the impression of the dodgy car dealer, but he is very sociable and likable. Dave was a typical IT manager … very defensive in a jokey sort of way. He’s likable too, but needs a bit of a boot to keep him on track. Mark was Mark. Knows what he wants, and expects it to happen. The problem (as usual) was Spike. He just seemed to be very disconnected. His three item agenda, turned into a six item agenda. He even asked about a project that was finished and signed off before Christmas. Unbelievable. Still he is off tomorrow, so everyone will be in a happy mood.

The rest of the work day passed without incident. Although I’m not very happy with someone at the moment. They seems to be fiddling their time sheets. Taking an hour lunch and booking only 30 minutes. Okay, I’m not overworked at the moment, but I try not to make it look too obvious. I don’t sit there reading the paper when I should be ‘appearing to work’.

Tonight’s meeting was informative. I feel a little more comfortable now. All the staff that will be going to Germany with the kids, seem to be fully confident that there will be no problems, and that if there are, they will deal with them. Cannot say fairer than that. It looks like they have 20 years experience between them. It is an interesting thought though. If anyone had said five years ago, even two years ago, that he would be going on a residential to Germany, I would have laughed them out of the room. Then here we are studying his kit-list and wondering which case he will be taking. When you think, all those years ago, and what we were given to expect. It is really quite amazing what he has achieved.

Firefox is fixed now. Usenet comes up with the goods again. Thank you ‘Fox On The Run’. It’s good to know, that when you want free professional help, that the newsgroups usually come up trumps. It has been a long time since I had a look on the groups, and to be honest, some of the questions asked, I know the answer to. With a lot of the questions though, I don’t even know what the question means. I’ll scan through the Excel posts and see if I can pick up a tip or two. I must have a serious look at getting a separate news reader. I don’t really like using Outlook Express. I know there are a number of free ones out there, but the last time I asked for advice about a free one, I got a lot of grief about not using OE. It was not what I expected. I used to use Forte Free Agent, and I understand that an old version is still available. I may Google the question. at least I won’t get flamed that way.

Will I ever be the same again …..?

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Last year, my wife, eldest son and me were in York. He had been walking the walls, like tourists and had just come down into Foss Island Rd, where there is a break in the walls. We were passed by a rather conspicuous Land Rover, that had a large pole, with a globe atop, in the back. “That” I proudly announced, “is the Google Mapping vehicle !!” No one was listening, and I promptly forgot about it. Until today, when someone at work mentioned that a few cities had gone live with Street View.

I had a look for our street, when I got home, but that’s not been mapped yet. I then looked for the office, but that’s not been mapped yet either. Although I did see the ‘chippie’ on Easy Road. I then remembered the day in York. I tapped in the location as I remember it,and moved along the road. And there we were. The three of us. I could not believe it. Eldest was very impressed, and to be honest, so was I.

The question is ……… should I be worried about ‘the invasion of privacy’ ??? Not one bit !!!