Baubles

Disclaimer, I am truly rubbish, see last post. At this rate it will be two posts a year, if I try really hard.

Well, I hope everybody had a good Summer, Halloween, Bonfire night, Christmas and New Year! Our Christmas was a good one, spent with family, which is one of the good ways; along with spending it with  the people you love. We are really lucky. We love our family, most of the time. I won't elucidate on that last point as many of my relatives are computer literate ,and everyone else that falls into the category of  family can read, plus they all know where I live.

Since my last posting I am now gainfully employed, doing a great little job providing IT support for a local charity, spending my time maintaining their computers, networks and numerous gadgets and when I've had enough of swearing at, and generally abusing, awkward and non responsive bits of kit, I go and help generally older people to learn to use their computers and software, whilst trying very hard not to swear at, or generally abuse,  awkward and non responsive clients

The contact with people is probably the best bit and I'd  forgotten just how much I enjoyed it! Like many small organisations with few staff, the work ends ends up being quite varied, today being a good example. This morning I, ferried a few files about on a memory stick, installed a network printer, did my emails, set up a couple of flashes with umbrellas for a photography session and ended up being the model! I tidied away the laptops from the previous day's sessions whilst trying to find the one I usually use, rearranged one of the storage cupboards in order to squeeze more stuff into it, set up some web hosting (web page and emails to do tomorrow), worked 1:1 with a client, enrolled a chap onto an online course and ran a group, the last three all at the same time! I do like a challenge at times.

That's it for this post, if all goes to plan there will be another post soon. If not, Merry Christmas!

The World's Worst!

Yes, I'm sorry, rubbish, I know. I am the world's worst blogger. This is my first posting since the start of May! the last being about the Eurovision song contest! But, I have been busy! (finished my computer course, family, life, general onset of apathy and continuing subject dilemma). My daughter has now finished at her school and is waiting to go to college, so, as a result I am spending more time with her, not that much more time 'cos she doesn't rise from her pit 'till after 10.00 and only then when I wake her! But she has inherited something terrible from her mother, an unconditional love of animal programs, specifically the satellite channel, Animal Planet and more specifically still, Animal Cops. Personally I would rather pluck my own nasal hair, or push lighted bamboo spills behind my fingernails, the channel and it's programming hold no joys for me, except on those rare occasions where the livestock bests the human component. It seems to swing between indulgent anthropomorphism, which I abhor and a gloating self congratulatory tone that states "We look after our animals much better than those foreigners do!" But spouse and offspring seem to like it, so at times, I have to watch it. And now I have forgotten where I was going with this, so I'll terminate this posting and promise to write again soon.

Eurovision song contest drinking game.

This is not my usual blog post, that is still to come. This is merely a handy repository for the rules of our Eurovision song contest drinking game. Usual disclaimer about responsible drinking, do not condone or encourage, etc,etc. But if you are lucky, unconsciousness slips in around song four!

Rules for Eurovision drinking game. V2.0

There are 3 categories of drinking action, sip, gulp and finish.
Whenever one of the following actions occurs you must do the appropriate drinking action.

Sip.
The word "Love" is used.
The singer or a group member is particularly unattractive.
The singer sings in any other language than their own.
The use of nonsense words.
Any facial hair.
Performer winks to camera.
Excessive amounts of flesh on show.
Hats and/or use of props.

Gulp.
Hats with horns.
Removal of any clothing.
Pyrotechnics or fire on stage.
Key change in song.
Singer falls to knees.
Backing group starts dancing.
Woman has facial hair.
Stage entrance or exit by any other means than walking.

Finish.
Uncertain gender or cross dressing.
The wearing of national costume.
Singer not from country they are representing.
French entry sings in English.
There is a contortionist or animal on stage.

These rules are in a state of flux, if you think of a good one or feel that some need removing, please let me know.
Oh and good luck UK. Josh I think they call him.

Today I am a Guinea Pig.

Today, for a change, I have donated my body to medical research. After replying to an advert some time back and under going some blood tests and psychological profiling, which I must have passed? I spent my day being poked, prodded and scanned. The research is about the efficacy of anti-depressant and their effect, if any, on the brain, an area of research I was quite interested in, in an earlier life and I belong to a rare group of people whose skins are just too thick to become depressed by the shit that life throws at them (or maybe just too thick)! The protocol involved me having a huge cannula in my arm into which they would infuse either saline or an anti-depressant (a double blind study) and from which, they would take an armful of blood every 20 minutes or so. All this whilst having an MRI and performing more psychological testing. How best to describe having an MRI. I was once told that it sounds like NiN tuning up, but that's not quite right, it's more like having your head clamped in a metal bucket which is being beaten by the Kyoto drummers, with spanners. But strangely the hard bit about it is trying to stay awake! And when doing the testing I kept trying to work out which finger was on which button and press those keys in time to that incessant rhythm. So, after spending 4 hours at a research lab and at least an hour in that infernal machine I received a tuna and cucumber sandwich, a hole in my left arm and the hope that I may have advanced medical science just a little.

Hunky-Dory?

This is just a quick follow up from a previous post, Windows 7 install. Good news! Almost everything is hunky-dory, the system itself is still stable and quick enough for most of my needs. disk space is looking good with no excessive churn, temp is o.k, yet I have a couple of black flies in my Chardonnay (thank you Alanis).
1. Photoshop elements 8 won't run for more than a couple of minutes without crashing! Annoying but not earth shattering. will just roll back to 7. There are better editors out there but I like the organiser and I've been with it since Photodeluxe 1.
2. Intermittent network problems. For some still unknown reason, at times I cannot connect to my mail server or the web but my Torrent client still downloads, my Twitter client still updates and Windows still says I'm still connected! Haven't worked it out yet, can't decide if it's hardware or software related. Also even if Firefox connects IE won't!
3. A complete failure of all my usb ports. Except my mouse! In the process of uninstalling all the drivers and starting again.
That will do for the moment and I appear to have used up my entire quota of exclamation marks for the month! Whoops! And next months! Best stop now.

Mood swings courtesy of bureaucracy.

This post was supposed to be about the importance of friends, family and birthdays but no. The government had to go and mess it up!
Just lately I seem to have been having lots of meetings at the Jobcentre. If not signing on then Restart. If not Restart then New Deal and it's impossible for them to schedule these to be on my signing day, so I've been on the premises at least once a week for the last month. At my last Restart interview, my advisor had worked out that because of my length of unemployment(ages) and where I lived(deprived), I would very soon be eligible for the chance to compete for some of the part time jobs they hold in reserve. So, a further appointment was made which took me past that date of eligibility. in the interim, an interview was arranged for New Deal, which is for people who have been unemployed for a certain length of time and the condensed version of this seems to be "here are some jobs, if you don't take them we'll cut off your benefit" but that's paraphrasing a bit.
Went for the interview, very nice lady talked me through New Deal, helpful, pleasant, new appointment made and joy of joys, on my signing day. A first.
Six days later, I attended for my Restart appointment. The security guard couldn't find me on his clipboard but, because I had my card with me, he let me up. Got to reception and lo and behold, no appointment! After a period of tooth gritting and requesting to see somebody, since I was there, I eventually saw some one, not my advisor, who knew what had been said at our previous meeting, but some one who had never seen me before. It conspires that New Deal takes precedence over everything else and once I had started on that particular beast it automatically cancels all other appointments at the Jobcentre. But doesn't tell anybody. Neither Restart or I were informed. Not happy. On a happier note my new advisor had a list of about thirty jobs, of which twenty six were for the 16 to 24 age group, three were suspended, which left two part time filing jobs, which I didn't quite feel qualified for.

Windows 7 install

Yes, tardy again, but the last post took a lot out of me and it has been my birthday.
Right, installing Windows 7. Last time I had a go it was the release candidate I installed on my somewhat aged AMD Athlon XP system. It went on without problem but due to memory constraints (I only had 512mb installed) there was a very annoying lag when launching programs. So I took it off. Now, some twelve months later, I've scraped some more memory together (a pair of 256mb sticks) which takes me up to 1gb and It's Windows 7 Ultimate that's been thrown on, and it was a piece of cake! I slotted the DVD in and formatted the hard drive, cos that's the kind of guy I am. Hit a couple of keys and away it went. The installation proceeded and installed 95% of the drivers I needed and following a reboot it installed the remaining 5% (mainly the Sata and motherboard drivers). That extra memory meant no more program lag and it is a joy to use again. The only Issue I had was that both my optical drives suddenly disappeared! No rhyme or reason for it , one is a Sata drive and the other a plain old Pata. They were there in device manager but not in My Computer, still missing following a reboot so I deleted them and rebooted. This time Windows told me it had found new hardware and was installing drivers for it and my Sata drive reappeared, but still no Pata! I installed a couple more programs, looked in My Computer and there it was, it had sidled back on when I wasn't looking and I still don't know why!
So, if you are thinking about installing Windows 7, go for it. It is more stable, less intrusive and boots up a bit quicker My only caveat being, make sure you have enough memory and that drivers are available for your motherboard. Oh, and back things up before you start.