Wednesday 29 July 2009

At LASTTTTTTTTTTTTT !!

We've had a BT engineer who showed a bit of grey cell action... he tested our line against somebody else who has Broadband and they are getting 2.4Mbits and they are 1/2 a kilometre further down the line than us !!! Yayyyyyyyyyyyy at last some progress.....

Yes Mr BT there IS something wrong with our line as I have been saying for the past 18 months or so.... Anyway the upshot is the engineer is going to try and swap out our crappy pair of copper wires for someone who doesn't have broadband and use their pair of wires instead....which may or may not improve our lot.... but that kind of scuppers the poor unfortunate people who end up with our two bits of wet string if they ever want broadband......but that's BT's problem not ours once the deed is done.... mind you the engineer didn't do himself any favours by stating that a village called Bronwydd nearby us were getting 7.6 Mbits and they were 6.9 kilometres from their exchange and yet we are only 5.2 kilometres and the best we can expect is 2.4Mbits ..... but to be honest anything above the dribble of broadband we are currently getting would be a bonus :) apparently it's all down to how thick the wire is they use, Bronwydd apparently has the thickest wires available but they did have the might of the Welsh assembly behind them smacking BT's backside to get them connected .....

Barbecue Summer.... not.....

Well the Met office shot itself in the foot this April when they announced that this summer would be a scorcher.... so far today we have had one months worth of rain fall on our house.... Hardly barbecue weather, apparently they have now back tracked on their first forecast and now it's umbrella weather through most of August !!! Well it's been torrential today. Unsurprisingly our broadband has dropped down to an all time low, I guess the string between here and the exchange is wetter than is necessary.... I complained bitterly to BT and they have agreed that I shouldn't really be paying for broadband when I'm not actually getting anything that can remotely be called broadband, even by stretching the definition somewhat... so they have agreed to refund any charges until it's sorted out, an engineer is hot footing his way here to tell me that "nothing is wrong with your phone line" ..... Oh to be Hannibal Lecter


Andrea (the mad one) has gone on her training run, she has a training schedule to follow for the London Marathon, she's just been waiting for a break in the weather, hopefully the window of moistness will last until the next torrential downpour, so she will only get soaked to the bone this time and not the soul.

I have the unenviable task of changing the front wheel bearings on the Pug (again)..... they are starting to sound like a Heinkel bomber over England, I have never known a car go through wheel bearings like this particular car, at the moment we are getting about 6000 miles out of each set if you average them out.... I'm tempted to put in genuine Peugeot ones, but the cost is prohibitive and it's simply not worth spending that much on Duran Duran... plus I'm not convinced the genuine article would last any longer... I am after all keeping this old lady on the road as more of a hobby than anything... I have to admit you do get a sense of satisfaction having done a repair that would have cost you at least £300 in a garage, or possibly more for a fraction of that.... Ahh well roll on Friday/Saturday groundhog bearings day.... the only up side I can think of is that the car knows the score and that I can do this job with my eyes closed.... although I think I'll keep them open to ward off spanner rash....

Sunday 26 July 2009

So proud :)

Andrea has just finished the Tenby 10k race in just over 1 hour !! I did question her mental health though because the forecast was for torrential downpours.... and for once the forecast was right, she got absolutely soaked but seemed full of beans and vitality when she rang me jubilantly after she had finished :) Well I guess that's what having a cold shower for over an hour does for you .... (click on the picture to see the route ....)

Her training is coming along nicely, I'm so proud of her commitment over this running business because I thought it would be a flash in the pan ... but it's been quite a few months now and she is going from strength to strength :)

Nothing really exciting happening with me, in fact the most exciting thing of late was having to rebuild the kids computer, it has/had four profiles on it and I've kept it limping along for months swatting the virus payload off it and the mountains of spyware it seems to collect.. they all cry "It wasn't me that downloaded it" ... Yeah right, that's why it's in your profile and nobody else's I guess ???

Anyway it died peacefully in it's sleep a few days back, refusing to boot just repeating itself on power on self test, so out came the spanners and screwdrivers, it's now flying with a fresh install of Windows XP but they have lost all their profiles... I did warn them... but who listens to the voice of reason ??? which is exactly why NOBODY is allowed on my computer except Andrea and myself :)

I've set policies on the kids computer now, it's going to be hard to download anything without an administrator (Moi :) ) ok'ing it .... tough... I really enjoy spending days trying to recover data for no pay !!! Anyway the PC is flying now, as XP does when it's first installed and then slowly grinds to a juddering halt after a few months of use ... roll on when Linux takes over the world ... I'll be a happier man :)

Saturday 25 July 2009

The Last Post.....



For the last man to have actually seen and witnessed the First World War.........It's gone from living memory now....

Wednesday 22 July 2009

Home alone....

Well nearly..... I'm tasked with the supervision of my grumpy step daughter (who isn't going to Cardiff on the train) and two younger sproglets, whilst my other half waltzes off to Cardiff with Freya and her friend Niki and their daughter to get fitted for a pair of running shoes !!! No doubt there will be a lot of window shopping and coffee shop stops and possibly a sticky bun or two ....although Andrea doesn't actually drink coffee...loves the smell of it but can't stomach it at all.... no doubt she'll make up for it with the sticky buns..... and then punish herself with a 6 mile run when she comes back "to break her shoes in".... (Just call me Nostradamus... yes that's him above apparently)

Gone are the days you went into a shoe shop and tried on pairs of shoes/trainers until you found the ones that fitted you.... no not these days..... you get assessed by a professional and they find out if you pronate or donate whatever-nate.... and then they find the "perfect" running shoe for you... I don't begrudge her though, she really enjoys her running and she does need the tools for the London Marathon, can't exactly have her running in a pair of £20 Nike's can we ? Besides she is toning up nicely which she is pleased about.... and I'm not complaining about it either :)

The only other thing of note was that our broadband nosedived last night (again)... I haven't bothered writing about it on here much because it's all been done, suffice to say I'm getting to the end of my tether over all of this, I sent off the usual complaint and contacted the Chairman's office (whatever that place is) and sent a rocket up them....and they confirmed that we have a fault....(no sh!t.... sherlock!!!) it's not on really, forking out for a service you don't actually get, it's been two months now of ON....OFF......ON.....OFF service.... I mean you wouldn't pay for water at a pub if you ordered beer... now would you ??? so why exactly am I paying for broadband when I'm not actually getting anything like it ?? go figure... The bad news is we are tied to the BT wholesale package because the exchange we are in hasn't been unbundled .... brilliant !

We also will now have to endure the "I'm bored" chorus which accompanies every school summer holiday, no doubt that will start soon .... and yes it's only the first week.... I'm beginning to think that the kids expect us to don our clown outfits and keep them endlessly entertained with the likes of sword swallowing and balloon animals.... Well it isn't going to happen, we've made a pact not to respond to "I'm bored" exclaimations..... we will standardise our reply to "Really ? ... that's interesting...anyway, as I was saying"

onward and upward !!





Sunday 19 July 2009

In all my years of Information Technology....

I've never come across this problem before, I was repairing an old computer running Windows 2000 Professional, and it was exhibiting some rather strange behaviour... it would just hang mid anything no rhyme or reason to it ... "Ahhh" I thought it's memory related, so I whipped out the memory and put some new memory in ... still it hung unpredictably ...."Bugger" I thought.... "time to bring out the big guns..... DIAGNOSTICS !!"

so I beasted it with diagnostics to within an inch of it's useful life and low and behold it passed everything, not once, not twice but well over thirty times without so much as a blip or error.... "Hmmmm" I thought "This isn't playing fair at all" .... but the second it saw an operating system (any operating system, be that XP,Linux or W2k) it hung like a dead thing......weird .....

So I removed the hard drive and put it into a completely brand new working PC... it hung again immediately..."Ahhhh" I thought "it's the hard drive locking up" .... so I put a new hard drive in the Dinosaur PC and started to install Windows 2000 Professional..... it hung about half way through !!!.... "Ahhh" I thought "it's the motherboard AND the hard drive" .... to cut a very long story short and much cursing and shouting at inanimate bits of IT paraphernalia.... I ended up building a brand new PC and copying the data across and re-installing everything on pristine hardware.... only then was I satisfied that I had got over the problem...

But that's what bothered me.... because I hadn't been able to identify/fix what was actually failing.... it was/is the most bizarre problem I have ever encountered, I haven't ruled out that the dinosaur was having multiple organ failure on several components, which would account for the fault moving when presented with new hardware... but I have to say this one stumped me and that doesn't happen often, I can usually tell what is wrong with a PC within a few minutes/seconds of looking at it.... but not this one !!!!

No doubt I will dig out the offending hardware at some point and get to the bottom of it !!

Thursday 16 July 2009

The Death of Respect

<-- Lovely picture eh ? That said ....I've just read a very interesting article on the BBC news website, apparently Britain leads all other nations when it comes to teenage pregnancy, alcohol abuse, obesity, health, crime... the list goes on... I shall be watching this program tonight on BBC2 Wales at 23:20 with interest.

I have to be honest I find "most" of today's youngsters completely devoid of any respect. Of course there are the exceptions out there but they are getting thinner on the ground.... I've lost count of the amount of times I've walked down a street and the way is blocked by a group of young teenagers hogging the entire pavement....90% of people seeing the group step out of their way as they pass each other, I don't.... I make a point of walking right through the middle of them, 9 times out of 10 it passes without incident but once or twice it hasn't, things have changed so much from when I was their age and just like the kid in the picture they seem to think they have a right to be respected.....erm no, they don't......

I don't know what has gone wrong with society to be honest, I have my theories, and it starts in the home and is reinforced in school. Sure I'm all for all people having rights, but not to the detriment of others..... I've got to be honest with teachers only having exclusion to punish bad behaviour what message is that sending out ? most of the kids who are badly behaved don't even want to be in school, so by excluding them they are simply being rewarded for behaving badly.... I think it was a sad day when they banned caning in schools, I really feel sorry for teachers these days, they have no teeth and no authority it's all been taken away from them......


Having said all of that something made me smile today, somebody I worked with many years ago at Microvitec Systems Integration or LTSS as was..... posted lovely note about be and I quote :-

“Derek was one of the best engineers I have worked with, his technical knowledge was excellent.” July 16, 2009 ....

:)




Tuesday 14 July 2009

You know that moment when you start something and wish you hadn't ?

Well..... I've just come in from cutting the grass and I'm soaked through, the thing is cutting the grass at our place isn't a case of whipping out the electric flymo for a quick hover over the brown patch of growth at the front of the house.... no this is Wales......where rain is rain and torrential is the word....and grass grows knee high in the blink of an eye....

I'd just finished my lunch and was listening to the weather forecast and it wasn't looking good, especially the next few days, and the grass REALLY needed cutting... even birds of prey were getting lost in it......so I dragged out the "beast" filled it with petrol and as always it started up immediately.... I managed our back lawn in no time flat....

and so I should have because I sharpened the blades on it the other day.... the "beast" would probably give a Samurai sword a run for its money !!

My intention was to tackle the front and side lawns as well... So I trundled the "beast" down the side of the house and made short work of one side of the front lawn... and I was just about to start on the other side and it started to bucket down...you know the kind of rain.... a few heavy spots warning then a wave breaks over your head from above...... the thing is.... I like to finish things I start and I dutifully walked back and forth realising I was fighting a losing battle... but I got there in the end, soaked but happy as I trundled the by now heavily steaming "beast" back into the workshop... I'm probably a bit warped but I love the smell of 4 stroke petrol and grass cuttings mixed ....

Right onward and upward.... I'm even considering replacing the bathroom light above the mirror because we can't get any bulbs for it any more .... I must be bored..... we shall see....

Friday 10 July 2009

The bat recovered and Enola Gay ......

Hopefully it's munching mozzies as I type this :)

I'm all for them, because they can eat about 3000 mosquitoes in one night or basically half their body weight in the little blood sucking pests.....and when you have a maternal bat roost as we do, then you can multiply that by about 200 ..... so that's 600,000 mosquitoes dispatched every night !!! so no bad thing I think :)

I went off on a tangent tonight, I was browsing through my music collection and stumbled across Enola Gay by OMD, so I played it and a few others of theirs .... basically had an 80's moment .....anyway I went looking for the cover art for the album/music to put into my Itunes library and then I got dragged into the whole Enola Gay story stumbling from one web site to the next, which I think is the great thing about the web because it can lead you all over the place, for instance I didn't know that in 1975 or thereabouts Paul Tibbets who flew the original mission over Hiroshima re-enacted the bombing of Hiroshima in a Texas airshow complete with fake mushroom cloud, which led America to make a public apology to Japan, or that the original propellors off Enola Gay currently reside in Texas A&M University in a wind tunnel where they have been chopped down to 12½ ft for use in the university's Oran W. Nicks Low Speed Wind Tunnel !!

Personally the whole issue about the atomic bomb's use on Japan is still a bit of a hot potato..... on one side there is the argument that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortened the war and actually saved lives... on the other is the extreme suffering caused to the Japanese who were under it when it detonated...the lucky ones were directly under the blast and were vaporised instantly.... the ones further out weren't so lucky...... (and yes that is actually a picture above of the detonation above Hiroshima) But equally the same could be said of Bomber Harris who commanded bomber command in the UK and the dreadful bombing of Dresden which caused massive fire storms and equally massive loss of life....and of course the casualties caused in the Blitz in London by the Luftwaffe..... but that's war for you, it isn't pretty....it's about killing as many of the "enemy" as you can with as few casualties to your side as possible......Nobody ever said war made any sense did they ????

If there was ANY good that came out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was a stark reminder to both sides of the cold war era just how horrific detonating an atomic weapon was over a city filled with innocent people... and that in itself kept quite a few fingers off firing buttons during that time, not to mention the mutually assured destruction of both sides, should one side decide to get a little trigger happy....

but now we are in a new era of the suicide bomber and terrorist attacks.... neither side will win, because they both are comitted to their way of life and beliefs ..... all it will do is rack up death and destruction on both sides..... sigh.... we never learn do we ?

I suppose I can only end this ramble with the words of Emperor Hirohito himself when, in his first ever press conference given in Tokyo in 1975 he said of the Atomic bombings "Shikata ga nai" <- google it .......

Tuesday 7 July 2009

It had to happen

I'm currently nursing a baby bat who looks a bit poorly, I've followed the advise on the bat conservation website, and spoke to a qualified bat man.....it's currently in a shoebox with a rag and a drink of water.... I don't think it's going to make it through the night though.... apparently there are not any bat people who belong to the trust in this area.... We shall see what tomorrow brings for the poor bat :(

Monday 6 July 2009

I should have realised

When Xbox boy had a conversation with me last night about not having any phone signal in the house any more.... that he would pounce on the land line to spend pointless and costly minutes/hours chatting to his girlfriend on her mobile phone.... ( and yes that is me pictured left as I will need to be restrained tonight if/when he gets home !!!)

This is the boy who used over 4000 texts in one month to her and ran up his phone bill to the £200 mark for one month twice in a row before his Dad chewed his ear off about it.... although I have to doubt his fathers sanity in letting a 17 year old lad have access to an unlimited phone contract.... but anyway I digress.....

Xbox boy has been warned time and time again that even if his on/off girlfriend's life depends on him using the land line, he is under no circumstances to even consider using it.... under a high probability of extreme pain and/or possibly death...... followed by a shallow grave lined with quick lime in the back garden.....that in turn followed up by postcards sent to his friends about how he has decided to take a few years off travelling the world...

But because I was thrown out of the Waffen SS for cruelty....... I've done much worse than that to him.... I've removed his wifi router from his Xbox !!! (which wasn't his anyway it was on a long term loan) and he isn't getting it back.....because short of chopping him up into little pieces (and I don't even think that would stop him) I don't think there is any other way to halt him in his head long pursuit of this female he deems (at the moment) to be the love of his life.....(sigh and a stifled yawn)..... This wouldn't be so bad but coupled with the complete disregard of anybody else... in fact a blinkered horse has a greater field of view than Xbox boy at the moment.......

Anyway I do have further sanctions I can impose, each one more draconian than the last...... the last of which is to have the DECT phone surgically implanted into my body to limit it's unauthorised use......

Sunday 5 July 2009

Darkness falls across the land, The midnight hour is close at hand, Creatures crawl in search of blood.

Well actually it's probably more insects they are after, but yes we are at that time of the year again when the baby bats are infiltrating our house..... I've already moved one out of the house, after an hysterical young teenage girl came screeching into the front room jabbering "BAT BAT BAT BAT !!!!"....

and this one above, was neatly attached to Andrea's linen trousers in the laundry room, it obviously hasn't learnt the subtleties of camouflage yet as white linen trousers are not the best way for a brown bat to hide itself...... I gently removed it and put it in our dark(er) shed high up so it could drop and swoop and it happily crawled up to a corner inverted itself and then re-attached itself to a bit of ivy growing on the wall..... If you click on the picture it will bring up a much higher resolution picture... unfortunately my Nikon doesn't like focussing on fur so the bat's face is slightly out of focus.... however it's left claw/wing is perfect in focus in all it's black leatherette glory, you can even see it's hooks, as for size it was a little smaller than a golf ball all told... I'm pretty sure it's a Pipistrelle bat quite common apparently.....

We knew the bats were back because the other night we heard scurrying in the loft space and initially I thought "ahhh mice" but then realised that there is poison laid down in the roof space, and either it hadn't found the poison yet or it wasn't mice.... I poked my head up into the loft space one night and came face to face with a young bat busily scurrying past my head..... they can really move quite fast on their feet you know.... anyway later on we knew it was bat related because we heard a few loud thuds in the roof space and we presumed that the bats were either learning to fly (unsuccessfully) or that it was a mouse gripping it's throat and staggering around on two legs bumping into things in it's death throes......


Ahhh well we have a few weeks of this now finding bat after bat hidden away in clothes and battering themselves at the windows, not to mention the high pitched screeching giving away their position......

Personally I don't mind them but the rest of the family aren't so keen on them ..... :(

And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller

MUAH HA HA HA HA HA HA Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Saturday 4 July 2009

Gobsmacked !!

About a month ago I installed a web tracking gadget on my blog because I was starting to wonder if I was just talking to myself, nothing new about that little gem ..... but anyway it's first reports came back and I was astonished to find out that my blog is read quite widely, if you look at the map above each orange dot is at least 20 - 30 visits and most of them are multiple reads over a period of days.... Overall in the past three weeks I've had well over 900 hits with thousands of page views..... it's a pretty comprehensive report and you can drill down and find out what people are reading and how long they read a page, and even where they come from.... "I know who you are !!!" and of course the operating system you are running, what resolution your screen is set to and of course your host name, the level of detail is quite frightening, it stops short of reading your bank statements or cloning your credit card however.


I have to say when I installed this I was simply expecting X amount of people read this page for X minutes.... it goes so much further than that. it even tells me how long a particular person read a page for .... AMAZING !! ..... I was even quite chuffed to find out that one of my daughters is reading my blog :) :) ... (that's it now.... she will never darken my blogs pages ever again.... up to her but she is most welcome to read)

The code involved is a very short piece of java script embedded in my blog, but it just goes to show how when you think you are surfing the web anonymously that your every move could be tracked, I'm pretty surprised and shocked at how many people actually read my blog, to be honest I was expecting maybe 40 or 50 people tops.... but I'm truly gobsmacked at the numbers.... OK we aren't talking thousands here but even so :)

Anyway whoever you are thank you for wasting your time and in such a manner :)

Oh in case you're interested the code is from Google Analytics all perfectly legal, and not some hackers code I've found on the Undernet .... :)

Friday 3 July 2009

Marathon or Snickers anybody ?

Andrea is running in next years London Marathon !!! :) she has a "Golden Bond Charity Place" and she is running for Asthma Research....her welcome pack arrived this morning :) ....... Apparently it's not the Flora Marathon any more but the Virgin Marathon, either way it's the same circuit she did a few years back.

She is really excited about it, although I can't see what the excitement is about with the thought of running 26 miles around London..... but each to their own.... either way she has to raise £1500 sponsorship between now and the Marathon, but she's already been promised £500 from the school for a non uniform day, so that's a long way towards her goal. She was spurred on by the recent and tragic death of a schoolgirl at the school she works at who died from an asthma attack. That said her training is going well and she seems to be enjoying it....... thus far.

The only other thing of note was me upsetting my step daughter last night.... I was rudely awoken at stupid past midnight to the TV blaring some inane drivel downstairs.... I waited, I listened... then I realised that there was no way on earth my step daughter would watch what was on, because it wasn't either "Friends, Hollyoaks or 90210 the reprise, anyway I quickly came to the decision that she had fallen asleep on the sofa (again) ......

I weighed up the options ie/ turning off the distribution amplifier in our loft.... but thought no that wouldn't do the TV much good showing a blue screen all night, plus the total waste of electricity....... so there was only one thing for it, I sighed, launched myself out of bed then trudged downstairs not in the best of moods and sure enough when I got into the lounge there she was curled up in a ball on the sofa.....with the TV blasting out, I'm pretty sure if I had rolled a live grenade in the room and it had gone off, she would have merely grunted and turned over..... Anyway I marched over to the TV and jabbed at the off button in an annoyed fashion and off it went.......silence.....utter bliss... I then turned on my heel in a foul mood and went back to bed...to be fair I did consider waking her up for about 2.387 nanoseconds... but it passed without a decision being made.....

I was greeted this morning by a very grumpy 15 year old who asked "why didn't you wake me up last night ?" to which I replied

"For God's sake you're 15 now, if you can't get yourself to bed, I'm certainly not going to wake you up.... if you want to freeze to death downstairs instead of going to sleep under your duvet.... then that's your problem not mine...... just you make bloody sure you turn off the TV before you decide to go to sleep next time...." and I was about to add "Or I will wake you up next time but with a cup of cold water" .... but in a true Kevin and Perry styleeeee off she huffed to school.... she's learning but it's a slow process Mrs Patterson........

But to be fair and good on her though, because she is supervising donkey rides tomorrow at some show for some extra pocket money, fair do's on the girl she's much more enterprising than her older brother who seems to be under the impression that somebody will gladly employ him to play xbox games all day.... Oh and he is going to University now, Army last week, Uni this week.... probably Al Qaeda next week, which is all well and good but I hear their pension plan is pretty rubbish.......

Thursday 2 July 2009

Well that's it Summer is officially over

At least for now anyway, we've had torrential rain here today albeit in short blasts, the really weird thing is it's still very warm, although the rain has freshened things up a bit. We had to have the fan on in our bedroom last night it was so hot, I fell asleep to the hum and rattle of it.... but it was nice having that cool breeze play over you.... Freya was fascinated with it in the morning.....

Nothing much else to report except FOMO boy is still waiting for his birthday present off his Dad, which still hasn't arrived, despite his father telling us and him that he has sent it.... Disappointed isn't the word for it......it's not the first time this has happened (or the second....if you get my drift) and the kids are pretty wise to this kind of behaviour from their Dad, which is why he doesn't want to go to France with him on holiday.... I don't blame him really.... you can only go on breaking your word so many times before people simply don't believe a word you say any more..... it's sad really because we've both encouraged the kids to keep in contact, and we usually end up having to make them feel guilty over not ringing their Dad.....

Oh well, what will be, will be, I guess.....They are old enough now to make their own choices.........It's most certainly not through the lack of trying on our part.......