Running & Stuff

Well the running was done by my uber fit wife who smashed her previous half marathon record at Helsby and did it in under 2 hours... which is no mean feat...Well done Andrea :)

The stuff bit is driving her to Newtown with two kids basically a two hour drive up through mid Wales on the twistiest roads imaginable dropping her off at Morrisons car park for Roger her dad to drive her up to Liverpool with just enough time for a drink of coffee and a sticky bun then ground hog day drive back for another two hours....Thankfully Freya remained asleep for practically all the way up but woke up about half way back and I got the incessant "are we there yet ?"

The worst part though was having to do it all over again the next day.... it's the train next time for my uber fit wife.. it was quite possibly the worst 8 hours I've had to endure in recent history....never again (and not in a Sean Connery Never say never again style.... comebacks are always bad news).

We stayed overnight at our friends house up near Newcastle Emlyn and I attempted to fix their brain damaged computer... it started when they got infected with some trojan downloader a few days previously, So after talking Nicola through running some software something equivalent to bleach, it got rid of the viruses but they had damaged the operating system quite badly......

So I installed Ubuntu 10.10... but it didn't want to behave Linux is far more picky about integrity than Windows and you know immediately if something is wrong and after testing the memory it failed on several blocks.....

So I advised to get new memory what I didn't realise was that the computer had been stored outside in the damp prior to its recent history and rust flakes had developed on the bits of mild steel that were in close proximity to the motherboard...

I'm guessing it was disturbed when the new memory was installed some of these rust flakes were scraped off and nestled in amongst the tightly packed electronics and were causing it to freeze...

I tried everything to sort it out but I had to admit defeat eventually.... the last resort  was to advise taking it to a garage with a high pressure air hose and blowing all the crap off the motherboard and hopefully whatever was shorting it out.... Although knowing Nicola she'll probably just buy a new one.... either way she's another convert from the dark side of Microsoft Windows and now runs Ubuntu 10.10 as does her son on his laptop.... well considering the majority of their problems were caused by viruses that will be a thing of the past...

Personally I wouldn't EVER use a Windows pc for banking or any electronic transactions even with up to date virus protection and if people knew how insecure Windows is they wouldn't either ....they are just too open to attack and very insecure in comparison to Linux.... Although a Microsoft fan boi might disagree on that one....whatever...