Microsoft / Google Maps

I thought that they only refreshed mapping data every once in a blue moon, but I was surprised to find out that they have refreshed the mapping on Microsoft maps quite recently, when I zoomed in on our house and you can clearly see the trampoline and tent towards the top of the right hand side of the screen, and the workshop on the left, you can even see Duran Duran centre screen with the Terrano next to it.... it must have been taken in or around the time of my stepdaughters birthday because that is when we had the tent out on the back field... amazing level of detail, I can even see Freya's slide on the back lawn....

As for me I'm suffering from either swine flu or a very bad head/chest cold, Freya's already had it and she turned into the amazing green snot monster with a temperature at one point of 40c !!..... It's not often I refuse to go out but I had to turn down an invite to our friends daughters 3rd birthday, which I was a bit gutted about, but I honestly do not feel well enough to be let outdoors let alone socialise.... I've got one of those hacking coughs which hurts your head ... hopefully I'll shake it off soon... I don't do being ill very well ......(sigh)

Engrish..... It's just funny

^^Love this one ^^

^^COLESLAW ???^^

^^Makes you wonder how big their assault rifles are ?^^

^^ I think they meant BBQ flavour^^

^^I have to admit it does look a bit dodgy to me as well ^^

It reminds me of when Mitsubishi had the Mitsubishi Colt car here in the UK then they released for sale the next in line of their "equine named" range of cars ... but somewhere it got lost in translation and was badged "Starion" here in the UK.... I think they meant "Stallion" .... although Mitsubishi meant "Star of Orion" ..... (yeah right I can't imagine the car being called Betelgeuse, Rigel, Saiph, Alnitak, Mintaka, Alnilam, Hatsya and Meissa because they are the stars that form Orion ) besides the previous car was called a "Colt" go figure !!!

There must have been a few embarrassed faces at the launch show, and many many scraping bows.....

Dump your shares in alternative energy companies !!!

Unless you've been in a cave for the past 20 or so years you'll have heard about the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth, and now even governments are listening to the IPCC (who are mainly a political group, not scientific) .....

It seems a hacker has stolen 61 Megabytes of emails between global warming scientists at Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia and it's pretty damning stuff in that :-

Collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, Conspiracy, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and more......Oh dear the gravy train has been derailed.... you silly, silly scientists .... (pah)

and here is a taster of what has been going on.... Oh It's in the public domain and has been disseminated to thousands of servers around the world now so prosecution is remote to say the least ;¬)

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

The "hide the decline" statement is about the tree ring data which at 1960 suddenly stop on the IPCC graph... they stop because they didn't want to show that...... embarrassingly instead of the tree ring data showing the earth was warming it actually shows a decline in temperatures from 1960 onwards.... hardly science is it ? to simply NOT show the data because it puts your work very firmly in the camp of "Oh shit we're wrong" ???... I thought scientists were supposed to be independent ??? it smacks of the fear of grant money being withdrawn to me.....

They've also sent emails to each other stating that they should delete emails from certain people because of marital problems... or in other words we have to be careful especially when a woman scorned is about....who knows ? but why would they want to delete emails talking about the AR4 data ??? did it show exactly the opposite of what they were trying to prove ? again hardly science..... and I LOVED the....

"Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years"

I'm sorry but that is an EPIC fail in accuracy, massaging the figures to make them look right ??? you remember the saying don't you ? there are lies, damn lies and anthropogenic global warming... sorry statistics..... the only anthropogenic warming going on is the hot air being generated by the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia !!! Global warming does exist but it's not through anything we as humans have made a great contribution to, the biggest contribution to global warming is the sun and water vapour... NOT CO2 !!!

This is going to blow the whole AGW myth wide open.... (hopefully) Remember the 1970's and the impending ice age ?.... well this is much more serious because billions of dollars have been ploughed into this myth.... heads are going to roll.... OR the CRU will be discredited by the Global Warming lentil eating hippies....but that's pretty hard because the IPCC relied heavily on their data (sorry that should have been spelt GARBAGE) I reckon we should push for Jeremy Clarkson to head the committee to look into the fraudulent claims for government grants into global warming research

You can download the hacked emails & documents from here

(might be a good idea to run your antivirus checker on it, although mine showed it as clean and it's mostly documents and text files, the text files look a bit strange because they are from a unix machine, but you can still read them, they are missing the CRLF that Windows requires to format it correctly)

Oh here we go again.......

It looks like the Scottish Parliament will be given powers to ban air weapons, because they have had a spate of air weapon injuries and deaths up there.... You only have to ask if the banning of hand guns after Dunblane had any effect on the circulation of illegal weapons ? or a decrease in gun related crime .....well did it ?... no it didn't... there isn't a day that goes by where you don't hear about some shooting somewhere in the country....

When are the politicians going to learn that banning something doesn't make it go away, you only have to look at drugs, they are banned.... are they off the streets ? do we have any less drug addicts ?... are there any less drug dealers ?..... of course not... but I guess if some document exists somewhere whereby the government has said "Thou shalt not !!" somebody else will exist where they say "Up yours !!"

But getting back to firearms, and just to fill you in on some of the legalities of air weapons.... not airsoft, paintball or BB guns, I mean something designed to fire a projectile usually made of lead or some similar type of material at no higher muzzle velocity than 12ft/lbs .... because make no mistake about it air weapons are firearms, they are not a toy, and certainly shouldn't be used by children unless under supervision, and any air weapon that fires a projectile at a higher muzzle velocity than 12ft/lbs requires a firearms certificate and a lockable gun cabinet.

Air weapons can and do kill in the wrong hands, some people simply do not realise how fast a pellet of say .22 calibre leaves the barrel of an air rifle.... and to put things into perspective what exactly does 12ft/lb mean ?

in answer to the first question .22 pellets can leave an air rifle barrel at between 650 feet per second and 800 feet per second (some faster some slower)... but it is very dependant on how heavy the pellet is, a .177 calibre pellet can reach speeds of over 1000 feet per second... so what is 650 feet per second ? well that's around 443 miles per hour and 1000 feet per second is 681 miles per hour....

12 ft/lb means it's muzzle velocity in feet per second times the projectile weight in pounds and air rifle pellets are weighed in grains average being 12 - 16 grains

basically it means that most legal air rifles @ 12ft/lbs can easily penetrate a human skull at ranges of up to 30 yards....

So yes air weapons can be lethal, but the same could be said for any bit of machinery in the wrong hands, a car for instance ? a bread knife ? cricket bat ?

It's all down to who is in control of them and what they are using them for.... banning an inanimate object doesn't stop the person who wants to use the object to injure/kill/maim somebody, nor does it reduce the circulation of them... since 1996 (Dunblane) and the political knee jerk reaction to it...... gun crime has increased by four fold not decreased..... go figure

I've got the unenviable task

Of re-installing Windows XP on my computer.... it's not that XP crashed or got infected with a virus, it's just that I've kept it limping along after many registry repairs and re-installs it was getting a bit ridiculous waiting for it to boot up every time... (we're talking a good 5 minutes here and my computer is no slouch it's just XP had accumulated so much driftwood over the years that it spent most of it's time fighting it's way through it ....) .....The last time I physically installed XP on this hard drive from scratch was about 5 years ago....it's since had a new motherboard, new CPU new sound card, and various other new bits and bobs....... so that's not bad going .... I've now got a check-list as to what I need to recover from my backup to bring me back to square one once more....

You simply do not realise what you actually use on a computer until it's gone.... no doubt over the next few weeks I'll have to dip into my offline backup drive to resurrect some utility or the like ....

The only other news of note was that Xbox boy is now Xbox man...... he had a good night last night for his 18th birthday party, we had some friends come over and Andrea's Dad... and a surprise visit from Xbox man's girlfriend...and the wine and beer flowed along with with pretty nice food..... and then today we all went down to the Quayside Restaurant for a slap up meal courtesy of Andrea's father, unfortunately Andrea's mother couldn't make it because she was working, but lots of pictures were taken and Xbox man had his first legal pint !! :) He also got more money for his birthday than he has ever had before..... He's also doing very well at his new job... things are looking up for Xbox-Man !!!

He's off out tonight with his girlfriend and some of his mates, no doubt he is going to paint the town in a rainbow of colours, and knowing Xbox man probably a few pavements as well.... ahhhh well you're only 18 once, you may as well get the liver damage in early while your body can still hack it eh ?

Labels ..... how I hate them !!

It seems the British Humanist Association you know the ones behind the "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" plastered all over 30 buses in London... Now I'm the first to admit that I don't believe in God, I used to but I don't any more.... but that doesn't mean I will be ramming my non belief down my daughters throat as she grows up.... I'll let her decide what she wants to believe in .... if she asks my thoughts on the subject then I'll tell her what I believe to be true.... as I'm sure any level headed Christian would.

I can see both sides of the coin on this one, on the one hand the Humanists are saying "let children grow up and make up their own minds, instead of having their belief indoctrinated into them" and that goes for Christians and any other faith such as Muslim, Buddhist or even Jedi.

But Humanists are just as guilty as Christians in that some impose their belief system on their children.... so there is little difference really except one is at one end of the scale and the other at the opposing end..... The whole point is we all "believe" in something be that God or the lack thereof.....

Religion has caused a LOT of trouble over man's existence, if it wasn't Crusaders chopping off heads in the holy land then it was the Saracens hacking the knights to bits.... more recently of course we have Jihad with extremist Muslims waging war on the west and all things western.... and of course our governments commitment to shooting/killing as many Terry Taliban's as possible....

So you see Religion has a lot to answer for over the years, rather than bring people together it's brought out the worst in them.......but that's the problem with having a higher brain function than the other species around us... we have to go that one step further and think beyond ourselves....

Lions kill when they are hungry, as do Sharks and most other predators.... Man on the other hand will kill because you go to a different church, or are simply a different religion, or even if your mobile phone is better than theirs..... or sometimes simply for fun.....

Anyway getting back to more current religion caused arsery ...... We seem to have forgotten that the USSR (as was) tried to control Afghanistan but were beaten by the Mujahideen, which it is rumoured were trained and supplied by various governments around the world who didn't want a communist Afghanistan. Then when the USSR pulled out because they were getting hammered the Mujahideen turned on themselves and had a bloody civil war.... then of course the Taliban emerged or "Students of Islam" as it means......and we are pretty much up to date..... We aren't going to win this war, just like the Russians didn't.... you can't fight religious zealots <- oh the irony in the etymology.

The British Government is starting to wane on its commitment in Afghanistan recent press reports are outlining that an exit strategy is on the horizon... I think they have realised that the death toll is simply going to continue and that although on a smaller scale, Afghanistan is turning into a British Vietnam..... see humans NEVER learn their lessons through history do they ????

Laugh ? I nearly fell off my chair......

You have got to read this David Icke fella .... I think he is actually suffering from something quite delusional and quite probably serious... but the thing that made me laugh the longest and hardest were all the credit cards and methods of payment he accepts at the bottom of every page.... Hmmmm so maybe he isn't as loony as he makes out eh ??? a true loon wouldn't charge for his snippets of wisdom or services, he'd want to evangelise for free....like prophets of old.... "those are my juniper bushes !!!" now wouldn't he ? .... apparently he is a conspiracy investigator whatever that is.... or is he ? maybe he staged the moon landings himself in Elstree Studios , or quite possibly has a collection of grassy knolls in his back yard (all signed and limited edition of course....paypal accepted)

His latest exposé is all about the swine flu vaccine and how it's been engineered to kill us all
and how the H1N1 virus was engineered to allow the reptilian overlords to control us and reduce the population..... not to mention the sea monsters which will swallow up all the BP oil drilling platforms.....

No..... if you EVER think you are going slightly mad have a quick read of what David Icke is sprouting about it will clearly make you realise that you are in fact as normal as the rest of us and not a few slates short of a full roof, or indeed several sandwiches short of a picnic


Ohhhh and the LRO from NASA has photographed most of the Apollo landing sites and you can actually see the LEM that was left on the surface when the Astronauts left..... I guess that means David Icke will have to sell all his moon rocks at a cut down price now .... who knows maybe he could re-market them as Reptilian gall stones ????

(hmmmm mind you the conspiracy theorists won't trust any multimillion dollar spacecraft because it was sent by NASA who of course staged the whole Apollo mission in the Mojave desert back in the 60's !! .....Damn foiled again !!! ) bloody lunatics !!!

What a miserable day .....

Made all the worse by the fact that my parents are enjoying Australian sun on their faces (well tomorrow at least !!) .... I can handle bad weather like snow, ice, hailstones... I actually enjoy that kind of weather.... The most fun I've had outdoors was traversing Crib goch in my crampons and ice axe on a near white out in December in North Wales hanging on for dear life... I'm glad it was low visibility have you seen the drop ??? .... Anyway I digress .....it's just the dreary wetness that seems to continually empty down on us here recently.... but getting back to my parents they flew out on the enormous Airbus A380-800 so they should at least have some leg room .... I tried tracking them on google earth but although I knew the flight number I didn't know the ID they used.... I think I got them as it was the only A380 going in that direction (Singapore) but then they dropped off the radar for that particular airport... I presume they went out of range rather than hit the deck like a dart.....or to use the words of Billy Connelly

Our Broadband is still rubbish, BT have sent us another hub but even the new hub gives up at night.... so no nearer a fix.... I've had to re-flash the old version 1 Homehub to run the original Speedtouch 7G firmware to give us ANY broadband .... long story... needless to say it works.... well better than any solution BT have given us thus far ....

Freya aka "Destructo Girl" very nearly chewed my "very" expensive ipod earphones to death... how they survived I have no idea .... but I guess they were just too chewy to resist !!

Australia

Well my parents have been flying now for three hours and forty five minutes on their way to Perth, Australia to visit my cousin Sue and her family.... My mother was really nervous about flying, she hasn't flown before, I'd presumed she had flown out to Holland when she was a young woman before meeting my father but no.... she's never been on a flight before or a plane of any description.... so here she is signed up to fly on the biggest jet airline thus far the A380 Airbus.... she's DVT socked up to the eyeballs as is my father .... They have a stop off at Singapore airport for refuelling then off to Australia and Perth. My mother couldn't get it into her head the time differences ..... either way I think her body will tell her she's just flown nearly 24 hours even if her watch won't !!!

They have a busy time out there because Sue has an itinerary with all the good places to visit and my parents have promised FOMO boy a boomerang (real) and some aboriginal art for teenage moody strop daughter because she's doing that in her GCSE syllabus.....

They will have a blast I'm sure, it will be so hard lazing around the pool at my cousin Sue's house in the suburbs of Perth ......waited on hand and foot.... rather them than me .... (not!!!)... seriously though they deserve a decent break.... and three weeks isn't bad in Auz !!

We've just had our friends around Niki and Justin and they have plied us with mulled wine and beer and some festive mince pies (bit early but who cares ?)..... Xbox boy's 18th birthday is looming I'm sure he will have a blast, he usually does...... regardless

as for me ..... well I'm waiting for the Ipod to die again .... to give me something to do !!! ho hum

I did however take this rather stunning photograph of a rainbow just outside our house this morning...... as you can see the weather is lovely ...... bet they don't get rain in Australia like we do here in Wales ;-) .... I'll have to visit our neighbour to see if I can steal his pot of gold !!!

Itunes and rain

It seems the latest incarnation of Itunes (version 9.0.25) has killed quite a few ipods, I was thinking it was Freya killing ours with the Sharpie pen and consequent rubbing with wet wipes... but my iPod died again.... Itunes has definitely something to do with it judging by the numerous posts on the Apple forums.... I've resurrected ours again ... how long it will stay resurrected is another thing ... we shall see....

Then there is the rain of which we have had plenty of these past few days, I took xbox boy for an interview for a job in Llanelli (which he got !!) and on the way back the heavens emptied it was like driving underwater on the back roads from Llanelli.... Needless to say Duran Duran coughed and died when it was driven past a moist hedge on the way back.... to be fair it was more than a moist hedge the water was at least 5" deep on the road, and even though I crawled through it at just a bit faster than the spread of bacteria.... it still coughed/backfired twice then died... so I had to wave the traffic past us on a pretty sharp corner.... I wasn't looking forward to getting my feet wet, but thankfully the engine sprang to life after a couple of tries.....phew :)

The trip back home after picking up FOMO boy from school early because of the torrential rain was a bit more exciting.... we have a T-Junction at the bottom of the Bancyfelin road and it was completely underwater by at least 5 to 8 inches of water.... just scraping the sills on the door I think.... we got through that on a wing and a prayer, only to be confronted with nothing short of a running waterfall that was our normal road home ....... the hill looked like a very flat waterfall.... I've never seen so much water on a road before.... it was at this point I thought "we aren't going to make it up this hill...." it was that bad if you had got out of the car and stood in the middle of the road the water would have been shooting past your knees with the spray off your feet... but Duran Duran did us proud .... coughed a few times but got us up there....

apparently it's not the worst of it we have more on the way ... St Clears I think is going to be particularly badly hit because the Taf and Cynin rivers have a flood warning and St Clears floods if somebody spits their drink out in one of the beer gardens.... so I think they are in for a bad time...... We are already cut off at our T-Junction and Meidrim is probably out as well....Andrea barely made it back from her marathon training session ......that only leaves the back way to Banyfelin left .... mind you if the water reaches our house..... all my readers are dead anyway !!! not that we are high up or anything ;¬)

Wasn't expecting this at all !!

I was doing my usual trawl of the BBC news website when I came across this item about an old friend Brannan Tempest .

He lives in Leeds and is madder than a box of frogs, but I was sad to hear his girlfriend Pippa had been injured in a car accident....I hope she fully recovers...... That said it does kind of follow that only Brannan could get a 2.4 metre high carved horse from Indonesia nicked from outside of his house......

This is the man who found a display firework mortar bomb which hadn't gone off at Rounday Park in Leeds after a commercial firework display....you know the ones where you hear the "thump" as it's fired into the air from a mortar tube then you get that massive star burst.... well he took it home and set it off in his field.... I think that's where the US military got the idea for the "Daisycutter" bomb.... his field remained pretty bare for several weeks....I suppose it's one way of cutting your grass !!! ..... thankfully he wasn't injured .... just deaf for a while... ahhh the things you do when you're young eh ?

Anyway it was nice to see him even if it was on a BBC News report about stolen wooden horses I hope they catch the thieving swine's !! I'm pleased to say he has less hair than me.... but not by much ;¬)

Addendum :- I've since found out that they recovered his trojan horse from a place called Castleford and it's been handed back to him !!! :)

This made me laugh.....

A woman has been convicted of being too noisy whilst having sex apparently they recorded noise levels slightly in excess of 47 decibels !!! horrendous !!

or so it seems until you look at a scale of comparable noises made everyday .....


For instance a Jet taking off at 25 metres is 150db and you would probably suffer eardrum rupture and then at the other end of the scale you have breathing .... you know in ....out.....in....out .....well that comes in at a deafening 10db.... 47db comes in between what you would experience in a quiet library or possibly a conversation in your own home..... hardly causing blood to spatter out of your ears..... now is it ?

but their neighbours were probably right.... things can sound REALLY loud if you have your ear to a glass on the wall ......

It reminds me of my old neighbours in Kippax, my ex wife and I had a bit of a war with them when I was renovating the bathroom and putting a power shower in (all the rage in the 80's you know ;¬) ) .... I'd warned them that I was going to be banging nails into the bathroom floor in readiness for bracing the floor for the ceramic tiles to be laid, and I'd told them I was going to have to hammer in a LOT of nails to get the marine ply to stay put....They were ok with all of that ...... but no sooner did I start driving the nails in than "MogaDon the mad monk of Kippax" and "Manic Maria" his wife started hammering the partition wall with something ...... so the devil in me rushed into our bedroom on the other side of the house and started banging the partition wall ... then running back and hammering a few more nails in on the other side of the house..... mind you they were strange.... I was once woken up by Gregorian chant music blaring out at 3am in the morning !!! (hence the mad monk title)..... So nice now to live without neighbours :)

Gary Glitter / Paul Gadd

I've just watched a drama set in a parallel Britain where the death penalty had been re-introduced for murder or rape of children under 12 years of age.....

it was called "The execution of Gary Glitter"

Now I'm no fan of Gary Glitter/Paul Gadd (never was ...not even in the 70's in his hey day !!) he's been convicted on numerous occasions of sexual offences against children and not only in this country.... thereby confirming that he is indeed a paedophile.... BUT

I think Channel 4 overstepped the mark on making it into a docudrama type program, mixing fact with fiction and indeed mixing real life people with fictional characters.... Yes Gary Glitter is a child sex offender, but it wouldn't have been that hard to disguise it's parallels with the real Paul Gadd by calling Gary Glitter .....say......Donny Sparkle or Paul Cadd.... I mean we are all pretty intelligent (well some are) and would have made the connection anyway.....

Paul Gadd is a Paedophile and in most peoples eyes he is lower than a skunks backside.... but does that mean he can have his name used like this ? can a TV company get away with this ?

More worryingly what was the point of this Docu-Drama ? was it to point out the realities of capital punishment....or was it to show how great it would be if we could kill every convicted paedophile ? or was it to poke a stick at what Channel 4 thought was sub human and had no rights, therefore wouldn't sue them for defamation of character because nothing they said wasn't true and the rest was quite obviously artistic licence ???? does that make it fair ????

They are treading on very thin ice methinks, and I thought it went just that bit too far, yes Paul Gadd is scum but that doesn't mean it's an open season on him or anybody else for that matter to allow anything to go by uncensored.....

They'll be portraying Gordon Brown as a literary genius and wordsmith next .......to you, you and you, isn't you ;¬)

Sagem DVR Update

It's been a long time coming.... an update to fix a minor problem with my 250GB DVR .... it's only a minor problem but it's bloody annoying....

Anyway today is the day the official update over the air arrives ..... (sigh) and my DVR has been nudging me to do the update .......I've tried it four times now and each time it comes up with ER14 which means :-

Er14 - Faulty data signals received by the digital-box

or translated into human means a car or possibly a small insect with excess static charge built up in it's wings has passed by the house and disrupted the signal so badly it's corrupted the update..... (double sigh)

I've just got to pick a time when no cars or statically charged objects are passing.... (or maybe it's my 1970's nylon Y-front underpants causing the interference !!!) it's a bit of a problem when you live in a fringe signal reception area and you have a TV aerial the size of a small planet perched on your roof going through a mast head amplifier then onto a distribution amplifier which has the ability to decode SETI signals from outer space let alone from the Preseli transmitter !!! to say our TV reception is sensitive to outside influences would be an understatement .... and to think some people can pick up TV signals with no aerial at all !!!

(make that a 5th attempt to update it.... it failed again !!!)

it's going to have to be working before my step daughter gets home to watch Hollyoaks .....or her life will be over !!!

for those of you searching for Sagem Error Codes ... here they are :)

Er00 - The software that was available for upgrading was of an older or of the same version as the one already in the digital-box.

Er01, Er02 -The upgrade failed. Some information was missed out.

Er03 - The internal memory is not large enough to receive the upgrade.

Er04 - The signal was disturbed during the upgrade.

Er05 - Wrong type of data was received during upgrade.

Er06 - Not used.

Er07 - Access problem in back-up memory (EEPROM).

Er08 - Access problem in video memory.

Er09 - Can not find any data to do an upgrade.

Er10 - Poor or no cable-TV signal.

Er11,12 - Not used.

Er13 - Unauthorised data signals received by the digital-box.

Er14 - Faulty data signals received by the digital-box.

Pb01 - A problem in the ROM memory is detected.

Pb02 - Memory size is too small.

Pb03 - A problem occurred during start up (initialisation problem).

Pb04 - Internal communication failure.

PbF9 - Hardware error identified during start-up


oh and if your Sagem gets stuck with an error message... wait until the error message appears then press the standby button on your remote.... that will revert to your previous firmware :)


Addendum:- It looks as if they have pulled the update.... by the looks of it many people were getting ER14's when they tried to update.... Ahhhh well nice try Sagem but no cigar !!!

It's official.... Simon Cowell is a cock

I was under the impression that X-Factor was a singing competition so why oh why did Simon Cowell decide to put Jedward vs Lucie to the public vote ? He knew what the outcome would be he just did a Pontius Pilate on us..... have a look at what they are saying about him on Twitter


We all know why he went to the public vote, it was ratings/money vs talent....

I'm not going to watch X-Factor any more he's blown any credibility he had with me and as far as I am concerned it's not a talent show any more it's all about ratings and money.... who the hell would buy any music Jedward produce ????

I guess Ireland didn't have a catastrophic phone system failure after all :( ........shame

Poor Lucie she must be gutted to lose out to those two performing seals..... I hope somebody signs her up with a recording contract that girl deserves so much more than what she got tonight !! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Ipod 5th Gen Video

I've just spent the best part of two days trying to revive an ipod from a fate worse than death.....ie/ Freya !!!

It all started with a Sharpie Pen... you know the ones which are impossible to remove from anything and everything ? Well Freya got hold of one..... a lovely black one.... and after she wrote all over the lovely white wall next to my office, she saw her masterpiece and thought why stop there ? She then started on the lovely white Ipod, she wrote all over the screen and click wheel.... fortunately Sharpie pens are not as indelible as they claim to be.. and also fortunate for me that I had a rubber protective case over the ipod, otherwise she would have coloured the whole thing in black.... but she was VERY pleased with her artistic streak :) ... There was only one thing for it !!


Step one :- remove Sharpie Pen scribblings with wet wipes.... it all came off bar a little bit on the click wheel.... phew !! (and now that's gone as well.... it does make you wonder what they put in those wet wipes ??) .....

Step Two :- power up Ipod

Step Three:- stare in disbelief as Ipod has a monumental hissy fit..... and promptly shuts down after a horrendous clicking sound.....

Step Four :- Start Ipod up .... watch it shutdown again chirping merrily as it goes

Step Five :- Connect Ipod to PC and watch as Itunes completely wipes out all the songs and films it contains.... stating very dead pan that ......"your NEW Ipod is ready for use."... (it wasn't by the way ... it was VERY broken)

Step Six:- Start it up again and swear profusely at white doorstop as it displays everything in Chinese....or possibly Mandarin...... Gotta love technology


After much scratching of my head I realised that it had had what amounted to a monumental brain fart and consequently thought it was connected to an Apple computer which probably accounted for the HFS+ file system I could see on the Ipod thank God for Mac Drive Software !!! which is free thankfully.... for a 7 day trial at least..... it's back in the land of the living...(I think) after creating a vanilla VMware virtual machine running XP on my XP system (go figure !! my copy of XP refuses to even acknowledge an IPod has been plugged in !!) and fooling it into thinking it wasn't a doorstop but an Ipod ......but it wouldn't surprise me if Freya used it to hammer something into the wall... watch this space for Ipod obituaries in the near future.....


For anybody else out there suffering the same problem I have an INF file which I've created which can drag your Ipod 5G back from certain death ;¬) and the magic numbers and letters are USB\VID_05AC&PID_1209\000A2700162D7F32 .....


addendum:- I've fixed my PC not recognising the Ipod.... it involved a fresh copy of USBSTOR.INF file and the USBSTOR.SYS file being placed in the C:\Windows\Inf directory you'll have to un-hide the directory with explorer under tools/folder options.... how they got hosed during all of this is beyond me... Anyway it's 1:41am in the morning and I'm chin strapped .... but I have a happily syncing Ipod sitting next to me :)

double addendum :- iPod Diagnostic Mode

Not many people know about this, but I am going to share it with you how to boot your Ipod into diagnostic mode :)


Steps:

1. You need to restart your iPod before putting it into Diagnostic Mode. Check that your hold switch is off by sliding the switch away from the headphone jack. Toggle it on and off to be safe.
2. Press and hold the following combination of buttons buttons simultaneously for approximately 10 seconds to reset the iPod.
* Original iPod 1G to 3G: "Menu" and "Play/Pause"
* All newer iPods, including 4G, 5G,Video, Classic, Nano, and Mini: "Menu(top button)" and "Select(centre button)"
3. The Apple logo will appear and you should feel the hard drive spinning up. Immediately press and hold the following sequence of buttons:
* iPod 1G to 3G: "REW", "FFW" and "Select"
* All newer iPods, including 4G Video, Classic, Nano, and Mini: "Back" and "Select"
You will hear an audible chirp sound (3G models and higher) and the Apple logo should appear backwards (older iPods). You are now in Diagnostic Mode.
4. Navigate the list of tests using "REW" and "FFW" on older models, or using the scroll wheel on newer ones.

Once you are in the Diagnostic Mode, use the "Forward" (>>) and "Previous" (<<) buttons, or scroll wheel on newer iPods, to navigate the menu. Each thing you see on the list is a certain test that can be done. To start a test, press "Select". To exit a test, press the "Play/Pause" (>||) button. For more information of the details of this menu......... happy testing :)

Facebook

I've deactivated my facebook account, mainly because it's purely mindless drivel, sure it has it's up side, but I really don't want to know what somebody had for tea, or if some other person needs a holiday or indeed if somebody really dislikes something on TV they have watched.... I was even getting sucked into the whole post about anything syndrome... and that's not really me, I say something when I want to say something.... I got a bit fed up with the constant "farkle" invitations and tired of the inane badly spelt quiz invitations devised by retarded text speak teenagers who probably need the calculator on their phone to count to ten and whose sum total life experience is summed up purely via the dexterity of their thumb on their LG phone and how many "friends" they have on facebook ..... nah not for me...... I prefer the real world......

So enough was enough I managed before facebook and I'll manage again, I had 97 "Friends" on facebook 10 of which I could say were "Friends" the rest well .... people I've met previously whom I have nothing in common with any more..... life moves on acquaintances fall by the way side.....

If somebody wants to contact me they know my email address and my good friends even know my phone number....

Super Massive Black Holes and other mind bending stuff

I've just watched a fascinating program about the current conflict in Physics about Einstein's general relativity theory and Quantum Mechanics/Quantum Gravity.... it is truly mind bending stuff, for instance they have discovered that most Galaxies contain a super massive black hole at it's centre and each galaxy has hundreds and thousands of "Stellar" black holes... our own galaxy has a super massive black hole around which every star, including our Sun (and us) revolve around it.

Einstein's theory of general relativity explains most things such as orbits of stars/planets and gravity or things on a massive scale..... but it's when you get to the black hole that things start to break down on the theory, where  once past the event horizon we meet the singularity where mass becomes infinite, and normal physics cannot explain it away.....Now nobody has ever seen a black hole, but we know they exist because stars orbit these massively super dense area's of space, and in normal space something that dense would be super massive, but these stars in some cases, especially the ones very close to the SMBH orbit them at incredible speeds with some of them taking only light weeks to complete a full orbit an orbit that would be inside the perimeter of the super dense object.... so that means the super dense objects are VERY small....

Now when you get down to the size of a singularity that is when Quantum Mechanics come into play because Quantum Mechanics explains very successfully how things work on a sub atomic level.... but this is the clincher, Gravity doesn't normally effect Quantum Mechanics because the particles being studied/theorized about are so small that Gravity doesn't really come into the equation.... However when you get down to the size of a singularity at the centre of a black hole Gravity becomes infinite as does mass, and at those levels of energy it would come into play.... so Quantum Gravity was born... but it's pretty meaningless at the moment because it's a label that has been put on something that cannot be measured or studied yet... Once black holes are cracked and the scientists can unify Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, or in fact disprove one or the other Quantum Gravity will remain a label over a large gap in Physics....

(That doesn't mean because it's unexplainable at the moment that it's down to God !!... you know who you are !! ... ;¬) )

Andrea Brabrook is fundraising for Asthma UK

Andrea Brabrook is fundraising for Asthma UK - JustGiving

She will be running in the Virgin 2010 London Marathon it's easy to donate just click on the link and follow the instructions, there is also the reason why she is running for Asthma UK....

Jedward......

Or possibly the two most annoying wannabe performers on X-Factor.... They've forgotten two of the most important prerequisites for appearing on X-Factor though... the ability to sing (in key) and the ability to dance/perform (with dance steps in time and in the right order).... What Louis Walsh was thinking when he put them through is beyond me, they are talentless morons with spiked hair and a self belief that they are actually good.... probably compounded by the fact that 99% of dribbling Irish teenage girls have jammed the mobile and land lines networks of Ireland every Saturday night in a thus far successful attempt at keeping them in the contest.... but you have to ask why ? surely that many people aren't  profoundly deaf or stupid or both ????

Now I don't usually pay much attention to these kinds of programs, I lost interest in Big Brother just after the second series, I honestly do not get the hype the surrounds reality tv....or the endless dross of nobodies it churns out year after year who fade into obscurity after having their 5 minutes of fame..... BUT when performers who are relative sky scrapers in the talent department in comparison to these two moronic performing seals..... why oh why are they voted off X-Factor in favour of two Irish buffoons (or is that Baboons ? ) is beyond my comprehension......

Methinks a change in public voting rules needs to be arranged, because there is obviously nothing better to do in Ireland other than to vote for two of  the Emerald Isles best advertisement for  keeping primates in cages and not feeding them or giving them any encouragement......

Hopefully next week Ireland will suffer a catastrophic phone system failure and Jedward will only get 3 votes from the thinking public