Another early night!

Well, it was a Monday.

We always have trouble staying awake on Mondays. I did manage to stay up a bit later than usual in order to see the credits of a sitcom on BBC3. Waste of effort though, the actress in question was not the same girl that Ian and Sally had been at school with. I checked out the new card reader as well, very nice, exactly what I needed and less than a tenner, thanks Gizoo.

I seem to have developed a dry cough in a very short space of time, hope I'm not starting a cold.

I think I am starting a cold.
I have got a cold, my head is heavy, my eyes are squinty and my cough is no better.
I now have a bit of a throat as well,
Oh b****r!

Busy, busy, busy.............

Image by Laura Whitehead via Flickr

Friday evening we went to Southway to spend some time with Ian and Lulu......... Dropped into Asda when we left and stocked up for the week ahead. Heavy rain that night and a big seepage leak in the bedroom. It seems to be coming from the old boiler chimney on the wall. It will be fun sealing that.........

The usual Saturday with Samuel for most of the day and a few jobs around the house. Chatted to Russ in the evening but very tired so we cut it short. ooVoo still looking good as a replacement for Skype. Sunday was "rubbish and top up the Merc with diesel and chip oil day". Only wasted a small amount on my shoe.................
I spent quite a lot of time re-building and testing the software on our Navman iCN530 satnav unit on Sunday. The new interface is much easier to follow and takes account of a lot of variables. I have yet to see it in action on a journey, but if it performs as well as it looks, it will have been the best upgrade ever.

We watched Doc Martin and went to bed early, this is beginning to sound like Samuel Pepys.

Catch 22 again.

I installed Server 2003 R2 64bit yesterday, all went well until I needed to go online. No driver! With Vista and Seven, the OS uses a generic driver in order to make the LAN work instantly. Not poor old 2003. So today, I have downloaded the latest drivers from Gigabyte and burnt them to a CD as, with no floppy drive these days and USB needing drivers................
I also changed the RF channel on the relay for the sat to the bedroom, channel two works well so that may well be where I leave it. Woke up to BBC1 London this morning and no bangs or whistles.
Pete and I had a bit of luck yesterday, we each went looking for a cable adaptor to convert a nine pin mini din to a standard s video input and struck gold. A Hong Kong firm is selling a 9 pin to S video/composite/component lead for less than a pound and doing cheap postage as well. To give you an idea, we bought four and the total price, goods and carriage, was less than a fiver. I just hope they don't get lost in the postal strike.

The day after..............

Last evening, I installed server 2008 on the test PC. Maybe not such a good idea. The whole interface has changed and moved on from very easy to fairly complicated. In addition, the drivers for the motherboard won't run in 2008 at all. I have chatted to a student about 2003 R2 and he has decided not to upgrade from it. I think I will just kill 2008 and install 2003 again.

A very good evening.

I discovered the problem with the sat system fed to the bedroom was very simple to rectify, put the cable back in the plug! Either cat or wife had pulled hard enough to completely remove the coax from the F plug. I have also moved the two working PCs around in order to work on the test model. This is now intended as a server for the outside world. We shall see.

Spent most of today at an away-day at the National Marine Aquarium here in Plymouth Not a bad day, all round. The aquarium is magic, of course, but the conference was pretty good as well. Most of it interesting and some helpful information as well.

Sometimes, the good stuff happens.

Well, a very good weekend. Samuel and Keane on Friday into Saturday. Spent some time installing Win7 Pro 64 onto the PVR dual core Atom in the afternoon and it worked so well I chatted to Russ via ooVoo in the evening. Whilst talking, we had an exchange that set me thinking about servers and, lo there was an awakening. I am going to try putting an outward facing server on my system at long last. It may or may not work, but it will be fun trying.
Sunday is just a black hole to me now, I've completely lost it. Oh, I remember watching Doc Martin at nine.
On Monday, we took a day off as I had bloods and Hazel had a hospital appointment. We did all that and went on to check out Plymouth Bio-fuels. It's a bit of a farmyard site but they are very friendly and try to be as helpful as possible so we decided to invest £40.00 in some fuel and a couple of containers.I hope to use the first 20 litres tonight and see how she runs over the next couple of weeks. I moved Sal back to her new digs last evening and we have quite a bit more room in the house again.

Here we are again, happy as can be,

All good pals and jolly good company. (End of pier song from 20s and also sung in the great war 1914 - 1918)

I watched the first of the new Albert Kahn series last evening, The Twenties In Colour. Wonderful, it must have been an almost magical time moving away from the great war and expecting everlasting peace. Shame about the 30s.

We went to see Sal after work yesterday whilst on our way to the vet to pick up some anti flea stuff for the girls. The girls are annoyed with me for treating them although it's a very specific anger. They both spent over an hour last evening on my lap or chest enjoying themselves. This morning, however, they both avoided me and Fluff even widdled on a towel right in front of me to show her feelings.

Don't some people mature quickly?

Bit of a fuss with number two great nephew yesterday, mum and dad having a barney as usual. Ian and Lulu with Dave attended and between them the problem was solved without fisticuffs and too much bad feeling. Whilst I would have expected this level of success from Lulu, to see it from Ian and Dave was enlightening. And Ian keeps on about, "You would think they would know better at their age". They are, almost exactly, the same age............

May you have an interesting weekend..

Old Chinese curse (Paraphrased).

Hazel and I went shopping on Saturday, nearly missed Ian and Lulu. Sal came around later to see them and did miss them. Hazel and I went to see them at the flat on Sunday instead. They both said they enjoyed their birthday gifts but Ian was a bit under the weather and Lulu was somewhat upset as well. They went to a party on the Saturday night and there was a big family row. Ian and Lulu ended up comforting all the little ones and just trying to keep some semblance of propriety. Both they and Wendy are outraged by the behaviour of the rest of the family and Nicki wants to take her dad to task as he was responsible for Keane and forgot all about him when the disturbance  began. Alfy was looking very sorry for himself as well but his concern is to do with his stomach more than anything else. The diet is biting hard and he doesn't like it.

The bedroom sat system failed this morning without bad weather so I must assume that the dish has moved in the wind again.
Russ and I tested the ooVoo video chat system on Saturday and we were quite impressed. It works as well as Skype but the display is, from our point of view at least, somewhat better and easier to work with. In light of the rumours circulating about the possible demise of Skype, we are thinking we may move to ooVoo permanently.

Oh Calamity!

Catchphrase of the late Robertson Hare.

A double check on the sat system confirmed it, it was weather.

After work, drove home and decided to move the Galaxy. No steering! Now we know which belt was slipping and burning. This is a double edged sword, in that the repair will be fairly cheap but we now have to get the car to Vospers without any steering.........
When we eventually entered the house, we found Wendy and Alfy there. It seems that poor Alfy is morbidly obese (19Kg) and needs to lose at least ten kilos.He has been put on a medically enforced diet of prescription only dog food and has to attend doggy weight watchers once a week. This is not a joke!  He will not be a happy doggy for a while. Hazels back is bad again, it seems to follow no pattern - just goes out for three days and causes intense pain.

Rain, rain, go away........

Nursery rhyme.

Went up to bed last night and tried to watch a program on the sat receiver. No good, pixilation on all channels. Finally decided it was weather related and read until tired. This morning, all channels fine again so it would seem that I was correct about the weather.

USB PVRs are great!

I re-formated the drive successfully yesterday and transfered some .mpg video files onto it. They are found instantly and play very well on the Technomate system. This is a major shift in the direction of helpful, moving movies around will be a doddle with this system. I may even buy another Technomate just to get the PVR part, it's cheaper than most and works better than most. Other than that, I napped for most of the evening as it was a Monday.

Three steps forward...................

I have now managed to find the correct arc for the sat positioner. I was just two degrees out at the furthest point  but that was enough. Also, finding the satnav helped enormously! I have set up about eight positions and scanned them so I can now watch German channels selling American products and dubbed into their own language. All very interesting, but Mr T selling kitchen equipment in German is a bit off putting at first. Currently, I am formating a USB drive in FAT32 in order to use the tuner as a PVR. That's when it gets interesting.

I think I also have a better understanding of what's happening when my work station is doing what it's doing. It looks as though there should be a small file on the boot drive to tell it what it is...........and there isn't.

The ups and downs of sat tv.

I received the Technomate 5200 tuner yesterday and eagerly took it home to set up. It was all I had hoped for and more. I had Astra 2 and Astra 1 working fine but the dish was slightly off so I attempted to re-align it. WRONG! I have lost all birds and now have to begin again. The Technomate is now plugged into the Sky LNB and runs in the bedroom to give us BBC1 news in the mornings. How are the mighty fallen.
Equally awkward is the work station. I have tried to install Windows 7 on an IDE drive and it hits the same brick wall as all the others, once past the first part and into re-boot it dies. This has to be a raid issue but I'm b******d if I can work out how. I may try a hard reset on the bios as the ultimate test.

Collar and no cuffs...........

Tag of a very bad joke.
On closer inspection, the head of the screw hadn't come off. It was the exact opposite, the brass collar moulded into the plastic had pulled out. I stuck it back in with super glue and re-fitted the LNB and all is now well again.