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.