Blitzy's mutterings.....

Getting new hearing aids fitted

2010-07-10T16:57:00.003Z

Several years ago, I got my first NHS hearing aids. After one of them go a fault, I was offered some newer Oticon Spirit 3 hearing aids, with "thin tubes", which were rather nice, in that I no longer had to wear earmolds, making them a LOT more comfortable.

About 3 or 4 years on, I was finding I was, once again, having problems hearing people, so I went back to the audiology dept... where I was told "it's time we retested your hearing". So a couple of weeks later, I went back, had my hearing tested (no change to my hearing loss... about -40 to -50dB at higher frequencies), and discussed what the options were.

I opted to go back to wearing earmolds, and I was offered a pair of new Oticon Spirit Zest aids. These are one of the current NHS "standard" hearing aids, and seem to be getting good reviews from those for whom they are suitable. Gone are different programmes for "omnidirectional" and "unidirectional", there's just the one programme, and the HA works it all out for you.

I have my other 3 programmes set for Loop, Loop with Mic, and Loop (Telephone).

Anyway, what I thought I would do it to explain how they set up digital hearing aids. I'm not talking about when they test your ears (and make you press the button when you hear the beep), but when the program up your aids.

The first thing they do is to fit tubes to the earmolds, and then onto your hearing aids, then plug a thin wire from the PC into the hearing aid, so the PC can "talk to" your HA. Tey don't fit the HAs just yet

They have a special little "test rig" that hooks over your ears. On that are several microphones, 2 that just listen next to your ears and 2 that listen down a tiny tube. The first thing they do is to calibrate this, so the ends of the tubes are clipped adjacent to the other 2 mics, then the computer makes a loudspeaker play a load of "hiss" noises. What this does is calibrates the sound the tubes hear against what the other mics hear.

Next, they slip the tiny tubes (I'm talkin 1 or 2 mm thick) into your ear, and fit your hearing aids, with tubes and earmolds on top of the tube.. The thin tube now hears what your EAR hears, via the heraing aid, and the other microphone hears "the world".

Now, the PC knows what your hearing is like.... after all, that why they made you press the button when you heard the tones. So it does an initial setup of the hearing aid, and makes the loudspeaker make "hissing" noises again. It can now compare "the world" to "what you are hearing"... it SHOULD be the opposite of how bad your hearing is, but due to inexact levels from your hearing aid's microphones and "loudspeaker", it won't be quite right.... but it now knows HOW "not quite right" it is.

The PC makes more adjustments to the programming of your hearing aid, and tests it again, until it's happy it's got it right!

Now, all that there's left to do is to remove the little tubes, take off the "test rig" from your ears, and say goodbye.

That was a couple of weeks ago. My brain is STARTING to understand what the Hearing Aids are doing, so they don't sound QUITE so wierd, but I'm expecting it to take another few weeks before I'm starting to "understand" what they are doing.... (If you've never had HAs before, then you should allow up to 3 moths of CONSTANT HA USE to get used to them!)

OMG, so much has happened

2007-10-02T17:01:00.001Z

It's been AGES, so let's work backwards......

This week I am in Milan, giving yet another training course. I'm in a hotel which is about 25 to 30 km from the office... that's about 6 miles. I had big problems finding a hotel... this one is "ok", but is in the middle of an industrial area, so quite a walk to a restaurant... no restaurant here, although they can get pizzas delivered.

The course finishes on Thursday afternoon, and I fly out on a 6pm plane. Luckily the office is only about 10 minutes from the airport, so there's not a huge panic... and Milano Linate airport is quite small.

Last weekend, we moved from our bedroom into M's which had been vacated (see below... the DISadvantage of telling a story backwards!!), so that after 16 years, we can finally redecorate our bedroom. Our bedroom has had the paper stripped from the walls, and the carpet removed. While I am away, D will hopeful be able to paint the skirting board... I guess next weekend we'll be buying paper and carpet.

Last week, I was in Amsterdam... you guessed, giving training. The hotel there was 5 mins walk from the station and the office... and the train only took 10 minutes to get to the airport... now THAT is convenience for you! That hotel had a pleasant restaurant (2 evening meals) and there was a Burger King next door (salad on the other evening!)

2 weekends ago we (the whole family) took M up to Clitheroe. M is having a gap year, and is working for a Christian charity up there. He's definitely fallen on his feet there: he's living in a huge house (42" plasma in living room :-) ) with 4 others, and they and all the other people involved are lovely people. He will be helping at the skatepark, and also helping out with the recording studios and music side of things (plus other tasks) at "The Grand" when it opens.

The Grand is being refurbished with funds from a local family's trust (I'm talking something like £1.5 million!!), and will be an amazingly hi-tech venue for teens etc when it opens: recording studios, theatre / performance area, cyber cafe etc etc etc. Clitheroe probably doesn't realise what is about to hit it... but it's going to be an amazing facility for the local community to have!

On the Sunday, we went to a "welcoming" service at one of the local churches: it was a beautiful place, which demonstrated that an old church CAN be modernised to be bright, warm and very welcoming.... and with a very pleasant congregation to boot.

3 Weekends ago (Fri-Sat) I collected M from a training course he was on, up near Bakewell, to take all his, erm.... ah, yes, "possessions"... (almost said "junk" :-) ) to Clitheroe.

About 5 weeks ago now (the last week in August) I flew over to San Francisco & stayed in Santa Clara to attend a training course.... a 10 hour flight, and boy does the 8 hour time difference screw with you. Luckily I went over 2 days before the actual training, so had time to partly recover (plus of course time to visit San Francisco!!). And of course, just as I was used to the new time zone, I had to return home. At least on THAT flight I managed a few hours sleep.

Next week, I get to GIVE that training course (over in Amsterdam!).... I only got the training notes a week ago, so you can probably see that I won't have MUCH time to prepare for it :-(

Oh, and SOMEWHERE down the line, about 2 weeks ago (when I was away from home), young C fell off his bike, and now has his arm in a cast!!!!

The good news is that, the week after next, I'm working in the office... well, no, not QUITE right, I will be helping to move some (training) servers and plan for an office move... we are moving to Theale, which is another 20 to 40 minutes away (kinda depends on which way I go, and what the traffic is like). To be honest, I am NOT looking forward to the move: perhaps, after 12 or 13 years of working where I am, I need to "consider what opportunities life presents"....

We're painting the roses red, we're painting the roses red....

2007-08-05T12:42:00.001Z

Ok, now with that tune, you sing "we're clearing the garage out, we're clearing the garage out...."

There is a great feeling of satisfaction to (a) clear out everything from the garage, putting it on the driveway & lawn; then (b) give the garage a good sweep out, and then (c) put some of the stuff back again, but much more neatly. The rest of the stuff sits on the lawn until the following day when (d) you take the *junk* that was in the garage to the tip.

The only problem is that the following morning you wake up with aches in places you forgot you had!

Yes, it DID all fit in the car in one go... THAT is one of the many reasons that I have an estate car! Guess where I'm driving after lunch :-)

Meal or no meal?

2007-07-29T19:32:00.001Z

Meal or No Meal?

Yeah, it's Mort's fault....

2007-07-25T10:35:00.001Z

Why not Simpsonise yourself?

Another catch-up

2007-07-23T13:50:00.000Z

Erm, what HAVE I been up to?

Well, I had a few friends around on Saturday evening for a BBQ.. it was clear, then it rained, then it cleared up again. The Gazebo and flying tarpaulins worked a treat. The food seemed to be enjoyed (especially the ice-cream!). Mum and brother N were able to come down from "up north", so it was really great to see them. Even nicer was the pressie they had got me.

Late on Friday night Mike & I went along to collect the 2 copies of the new HP book (one for him, the other a birthday pressie from him to me!). I've now read it all, and can categorically state:

there is much fighting
magic is used
many people die
many more people do not die
the book has a LOT of pages!
ITS ONLY A STORY!

I reckon it's amazing how one (set of) books can not only bring so much pleasure to many people, but can also persuade so many kids to actully experience the FUN and EXCITEMENT of reading a book!

And to the anti-HP brigade I say: it is a story, a piece of fiction, based in a "fantasy world", but a world with good morals, where friendship is important, and good can overcome evil.

Shame a few of the "yobs" out there don't read it and take note!

Will it blend?

2007-06-26T12:41:00.000Z

Found this website and spent FAR too long looking at the videos:

www.willitblend.com

(my favourite was the iPod!)

The mud at Glastonbury Festival: a study

2007-06-25T12:44:00.000Z

I was going to write about the different types of mud you might encounter when you go to Glastonbury Festival, but found that someone else (who does moto-cross) already did it here. However, bear in mind that the ground at Glastonbury is clay!

On Thursday mid-afternoon, when we arrived, it was "relatively dry" underfoot. By thatI mean that there was a slight amount of light surface mud, and that for the most part, wearing normal shoes was a suitable option for the 1 or so mile walk from the car park.

We walked around the site, looking for a piece of grass on which to pitch... it seems that everyone else had arrived there on Wednesday, and there weren't a huge number of bits of spare green available. Then, as we walked past an electric pylon, we spotted spotted a space, half under the pylon. It turned out to be a good location: close to the Pyramid stage, very close to food and loos, although a bit noisy.

After having got the tent up, it did start to rain a bit.... weather that we would get to know a lot better over the weekend.

Of course, solid ground + rain = mud.... and solid ground + rain + 150,000 people = HUGE amounts of mud!

It rained in the night, and it rained during the day on Friday. The top surface of the ground became a very liquid mud, very much like a "thick shake"... whilst filthy, it was very easy to walk through, and below the inch or two fo mud, the ground was still very solid.

More rain came, more people walked, the mud layer became deeper.

Then there was a period of non-rain"... I guess we could call it "the dry spell". Whilst this helped to dry up the mud a little, the constant churning brought up new ground to it, so it got much thicker, and deeper. This sort of mud is a lot more difficult to walk in, as it sticks to your shoes. We're talking more like the consistence of a cake mix, but amazingly sticky.

6am saw the JCB out, scooping off the top layer of mud in the areas by the food stalls, and by the main stages, then laying straw. This helped to some extent, but the effect of those 150,000 people walking soon pushes the straw down into the mud. You end up with quite a thick sticky mud that clings to your boots.

Keep adding more light rain, and more people walking through it, and you end up with the mud we had on Sunday evening in front of and around the Pyramid stage: in places it was a good 6 inces deep, and always at least 3 inches. It was VERY sticky, and very difficult to walk through. Many people were having big problems getting their wellies out of it!

It drizzled all the way through Sunday evening, but it did have ONE advantage: the mud in the large "shopping areas" went from thick and sticky back to being quite liquid, and a LOT easier to walk through.

We had packed the tent down late afternoon (we managed to find a 10 minute slot when the rain was almost stopped) and left the rucksacks and tent in someone elses tent. After the end of The Who, we chilled for a bit, and then had the, er.. "joy" of walking the mile or two back to the car, in a constant drizzle, mud underfoot, rucksacks on back. Boy the car was a great sight.

Getting off site didn't take too long, but was fun... yes, you guessed it, that raind had made the car-parking filed amazingly muddy & slippery. Because there hadn't (yet) been a lot of traffic, it was still firm(-ish) underneath, but slipper as hell: we needed 2 peopl-pushed and a tractor push to get out! (Thanks guys!!!)

So, at 2am, it had taken no more than 30 minutes from arriving at the car, changing clothes, getting stuck etc, to being on a REAL road again. And STILL it rained!

Shattered, we got home at 3:30! And the good news: in Winchester, it was NOT raining!!!! And boy, I can't remember the last time a hot shower was SOOOO enjoyable!

It's now 2:30pm on Monday, all our kit is STILL in the car (you didn't REALLY expect us to get it out last night did you???), and I didn't actually wake up THAT long ago.

More later, but my weekend highlights? The Who, Lilly Allen, The Kaiser Chiefs and a small group we saw at the "bandstand". Bjork was rather disappointing though.

4 equals 5, honest....

2007-06-08T12:14:00.000Z

I arrived in to work on Wednesday, and my colleague asked me "what are you doing here?"... well, I explained that I still worked there etc, but he ws unconvinced. "You're supposed to be in London today" he reminds me. I turn around to look at the whiteboard, and there it is, written clearly for Wednesday: 'London'.

Ooops!

So I quickly call the customer, to apologise & reschedule: luckily it's not a big problem, and I arrange to go to see them the following day (Thursday).

Hmm, maybe I can manage to meet up with Paul G0TLG, as I know that he now commutes daily up to London. A quick text later and I learn "7am train from Southampton, 4th carriage". A quick look at the timetable reveals that the "7:00am from Southampton"becomes the "7:18am from Winchester"....

Boy, it's hard getting up THAT early... I usually arrange to be onsite in London for about 9:30 to 10:00, and end up on a train just after 8am. But I amazingly DO manage to get up, park at the station, ane be ready for the train with plenty of time to spare. As I wait, a train comes in, and I look where the 4th carriage is.... and move along the platform so as to be closer when the 7:18 arrives.

I text Paul "see you in 7 minutes"... he replies "not many seats, I'm in the 4th carriage".

The train arrives, I get onto the 4th carriage.... ah, good there ARE some seats (I guess vacated by those getting off the train), but I can't see Paul yet. Never mind, get a seat, then sort out finding Paul afterwards.

I text Paul "where are you then?". A few minutes later (after we leave the tunnels, and phone reception returns) I get a reply "I'm in the 4th carriage.... half a mo, no, the 5th carriage". Yes, it seems that Paul G has indeed lost the ability to count big things that add up to less than 10!!!!

I save my seat, and walk through to the FIFTH carriage (that's the one NEXT TO the FOURTH carriage!) where I find Paul, who I've not seen for a few months. No seats, but I stand and we have a nice chat about life etc.

I caught the 5:35pm home (Paul goes on the 6:05pm) and was early enough to actually get a seat... I was quite tired... and Paul (and many others) do this every day! All I can say is "rather you than me"!

Always good to meet friends

2007-05-25T10:04:00.000Z

As I mentioned before, M and I will be going to Glastonbury next month (assuming the tickets actually arrive!!). We obviously need a tent, but the tent I have is really only big enough for 1 person, so I asked around to see if I could borrow a bigger one.

Well, that great man, Omally, came up trumps, and offered to lend us his, so last night I went around to collect the tent... Of course, I also had the opportunity to meet the cats... and I can only say that Bez is a lovely cuddly and very relaxed cat!

And then we all went off to the (almost) local pub for a drink and chat, and I don't know about them, but *I* had a very pleasant time, and it was great to see Omally & Maddison-Star again, it's been far too long since we last met up!

Ooops, I forgot....

2007-05-09T10:41:00.000Z

Have you ever noticed when you, say, go shopping, you remember all the "not so important" things, but when you get back, you suddenly realise you forgot to buy what you REALLY went out for?

Well, back on Saturday 21st April, something **BIG** happened, and I forgot to tell you about it.

My elder son, M, my "little baby" turned 18: no longer is he a boy, but he is a MAN! At midnight on Friday night / Saturday morning, we went into Winchester, and I bought him his first (legal) drink. This "late night drinking" does have it's advantages after all!

M is currently revising for his A-level exams: Law, Maths, Further Maths and General Studies. Next year he's having a "gap year", and hopes to do voluntary work for The Oasis Trust. After that he's hoping to study Law at Bristol University.

He also seems to have recently found a girlfriend, but I'll not embarrass him any further by giving any details :-)

catch-up

2007-05-08T13:07:00.000Z

I went to Copenhagen: luckily I had booked with BA (the alternative being SAS), as when I arrived I found out that SAS cabin staff were on strike, so most of their planes were cancelled. The course went fairly ok (apart from some instructor in India that was screwing things up a bit for my course), and I managed to borrow the hotel's bicycle to go out for some caching!

The flight back on Thursday was a bit delayed, plus parking over Essex meant I didn't get home to close to midnight. I didn't go to work on the Friday morning (zzzzzzzz) and I wasn't at my best in the afternoon.

I reckon this was the start of some sort of tummy bug that I picked up from somewhere... I slept almost ALL of Saturday, and was "delicate" on Sunday... it wasn't till later in the week that my guts calmed down.

Then we had another bank holiday weekend. We did nothing special, just sleeping in & being lazy. On Sunday I helped at a HR fundraising event, which was very pleasant & non-stressful.

Spent 4 hours on Monday round a friend's installing a new network & router & printer server, and all went well apart from the usb wireless thingy for the laptop, which didn't want to install. I left him with a LONG lan cable for the moment!

Now, some of you who read this blog will know that I frequent a certain chat-room, and it is interesting to learn that I, as a teen, was / am not the only one that had problems finding friends of the opposite sex. I had always believed as a teen that all the girls had the choice of guys (and I just wasn't one of them!)... but it seems that some girls have exactly the same problem finding guys.

Back then, we didn't have the internet.... so I wonder if having the internet makes things any better? There is of course the risk that you'll just accept the lack of friends, become a recluse, and just have internet friends, rather than being forced to have to do SOMETHING "physical".

I know one thing that helped a lot at Uni was the fact that I was in a "catered-for" residence, so you will meet loads of people at dinner time. I suspect that much more uni accommodation is self-catering these days.

The good news is that, a couple of years later (hell, who am I kidding? it was about 7 years later!) I found a girl who I went on to marry, and have 2 great kids.... but that is another story.

It's been a while, hasn't it...

2007-04-22T20:37:00.000Z

Wow, so much has happened these last 2 or 3 weeks....

- I went to the HBA conference & awards ceremony up in Northampton

- I've been on site to visit a customer (which has since ended with a nice order!)

- I overate chocolate easter eggs

- we (me, D and C) went up to York to visit family, whilst M went across europe with the scouts, to celebrate the 100 years of scouting

- just before going to York, the PC died, so I've not only had to buy a new motherboard (and then memory, hard-disks and graphics card to go with it) but hav spent loads of hours re-installing software

- I got (free!) an iPod shuffle (very nice little thing it is)

- Tomorrow I got to Copenhagen to give a training course.

So there you go, you're all up to date!

A nice day in London? Yes!

2007-03-28T22:55:00.000Z

D arrived home as planned on Sunday night.

Younger son, C, had been really good all the time she had been away, until she arrived home..... I had asked him (and he had said "yes dad"...) to tidy up the 2 cereal packets and the dish / spoon he had taken into the lounge. I went into the lounge a bit later, to find him in there.... he had laid down on the settee, started to watch TV, and had fallen asleep. And as you can probably guess, the 2 cereal packets and the dish / spoon were still there. I therefore did what most parents would do and told him off. Now that mum was back, he decided it was ok to start whinging, coz mum will always be nice to him. C is such a lazy little £^&^*&^... any suggestions on how to improve things? I'm already considering reducing his online-time.

Today I went up to London. Now normally that means getting up about an hour earlier than normal, drivng to the station & park there, and catching a train just before 8am. That arrived about 9am, and means I can be on site by 10am.

Today, I didn't need to be there until 1pm.. yes, as in AFTERNOON! I was planning to have a bit of a lie-in, then get the 10:45-ish train. The phone rang at 9:15... there was a major network problem in the office. I did some tests from home... boy, things were slow in the office. So I got my colleague to reboot the firewall (no effect) then reboot all of the network switches (which DID fix the problem!).

By now it was after 10am, and I wasn't dressed. Suffice it to say I missed my preferred train, and caught the one 10 minutes later (which was the slow one, and took 15 mins longer). But once I got to London, tube trains were just waiting for me both at Waterloo and at Bank, so not only did I make it to site by 1pm, I also grapped a sandwich and ate it whilst walking from Angel tube station.

Oh, it was nice & warm (well, ok, not really "warm", but not cold or windy.... ggod "no overcoat" weather) and the sun was shining too... it almost made London a nice place to be!

The guy bringing the kit was delayed in traffic, so I remotely logged into our demo unit, and showed the customer how it worked (which he found very useful, so it wasn't wasted time). The kit arrived, we plugged it in, I configured it, it worked as we all wanted, and I left there about 4pm.

Sadly I missed the fast train home by about 2 minutes, but the slow train still got me home by 6pm.

So, not a bad day at all!

an interesting week...

2007-03-24T17:07:00.000Z

This has been an interesting and pleasant week.

Let me start with Tuesday... a couple of blogs ago, I explained how we were testing out some changes to our network at work: on Tuesday we went for the "Live Install"... with a planned outage from 6pm to 8pm (enough to sort out any problems). At 6pm we unplugged the old kit, and plugged in the new (that bit took 5 minutes!). Next we started to test connectivity. Apart from mis-plugging one cable, EVERY test we did worked fine.

After having dinner, I went to the Hospital Radio, where we took a look at the Outside Broadcast kit. It's been used a lot in the last year, and it had developed a noticible "hummmmmm"... after a bit of poking inside, we changed a component, and it is now all working again, without the hummm!

Wednesday morning it was WAKE UP EARLY .... my wife, D, was flying off to Edinburgh for a few day break all by herself, and the flight was at 7:05am! We left home at 6:00, and were at the airport by just after 6:15... dontcha just love local airports! She returns late Sunday evening.

So, in the meantime, we're looking after ourselves. The 2 kids were home when I got in at 6pm, and I made the dinner.... Wednesday was nice sausages, with rice & sweetcorn. Thursday was haggis and mashed potato and gravy and veg. Friday we had fish fingers, corn on cob, and chips from fresh potatoes . Noone complained, it was all eaten up, and filled us up well.

And I've not had to do any Hospital Radio since my normal Monday & Tuesday nights, so it's actually been a very restful week.

Good news & bad news

2007-03-14T19:50:00.000Z

I was due to have been in Cheshire tonight, to visit a customer tomorrow. However, whilst one part of the customer says "we need this problem fixing quickly", another part of the company says "if you want to do THAT, then you have to do it probperly, and you can't do that quickly"!! So the visit has been postponed for the moment... I had a feeling it might be, and I'm not gonna complain!

That was the good news.

The bad news is that a lovely gentleman who I know through Hospital Radio has died: we have known for a month or so that this would happen, but it is still sad. I have a lot of respect for the gentleman concerned: I have broadcast with him on several occasions, as well as hear some of his own shows. He was a lover of many music styles, but I know he particularly liked classical and jazz / big-band. He had a lovely laid-back, relaxing style to his presentation... just right for the patients who are listening in hospital. We could do with a few more like him.

Ron: it was a pleasure & priviledge to have met you, to have known you, and to have broadcast with you!

I like days like today!

2007-03-07T22:57:00.000Z

The day at work was pretty normal: we has a problem with the WiFi point in the stores... so I moved it a bit closer to the open area where it's needed, and it seems to work fine. I finished installing bits on a laptop that we had fitted a new hard disk to.

But the best bit was AFTER going home time: we had announced that we were going to do some "network testing" between 6pm and 7pm: we are about to replace the main router on our network with a nice little Netgear Layer 3 Switch... and at the same time, the config on our Pix firewall would need changing. As luck would have it, we "happen to have" a spare pix, so I have, over the last week or two, take the config from the current Pix, deleted a load of old bit, and copied the config over to the new unit. At the same time, I set up the L3 switch as a router (which is all done with port-based VLans, something new for me).

So the idea was to temporarily unplug the current pix and router, and put in the new ones.... which we did. We had a few problems to start with, and I wasn't too surprised to find that I needed to reboot a couple of the core switches too, along with the main internet router (to flush the arp cache).

Now, before I could leave this all live, I need to do a LOAD of testing: tonight was a "confidence test"... had I got the basics right... could I actually route through this new Layer 3 Switch. Amazingly, everything we did worked 100%!

By 7pm (the planned end-time) the old network was back up again (having had to reboot all those switches & routers again!!), and we went home.

Once home, I had 2 more things to do:

a) My colleague, K, had a 3 gig USB hard drive (a tiny 1.5" thing!!), but it had stopped working. He took it to bits, and found that the flexi-pcb that connected drive to plug was damaged. He wasn't so worried about the drive itself, but DID want the data, if he could. So, 3 soldered wires later, it was working again, and I managed to copy all his data off it!!!

b) I had just bought a printer server (to connect a printer to a LAN) fromeBay, for a friend. It had no PSU, but I believed I had a suitable PSU, and a suitable connector. Indeed I did, and it is now all working, and configured ready for his new network!

Oh, it makes such a pleasant change when things go as they are supposed to!!!! It's just a shame it doesn't happen more regularly!

A green brain?

2007-02-20T14:27:00.001Z

Your Brain is Green

Of all the brain types, yours has the most balance.
You are able to see all sides to most problems and are a good problem solver.
You need time to work out your thoughts, but you don't get stuck in bad thinking patterns.

You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the future, philosophy, and relationships (both personal and intellectual).

What Color Is Your Brain?

How to fit a car side window in about 10 minutes....

2007-02-17T17:15:00.000Z

We'll come onto the title bit later.....

Last Sunday, I had the, er, "joy" of having to travel up to Middewich (a tiny bit south of Manchester) so that I could visit a customer in Northwich on the Monday morning. I waqsn't looking forward to the journey there & back, as usually on a Sunday the traffic is bad, and I end up leaving site late, and get home even later.

But, for a change, this was an almost "pleasant" trip: I left home with the car claiming to have just about enough fuel to make the trip (it has a useful "xxx miles left" facilty, that works amazingly well)... I was worried about whether I DID have enough diesel.... and the prices on and near the motorways were SILLY... 94 or 95p per litre.

But I kept going, suffering no real delays (even in the various roadworks) and arrived at the travelodge... to find a BP station next door, with diesel at 88p/litre!!!

Mad it to site for 9:30 as requested, had a very productive time, finishing at about 1:30pm. Had lunch in their excelent canteen, and drove home.... again, no delays, and was home well before 6pm!!!!

I could do with a few MORE trips like that one!!

This week I bid (again) for some wireless access points.... and I finally won one. It arrived on Thursday, and I plugged it all in last night. Not bad for only 15 quid. Ok, so it only does 11 meg, but that's faster than the broadband, and that's all I need it for. It gives excellent coverage throughout the house (the wireless on the router covers the computer shed)

Now onto the "headline": last night late, M rings: he was out with D's car, and had parked it on a private driveway, and had returned to find some nice kind ******** had put a stone through the rear side window (it's a fixed one). I told him not to worry, but to get home.

So, today he rang the local scrapyard (which no longer seems to have cars) but was give details for a scrapyard near Botley. So off we went. We were told where the Peugeot were... and found a couple with the window we needed. It only took about 10 or 15 mins to remove the window (from the inside) and M paid the £15 +vat for it.

Back home, I explained the trick of using soapy water to make the rubber slip in better... and it took no more than 5 to 10 mins to actually fit the glass in the car.

So, not QUITE as bad as it could have been... 20 quid plus 3 hours total time (to include all travel etc, plus a call to the boys in blue to log the call, if only out of principle) and a load of angst for M and D..... I had no angst: I didn't do it, it wasn't MY car, and I knew it would be simple to fix!!!!

Isn't life fun!

2 days at the pub.... it's a hard life!

2007-01-29T11:35:00.000Z

Saturday was the long-awaited Pub Simon G meet up at the Pelican, in Addlestone. It was odd, 'cause all around it are industrial buildings, so I wondered if we were actually in the right place... but there it was, next to the canal!

Not only was the pub rather pleasant, so were all the people we (me & son M) met with... most had only been names in a chatroom up until then. And lunch was YUMMY too: lamb shank... definitely recommended!

Before having a disgustingly stodgy (but very nice) treacle pudding, M & I went for a short walk to find a cache in a tree.... M couldn't see it for looking, but I found it in about 10 seconds! But a very pleasant walk, and always good to get some exercise.

We ended up playing a silly card game called "Fluxx" (I'll leave you to Google it!) where the rules change as you play... it was sufficiently good and silly that I have since ordered the game for myself!

The day must have been good, as I was absolutely knackered

Sunday was the Fifth Annual Late Christmas Winchester Cache Bash (or something like that!), at the Cart & Horses, in Kingsworthy. I don't know about any of the other food, but the Sunday Carvery there is always good: yesterday we had a choice of beef, gammon and turkey, yorkshire puddings, carrots, brocolli, cabbage, roast spuds, road parsnip and loads of gravy...

Whilst the turnout was noticibly smaller than the last couple of years, that actually was an advantage in that we were able to congregate & socialise more easily. A few went on the longer walk to do the caches set last year and the yaer before (all loggable), almost everyone went for the short walk for the event cache.

The cache was placed in some woods, in the cellar of a derilict building. From the way it was built (big girders included) and the age of the trees (probably no more than 20 years old) I guessed it was a 20th century building, probably used by MoD in the way, and abandoned afterwards.

It wasn't until we went to collect the cache at the end of the day that I learnt anything about the place, when we met some (older) dog-walkers who told me that the place was called "Kingsworthy House". They believe that it had been used by the Navy during the war. It had apparently been still standing till about 10 or 15 years ago, when there was a fire, and it collapsed. The gateway on the A33 was indeed the main entrance, and there was a driveway to the right of a "paddock" (clearly shown on the modern map, and there's still an iron railing fence around it... although EVERYWHERE is filled with trees). There had been attempts to build some sort of "science park" on the site, but the locals objected due to the size of it.

Now, it's nothing more than a pile of rubble, with trees all around it, and on it.

Unfortunately, I've not managed to find any more details off the internet.

So, all in all, a very sociable and very pleasant weekend...

Another boring tax return....

2007-01-26T10:45:00.000Z

It the end of january, so what does that mean? Well, for a certain percentage of the population, it means that it's time to panic, and fill in the annual tax return form.

Yes, I *know* I could have done this last year, but summer holidays, christmas, new year, hospital radio and life generally was so much more interesting!

So, on Wednesday I sat down to fill my tax return in.... online of course. panic: where's my P11D? (Whata one of those? it's the form you get from work that says how much all your "benefits in kind" were worth.... in my case the company car and the health insurance). Ok, get a copy from work.

Thursday morning I ask the relevant person: "no, we don't keep a copy, we send them to the tax man". So I ring up the tax man ... or actually a lady. In fact a very helpful lady who, after asking a few questions to make sure I was me, gave me the numbers I needed. I must admit that, as far as the people you call on the phone, the Inland Revenue seem to have sorted themselves out well. Shame about the rest (but more on THAT later...)

Last night I gathered my dividend certificates & bank books together, and filled in the tax form.... didn't take very long at all... and it told me that I owed them LOADSA money.

Now this happened last year. And the year before. And the year before THAT. And last year I worked out what the problem was (they are still taxing me as if I had the car I USED to have, about 6 years ago).

In fact, last year, not only did I write a note on my tax form, but I told them on the phone. I told them on the phone yesterday, and on my latest tax form, that I no longer have a company car.

Earlier in the week, I got my latest tax code through, for 2007-8.... and it STILL has the wrong car tax details on it. Looks like I need to spend some time to ensure that they ALL know that I no longer have a company car, otherwise I'll be paying to come to work next (tax) year!

Nice and stable broadband!

2007-01-19T15:56:00.000Z

I moved my broadband from BT to Eclipse last July: as well as moving, the speed of the link went up from 2 meg to 8 meg.

However, we soon found that, whilst I was getting good speeds (I'm under 1km to local BT exchange, and modem was negotiating 8meg plus), the link was not only "resetting" every few hours, it wasn't all that fantastic in-between times.

So, I posed the question to Eclipse as to whether I should expect this type of behaviour, or whether the link should be a lot more stable.... I never REALLY got a proper answer to that one.

Just after Christmas, BT's sub-contractor were "up the road" messing with the phone cabling.... and about this time, we noticed not only was the broadband being a bit of a PITA, the phone was going offline too.... but having reported it to BT, it seemed to fix itself.

Until late afternoon on December 29th that is.... when the phone and broadband went COMPLETELY dead. Of course it was the weekend and then New Year... so BT didn't look at it till the following Tuesday (so we were having to use mobile phones to make calls), at which point they found a dodgy joint, and fixed things!

But the story does have a good ending: since they fixed it, the broadband has been 100% stable: whilst the link is a tiny bit slower, it's VERY stable.. in fact until I rebooted the router yesterday, it hadn't had a SINGLE problem or reset since it came online when BT fixed the problem.

So, who likes Liquorice?

2007-01-12T23:24:00.000Z

At work there is a cupboard-top, and when anyone gets cakes in, or brings back biscuits etc from overseas trips, they get put there. Today, a "cone" of liquorice appeared. We're not talking Bassett's allsorts, we are talking something like German liquorice.... and it was yummy.

So, whilst in a chatroom I frequent, I mentioned that I was eating liquorice.... almost EVERYONE there said "yuk" or similar.

Now, I realise that liquorice is not the most "mianstream" of confections, but I was amazed at the general negative response.

Do YOU like liquorice? What about Marmite? Celery? Peas?

Wow, back again!

2007-01-08T15:15:00.000Z

Well, there was a busy bit before Christmas, plus getting a cold at the start of December (which left me feeling rather rough until only a few days ago).... and a second (short) cold just after Christmas itself.

Over Christmas I did a LOT of Hospital Radio... whilst it did take up many evenings, it was clear that the patients were enjoying our visits up on the wards. and, its Monday today, so guess what I'll be doing again tonight!!!

Oh, the GPS antenna is working a treat....

....more than could have been said about the car, immediately before Christmas: I was collecting M from the station, I'd braked once, then suddenly found a lack of power brakes. By that I mean that the brakes WERE there, if you pressed hard, but no power brakes. I waited a short while (10 or 20 seconds) and found I had power brakes again.

So I drove home VERY carefully & slowly: as long as I waited, I had good brakes.

Of course, I rang the garage straight away... not the BEST of time, as they were busy before Christmas, but appreciated that it HAD to go in (it's only 18 months old, so still under warranty), so again I drove gingerly to the garage.

It turs out that the master cylider was leaking brake fluid into the servo, stopping it working.... boy am I glad it was a warranty job!

So, back into the routine again at work... went to Gatwick last Friday to visit a customer, which although it was a long day, it was quite pleasant & emjoyable. This week I'm fronting the Tech Support phone, as my colleague is training (onsite)... gives me something to do. Mind you, I need to do some "Citrix Application Firewall" revision, ready for doing an exam, maybe something I can do starting tomorrow!

Fitting a GPS antenna

2006-11-19T15:03:00.000Z

Last week I bought a new GPS repeating antenna (you have an external receiving antenna, and a transmitting antenna in the car, near your GPS receiver) from eBay... they are normally about 20 quid or so, this one was "new, never used, bought in error", and only cost a tenner.

So, I'm in the middle of fitting it.... it has to go at the REAR of the car as (a) the main bit of the roof is glass; (b) the bonnet is plastic... so the wire sneaks under the roof-rail bracket, and in via the rubber grommet where all the wires to the rear door go. Then into the head-lining, t9o the front, and down the driver-door pillar.

Have you ever noticed that panels and headlining in a car always take about TEN times longer to fit back in that what it took to remove? In my case, I'm talking about the plastic bit at the back, by the read door.

So far I have the antenna wire to the front of the car, where it plugs into the "cigar socket". I now need to fit the other bit from there to where the GPS is. I also need to fit in my 4-way "cigar socket".... but WHERE do I put it... decisions decisions!

I have another training course next week (I'm GIVING it) on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It's up in Chalfont St Peter, but I'm staying over Mon to Thur, so I can avoid the potential for delay and lateness going up the M3 and around the M25... never a good place to go.

More brain overload...

2006-11-11T15:03:00.000Z

I have spent the last week (since last Sunday) over in Antwerp, on a training course for the Citrix Application Firewall (a device for protecting your web server from nasty hackers).

It's a 5 day course with fairly long days, and a 5 to 6 hour exam / test on the last day (and the stress associated with that!). It wasn't helped by the fact it was a large class, mainly guys who had English as a second language, so there were a lot of silly questions (mostly caused by the trainer explanations & documentation not being that clear for non-English speakers)... so we were running late.

I seemed to manage the test OK... I now have to take a 2 hour Prometric exam, and pass with something like 80% (no pressure on me!).... the plan is that I then go & sit in on another course... and if all goes well, I get to give the raining course myself!

I flew from London City Airport, which is smaller that Southampton, and a pleasure to fly from (from Waterloo, Jubilee Line then DLR to the front door!) - unlike Heathrow, you don't have to walk for miles, and its only a 15 minute check-in.

Met up with an ex-colleague who was also on the course: we had managed to plan for the same flight and hotel, which meant that I had some company in the evenings. He's also hoping to be giving the course i the future.

We didn't actually get to visit Antwerp (the number of place I've "been to" yet never seen is huge, and still increasing!), as we were about 4 or 5 miles from the centre. Instead, we just walked the 1/2 mile or so (good exercise!) to the local "village" of Edegem where we ate on 3 of the evenings.

In another two weeks I'll have the enjoyment of flying off to Zoetermeer (via Schiphol) for a couple of days... at least then I'll be going from Southampton.

Thanks to Paul G0TLG for a silly link he posted... here's another one from the same website: www.rathergood.com/knees/

catch-up

2006-11-04T18:52:00.000Z

OK, what HAVE I been doing this last week?

Well, the old company car has been returned, and I'm now driving my new (to me) Peugeot 407SW. It has a 1.6 litre diesel turbo engine, with very low pollution, but has 110 BHP ... that's the same power my old Peugeot 806 had with its 2 litre engine! the 407 is smooth, gentle, comfortable, and a delight to drive!

I've been looking at the options for a new company phone: as many of you know, I have a hearing aid, so I'm looking at options to make life easier. At the moment, I have an "inductive hands free kit"... its like the cheap 2 quid ones you get that plug into the phone, but mine costs more, and has a kinda "j" hook that goes over the ear: turn the hearing aid to the "induction loop" position, and you have a hands-free solution. The problem is that (a) it only plugs into a Nokia with a 2.5mm jack; (b) new Nokias don't have that jack; (c) its all rather fiddly.

So, I've been looking at bluetooth options. The cheapest is from the RNID, at £100, and is a neckloop with a bluetooth module on it. There are a couple of more expensive versions around too.

Next is a bluetooth earpiece (like many that you see) that instead of poking in the ear use an inductive coupler. Only just found those, so not sure of availability / price.

The "top of the range" option is the Starkey ELI DivX unit: you get a "DAI shoe" that plugs onto your hearing aid (only works for behind-the-ear units), and you then plug this tiny bluetooth module onto that. The great thing about this solution is that when a call comes in, it AUTOMATICALLY switches the audio to it.

The BAD news on this product is the price. In the USA it comes in at $299 (which is around £160).... but in "rip-off Britain" the price at Specsavers is a massive £268!! How can they justify THAT?

My current thinking is to get the low-cost BT loop (my boss has offered to pay for it!), and maybe in a couple of years, when technology has taken another step, re-evaulate the options.

Another thing I'm considering is whether to get a BT handsfree kit installed in the car (NEW Peugeot 407's already have this fitted!) ... the cost to get one fitted is just over £200.

Half Term.... and I'm on holiday

2006-10-26T20:46:00.000Z

It's half-term week, and I'm on holiday, to "look after" C.

As holidays go, it's been a fairly lazy one.... we did very little on Monday, on Tuesday we went to Southampton where, after lunch, we managed to buy C some shirts and a new pair of trainers. I really must recommend Primark: it has good clothing at a good cheap price.

Yesterday was a late lie-in, dropping C & mate at local-ish playground / playing fields. When I returned, an hour and a bit later, they were very wet! Typically, instead of sheltering from the rain, they were having fun getting wet. Well, they are kids I guess.

Today, after another lie-in, we went to the Cinema where we all laughed at "Barnyard", and then collected the new car from the garage (which is conveniently next door to the cinema!)

Everyone is suitably impressed with it... even mum-in-law, who promptly suggested I could take her back to the station in it!!!

Tomorrow I travel to Norwich, for the Hospital Radio conference this weekend!

I bought a car...

2006-10-15T18:43:00.000Z

Ok, I've not actually GOT it yet (mainly coz I don't actually NEED it till the end of the month, when my company leased car goes back), but today, I went to the Peugeot dealer, and took out a Peugeot 407 SW (= Estate) for a drive.

It was smooth, it was gentle, it was pretty much everything a car SHOULD be (and which the current car fails on in a few areas!!!).

It's 18 months old, with just over 14,000 miles on the clock, and should, with luck, last me 3 to 4 years.

So I have been getting insurance quotes. One of the problems with having had a company car for the last 20 years is that, of course, I have no "No Clains Discount"... so this has generally pushed up the quotes to around the £500 to £600 range. However, there ARE a couple of places that will take your company driving experience into account, so you end up with a £300 to £400 quote instead.

Just for a laugh, I added Mike onto the quote... I pretended he had passed his test (he takes it on Friday!!!), so he was a 17 year old with zero experience, zero ncd etc.... and it came to slightly over £3000!!!!!!! Needless to say, he will NOT be driving my car just yet!

New glasses

2006-10-14T17:20:00.000Z

Over the last few months I've noticed whilst driving that things in the distance are blurred (they used to be nice & clear!)... you know, you're struggling to read the signposts etc...

A couple of weeks ago, I made time to visit my optician, who was very happy to charge me to test my eyes. Well, it HAS been almost 2 years since I last had them tested, and got my first pair of VARIFOCALS!

It seems I need another 0.5 diopter on each side for the distance viewing, but reading is fine.... so open wallet and remove £££ for a new pair of varifocals. I also get a "free" second pair of glasses, so I also ordered a pair of varifocal sun glasses!

I had hoped to collect them last Monday, before I went away, but didn't have time, so popped in yesterday to get them.

Well, the difference is amazing, everything is all nice & crisp and clear again! The only problem is that, as they are varifocals, different bits of the lens focus at different distances... and its all a bit different for the new pair compared to the old ones, so I have some "learning" to do again.

Why are hotel beds so darned uncomfortable?

2006-10-13T22:47:00.000Z

I realise that I've not blogged for a bit... so what have I been doing?

Erm, well, I was in Dublin for 3 days again this week. This time it was a Conference hosted by one of the manufacturers of some of the kit we sell. I went there with the aim of trying to understand a new bit of kit they do (well, it'n not actually new, but they took over the company that makes it....) and I succeeded.

But it was rather tiring.... on Tuesday I was up at 5am (yes, that hour DOES exist!) for a 7am flight, and I got back home at 10:30 last night. In between I ate FAR too much, managed to squeeze in a couple of pint of some local dark beer, and slept badly in the hotel bed. Why is it, even when the bed is new, hotel beds are just SO uncomfortable?

Look at it this way: many travellers arrive at the hotel at say 7pm. They sleep from maybe 11pm to 7am, and have left by 9am. So, they are at the hotel for 14 hours, and asleep for about half of that time. So which piece of furniture is the most important? The Bog? The shower? Or perhaps the bed???? So why oh WHY do they buy such CHEAP beds?

I replaced our bed last December... its a very comfortable pocket-sprung one, and cost around 700 quid. (Now, if it lasts only HALF the length the last one did, then it's still costing us less than £2 per week!!!!). I'm not asking for them to spend THAT much, but getting a COMFORTABLE matress in a hotel would make many travellers a lot happier!

I can fly.....

2006-10-06T21:08:00.000Z

Well, last week I promised a piccy of me doing indoor skydiving.... well, as soon as I copy them from my laptop, you will have them.

However, to keep you amused, why not have a look at a VIDEO of me instead? This is the bit where I make a prat of myself, and "fall out the door"....I can fly! (its just over 600k long)

another boring blog title....

2006-09-30T16:54:00.000Z

Having been to MK on Wednesday (I was aching for 2 days after, I obviously used muscled I'd forgotten I had!), I had the "joy" of a day trip to Newton Abbot on Thursday... that's about 300 miles round trip, plus 4 to 5 hours work too... so I was rather tired when I got back!

Last night I presented the request show, to give Anna the evening off (although she collected the requests). One of our patients who had been in the hospital for a couple of months finally went home (which is great, but means he no longer calls in every night!!), so one of the other guys called in from that ward.

Today I helped the "lady over the road" and her son move a cooker to his new flat, and later I need to pop around to the Manse to sort out the new broadband in the church office.

Tomorrow we have a couple of people (who I met through geocaching) visiting for lunch... haven't seen them for absolutely AGES, and am quite looking forward to it!

A bit of work and a bit of play

2006-09-27T18:50:00.000Z

Today was one of my company's "reseller days", up in Milon Keynes. The morning was "death by powerpoint".

The afternoon was fun.

Here's a couple of pictures of some of the others:

(The pics of me taken on my camera didn't work, but I promise to post some that were done on another camera)

Americans are CONFIRMED as stupid!

2006-09-22T17:37:00.000Z

As you may know, I give training. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from the American guy that coordinated the training: "we are going to update the course, please join us at an online meeting, Friday 22nd Sept, at 5pm GMT".. the email also gave the URL that would show the slides, plus a phone number & login for the audio.

I emailed him: "when you say 5pm GMT, do you mean 6pm BST (= daylight savings)?", the reply was "yes, 6pm your time".

So I left work early, logged in to the URL at about 5:00 pm... there seemed to be about 2 others in the meeting, some slides being looked at, I thought nothing of it... I just assumed that someone was checking out the slides.

I went off to get food (I even posted a not to say I was "going to get food, back in 45 mins"... noone made any comments). At 5:50, I phoned the number, entered my code, got some "music on hold". OK, 10 minutes to go before the meeting, no big deal.

About 6:10, I asked one of the co-organisers something, and she commented that the phone number had changed, did I have the new one.... I then asked when the meeting was going to start... "oh it started just over an hour ago"...

Well, it's no use joining a 2 hour meeting 2/3 the way through, is it? So I just logged out.

But what a screw up! And what a waste of time!

And it proves, beyond a doubt, that the Americans are completely unable to tell the time!

Welcome, Reverend....

2006-09-17T21:29:00.000Z

Our church has a new minister at last! We've kinda been taking things slowly since our last minister left. Neil has preached at the church many times over the years, and after much thinking & praying, our church elders asked Neil if he would become our new (but part-time) minister, and he accepted!

So today was Neil's Ordination and Induction Service, held in the afternoon (this is quite normal, to allow members of other churches to come along). I did the sound & PC, and all went well.

(Hmmm, must remember to go & order the ADSL for the church room!!!)

Anyway, welcome Revd Neil!

Isn't networking fun?

2006-09-16T19:06:00.000Z

No, not really!

A couple of months ago, I got nice new Draytek router. It has some nice features, like voice ports and wireless. Like the old one it has a DHCP server (that's the thing that lets you just plug your PC into the network & it automatically gets a network address etc).

So I installed the router, but for some reason, the DHCP service just didn't seem to want to work. A pit of a pain, I can manage without, but easier if it were working.

I went onto the Draytek forum, to ask if anyone else had seen the problem, and one person said they had seen the problem, but they factory defaulted the box, and it had worked since.

So, that was going to be one of my tasks for the weekend.

This afternoon, I set up a Nintendo DSLite to work with the Draytek (wireless) and it worked without the normal setup... and when I looked, I found that the DHCP service WAS now running on the Draytek... I got my laptop out, and it ALSO worked fine...

Now, I never thought things like routers "had life", and could hear what was going on (heck, maybe it read the forums as the data passed through it!!).... but I'm not so sure now.

yeah, right on....

2006-09-15T19:48:00.000Z

Printed at the top of a parking ticket I bought in Newbury this week:

"Please place ticket behind windscreen well legible from outside!"

hmmmmmmm

Miracles DO happen

2006-09-15T16:19:00.000Z

Well, the course has finished... it went very well. Even more amazing is that all the students managed to do the exercises without major mishap, and I'm getting to know the product enough that I felt quite confident when helping work out what the problems where when they DID have a problem.

So, yes, occasionally those miracles DO happen.

One of the things I do in my "spare time" is to make some interfaces to let a "playout PC" (*1) switch auduo sources. I was email-chatting to the support guys, and we felt that maybe it was time to move away from i/o cards or serial interfaces, and go USB. So I found a nice Velleman USB kit (also available pre-built, and currently on special offer at Maplins!), which I promptly ordered.

The postie tried to deliver it yesterday, so I had to go collect it this morning. Of course, I HAD to try it, so when I got back to the office around lunchtime, I had a play with it.

Well, what can I say.... I plugged it in, and the demo software just worked! So I guess I need to add some relays, and put it all into a box, so they can have a play with it.

Away from home...

2006-09-13T16:45:00.000Z

I'm away from home again for a few days, giving training. this time it's up at sunny Gerrard's Cross, up near where the M40 and the M25 meet.

So far, the training is going ok. We're a tad behind, but all the lab exercises have worked well! Which I'm sure means that we'll have problems tomorrow!

So, I picked up my paper this morning, and at the bottom of page 11 is a headline that proclaims "Illegal GM rice discovered in Europe". I read further to find that the rice comes from a variety of places, including the US. But it seems that this rice was not actuallt GROWN as GM rice, but "involves pollen from GM rice testing sites which has polluted conventional crops".

Now, a small number of years ago, when GM crops were staring to appear, we were told that the risk of cross-pollination was so small, that the problem could be ignored, GM and "normal" crops could be grown in quite close proximity.

....or not, it so seems!

What worries me is that the newspaper hasn't actually picked up on this small fact!

Even more worrying is that it seems that "at present, this contamination is being found almost by accident".

I really wonder how much of the whole GM issue is being carried out in secret... probably far more than we might think.

Wires and travelling..

2006-09-09T18:18:00.000Z

Several months ago, when I re-decorated C's room, I fitted some Cat5 cable from the Computer-shed to his room, and from his room to M's room. Today I finally put wall sockets on and made it work! Gosh, wasn't that exciting!

Son M is going to York in half-term, to visit my mum & brother... he hasn't seen them since last summer.

So, how to travel? Flying from Southamptom to Leeds is a (pretty fast) option, but by the time you add it together its just under £100 return (and then you need to add on train from Leeds to York etc etc).

The bus goes from Winchester to York (via Birmingham or London) and takes 8 or so hours, anc costs about £65 return.

The train takes just over 4 hours, no changes, and peversly two single tickets are cheaper than a return ticket (go figure)... £30 in total (or £18 with a "young person's railcard). First Class is double that! M like the idea of going First Class!

I do not believe it!

2006-09-06T19:55:00.000Z

At work, we use Trend Antivirus software on all the PC's... it seems to work well, and doesn't need moch looking after, so when Trend announced an anti-spyware product (at a sensible price), it seemed sensible to go for it.

"Will the management software work ok on the same server as the AV management software?". "Yes!". So that's where it went. Ok, that went well, and I followed the instructions to "deploy the client" to my own laptop. Of course, it ried, but failed. I tried it a couple more times, and it still failed. I tried doing it to my colleague's PC, and THAT failed.

On to E92Plus, with whom we have a support contract (and very helpful they are too!)... I was asked to dig out various files & screen dumps & send them off. I was asked for more info, but sadly I had just finished my "quiet period", and was up to my eyeballs for the nexy 6 or 8 weeks, with visiting customers, giving training, having holidays.

I was supposed to be busy at customers this week to, but that got cancelled at the last moment, so I now HAD some time. I printed off the list of "things wanted" collected them, zipped them and emailed them. That was last thing on Monday.

Today I got a call. The info had indeed been sent back to Trend, and could we do a few more bits... find a log file or to, try and access "\\\admin$"... yes, all looked good, but it STILL wouldn't deploy. We tried telnetting to the deployment port... no luck.

F, from E92Plus explained that Trend were thinking along the lines of "firewalls"... but there were no firewalls, these machines are both on the corporate LAN.

Then inspiration struck: "half a mo, we use Trend AV, and that has a firewall in it, which we have enabled globally, let me turn it off and try again".

Needless to say, the Trend Anti-Spyware client instantly deployed to my PC.

We both had a good laugh at Trend's expense... THEY certainly now have an issue, that ONE of their products stops ANOTHER of their products from deploying (and you're gonna try and tell me they never thought to test that?). I have no desires to go and globally disable the firewall on the PCs so the anti-spyware will work, so they are going to have to work it out!

Bloomin' software!

Saved... by 2%

2006-09-04T21:35:00.000Z

Professional and semi-professional audio kit often has fancy features that you won't normally get on a domestic unit. I'm thinking of things like direct drive turntables (which let you cue a record without constantly stretching the drive belt), remote starts (essential for radio use), and rotary knobs on the CD players, that let you easily cue up the CD.

Apart from budding DJ's, home users have no use for such features, and as they usually cost money to have, the stuff you buy at Richer Sounds never has those features. I mean, all most people want on a CD play is a "play" button (rather essential!), a "pause" or "stop" button (for when the phone rings), a "track >" and "track <" button, to skip tracks you don't like, and an "eject" button.

WHR's normal Monday presenter, R, is still in hospital, so muggins here got to not only collect a (very) small number of requests, but to do the 2 hour request show.... and I must admit that tonight was (from a technical perspective) not my best. I was not as prepared as I should have been, and I played one jingle late, one early, I managed to accidentally re-cue an Elvis track on the computer... and to round things off, having worked out my timings for my last track (a classical piece, around 7 minutes long) I said my goodbyes, to discover that the track was going to be about 5 or 6 seconds later than planned, ending at about 3 seconds to the hour

This gave me a problem... the News jingle needs to start 9 or 10 seconds before the news... I guess I could just do a live voice intro "by your bedside 24 hours a day, this is Winchester Radio".... and into news. It would work, but it would not sound right.

But then I remembered another of those features that Professional record decks and CD players have: the ability to adjust the speed by + or - up to 5%. Now, if you run a track at +2%, that will gain you just over a second every minute, and with 6 minutes of the track left, I could probably manage it. And as long as you speed up and slow down the music very gently, it is NOT noticable (honest, it ISN'T!!!!).

So, I ran at +2% for about 4 to 5 minutes... constantly checking the countdown timer (and remembering that the track finished 3 seconds before the counter reaches zero), and I DID manage to catch up the time!

So, the track crescendo's, I play the news jingle, and manage to hit the news spot on! One very happy presenter!

I must remember that trick for next time (which is actually tomorrow)!

A week passed

2006-09-02T22:22:00.000Z

With Monday being the Bank Holiday, I was able to start my Hospital Radio visiting in the afternoon. Went and saw R, our "normal" Monday presenter... he's on the cardiac ward. I DID suggest that he could do the show using the Outside Broadcast kit, but he seemed to ignore the suggestion... I wonder why?

Tuesday I was out on a customer site. The good news is that it was only 4 minutes from home.... I wish there were more like that!

The rest of the week I was at home, on holiday. On Wednesday, I cleared out the (computer) shed ready to work on the floor. I decided that, rather than just cover the floor with a layer of chipboard, the back 12" of the original floor really DID need replacing... so went to Homebase, where they had bugger all of use, so went to B&Q, where I bought the wood I needed. It took a bit longer than anticipated (it always DOES, why IS that?), but on Thurdsay morning I fitted the last bit of chipboard (decided using the circular saw at 9:30pm was NOT a good idea!), painted a couple of the walls and laid the carpet tiles.

Then I started to bring stuff back in.... it took absolutely AGES, but I've been throwing out a load of old stuff (eg I don't REALLY think I'll ever need my MSDOS 5.0 reference manual again!).. manuals, documentation, a load of old electronic bits etc.

Friday I had some "rest", and took M and C to Southampton, where we stuffed ourselves at Pizza Hut, and wandered around a few shops... then returned and continued re-filling the shed!

It's late Saturday night now, and it's 99.5% done... just a couple of odd bits left to find homes for. The good news is (a) it looks a LOT neater now; (b) I think I've found everything again!!

Tomorrow we have a Church Service up at Littleton, in the Marquee that was used for the Littleton Show today. I am, once again, doing the PA system, so it's an 8:30 start!!!! Well, more like 8:20, to give me 10 minutes to load the kit into the car.

I guess that means I OUGHT to get to bed.....

Oh, no, not Sunday again!

2006-08-27T22:38:00.000Z

The show last night WASN'T as bas as I feared. We only collected 5 requests, but there were 2 on the answering machine. S presented the first hour, whilst I did 3 of the requests down the phone (and managed to get 3 smiles from the 3 patients!!! THAT's what it's all about!!!). Then S went off at 9pm, and I did the second hour with M.

We invented a new feature called "songs we thought we'd managed to forget"... I'd found "Loop-di-love" by "Shag" (actually another of Jonathan King's stage names!). One of the patients called in for something else, and agreed that it was BAD! Gave us a laught, and hopefully a few patients saw the funny side too!

Today was Sunday, which means church. Had to take all the PA kit home, coz next Sunday I'm doing the PA at the Littleton Show Service, which is in a big tent. I've done it for about 4 years now, so I know what to do, and it's not stressful.

Spent an hour or two trying to help MMM to make her new wireless extender work. We failed completely, coz to make it work her existing ADSL router / Access Point needs WDS, but it doesn't! Curses!

The day ended by going to bed. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Another radio night....

2006-08-26T15:26:00.000Z

A, our station manager at WHR, has family visiting, so is having the week away from broadcasting & visiting. So, as well as collecting requests on Monday, I also collected some on Tuesday, and Friday too. I also presented the request show on Tuesday and Friday.

And hey, guess what I'm up to tonight?!!

I was quite stressed & tired after a busy day at work yesterday, so wasn't sure how I was going to manage last night. As it happens, after the visiting, I was feeling noticibly better. The selected music was pretty well all nice & gentle & mellow, and I ended up with the second hour being predominantly classical, so by the end of the show, I fell well relaxed and "chilled out"... in other words, a good cure for the rest of the day!

So, M will be coming with me, to join S, and we get to do it all again tonight! Maybe it won't be as bad as I think.

Professionalism

2006-08-24T19:01:00.000Z

When my Firefox loads up, it loads Google and Simon G's site. The first thing I then do is look in the right hand column, to see if Aviatrix has blogged... and if she has, then it's the first thing I read.

This is a lady for whom I have BIG RESPECT. Her blogs are a hundred times better written and more interesting than mine are (or will ever be)... Reading her blogs is a bit like watching a good soap or adventure series: you simply HAVE to come back to see how things continue.

I like to think that, at work, I try to act professionally. It can get very hard at times, and there ar times when that professionalism fails. A lot of my job means I am with customers, and I hope that when I am with customers, I DO manage to keep mynprofessionalism... it seems to have been going ok recently. But there are times when in the office, when something happens, and that professionalism fails. And I know that I'm not the only one that has these failures. But I think we all learn from those times. We strive to NOT do it again. But I don't think these lapses make us any less able to do our jobs. It just shows that we are 100% human.

Aviatrix's blog yesterday (which I only read today, coz I had an early night last night!) dealt with her recent professional "lapse"... what can one say? It felt like the end of a TV series cliff-hanger. Boy, was I feeling gutted when I finished reading it.

From everything I have read in her blogs, I believe she has always done her level best to be professional at all times... and I don't think her recent actions were anything other than that. I just feel so sad that her bosses appear to have reacted with such a knee-jerk.

So, how do I end this blog?

Maybe I'll just say "thank you Aviatrix for continuing to share your life with us: the good times and the bad times". Oh, and I'll be back again tomorrow to read your blog, coz I despreately want to find out what has happened.....

Of Hearing Aids and things

2006-08-20T19:20:00.000Z

Mum has had Hearing Aids for some time (well, she IS in her 80's!), but has often had problems... she's been to a couple of places and tried out some digital "in the ear" (ITE)units.... she doesn't like the ide of the "behind the ear" (BTE) units.

I got my aids about 3 years ago now, when the NHS started doing digital HAs (the old analogie HAs were no help to me) and I recently got some newer models... but I've been on at mum for a year or two to go to HER local hospital's HA department, and get checked out. My feeling is that, because the NHS audiologists are dealing with SO MANY differnt people, they have probably got a LOT more experience that the people in the HA shops.... the shops probably sell a handful each week, the NHS Audiologists are dealing with people all day every day. Also, you get a PAIR of HA's from the NHS, and hearing works better with 2 of them.

Well, last week, mum FINALLY got her new HAs! They are made by Siemens, and are the sort that cost about £950 each down the high street (mine are Oticon's, but are, in principle, very similar) They are BTE's, and despite the fact that she reckons they make her (or her ears) look like Prince Charles, she says that she can actually hear amazingly well with them! Which, funnily enough, is pretty much what I predicted.

But it's interesting comparing here experiences up in York, to mine here in Winchester... I don't know whether it's caused by the funding, the people involved, or the differences between the patients (mum vs me!) but the experience I get here is a really good one... tyhe staff are always pleasant and helpful (I got these new aids simply because I was chatting to the audiologist, and was asking whether any of the newer (ie more modern technology) aids that you can get down the high street shops would be of any help to me).

I suspect it's a bit of all 3...

I have absolutely no guilt in getting the latest HAs out of the NHS... I wear them typically 15 hours per day, and they are actively used for a large amount of the day, helping me to do my job. If you compare that to the "active use" by many retired people, then I reckon that, in "cost per word" mine are very cheap!

Hearing aids can NEVER "make your hearing normal again"... but they can be a great tool to make life a lot better...

So. please turn down your music a bit, and try and keep your own natural hearing! It's a LOT better than the alternatives!

Friday at last....

2006-08-18T18:03:00.000Z

Been learning more about PDAToolkit: there's a guy who's been playing with the product who has made a whole load of simple videos, telling all about how to do things with it (some for absolute beginners, some for slightly more advanced users).

I must say its a ver nice way to learn about something new... sure beats reading a manual!!!

So, I'm slowly making progress, need to try some scripting to get the final bit to work, but for only 5 days into a new product, I'm impressed that I am able to have got so far so quickly!

Work has been pretty normal: we had a problem with 2 of our training PCs... one was caused by the extra memory we fitted, the other was far more serious... the "burnt IC" smell was the give-away! Dell are sending a new motherboard by courier for Monday delivery. Whatever you may say about Dell, their service is excellent... I've had other problems with Dell kit before (we have a load of Dell stuff), and they fix it quick.

A night at home for a change!

2006-08-16T18:32:00.000Z

Mondays and Tuesdays are Hospital Radio nights... on Monday, N sent me an email, reminding me / telling me that our normal presenter, R, was away on holiday, so not only would I be collecting requests, I would need to do the show too!

Didn't get many requests, but what I did get were quite pleasant. Only one boo-boo, which was when I was playing 3 movements of a Mozart horn concerto: this was about 15 minutes long, and so I was in the office, chatting with N. I heard a pause in our output: "ah, must be end of the second movement, let me see how long I've got"... to find it was the end of the THIRD movement, and it had started the next piece! Curses!

So the comedy pot was a few minutes late... and it was a long one, so I ended up going straight into the "public service announcements".

If that was my only mistake for the night, I'm happy!

Last night was "engineering night". When I arrived, N was chatting with a potential new "engineer".... maybe it will be "third time lucky"... the previous 2 "potential engineers" seemed to not be very interested!

We go on air at 8pm. At 3 minutes to, I realised that A wasn't back from the ward visiting, so went into the studio, just in case..... A minute later, a puffed out A arrived..... luckily she just about managed to get into the 8pm news, and sat and got her breat back!

Late last year, I was approached by a company over in the Portsmouth area, and I went over for a very informal chat with them. Nothing actually came of it (although the door was still open), and they gave me a payrise at work too.

Today I heard that they had just gone into receivership, and everyone had been made redundant.

I have to believe someone has been looking after me.....

Programming on a Palm PDA

2006-08-13T21:39:00.000Z

Ages ago, I looked around at simple (and FREE / cheap) database programs for a Palm, that would let me search a simple 25,000 record database (its a record library database, listing CD/vinyl id, artist, track name & composer). I found one that could cope, but it is NOT easy to use, and because it's general-purpose, is rather slow (eg takes about 30 seconds on a reasonably fast PDA to search).

Well, I was nosing around the PDA forums the other day, seeing what was new (I discovered that my iQue 3600 PDA / satnav unit is now "discontinued"!!! I am shocked!) when I came across a post from someone who asked about what easy ways there were to program a Palm... and someone suggested PDA Toolbox. Someone else commented that it was rather biassed towards databases.

Music to my ears!

So I am now 1 day into a 30 day evaluation of PDA Toolbox! I've already managed to make a simple data viewer for the database (took a couple of hours, most of which was learning & playing!). I now need to take the next step, and work out how the scripting works, and I believe I'll be quickly able to create the application that I want.

And the good news is that the software, if I buy it, is gonna cost under £25, which isn't bad!

A couple of lazy days

2006-08-11T16:22:00.000Z

Having arrived home late on Wed, I had a long lie in... I missed "morning", so just started off with "afternoon"!

I logged in & checked my email, read blogs etc. I watched TV... in fact, I did close to "bugger all" all day.... Oh, I *did* spend an hour or wo playing with some data(*1), so it would import into my PDA. Today I got up late too... but I HAVE done *something* useful today: I cleaned the bath and sink!

Then I looke around the garden: this year, we have a HUGE crop of plums... and the wasps don't seem to have come in their normal numbers (in fact, not seen many wasps at all this year) so there's plenty left for us.

I rang up one of the guys at work, whose wife makes jam.... so I'll be taking a load into work for her.

Shame I don't like plums though!

(*1: WHR record library & myriad databases... lists about 30,000 tracks in all!)

The return

2006-08-10T12:04:00.000Z

The boat back from Rosslare was timed at 3pm, which meant that we didn't need to get up particularly early. It's interesting, as M & C have got older, how much easier things are when doing things like this.

Knowing how we all suffered on the way out, the plan was to have a reasonable breakfast, then no food till we got back to Wales. So I had a dish of cereals and some toast, and a cup of tea.

We left the apartment just before midday, and drove through New Ross, and over to Rosslare. We arrived there at about 1pm, so had some time to kill. Having driven through the town / village of Rosslare, we decided not to stop there, but instead parked up by the beach in the rather pleasant (and mainly empty!) beach. M & C spent a bit of time messing about on the beach, whilst D & I sat on the wall, watching and looking at the view out to sea.

At about 1:45, we decided to drive down to the ferry terminal, where there was no queue, so we checked in and joined the queue on the dockside. We had just been informed that "due to essential maintenance" the crossing would take 2 1/2 hours, rather than the normal 2 (ie "essential maintenance" = one of the 4 engines was dead!)... at this point I was reminded of that terrible Irish joke:

An Irishman is on a long plane trip. About an hour into the journey, the pilot come on the PA: "I'm sorry to tell you that one of our 4 engines has died... but don't wrorry, the plane can in fact fly on a single engine. However, it does mean that we're not flying as fast, so we'll be about 30 minutes late arriving".

A further hour passes, and the pilot comes on the PA again: "I'm sorry to inform you that a second engine has died, but don't panic, as I said before, we can fly on a single engine. However, we will now be just over an hour late arriving".

Another hour passes, and the pilot is on the PA again "I'm sorry everyone, but a third engine has died, but as you can see, we are flying fine on just the one engine. However, we will now be nearly 2 hours late arriving".

At this, Paddy is heard to comment "Oh, bejesus, I hope that last engine doesn't die, or we'll be up here all darned night!"

Due to the engine probelms, the boat is late arriving, and there are problems with loading a couple of larger vehicles, so we're 30 minutes late leaving, meaning that we won't arrive in Fishguard until just after 6pm.

The sea looks fairly calm today, but the captain does warn that the forcast is for it to be a bit rough on the second half of the trip... NOT what I wanted to hear.

The anti-seasickness tablet was certainly affecting me.... so I sat back in my seat, and relaxed, the slight sway of the ship having zero affect on me (makes a change!).

About 90 minutes in, the captain comes on the PA system (no, he doesn't tell us that another engine has died!!!!) to say that the forcast was obviously wrong, and that the seas were not as bad as he had thought, and to expect the crossing to be no worse than it was. Well, that was certainly news to my ears!

About 30 minutes later, decided well enough (and rested enough) to go get a cup of tea... which strted to wake me up a bit.

Looking out of the side windows, we could see land at last, and as promised, we berthed at just after 6pm. As luck would have it, we were amongst the first 20 or so cas to get off the ferry.

We drove as far as Haverford West, where we decided to have dinner: after all, it was close to 7pm, and we'd all not eaten since breakfst time! We found a Chinese restaurant, where we filled ourselves up.

Then a boring drive along the A40, A48, M4 and A34 got us home just after midnight. I let everyone else unload the card (long distance driver's perogative!), and finally got to be a bit before 1am.

A long day, but more importantly, it was the first time for ages that I'd been on a ferry and NOT been sick!!!!!

The Plague

2006-08-08T18:59:00.000Z

Back in the mid 1800's, farming was the main way of life in Ireland. All the fancy crops went to the landowners, to pay rent, and the workers mainly got the potatoes. That was fine until there was a disease that hit the potato crop, which meant that the staple food was suddenly not available.

The population of Ireland was around 6 million, and over a million died from starvation & disease.

Thus it was that large numbers of Irish families decided to emigrate to America. The boats they went on were sailing ships, that took over 50 days to get to New York. Many died on the journey, and conditions in the ship were pretty nasty... the ships were called "famine ships".

If you go to New Ross, you'll find a ship called The Dunbrody... this is a replica of a ship that used to sail from New Ross, carrying families to New York... it could hold just under 200 at a time, although there were times when they took over 300.

John F Kennedy's grandfather used to live in New Ross, and was one of those who sailed to America on one of these ships.

Spraoi parade

2006-08-07T18:57:00.000Z

On the way from Dublin to Waterford, we drove past a landfill site. There was a sign that read "anyone caught dumping in front of these gates will be prosecuted". C was giggling at it for about ten minutes!

Anyway, last night, M & I went into Waterford to catch some more live music plus the parade & fireworks. The laatter was running abit late, so it was about 11pm when we went back into the pub to listen to a very capable Dutch rock band called Snatchin' Jenny. They finished their set after midnight, so we were a bit late back "home".

The parade had a theme of "monsters", so there were jelly fish, octopusses, strange fish, plus a few other land-based monsters... all were quite original and some were very good... I'll try & put some pics online sometime.

Over the river there is a hotel... closed at the moment for renovations, but some clever organiser had managed to get the correct room lights turned on, so the building spelt out "SPRAOI", which went down well with all who saw it! (got a great pic of it which I'll upload at some point).

This afternoon we went down the coast to Dunmore East... there is a tiny sand beach there, and from over the bay, about 1/2 mile away, we could see it was full of people (remember, it's a Bank Holiday here today), so we went for a walk down to the harbour, then into a small rocky cove, then finally spent about an hour lazing on the grass in the park (where we still had amazing views across the estuary).

Drove home via Tramore, then grabbed fish & chips at the local chippie... one option that the F&C shops have here (but sadly didn't have any today) is SMOKED cod... I would have enjoyed that!

It's a bank holiday = its raining!

2006-08-06T17:51:00.000Z

As I said before, it's a Bank Holiday this weekend... well in Ireland it is. Yesterday was nice. Tomorrow is forecast to be nice. But today it rained.

So we decided to go to Hook Point (which, I am told, is the "hook" in the phrase "by hook or by crook"... Crook Point being along the coast). There are two ways to get there: one is an extra 30 km, the other is across a ferry that cahrges 11 Euros for the return trip. So we took the ferry! I arrived just as the gate closed, and the ferry started moving away.... Ok, "I'll just have to wait" I thought.. but no, the ferry stopped, came back the metre or two it had moved, the man opened the gate, and let me on! Almost the same thing happened on the way back... two of us arrived moments before they were about to move off. I can't imagine such helpfulness over in England!

The GPS maps of Ireland seem ok if you are in a city or on a main road, but today we went down SEVERAL roads not on the GPS. At least we knew roughly where we were.

As we went down the "peninsula" towards Hook point, it got foggy! So much so that the Lighthouse at hook Point had its foghorn going! But it cleared up. Loads of sedimentary rocks there, and we saw loads of small sea-creature fossils in the rocks!

Now, I meant to fill up with fuel before leaving Waterford... so the tank was getting decidedly low by the time we got to Hook Point... and the little yellow "for gawd's sake buy some fuel" light came on on the way back.... luckily I found a garage before I ran out. When I got back "home" we found that I'd managed to leave the fuel cap at the garage. I'm not going back, so I rolled up some polythene sheet (packaging stuff) and put that in... polythene is pretty inert, so should be ok for a day or two.

The Spraoi festival continues... the parade is at 9:30 tonight, with fireworks at 10:30.... and rumour has it that it's worth going to see.... so that's what we'll be doing later.

Spraoi at Waterford

2006-08-05T19:22:00.000Z

Had a bit of a lie-in this morning. Shortly after midday, M & I went into Waterford, D& C had decided to go off on the bus to the beach at Tremore. We started walking, past the local (rather smaller) versions of B&Q etc, and spotted a bus top on the "towards town" side of the road.

Now, for much of the last week, my left foot has been getting a bit sore if walked on too much, so the idea of a bus ride into town had a great appeal. The downside was that whilst we knew the number 360 (from Tramore) came past, it was a 30 minute service. 30 seconds later, the bus came around the corner!!!!

So M & I got to see some of Waterford Spraoi... but what IS it? Well, it's like the Winchester Hat Fair (oh, come on, I'm TRYING to be helpful!).... there were several stages around the town with local bands of various types playing music. By the cathedral we saw the very end of a set done by a guy on a tall unicycle... after moving to another neraby "stage" we watched an amusing and talented Scottish street entertainer / magician, which lasted 20 mins, and made us laugh.

The off to the "Peoples' Park", to see the things that were starting at 5pm. We watched an act best descibed as a "theatrical gymnastic" act... doing things dangling from a rope.

Finally a walk home for a well deserved cuppa and tea... tonight we could drive into town to see some more (or maybe we'll just fall asleep!).

Whilst the festival is free, they are flogging writbands to help fund NEXT year's event for 5 euros, so I bought one for M... heck, that's cheap for an afternoon's entertainment!

Enniskerry

2006-08-04T17:17:00.000Z

The trip to Ireland is for 2 purposes: first of all I'm here on business, giving some technical training for 3 days (Tue, Wed & Thur). After that, I'm on holiday, and we return home to England next Wednesday.

The first night was in Enniskerry, which is something like 20 miles south of Dublin, and about 5 miles from the coastal town of Bray (which we briefly visited).

As I didn't get final confirmation of the course until about 5 days before we travelled, I had a bit of a frantic time organising hotels on the internet. But I reckon I did well for our first night: the Summerhill House Hotel is the sort of place you go for your wedding do... in fact, they specialise in weddings, having one there most days (but luckily not the Sunday night that we were there!). As a result, the hotel was VERY pleasantly decorated, and we had a good-sized (family) room with THREE double beds! And with it being out of the village, it was nice and quiet: in fact, a lovely place to start the trip in Ireland!

Monday morning, after a nice breakfast, we set off for Dublin... as we booked late, the best place I could find was the Holiday Inn. Whilst in a pretty uninteresting part of the city, the "family room" was slightly larger than what you typically get in such places, with 2 double beds, but at the rear of the hotel, which meant it was pleasantly quiet. The first night we ate at the pizza shop next door, the second night we went to a popular Japanese restaurant called Yamamori Noodles... kinda like a Chinese but rather more interesting food.

The third night (or should I pronounce that "tird night") we went to O'Connell Street (right in the middle of town) where we found a "Family Restaurant" (which means they do burgers, chicken etc etc!), and last night M & I went off to the Guinness Brewery, and went to a Bistro on the way back, where we both had Irish Stew (yummy!).

Whilst I worked, the rest of the family went to do a bit of sight-seeing around Dublin, and one evening we all drove to Phoenix Park, a HUGE park, with lovely views back towards the city.

The 3 day training course went ok... and it was there that I discovered that this weekend is Ireland's main bank holiday weekend (which explains why all the hotels were full for the weekend!!!!), so traffic on Friday evening could be heavy... and that was the day we were to drive from Dublin to Waterford!

Not only that, but The Waterford Spraoi Festival (it's pronounced "spree") is on over the weekend!

So, we left Dublin just before Midday, dropped into Kilkenny for lunch (which was VERY busy) and arrived in Waterford just before 6pm. Whilst there are motorways & dual carriageways up near Dublin, the roads become single-carriageway towards the south, so it was a relatively slow trip.

We are staying at 'RiverWalk' in Waterford... this is a modern set of self-catering student apartments: we have 3 bedrooms (double, twin, single) with a small, but usable, kitchen / lounge / table area. They provide everything except towels. Ok, its a bit bare, but for 5 nights I'll cope! And at a little over £350 for 5 nights, it's pretty good value too.

And with it being student accommodation, you get free (wired) broadband!

And THAT is how I can blog tonight!!!

Travelling to ireland

2006-08-02T12:24:00.000Z

We got up at juat after 5am, had showers, ate breakfast, packed the car, and managed to leave by 6:15am... it almost killed us! It wasn't so bad for D, M and C, as they could relax, but I had to drive.... and it's a loong way to Fishguard.

We had a couple of stops on the way, and arrived at the port a few minutes after the designated 10:30 (for an 11:30 sailing). We were travelling on the "Stenna Express", a relatively small 2-hulled vessel that carries around 180 card (no trucks): the advantage of this over a normal ferry is that it has a mere 2 hour crossing time.

The info board indicated winds force 5 to 6... and once onboard, we were told that the journey should be relatively smooth, but it might get slightly rough mid-channel. Well, things started off ok, but soon the boat was bouncing a bit.... experince tell me that I cope better out on deck, where I can see the horizon.

A short while later, it was bouncing around MORE than a bit... and I guess it was around that point that my colour changed to a sort of green, and my stomach decided to start ejecting itself over the side of the boat. This went on for a few minutes.... until I felt that I really needed to go to the loos, lest I have other problems.

Of course, there were others suffering, but luckily I DID find a spare cubicle.

(There was an article in the paper the next day, about herbal remedies for sea-sickness... amongst typical symptoms are apparently "nausea, sickness, diarro, er, dierr... erm, the runs, perspiration...": yes, I had ALL of those!!!)

It's amazing how tiring being sick is. After driving off the ferry, I was obviously dehydrated (but drinking just made me sick) and tired, so had to stop for a while to recover.

The drive up to Enniskerry was a slow and gentle one.......

Off to Ireland.....

2006-07-29T19:26:00.000Z

Tomorrow (that's a SUNDAY!) we get up about 5am or so, in an effort to leave at about 6am. Why? Well, we're driving to Fishguard, which is about a 3.5 to 4 hour journey, to catch the 11:30 ferry over to Ireland. We're taking the "Stenna Express", which is one of those super-fast ferries, that only takes 2 hours to get there.

Then we're staying at Enniskerry for a night, then to Dubin on Monday. I'm going to be giving a training course Tuesday-Thursday, and while I do that, family get to see Dublin. Maybe I'll get to see a bit of it too...

On Friday we're off to Waterford until Wednesday, when we return.

And by good luck, the hotel in Dublin plus the apartment in Waterford both have broadband! So I'll be able to tell you all about things while I'm there.

And here ISN'T the news...

2006-07-27T18:45:00.000Z

The guys up at Basingstoke have a simple, but very annoying problem: the wire that feeds IRN news to Studio 1 is broken... So I am about to pop up there & fix it for them.

Paul

New and bigger...

2006-07-26T21:14:00.000Z

Today was the day! I have changed my broadband from BT Connect (that's the "business" side) to Eclipse (www.eclipse.co.uk). The BT broadband was costing me £33 per month... the new one at Eclipse is £18.99 per month (first month free, and reduced to only £12.99 for 3 months)... all in all, a nice saving.

The first indication that things were happening was when C told me on the way to Holiday Club that his internet wasn't working. M rang me later on, to tell me that the internet was dead (and so I looked up the train times for him.

When I got in tonight, I spent about 2 minutes logging in to my router, and setting up the new login / password, and within a minute it was up & running, at OVER 8 megs!

There seems to be a slight problem with the new mail accounts I set up, but that's not a big worry, as I have a couple of backup options that work well!
But as far as web surfing goes, it's amazingly fast!

Even had a voice chat with a friend who is over in South Africa.... worked 100%.

Today, I'm a happy blogger!

New hearing aids

2006-07-22T17:10:00.000Z

Whilst I was over in Paris, one of the micropones on my hearing aids died... luckily it was only the one that makes the hearing "directional".

So, when I got back from Paris (3pm a week Friday) I realised I had time to get to the Hearing Aid department to get it swapped out. I explained the problem to the Audiologist, and she went to get a replacement. I also asked her whether the newer aids available through Specsavers etc would give any advantages over the ones I had... she never REALLY answered the question, but did suggest that I might like to try out a new Oticon aid they had started using... same concept as the Danavox units, but with newer features. Of course, I said YES!

She also said that, as my hearing problem is only "moderate", I might like to try out the new "micro-tubes". Normally you have a plastic tube (about 3 or 4 mm diameter) from the aid, going into the ear-mould... which is quite noticible. The microtubes are less than 2mm diameter, and don't use an ear-mould: instead they have a tiny soft plastic "umbrella" that centres & holds the tube in the ear... and it also has holes in.

The end result is that you don't get the occlusion of an earmould, so you get a VERY natural sound (as you now get a larger amount of "real" sound coming in). In addition, they are VERY comfortable... your ears don't get anything like as sweaty & itchy.... and they are close to invisible.

Whilst I've already got pretty used to them, it's gonna take a bit longer to really get used to them.... but that's no real problem: it took me about 6 months to get used to the previous ones.

In summary, thank you NHS, you probably saved me an expensive visit to Specsavers!!!!

Bloomin' computers and Superman

2006-07-21T21:11:00.000Z

I promised M that, while he was away on holiday, I'd take a look at his PC... it's been giving him problems like rebooting etc. We agreed that a complete rebuoild was in order.

So, after backing up his data, I started a rebuild. First thing I did was to give the machine a good clean. Then I plugged it in to the mains, and the PSU went BANG! With sparks & flashes too. So pulled out a spare PSU, and the machine ran ok. But over the next couple of hours (during which time I reloaded windows and a few other bits too) the machine rebooted itself on several occasions, with no warning. This was pretty much the problem that M had been having, so I decided that maybe a new PSU & motherboard (same CPU & memory) were in order.

So this morning, after a quick approintment at the hospital, I popped over to Novatech in Portsmouth to get the bits... This evening I loaded up Windows and loads of software, and it looks to be behaving well.

This afternoon I went to see Superman.... yeah, full of effects, nice storyline, but I'm not sure if I ACTUALLY enjoyed the film. I guess we have got so used to seeing "the impossible" happen in a film, so a sequence of superman holding up an aeroplane that has no wings is pretty "normal".

Maybe I should go and see Garfield II?

Holiday!

2006-07-19T19:47:00.000Z

Most of this week, I'm on holiday...

Monday was rather special: my 50th birthday. Also 4 years to the day when I got my hearing aids... and I got a NEW pair of hearing aids, newer technology, but still free from the NHS! They are a LOT more comfortable, and so far seem to work well... I guess only time will tell how good they really are.

Monday was a rather lazy day... but heck, isn't that what holidays are about? Apart from getting my new ears, collecting requests, and going to the studios in the evening, didn't really do much.

I slept late on Tuesday too, but in the afternoon fixed the puncture on C's bike (well, the tube was sufficiently bad it was thrown away, and I just put in a previously repaired tube). The front suspension on M's bike hasn't been working for a while, so I ignored the "no user servicable parts..." warning, and stripped the front forks down. I forgot about the "bikes are generally built using the simplest method" adage.... and was pleasantly surprised how simple the suspension mechanism was (a long spring!). The problem was that the plastic "sleeve" was too tight, caused by M having got water in the suspension, and there being a tiny bit of corrision behind the sleeve. Works a treat now.

Today was my one non-holiday: caught the 7:48 up to London (as ever, no seats!) and arrived on site to find.... no kit. Oops. Yes, it hadn't been delivered, but had been returned back to the office.... which is in Newbury! They organised a courier to get it to me, and a quick calculation gave me about 2 hours to kill.

So, given that I was just off Oxford Circus, I went for a walk to Picadilly Circus, Leicester Square (where I read the history of the square), then up to Tottenham Court Rd to look at the electrical shops. Then back down Oxford Street where I picke up a sarnie for lunch. It was rather hot, but dry and with a slight breeze, and in the shade it was bearable.

Got back to the customer around noon, and 5 minutes later the kit arrived! What excellent timing! The kit installed in a textbook fashion (which doesn't happen very often!) and was away by 2pm.... so was able to get home early. I have no guilt about that, as recently with my travelling, I reckon I've built up a good "credit".

Tonight was C's "School Perfomance"... The Wizard of Oz, lasting 45 minutes. Too hot, but amusing. When we came out, the temperature had dropped noticibly, and there was a nice breeze, thank goodness!

Not sure what I'll do tomorrow (depends on how hot it is), but the list of possibilities includes visiting a garage door shop and going to buy flooring and wood to repair the "computer shed". It also includes flopping in the armchair and watching the TV with the air-cond set to max!!

Friday I'm hoping to meet up with a WHR colleague and go to see Superman!

More Paris, and coming home

2006-07-17T13:53:00.000Z

The training course was 3 days, and on Thursday, I went to our French office. From La Defense this was easy, as there is a direct train, that takes only 25 minutes. I arrived at the local station, completely unsure where I would find my lift. I rang the office, and told them which bit of the station I was in (by the taxi rank!), and a few minutes later a car arrived, with a big sign in the window with our company name on... what excellent thinking!

After a bit if thinking and trial and error, managed to get the new router / VPN box in and working, so a successful visit. As we left for the station, the thermometer in the car showed 28C... and Thursday was a COOLER day!!!!

Thursday evening was a bit different.... the following day, 14th July, is the big public holiday, with military marches and plane flyovers all planned. There were lots of people out in the bars, and later on, back at the hotel, I heard fireworks. As I looked out of my 11th floor window, I could see SEVERAL major firework display happening, in various areas of Paris. No doubt there would be a load more the following night.

Friday morning, I was travelling back home. I was running a bit late, and was slightly worried that, as the RER (longer-distance underground service) was on a sunday service, I might be late for the Eurostar. I needn't have worried, not only were there enough trains running, they were all running on time (now tell me that you could rely on THAT in London on a bank holiday!!), and I mad the Gare du Nord in plenty of time.

The train back was just as pleasant as the one out....

Mike's away

2006-07-16T19:39:00.000Z

Just to confuse you, I'll not only tell you more about the Paris trip, but I'll do some "real-time" blogging too! I'm sure your brains will cope!

Yesterday, got up stupidly early for a Saturday, leaving the house at 8:30. Today's "fun" was to drive Mike & 3 mates up to Stansted Airport, to catch their plane to Cyprus, where they will spend a week swimming, doing silly things, no doubt getting a little drunk, and getting sunburnt!

The plane departs at 1:30 pm approx, so they need to be there by 11:30. It's a nominal 100 minute drive there, but we left early in case the M25 was trouble. Luckily, we were early enough, such that the roadworks "up the top" of the M25 only delayed us about 15 minutes... so we arrived a little after 10:30.

The journey back was a bit slower.... the roadworks just mentioned were ok (but looked rather bad in the OTHER direction!), but there was an accident south of the M3, so rather a long delay there for me.

Called in to Basingstoke on the way to pop into PC World... my CD burner died a couple of weeks ago, so £35 got me a new "records everything" DVD burner (including double layer DVDs!).

As my birthday is tomorrow, the remainder of the family (C, D and me) went off to the Cart & Horses for lunch (same place we now hold the Late Xmas Cache Bash). With Mike away, and me being busy, not had a chance to organise a birthday event, so will have to have an "official birthday" next month.

Le Monday...

2006-07-15T22:00:00.000Z

Sunday night was a sad one for the French, what with losing the football match... but life goes on.

Monday was day one of the training. Now, normally on a training course, you do one of two things for lunch. You either go out to a restaurant / bar, or you have a plate of sandwiched etc. The latter isn't good enough for the French! No, they take eating FAR more seriously!

For 8 of us there are 2 large cardboard boxes. Inside are 4 boxes, each about 15" to 18" wide, 12" deep, about 4" thick, of corrugate cardboard. You open this up to find a "food tray" (think of the sort of thing you get on an airplane)... starter, main course, sweet, bread roll, cheese, cutlery etc.... and the food was VERY acceptable! But heck, this *is* France we're taking about!

Having stuffed myself at lunchtime, I couldn't face a full meal out, so decided to visit the local shopping centre at "La Defense"... So a walk across the plaza, where I could hear an orchestra playing up at the far end ("obviously the French like their culture" I thought...) I started at the nearest end, which was the "old end" of the centre (which is in the middle of a refit)... walked through there to find that Auchan was at the other end. Had a wander around there, and got a microwave readymeal, then went up to see the rest of the new part of the centre that I was now in.

Called "Le Dome", this has a set of restaurants, and the entrance to the cinema too. It looked rather busy, and I was rather surprised to see not just security guy aroundm but also a couple of Gendarmes. Having got what I came for, I went outside, where I saw, down the long set of steps, a large blue carpet. "Odd" I thought. Then realise that the orchestra that I had heard earlier was down the bottom of these steps, and there seemed to be a bit of a crowd down there too. Well, I had to go that way, so went to investigate. Yes, there was the orchestra.... and a few TV cameras too, with big video screens.... and then I spotted the giveaway.... "Superman" bits around the place. I had accidentally found the French premiere of Superman!!!!

Bonjour encore!

2006-07-15T16:00:00.000Z

Well, the last week was spent in Paris.... a VERY HOT Paris! Let's start at the start...

I can strongly reccomend travelling on the Eurostar! I went "Leisure Select" class... (better than "Standard", not as fancy as "Business Premiere"), which has big seats (3 seats across), power next to the seat, and food provided. The train was prompt, the staff courteous, the seat comfortable, and the air-con worked nicely!

Of course, when you board a plane, all several-hundred passengers board via one or two doors, making things very rushed and stressful. The train has 1 door per carriage (= 18 doors) so boarding and exiting was a much more relaxed affair.

No seat-belts needed, nor any life-jacket demo! All in all, nice and relaxing. Oh, and power next to the seat, if you need it.

With a maximum speed of 180 MPH, it takes 2 1/2 hours to get from London to Paris (and that is IN Paris, not outside, at the airport)... By comparison, if you fly, then by the time you add in time to get to and to park at Heathrow, transfer to the terminal, check in, and walk to the gate... and collect your luggage at the far end, I reckon the trainis possibly a tad faster.... but a WHOLE LOT less stressful.

So, I arrive in Paris at tea-time last Sunday, which is of course, about an hour before kick-off (you may remember that there was a football match on Sunday, nothing important, just France vs Italy in the World Cup Final!)... and the Metro / RER was very busy with good-humoured fans, going to central Paris to watch the match & have a fun evening.

At the hotel it wasn't possible to avoid the match... about 100 yards (metres???) away, there was a set of bars, so every so often you heard a cheer or a boo go up. I decided to watch the match on TV! Being in France meant it was actually a bit of a shame when Italy beat France in the penalty shootout.

The place I stayed wasn't quite a hotel, more apartments with a small kitchen area. There was supposed to be free Internet, but unfortunately the provider's network (Wannado / Easynet France) was playing up, so was completely unable to use that! (otherwise I would have blogged from there)

Coming tomorrow... "La Defense", blue carpets and fireworks!

Not enough time.....

2006-07-08T20:29:00.000Z

I don't know where time goes... I certainly don't seem to have enough of it at the moment!

Due to work & holiday, I was due to have been out of the office for about 6 weeks (but see below), so was trying to tidy up a load of "loose-ends" at work. Succeeded doing quite a bit... building 3 servers for my colleague P, speccing up a laptop for our new German guy, and a few other bits too.

They finally fixed the computer room air conditioning this week, so on friday the "beast of an a/c" went back... giving us a bit more room in the computer room. They have also been working on fixing the office air-conditioning too.

Tomorrow I'm off to Paris (giving another training course)... decided to go by train (it gets a bit boring flying after a while!!).. so I catch a train up to Waterloo from Winchester, then walk about 200 yards to the Eurostar... sure beats Heathrow! And I arrive IN Paris, able to get the Metro to where I'm going.... I'll tell you how it goes soon!

I was due to have been going over to Brazil to give some training, but they have now sourced a "local instructor", so I'm actually back in the office in 2 weeks time (to be honest, it may SOUND fun going to Brazil, but what with a 14 hour flight each way, and the jet-lag, its really not all that fun!).

I go to Ireland to give more training (going with family, and we'll all be on holiday for the following week too), and then more training in Austria in mid August.... well, assuming they don't cancel THOSE courses on me!

Au revoir!

Just a software upgrade....

2006-07-04T23:36:00.000Z

At work, the annual renewal for our anti-virus / anti-spam sofware comes up in mid-July, so being prepared, I got the quote in plenty of time, and we placed the order, well in advance. And, a couple of weeks ago, I got the new keys for the software.

Except that the key didn't work. Ok, I'll ring tech support at the reseller. After a bit, they come back with the reason: "you are running 'ISVW 5 for SMB' but the key is for the new version, version 6". "Oh?" I say, "and when did THAT get released then?". "End of May" was the response.

So, a new major release of software comes out last week of May. Then in mid June, when I renew, I discover I need to upgrade the software. Not good.

The reseller goes away to speak to the software company.... a couple of weeks go by, and its looking that I'm gonna HAVE to do the upgrade... but WHEN? Well, as luck would have it, the course I was due to attend this week got cancelled, so I pencilled it in for yesterday.

I then read the "readme.txt". Now, version 6 brings together two versions of the software... the "Enterprise version" (version 3.4) and the "SMB version" (version 5). There is an upgrade path from 3.4, but NOT from OUR version. Bugger. It's gonna be a uninstall, fresh install, and configure from scratch. Double bugger!

Yesterday comes. We have TWO of these email virus-scanning PC's, so I can take one offline, no problems. I uninstall the old software... takes a couple of minutes. Reboot. Install the new software. All seems to go ok, and I log into the new console, spend an hour playing with it and configuring it and understanding it.

Ok, time to TEST it. Hmmm, my outlook express, which works fine with the old one, doesn't want to connect to the new version. I try it manually (telnet to port 25... useful trick!), no luck. Try it LOCALLY... even THAT fails! It seems like it's not going to work.

Time to sit down with a cuppa, and have a think. (ok, so it's just an excuse to have a break and a cup of tea!). I'm thinking there's some interaction between the OLD software (maybe it didn't REALLY uninstall 100%) and the NEW software.

Ok, what's "Plan B"? Rebuild from scratch. I decide that the servers I used for the old version are a bit crappy (850 meg single CPU, plus a single IDE hard drive), so why not use a pair of the old DL360's (dual 800 meg CPU, 1 gig ram, SCSI mirror drives). So I spent most of yesterday afternoon building Win 2003 on one server, applying all upgrades... then moved the "spare" mirror drive to the other machine, and let the 2 PC's rebuild their mirror drives (saved building a second machine, which takes 2 or 3 hours!). And yes, I DID run NewSid!

Left the machines re-mirroring & upgrading overnight, and this morning, moved the first PC into the computer room, and installed the software, and spent 30 mins or so setting it up (its always quicker second time!)... and guess what? It WORKED! Did a bit of testing, and when I was happy, put it online for a couple of hours, while I did other work and had lunch.

This afternoon, all was looking good, so I installed the software on the second PC, copied over the config files (save manually setting it up!), sorted out the config screw-ups, and brought the second machine online. Things were looking good. I'll confirm tomorrow if it really IS ok.

So, there you go, a "quick upgrade of two machines" took 2 days. Is there any wonder I was loath to try to quickly "squeeze it in" somewhere?

Oh, you'll be happy to hear that last Friday I got an email, telling me that we COULD have a license for version 5........ I really did NOT what to hear that!

Off to Universities....

2006-06-30T19:10:00.000Z

On Wednesday, M had been up to visit Oxford University, with D. Now it was MY turn.

Yesterday morning we (M and I) left the house soon after 7:30 (and boy was THAT a killer!) to go to Bristol, to the University Open Day. We parked at the Park & Ride down in Brislington, and caught the bus to town (yay for bus lanes!!!). Up the hill (and there seem to be PLENTY of those in Bristol!) to the University, and specifically the Law Department.

Bristol University Law Department is in an old building... you walk in, and whilst the corridor ahead (in the middle) continues, there are two huge polished stone staircases left & right, leading up. Into the room where the presentations are happening: nice AV setup: you can hear the speaker well, and the projector screen is HUGE! They have money in law departments! And they are looking for the top students.... they make THAT very clear. And the students will be taught by top lecturers. A couple of very good presentations, and an interesting "taster lecture". The library there is what you might expect of a law library in an older university... you could easily imagine what it was like 100 or more years ago. But quite full of reference materials.

Then off to the Student's union, which (unlike Southampton, where I went, where the union building is in the middle of the campus) is a bit away from the main niversity buildings. As is the accommodation. But I guess that is to be expected in a city-centre style of university. Had a useful "overview" presentation about life as a student in Bristol... but not quite as plush as over at the law dept!!!!

M seemed to like Bristol!

About 4pm or so, it was back to the car, then drive up to Nottingham, where we stayed in a Travelodge, but not before we went for a drive around the Nottingham University campus. We arrived at the hotel about 8:30, after having fun working out where the (NCP) car park was, and how to get to it!

By staying up there, we were all refreshed to be able to get to the university campus just before 10am. Everything was VERY well organised... straight in and parked within 5 minutes.

Wow, what an amazing setting: halls of residences at the north / west of the site, the academic buildings more to the south / east.... and some lovely green areas in the middle! Unlike Bristol, Nottingham is a campus university, with over 300 acres!

Once again, we started at the Law Department: nice, airy, modern, clean bulding. Cafe just inside. Presentations were in a HUGE lecture room (with COMFORTABLE seating for 250 plus!), automatic curtains, another excellent PA system & projector system... in other words, the law department isn't short of funding here either. Even more so than at Bristol, they make it very clear that they are looking for the best students around.

And here, like Bristol, require potential students to take an LNAT test (a special aptitude test): this is to allow them to differentiate between the "best" and the "very best". I don't think *I* would have stood a chance of geting an offer here!!!!

The Student Union is a couple of minutes away, and has obviously been well maintained an updated, with all the facilities you would expect, along with a good shop, and very pleasant "restaurants". Grabbed lunch at a BBQ just outside (specially run for the day)

Next a wander off to a couple of the "catered" Halls of Residence: these were amazingly like the rooms I had at Southampton, about xx years ago: a small "box" with a cheap (and probably uncomfortable) bed, chair, bookshelf, and aging wardrobe. The (shared) bathrooms & kitchen were pretty drab. When We walked into the first hall's main dining room, it was SO like the Hall I was in: wooden panels on the wall, and a raised stage at far end for the SCR.

M is also considering doing Maths, so we next went over to the Mathematics Building... talk about "chalk and cheese": THIS is what *I* remember university being like. An older (but "modern") building, desperately in need of a revamp... you can tell that the department doesn't have the same sort of available money that the law department does (I guess its something to do with the level of sponsorship that law firms can afford, to persuade top law graduates to come & work for them!!!!!).

The day finished about 3pm: we left about 3:30, after sitting in the car having a cup of tea! I must admit, Nottingham organised an EXCELLENT open day.

Then it was back home... for a Friday afternoon, the traffic was amazingly pleasant, and we were home well before 7pm.

I asked M which of the two he would prefer: whilst I would have chosen Nottingham (I'm not a great lover of city-centres), M says he would go for Bristol. Each to their own I guess. And I'll support him (in more ways than one :-) ) wherever he goes.

So, a couple of interesting (and WARM!) days...

Another day in Woking

2006-06-27T16:36:00.000Z

I spent most of the day visiting a customer in Woking.... wow, wasn't THAT exciting!

Tis Tuesday, which means I'll be off to the studios later on: tonight we need to start to put together a report to the hospital detailing how much space we would need should we have to move premises.

Thursday and Friday I'll be on holiday... but not THAT sort of holiday. Thursday I'll be taking M up to Bristol Uni to have a look around. Afterwards (ie late afternoon) we'll drive up to Nottingham & stay overnight, ready to spend the day looking at Nottingham University. Well, it could be worse, I could have had to be at work, or even driving to see a customer!

It feels like Christmas....

2006-06-24T16:46:00.000Z

The postman knocked on the door today (or maybe he rang the bell!), and delivered not ONE but TWO packages. They were both things I had bought on eBay:

a) A Nokia 1600 mobile phone with charger.. in excelelnt condition bar a couple of minor scratches from use: at under £25, an excellent buy. It was locked to T-Mobile (I'm on O2) but that was not a problem: over to UnlockMe.co.uk where I got an unlock code within a couple of hours, which worked fine!

b) A Pinnacle TV tuner card with composite & S-video inputs. This went into the server PC, so I can plug the Web Cam into it... one day, I'm hoping to get some software to allow people to remote control the camera over the web! Could be a laugh! Had to download the software, but once I did that, it burst into life (just took a bit of time working out WHICH version I needed! The first one wasn't right!)

So, 2 more successful purchases from eBay! Hurrah for eBay!

The bike passed ok...

2006-06-23T18:49:00.000Z

Youngest son C (11 yrs old) is doing cycle training at the moment. Yesterday, as you will have read, his replacement bike was all working, so today was his first real chance to try it.

As part of the training, the bike was inspected... you know, do the brakes work, does it have wheels & tyres etc etc... and it PASSED! Hopefully I'll now get a little bit of peace about the bike!

On the work front, did I tell you the latest in the computer room air-conditioning saga? The other day, the built-in system died AGAIN... but this time they didn't rush to repair it, as, next week, I believe, they should have some parts in to PROPERLY repair / replace the external heat exchangers. In the meantime, the rented 6kW unit (normal home aircon unit is about 2 kW) and the new 3kw unit have just about been coping. Before coming home tonight, we dumped the little 2kW unit in there too, and turned off as much as we could: I just hope the 3 units cope ok over the weekend!

Taunton here I came...

2006-06-22T21:11:00.000Z

Work took me to a customer in Taunton... which is about 2 or so hours away. The worst bit, for me, isn't so much the length of drive, but the fact that I *know* I'll be stuck, at some point, behind a truck or horsebox on the single-carriageway part of the trip.

Was due there about 10:30, so left at 8:30.... yes, I *did* get stuck behind slow traffic, and got there at 10:40, so not TOO bad. No sign of the guy I was due to meet, and he turned up about 15 mins later (which meant I didn't feel anywhere near so bad for being only 10 mins late!

Now, what usually happens on these sort of visits is that I end up staying on site till about 4pm or later, then get caught in traffic, and get home late. But today was MUCH nicer. A little before 3:30pm, the customer said he was very happy with what we had done, and said he needed to leave now... I didn't disagree, so left too, and managed to MISS the worst of the traffic (well, apart from a couple of trucks and a horse-box!) and was home by 5:45!

Took C's bike (M's old one, that I've just spent 35 quid on bits to fix) round to Halfords to get the pedals sorted out... we had problems, but managed to sort things out, so C now has a more useful (24" wheels) bike he can use, especially for his Cycling Proficiency training he's doing.

Back in the office tomorrow, need to organise trains & hotel for Paris (2nd week July).

Oh, I promised to tell you how much we raised on Saturday at Sainsbury's... I am told we were about 100 quid up on last year, being a few pennies under £800! Now THAT makes the long day on Saturday worthwhile!

Another week...

2006-06-21T20:25:00.000Z

Monday: at work, Hospital Radio in evening... still tired from the weekend, but managed to collect a few requests.

Tuesday: up to London, first of all to the Passport Office: very impressed, they really seem to have got things right as far as the queuing goes. After that, on to a customer, where I had a bit of a crappy day... a few problems, mainly caused by the customer not really knowing what they are doing! Hospital Radio in evening, where we finally put the kit from Saturday away!

Wednesday (today): Morning up to Woking... traffic quite light, kit installed a dream. Seems the air-conditioning died again, but the rented unit plus the big bought unit are just about coping.

Need to start working out travel details for my many trips over the next couple of months. My trip to Munich to receiev training (1st week July) is cancelled. 2nd week of July is Paris. I also have trips lined up to Austria, Brazil and Ireland (where the whole family is going for a holiday too).

I'm already looking forward to September, when I hope to be in England for more than a week at a time!

The end of a tiring week...

2006-06-18T14:04:00.000Z

Yesterday, you may remember, was WHR's annual Outside Broadcast from Sainsbury's. I had managed to find (from local paper / internet) a "man and a van" to collect & return the staging, and we were due to meet at the school that lends us the stage (in exchange for a donation to the "school fund") at 7:45, So I got there just before. G, the caretaker was already there, and we got the staging out.

S, the "man" with the van, arrived a few minutes early (excellent!) and the van has a TAIL LIFT! Oh, what luxury! D was meeting us there to help lift the stage into the van, and we were ALL pleased to not have to strain our backs this year!

So, off to Sainsbury's, slightly ahead of schedule, and whilst the others put the stage together, and erected the gazebo, I sorted out the mains power. In the past we have used a generator, but this year we had negotiated to be allowed to used a mains feed over the roadway.... so I routed the wire to a nicely provided "hook", and ran the wire in the air to a 10ft tall "mast" (attached to the stage & guyed back to a sign), on the way, putting some bits of white tape on the wire to make it visible. More of that later!

By the time that was done, the stage was up (a bit longer than normal, as the school had bought a bit more staging!) and the gazebo almost done. Whilst the team put all the audio kit together, I built the transmitting aerial (think of a 3 element VHF aerial, then double the size.... 6 ft long, 10 ft wide) and put ot onto the mast that gets roped to a convenient sign.

This year I let N plug the transmitter in (I screwed it up last year, not gonna do it THIS year!).... the SWR looked good, so, at 9:40 (on air time was 10:00) I returned to the studios, to hear the signal coming in nice & strong, but with a bit of "buzz"... we played for 5 mins, and reduced it noticibly.

So, just before 10am I call the OB back.... I'll play an 11 second jingle up to the hour, they should clock-start on the hour. I listen to what's playing out on the playout system, and realise that the track will finish, and I don't want 5 seconds of another song starting, so it's fader up and "well, we'll be taking you live to Sainsbury's Badger farm in just a moment...." and play the jingle... and at 10:00:00 I hear the jungle come in from the OB.

So, with a big smile on my face, it's back to Sainsbury's, where N & I agree that it's probably been the least stressful setup & start for a few years!

The day was HOT!

The format for the day was to have 4 x 1 hour "specialist shows": Strict Tempo Dancetime, Big Band / Jazz, Country & Western, and 60s / 70s / 80s. This was interspersed with 4 x 1/2 "Top 100 requests" slots. I was doing the last one of these.

All went well... just before my slot, S was playing something from the 80's (probably one of the most "up to date" tracks of the day" when a lady comes by, complaining "why do you have to play this pop music?" ... to which a couple of us replied "well, you should have been here this morning!". I added "or wait 10 mins till MY show starts!

I actually chose music she would have liked... Dean Martin and Chopin were included. And a request for Freddy & the Dreamers.

Just before 4pm, I remind J that he's supposed to go to the studios and take th OB "off air"... 5 mins later get a phone call... he doesn't have keys!! Heck, if that's the biggest problem of the day, I can live with it!!!!!! We send B off to let him in!

We finish, as planned, at 4pm. Now "all we have to do" is take the kit to bits again, load it up, ande take it back to the studios! S (the "man" with the van) arrives a bit early, at 4:45, and load the stage for us, and we all go back to unload the cars.

On the way I go to the school, to make sure the van is unloaded ok, but also to see the Headmistress (the school had it's summer fete, so she was still there) to pass her the "donation", but more importantly to wish her well on here retirement!

And, you might think, that was the end to the day... but it wasn't, as Sa and I had to collect some requests, and present a 2 hour request show! We only had a few, but one young patient had requested several, and also phoned us a few times during the show.

At about 10:30, we finally went home... absolutely, erm.... "tired out", after a very tiring, but very successful, day.

Oh, I forgot to relate the fun of the overhead cable: N nearly died when the small bus that runs between town & Sainsburys sped under it (luckily it had good clearance). A bit later we see a full-sized coach enter the car-park... oops! So went & warned the driver (who was very pleasant about it). He carefully approached the cable, I got up on the step-ladder on the stage.... we decided that if (a) he closed his roof vents and (b) we pulled on the mast to raise the cable a bit, he would make it under.... he did, with about 2 inches to spare!!! little did we realise that he would return later on, and we'd do the same thing again (I would have said "but that time it was a lot simpler", but not only was I holding the mast, I was in the middle of doing a live link in my bit of the show!!! So maybe NOT so simple!)

Of course, it was church this morning, and I was still aching and tired from yesterday... but I did manage to stay awake!

When the pics are available, and we know how much we raised, I'll let you know.

It's a WHR week...

2006-06-15T16:18:00.000Z

Well, that's what it feels like:

Monday : collected requests

Tuesday: Engineering evening (we had to get everything ready for this coming Saturday)

Wednesday: Visit to Patientline (was useful, coz we finally had a chance to listen properly to our output, and actually SEE our interface box. We realise that our signal is a tiny bit too high (no more than 5 or 10%), but the interface box IS giving crappy bass (maybe we can pre-boost it?)

Thursday: Need to pop in, to finalise presenters & music for Saturday

Friday: Station meeting (actually looking forward to this one, got some good listening figures to show our "disbelievers"... assuming they come along)

Saturday: Sainsbury's Outside Broadcast: start by collecting stage at 7:45 am! Broadcast from 10am to 4pm. Then doing show in evening! I'm gonna be knackered by 10pm!

Sunday: Go to church (hey, NOT a WHR day!!!!)

It suddenly got all hot....

2006-06-12T14:34:00.000Z

The weather last week over in Zurich was blue skies & sunny, but "pleasant". My return to England on Saturday was a shock... it was hot & sticky! I'm not used to it getting like that in England!

Now, up until a couple of years ago, I dreaded this time of year... I would be dosing on anti-histamines to stop me getting itchy eyes, nose & mouth, but would still suffer tiredness due to Hay Fever.

Last year, after an Easter visit to the US, I had a Hay Fever free year. No pills, no itching... it was lovely! I have suffered from Hay Fever now for some 28 years, and the thought that I may have finally "grown out of it" was a nice one.

So, would I REALLY be free of it? I have been awaiting this summer with trepidation, waiting for signs of itchy nose or eyes, sneezing, runny nose.... and here we are, well into June, no anti-histamines, and no Hay Fever!!!

Yesterday I did the PA system for an outdoor church service (BBQ afterwards!) ... I *did* have a couple of sneezes, but it never got any worse. So I think I am!!!!!

Today was fun (not): we arrived in to find the computer room air conditioning had failed again over the weekend, meaning we had a rather warm computer room. We had a couple of other small air con units in there, but they aren't really able to cool enough... tried to buy another one down at B&Q (sold out! what a surprise!) so ended up renting one. It arrived this afternoon, shortly after they "fixed" the old air con system (still don't trust it), so we now have a small "beast" of a unit (6.1 kW = 21,000 BTU) running too.... finally the temperature is down to a sensible level again!

Switzerland!

2006-06-09T15:39:00.000Z

I have been giving a training course in Zurich for 3 days, so I came over on Tuesday afternoon, and managed to go out cache hunting in the evening. Due to some major building works, the paths / roads I would have used were not so much closed, as non-existant in places!

So I had a bit of a detour.... but I finally got to the place: an interesting covered bridge over the local river. Unfortunately it also seems to be a popular place for the local teens to meet, so I didn't dare search for the cache, lest the location be compromised.

But it was, nevertheless, a nice bit of exercise, and it's always nice to get out of the hotel.

The training location is a couple of miles away, in an office block above a large shopping centre, which includes a HUGE "Migros" store (huge as in 4 floors, food at bottom, electricals and clothing further up). There used to be a couple of caches near there, but they have both been lost for the time being.

Whilst I say "I'm in Zurich", I'm actually several miles outside Zurich... the hotel is in an industrial area, so there's nothing much around here... so unless I get a taxi, I have to eat in the hotel. And there's no other caches nearby either.

The course finished about today at 4pm, and I had thought about going into the city, but I'm so tired after both the training and a lack of sleep (I never sleep well at hotels) that I won't bother.... so "another place visited that I've not really seen"!

The hotel is rather nice: The Renaissance Hotel, with 4 well deserved stars! The room (actually TWO rooms) are quite spacious... the bedroom includes a bed that is so wide, it's wider than my out-stretched arms (so maybe 6ft 6ins wide?) The "lounge" room is the same size as the bedroom / bathroom, with desk, a second (big) TV, 2 armchairs and a small sofa. Oh, and fast, free, wireless internet!

When I booked the room (not cheap, but I'm not paying!) it ended up being one of the "club" rooms, which means I get to use the club lounge along the corridor, which is where we also get our breakfast (instead of the other hundreds of guests who use the main restaurant areas!). Oh, along with coffee & cakes etc available early evening.

Of course, there is the statutory "Spa & Fitness" centre down in the basement, complete with all those "sweat-making" machines: of course, I won't be using those, but I may be tempted by the pool with the jacuzzi!

Reception has a lovely staircase to the next floor, with a large fish pond containing something like a dozen huge Koi Carp.

Sadly, it's back to the real world tomorrow :-(

another title needed....

2006-06-04T17:38:00.000Z

Sundays can be quite boring... today was no difference. What have I done today?

- slept in late for a change
- got up
- put cat 5 lan cable from garage to shed
- tried to make Nintendo DS work with new Draytek wireless router (it doesn't!)
- logged onto Simon G's chatroom

I need a cuppa.....

Goodnight!

Another saturday night....

2006-06-03T16:28:00.000Z

It's been very much a Hospital Radio week this has: Monday I collected requests, and did a few other bits; Tuesday was engineering night, and I did some... I fitted a new toilet cistern! Wednesday was a night off.

Thursday was a committee meeting.... in fact a very pleasant meeting, and the first for a LONG time that felt very positive. N had done some graphs from the patient listening figures, and compared to 3 years ago (before we made the "big changes") things look a lot better, which kinda vindicates what we've been doing.

Last night I visited one of the wards, and then presented the request show.. we had about a dzen requests, and had 3 phone calls from patients during the show. I'm back there tonight with son M, and we will visit & present the show.

On the ADSL side, I'll be changing ISP very soon... in preparation I now have a nice new Draytek Vigor 2800 VG router. I must admit, I'm VERY impressed! Nice menu system, plenty of features too. The reasons for getting the new router were (a) ready for 8 meg; (b) wireless.

I tried out someone else's USR ADSL 2 router with wireless, and wasn't impressed with it's wireless performance (neither was he, part the reason he was getting rid of it!!). But this Draytek's wireless performance is noticibly better. It's also faster online too.

It also has a couple of voice ports on it, so once I've worked out what I can do with them (yes, I know, you plug a phone in!!... I'm meaning what I can set it up to do!) I shall be playing with that.

Next week I shall be over in Zurich... the hotel has free broadband, so I'm hoping I'll be able to tell you what its like over there! I even have a cache lined up to do!

How much power does a computer room use?

2006-05-31T19:16:00.000Z

Well, with everything turned on, our computer room at work uses about 10 or 11 kW... that's almost 4 x 3kw fires on full. If we turn off the training servers, and other non-essentials, it goes down to almost 6kW.

And if the air-conditioning starts to play up, it gets hot quite quickly!!! Which is what happened today! So we opened the window, turned off a few machines, stole all the fans (3) in the building, and kept things working.

A nice man came last thing to make a temporary fix.... the AC system needs replacing, and will get replaced, we're just arguing who pays for it!

Another bank holiday already?

2006-05-29T23:27:00.000Z

Actually had a pretty lazy day today.... went and spent FAR too much money at 7dayshop.com ... about 2 or 3 years ago, I bought a 256k SD card from them... it cost around £65!! They now cost about £6.50! The 1 gig one only cost £17! And a tenner for an MP3 player for C, plus a load of cannon ink tanks for M (at 99p each!).

Hospital radio again tonight (it's Monday!)... very quiet on the wards, only got a small handful of requests. Part of the issue is that it's Bank holiday, so there seem to have been no new admissions. Also, they had the windows open (so it was a bit cooler for a change) which probably meant the patients were all zonked out after so much fresh air! Had bad news on one ward... a nice lady I've visited a few times, and always had nice requests from, has sadly died. Its so much nicer when they manage to get well, and can go home.

Must remember that we have a commitee meeting on Thursday.

This time next week I'll be in Switzerland! Not sure if that is good or bad. I have to travel out on Sunday, which isn't so good.

Another Lazy Sunday

2006-05-28T20:05:00.000Z

The only problem with watching TV late (or maybe that should be "early"!!) is that you feel rather tired the next day.

I went to church, came back, read the paper, eat lunch, then snuck upstairs for a snooze!

I guess I really MUST sort out this Saturday rota for WHR.......

'Transformation through stretching'

2006-05-27T14:30:00.000Z

Our church is in the middle of a series called "Transformations", and this week will be about 'Transformation through stretching'....

So what, you ask.

Well, I got this phone call from M, asking if I could be interviewed during the service about my involvement in Hospital Radio.... which M knows well has been VERY strething for me in the last couple of years!

Here's the questions he sent me, and that I'm going to be answering.... I thought you you might like to see the (very short versions of the) answers too!

1) Tell us a little about what WHR is what what it does.

We provide a "radio station" specifically for the patients at the RHCH (hospital): currently for 22 hours a day this comed from a computer, and we have a 2 hour request programme. We visit the wards regularly (about 3 times a week) and chat with the patients, and get a request from them. The most important thing is that we are playing THEIR sort of music, and for their age group (mostly 50 or 60+)... there's not a lot around for them elsewhere.

2) How did you get involved in WHR?

22 years ago, the hospital was fed from Southampton, but a small team there wanted to improve things for the patients in Winchester. I worked with one of them, and he asked if I would word-process (a new thing then) their report.

The next think he asked was "would I be their Chief Engineer?"... its diffucult to say "no" to something that is so important like HR.

3) What jobs have you done there.

I was very much a "techie" to start with. S had designed much of the equipment, and I ended up building it & getting it all working (with a bit of help).

I took a break after WHR went on air, then was invited back to design & build a new studio complex... again a lot of techie work, but also project managing to some extent. It was fun because we were building bits of electronics that we'd never normally do, and someone else was paying for my hobby!

More recently, we've realised that we have more than a management role, we are also trustees, and as such need to be "looking forward"....

About 3 or 4 years ago, we felt that the organisation wasn't quite on the "right track" any more, and started to work on what we SHOULD be doing... Around this time, we found that we needed someone to lead the Programming team... which I did jointly to start with. Last year, I took on the role of "Programme Controller" alone (with lots of support) , but in addition to still being Chief Engineer.

Last year we finally implemented some major changes.... but more of that in a moment...

4) Talk us through the pictures (from the website).

(go look at "www.whr.org.uk" and take the "studio tour".... you'll see what our studios look like!

5) What are the particular challenges you have faced recently?

As I said, we felt that we weren't really "doing Hospital Radio" the way it should be... we spent a lot of time chatting to people at other stations (which we do at the regular HBA conferences... last one was up at Blackpool, when I was at last able to give BACK some of that advice!!) and to each other, and felt that we needed to make some changes... not just "major changes", more like "drastic changes".... despite consulting our members (and getting little feedback... we believe there was a feeling of "they will never do anything, it's justv talk") when we actually announced the changes, there was a lot of opposition from a small group.

The problem we kept asking ourselves was "are WE right" or "are THEY right"... but the more we spoke to others around the country the more we felt that we WERE actually doing the right thing.

Now, I don't know about the others, but as a christian, I also prayed about it. I've never had a "curtain tearing" response, but everything I did said "keep going".... so i did.

Lst October we mad the "drastic changes"... we have since lost a few of our more experienced presentes, meaning those of us left are much busier, but we are now 100% happy that what we did was the right thing: the feedback we now get from our listeners, the patients, is so positive. We walk into a ward with our "WHR folder" to collect a request, and many patients know exactly why we are there"!

6) How have you faced these challenges?

We spent a lot of time discussing what we were doing amongst ourselves. As I said, I certainly prayed for guidance (in fact, historically, I have even prayed to question if HR was a good thing to do... all I ever felt was that it was) and have only had good feelings (ok, plus a lot of stress at times!) about what we were doing.

We kept on doing what we felt was right, and are now 100% happy that we did the right thing.

We now have to build up the strength and size of WHR again, so we can expand what we are doing... all part of our original plans.

7) Now we are going to pray for you and WHR.

Moving ISP, part 1: preparation....

2006-05-24T20:08:00.000Z

I decided a while ago that I pay FAR to much to BT for my ADSL, so I'm preparing to move.

Of course, moving ISP is not that simple... for a start, I have a couple of websites that sit on my BT-provided web space. Plus my email, whilst I have my own domains, needs to be forwarded somewhere for me to collect.. again, I currently use BT.

Now, once I move, my new ISP will provide me with webspace and email, but there will be a slight "gap" in the middle, during the move, and I don't want any hassles of losing email etc.

So today, I started thinking about the web pages... I need some web space. Then I had sudden inspiration: my brother has ADSL (in fact I'm planning to use the same ISP) and doesn't use his web space, so I can copy my pages over to his space, update my web page forwarding, and all will be ok.

So ran up CuteFTP (a really GREAT FTP program!) and sucked all my web pages down from BT, then pushed tem onto my brother's space.... took about 15 or 20 minutes, no problems. Next, go to simply.com, and update the web forwarding... and guess what! Wrong, it WORKED FIRST TIME!!!

Ok, what about my email... again, my brother's ISP account solved this: he can have multiple mail accounts.. so set one up for me, and set up my Outlook Express. Send an email... oh, look, there it is, worked first time, no problems.

Ok, now onto simply.com again, and redirect all my email to he new account & test... again, it worked first time.

For sending my email, I use a programme called "mady", which lets me send email directly to users, so in principle, that will continue to work. There is only one more thing to do: check that I can get the new ISP to allow me to relay email from my domains via them, when someone won't accept the email directly.

So, almost ready for a change of ISP, and things are looking good!

Hospital Radio days...

2006-05-23T23:04:00.000Z

Monday and Tuesday are my regular Hospital Radio days... last night, I did the visiting (at the moment we are the only weekday that doesn't have a visitor) and R did the presenting.

Tuesdays is more on an engineering night, but I do try and do a few live links down the phone from the wards (saves the hassles of setting up the OB kit) between 8 and 9, with A in the studios... that seems to work quite well.

Also tonight we had a visitor from another HR station... he had a problem with a button on a mini-disc player (and non-portable mini-disc players ar NOT easy to find these days!)... so it was a case of doing a bit of micro-surgery, and I did manage to fix it!

Another job we had to do was a follow up to last week's bit of plumbing... at lunchtime I nipped over to B&Q and got a new trap for the sink in the ladies, plus some pipe & elbows, and I re-piped the waste from the sink... took about 15 to 20 minutes, and was 100% successful.

N brought along some Patientline listening figures which he put into a spreadsheet, and produced some useful graphs... whilst the actual listener numbers aren't especially high, most nights between 8 and 10 (when we do our request show, live) we are well above the other radio stations, which is good news. The noticible dips were (a) european football final; (b) euorovision song contest!

Oh, almost forgot, we had a power cut at work. The great news was that the UPS did its job perfectly, and none of our servers were directly affected! we made sure our boss was aware of the fact too.... the UPS cost a load of ££££!!

Another task out of the way at last...

2006-05-21T19:19:00.000Z

The only problem with being a "nice helpful sort of person" is that, if you'r not careful, you end up offering to do to many things! It's not that I mind doing them, but I have to somehow fit them into my life (and then find the enthusiasm to do it!).

A few months ago now I offered to design & build a "Myriad & IRN switch box" for the guys up at Basingstoke HR... and the good news is that today I managed to not just get it working, but also fit it into a plastic box, with connectors & indicators! I'll be seeing N on Tuesday, so I'll be able to tell him (and SHOW him) the good news!

Last week I applied online for an EHIC card (replaces the E111, lets you get medical treatment in EEC)... it arrived yesterday, and I managed to remember today to apply for one for D, plus ones for the kids.

The weekend, at last!

2006-05-20T22:01:00.000Z

Yesterday I did indeed go to London... nothing exciting happened thus no blog about it....

Today I went to Maplins in Southampton: I needed some components for something I'm building for the Hospital Radio up at Basingstoke.... and of course, they had close to no stock of what I needed... nor of anything at all close... Which means I'll need to order online, and then pay for the priviledge of them posting it to me. Such is life.

Stood in for someone on the Saturday Rota at Winchester HR, so ended up with just the 2 of us. I maneged to get there early, so had enough time to cololect request on a couple of wards, and S did the other ward when she arrived. A nice low-stress show... not a huge number of requests (and only one for the second hour) so played a couple of long classical tracks... something we don't get the chance to do very often: Bach's Tocatta and Fugue, and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

Must must MUST get mum's card in the post tomorrow, otherwise there may be a death... mine!

Team meeting....

2006-05-18T20:14:00.000Z

It was the day for the IT department (all 5 of us) meeting.... and nothing momentous happened! Ok, so our boss is shocked at the costs involved with buying Microsoft server licenses (well, it is about 500 quid per server!), so I have been tasked with listing our servers, what they do, and whether some of their functionallity could be merged... which I've almost done.

We talked about various aspects of doing consultancy... from setting expectations, to our issues about when we are expected to install something that we have little experience with. Nothing really new.

I also need to help P with putting together a slightly more detailed "hit list" for our IT strategy... so that will give me something to work on next week.

On the Hospital Radio front, we just received the first of our "Broadcaster's Bulletins", which lists daily events and birthdays, which saves me having to trawl through Wikepedia to pull them out (which takes AGES).

Off to visit a customer up in London tomorrow, in Moorgate... I've been there before, and its qhite a pleasant place, nice staff. Just have to get up a bit early.....

Well, it started off dry...

2006-05-17T18:24:00.000Z

Had a problem with remote printing in NL to sort out, so run the guys in Canada at just after 11am (yeah, one of them gets up real early to cover European calls)... no reply, so left a message. Left the relevant server offline (well, there are another 8 to work on).

The rest of the day was relatively quiet... B from NL called, could I install the corporate anti-virus on his PC? (well, I *did* offer!) "Yeah, ok, should only take ten minutes"..... ok, that will teach me! 2 remote take-overs, 3 reboots and 90 minutes later we had it licked (the "auto-uninstall" of Symantec AV wasn't 100%, also had to remove the Lavasoft firewall). But we can now track the PC on the corporate AV system.

We have a departmental meeting tomorrow, so over a cuppa, C and I had a chat about what we need to put in a "strategy for IT" list... Backup strategy, for example. Are we happy with Backup Exec (if so, P needs some training), or maybe we would like to investigate offsite realtime backups?

Decided to go & get LRP (the Linux Router Project).... discoverd it died a couple of years ago, but ther is another version available. Downloaded it, and tried it on a server.... but it didn't find the LAN cards.... which wasn't too surprising coz when I read the words, the Intel cards weren't "on the list" were they".

Was about to leave when the phone rang: it was the guys I had called this morning... their phone system had been playing up. Explained the problem..."try this" he said.... I did, and it fixed the problem nicely... just need to do it on the other 8 servers tomorrow,

Drove home.... it was raining!

Another Exciting day...

2006-05-16T22:17:00.000Z

Yesterday I fixed the Dutch VPN.... got theGerman one working in about 30 minutes today too! And did a few other bits too, so another good day at work.

Hospital Radio tonight... went up and presented some requests from the patient bedsides... I enjoy doing that, coz you break up the boredom for the patients, and get to play them a piece of music they like... and as one patient commented, music can bring back such vivid memories. Many smiles tonight, so well worth the effort.

Looks like I'm going to London on Friday to visit a customer... luckily they are a VERY nice customer, and have no problems with me leaving at a sensible time, so I can get back to Winchester not long after 6pm. Of course, Friday evening means it will be busier earlier.

We have a team meeting on Thursday... I've suggested that, now the IT stuff is pretty stable, we should start looking ahead a bit more.... what we want to do, how we want to do it.

Got some info about my trip to Switzerland in June... so I now know where I'll be going (outskirts of Zurich, not a huge trip to the airport) and have some suggested hotels nearby. It's been about 25 to 30 years since I last went to Switerland, when I was in Berne.

Mum's birthday next week, and Callum's the week after... mustn't forget!

Back to the office...

2006-05-15T23:55:00.000Z

First time in the office for a week or so today (I was out being trained last week, if you remember), so time to catch up.

About 3 weeks ago, our VPN to The Netherlands stopped working.... it was wierd, the VPN itself was fine, just the windows 2003 box wouldn't route the data. After spending far too many hours on it, we chose plan B: get the spare little router box over from The Netherlands... That was duly plugged in, and *appeared* to work... but it didn't... for some odd reason, some devices on the network couldn't ping the box, other only did so intermittantly. My PC had no problems of course. We tried a few things (my colleague in the office, me remotely), but again, nothing worked.

Today I decided I would upgrade the little router... nothing ventured, nothing gained. Oddly enough, it FIXED it!!!!!

So, just when we were feeling pleased with ourselves, the phone system stopped working.... and the big UPS started making a loud beeping (which is odd coz the phone system wasn't ON the UPS!... it is now though!). A few minutes investigation discovered one of the two PSUs was dead (and the act of dying had created a mains glitch that upset the UPS!) Luckily, we pulled a couple of cards, and had it running on one PSU. After work, we got out the spare chassis and fitted it ... all working again (but we no longer have a spare PSU!)

After work and a rushed dinner, went up to the hospital to collect requests (got 10... not bad for 45 minutes), and then to the studio to present a 2 hour request show, which went ok... even had someone call in with a request for Dire Straights.

I wonder what excitement there will be tomorrow.....

SATURDAY:

2006-05-14T13:12:00.000Z

D plays cello... she's done so since school, and has played in several orchestras over the years. Over the more recent years (something to do with having kids I guess :-) ) she's not played in orchestras, but DOES play every couple of weeks in a "quartet" (which, I gather, varies is size from 3 to 5!). Several months ago, she went with a couple of the others from the quartet, over to Worthing, where a group of musicians got together as an orchestra, to play for the day.... she quite enjoyed the day, so today she went again! She left at about 8am... of course, we were all still asleep, and returned at about 6pm. Seems she enjoyed it again, so I'm sure she'll go again next time.

Which meant that "we lads" (me, Mike [17] and Callum [10]) were able to go out to Southampton, where we found a Pizza Hut and stuffed ourselves with "all you can eat for £5.49". Oh, ok, we also wandered around the shops too... didn't find much, so dropped into ASDA on the way back, where we DID buy a few clothes.

Mike had another driving lesson this evening... he started driving around a quiet industrial estate, and then the instructer let him drive through Winchester City centre!! Sounds like he's coping well. Which reminds me, need to sort out insurance on D's car so Mike can drive it... boy, does that push the premiums up!

Watch out for a dark blue peugeot 106 being driven by a skinny lad with curly hair! Don't panic... just run!

This week.....

2006-05-12T20:57:00.000Z

Those of you who know me know that I'm a "Technical Support Consultant"... fancy title, what it really means is that I:

- provide pre- and post-sales support for (a subset of) the products that my company sells
- I give training for a few of the products (to end users and resellers)
- I visit (paying) customers to provide services for the above products
- I provide in-house support for our own computers & network

It has been decided that I should take on a new product (for support, luckily NOT for training!), and to that end I've spent the last week on a training course... this was, of course, only decided the previous week!

The problem with going on training is that it can actually be quite tiring... you are taking on so much new info, that your brain starts to suffer.

Now, I'm in Winchester, the training was in Maidstone... that's an hour's drive on clear roads.... so leaving at 7:20am, to arrive before 9.00 would sound fairly reasonable, wouldn't it? Well, the weather was nasty, and there were huge queues due to the A329M being closed, so I didn't arrive until 9:50am!!!!!

I was starting to wonder if this was going to be a daily problem, but the journey home was only an hour, and in fact, all my other journeys took no more than 75 minutes... so Monday morning was just unfortunate.

All went well on the course until Thursday. I should explain that on Thursday, Debbie was also due to be away, so I took her down to the station at 7:15... which in itself wouldn't have been so bad apart from the fact that I went to bed late, and slept badly. Add to that a fairly heavy day on the course...... At about 3pm, we had an exercise to do.... I managed the first bit, but then just sat there, staring at the PC, not really knowing what to do..... my brain had (for the first time in a long time) simply frozen & given up! I quickly realised what had happened, so didn't even try to continue, but instead tried to watch what the guy next to me was doing.

The whole episode rather shook me.... I know I was NOT feeling right in the car driving home. When I got home, I dived into the bedroom for some zzzz's .... waking up a couple of hours later, and had an early night.

Today was the last day of the course, I was rather more awake, plus it ended early!!! What more could you ask for on such a nice day!

Back Again!

2006-05-12T20:40:00.000Z

I realise that it's been AGES since the last time I blogged, so here's a quick summary of things that have happened since then:

- We moved office (with under 2 weeks notice)
- I earned good brownie points for fronting much of the technical side of the move
- I finally got a payrise in the new year
- There was talking with potential new employer: nothing came of it then, but the door is not closed
- I took on a new product at work, which I am now training, which has already taken me to Dubai and Munich

Debbie is away tomorrow, which means that us 3 men (ok, 1 man and 2 boys) can go *out* for lunch for a change!!!

Oh, and the car is STILL just as crap as when I got it, but as I said, it's paid-for by the company!

Paul

2005-08-14T14:21:00.000Z

Well, the saga of the car has a reasonable ending.....

As you will remember, my car is a company lease car, but they are not taking on any more lease cars, and we have to run our own (on a pittance). And then, at the last moment, I was offered the car from someone who is leaving.... but didn't know when it would be available.

Well, they extended the lease on the old car for a week, so I went up to Yorkshire in the Peugeot 806 (MPV).. and then after, up to Manchester on business.

Last Wednesday, I finally swapped cars, and now have a black Mitsubishi Shogun Sport, just under 2 years old, with 44,000 miles on the clock. It sounds really great, doesn't it? Well, let me compare it to my old car:

- has 2.5 litre vs 2.0 litre engine (hmmm, sounds great....)
- but is only 114 bhp (vs 110 bhp)
- manages 21 MPG (vs 41 mpg)
- max speed is 93 mph (vs 109)

So, here we have a marvelous 4WD "poser-mobile" that is actually worse than an MPV on many counts.......

If I now add in:

- only 5 (vs 7) seats
- not as comfotable, especially in the back
- no tow bar (yet)
- not big enough to easily take a bike (or 3) inside

Maybe if I was about 20 years younger, I'd enjoy having such a car, but at my age, it's "really not quite me"... And thank goodness it doesn't have "bull bars".... I really would NOT have coped with that!

Oh, the GOOD news... especially at 21MPG: the company still pays for the fuel! However, the lease ends in October 2006, so I only have it for 15 months.

So, my stress levels have finally managed to reduce a bit.....

2005-07-27T18:17:00.000Z

Hmmm, the ongoing saga of the car continues.....

I was, until Monday, still hoping to buy my Peugeot 806, that's been on company lease for the last 4 years.... the lease runs out on 5th August (erm, that's 9 days time!)

Now, if you remember, back at the end of May, the engine died (camchain broke... not nice): the car went to an engine specialist for repair. They tried to get a reconditioned engine, but no luck, so they had to repair the existing engine

When the car was finally returned, it wasn't 100%... between 2200RPM and 2800RPM, in 3rd gear and above, there was a noticible engine vibration when the engine was under load - it felt very similar to the sort of vibration you get when a wheel is unbalanced.

It went to the garage in Newbury, for a minor service, and for them to pass comment on the engine.... they were very non-commital on the latter. So, last Friday it went to the garage in Winchester... yes, they DID confirm there was a vibration in the engine, and it ought to go back to the place that did the repair. That COULD have happened this week.... but I would have been left without a car. Besides, if they worked on the engine to find more money was needed to fix it, the lease company would NOT have paid.

The end result is that I could end up with a car with a dodgy engine. That was the point I decided NOT to buy the 806.

So, there I am, a week and a half to go, and need to now buy a car. Having been out looking at lunchtime, I realised I needed a day off, to go find a car... so off to my boss to explain why I needed a day off.

Realising my plight, he makes a useful suggestion: another member of staff has just handed in his notice, and he has a lease car (nothing fancy, just a Mitsubishi Shogun!!!), I could have that! Now that was GOOD news: (a) it would save me the panic of buying a car; (b) I'd not be stuck with a crappy £4000 p/a + 12p/mile allowance to run my own car; (c) I'd be better off overall!

However, life is never simple: MY car lease runs out a week this Friday (oh, I forgot to mention, I'm actually ON HOLIDAY next week!), and noone yet knows when this other car would be available.

So, its the Wednesday 2 or 3 days before hoping to go northwards on holiday, I don't know IF I'll have a car, and if I do, WHICH car I'll have.... and maybe I'll have to return on Friday 5th to swap cars.

I'm guessing that, at 5:25 on Friday evening, someone might tell me the news about a car.

Paul

Blitzy's mutterings.....

Getting new hearing aids fitted

OMG, so much has happened

We're painting the roses red, we're painting the roses red....

Meal or no meal?

Yeah, it's Mort's fault....

Another catch-up

Will it blend?

The mud at Glastonbury Festival: a study

4 equals 5, honest....

Always good to meet friends

Ooops, I forgot....

catch-up

It's been a while, hasn't it...

A *nice* day in London? Yes!

an interesting week...

Good news & bad news

I like days like today!

A green brain?

How to fit a car side window in about 10 minutes....

2 days at the pub.... it's a hard life!

Another boring tax return....

Nice and stable broadband!

So, who likes Liquorice?

Wow, back again!

Fitting a GPS antenna

More brain overload...

catch-up

Half Term.... and I'm on holiday

I bought a car...

New glasses

Why are hotel beds so darned uncomfortable?

I can fly.....

another boring blog title....

A bit of work and a bit of play

Americans are CONFIRMED as stupid!

Welcome, Reverend....

Isn't networking fun?

yeah, right on....

Miracles DO happen

Away from home...

Wires and travelling..

I do not believe it!

Saved... by 2%

A week passed

Oh, no, not Sunday again!

Another radio night....

Professionalism

Of Hearing Aids and things

Friday at last....

A night at home for a change!

Programming on a Palm PDA

A couple of lazy days

The return

The Plague

Spraoi parade

It's a bank holiday = its raining!

Spraoi at Waterford

Enniskerry

Travelling to ireland

Off to Ireland.....

And here ISN'T the news...

New and bigger...

New hearing aids

Bloomin' computers and Superman

Holiday!

More Paris, and coming home

Mike's away

Le Monday...

Bonjour encore!

Not enough time.....

Just a software upgrade....

Off to Universities....

Another day in Woking

It feels like Christmas....

The bike passed ok...

Taunton here I came...

Another week...

The end of a tiring week...

It's a WHR week...

A nice day in London? Yes!