another blog

Another week, another blog. Strange how things change, like the seasons slowly creeping up on you.

Pretty quiet week, I’ll be moving to a new post in the New Year, so trying to focus on clearing up old tasks, rather than starting on new ones. Letting various folk know that I’ll be moving on, it is good to let people know in person when I can, so although I’ll still be in post for a while yet, it will probably be the last time I see a few of them.

I suppose I am inclined to get a bit sentimental, I’ve been involved in some interesting pieces of work over the past year or two, and some decent projects have come off well. Of course I’m only a contributor to the successes, they all very much team efforts, but nice to have been around and played my part.

I have been rather touched by the reaction of people to hearing that I’ll be moving on, you never really get much impression of what other people actually think of you, but quite a few seem genuinely sorry to see me go, and grateful for all my help over the years. I’m a bit of an Eeyore at heart, I never feel that I manage to get done as much as I intend to. I do my best to get back to people quickly, and do what I promise to, but I’m acutely aware that I never quite manage it all. It is heartening to hear that nonetheless the general impression is one of helpfulness and genuineness, rather than gormless incompetence.


I’m still struggling out of a cold and seem to feel pretty run down much of the time, so I am just trying to take things easily. It does just feel dark all the time, and it can be perishing cold. I have been out to the shops a few time, and the fellow shoppers seem to be demonstrating the seasonal rat-like selfishness, panic behind their eyes, as they rake through consumer goods stacked high, seeking something made in China that satisfies some joyless duty to swap gifts. When did Christmas ever end up so joyless. Joyless is the most depressing of words. Etiquette can make kindness joyless, Christmas seems to make shopping and giving joyless. Basically, I think that whenever something is getting joyless there is something far astray.

I’m probably on schedule with my gift getting, but hopeless on suggesting anything that anyone else might get me. I rather wish that I had just toughed it out, and said, give the money to charity.

Not much else to report, I’ve figured out that all my IT problems with my new MacBook backing up, must be down to the external hard drive I bought being defective in some way. Of course getting a new laptop, external hard drive, and upgrading the OS, and installing all sorts of software, all at the same time, made diagnosis a pain.

My best guess is that there is some intermittant problem in the Hard-drive that crashes backups, and this corrupted the system on my laptop. I reinstalled the original operating system, and it seems to be running okay now. I’ll proceed slowly, and if all is going well in a week or two, maybe run the OSX Leopard upgrade again.

I’ve reported the problem to LaCie, but I seem to be stuck in some tech support hell, where they take days to respond. I don’t really want to be doing basis diagnostic stuff for the next month, when the hard drive is pretty obviously crocked, so I’ll try and push for a quick replacement.

Learning lesson to all this, in things IT, take little baby steps and make sure that you are on sound ground before proceeding to the next stage.

Once I get the External Hard Drive sorted out, I’ll probably get a new desktop, which will let me retire my current one to my daughters room, which will let them play Sims, and ArtRage etc to their heart’s content. That would bring us upto a three computer household, which does not seem unreasonable as there are four of us.

Of course there are actually more computers than that. There is a really old Acorn in the loft, which is less powerful than your average mobile phone these days, and a bondi blue iMac, which went phut, probably a defective power block.

I guess a lot of this IT stuff nowadays, is probably written off totally within three years, so I always get much more use out of them than that. I’ll not feel unduly guilty. Any IT kit here gets a good home, and is well used.

I am intrigued by the speed of the laptop, my impression, confirmed by speedtests in the magazines, is that the laptop is actually slower than the desktop, this is despite them both running the same system, and the laptop having IGB ram, to the half gig of ram on the desktop. I guess that it must be other components making the difference. To be honest, I’m not sure that it actually makes a vast difference, but I’ll maybe look at picking up some more RAM.

Moving to using the laptop, and desktop, means that file synchronisation is now rearing its head. I’ll need to figure out how best to organise things so that they are where I want them to be when I want them to be there, without running a spaghetti bowl of wires all over the house all the time.

Cool software - Rogue Amoeba Radioshift, lets you listen to, and record streaming radio. Not all the possible channels seem to be streamed, but the obvious BBC ones are, and as far as I can tell, you need to be connected to the internet to do the recording, but the quality is impressive, you can edit the stuff, and save to iTunes. I don’t seem to have figured out the editing yet, but I’ve not even read the short instructions, so more a comment on my relative density, than the software. I bought it Friday, upgrading from demo, instantly persuaded by the opportunity to record an episode of the Burkiss Way on radio 7. I have fond memories of radio comedy, including the Burkiss Way, so I’ll maybe need to scour the schedules to build up a little stock of radio comedy for my iPod.

Also recommended, check out MacSanta for deals on Macintosh shareware this month!!!
Yaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!!!