Monthly Archives: April 2008

Moronic tech guys

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J’s laptop broke, she saw one online and bought it. It’s an Advent 9112 running Vista.
Arrives this morning and I start to set it up. Find MAC address, add to router and then try try and try to get it to connect. Eventually get the message:

“The capability of your network adapter does not match the requirements of the network.”

Google it, can’t see where to change the details needed. Ring “the tech guys” who demand a receipt number. I say I don’t have one, that it was bought online/over the phone, that J is out and I’d like it fixed and running for when she gets back. They tell me they cannot talk to me, to phone another number.
I ring the other number, get bounced from person to person. Eventually get someone who says they can find the receipt number but as J bought it she won’t tell me. I say I’ll return it. She says I can so long as I have not switched it on – and how would I know it didn’t work unless I had I say? To which she says that she cannot help and to ring the tech guys. I explain again but more slowly. She won’t budge – it’s not a fault, it’s software and they are not obliged to cover it. Fine – I told her I will find a “fault” and then I’m covered. She told me that the tech guys will need to confirm it – fine by me. I’ll damn well kill the machine if I have to because this is fucking stupid.

Oh, and Vista? No fucking chance, ever. “It’s wrong” with no clue as to why is stupid. Screw the money I’ll buy her a macbook.

And now I’m going to google how to kill a laptop without having to drop it.

Update: J has secured the machine’s return and a refund. As it was she who rang and bought it, and as she had the name of the person, the time she phoned and every detail she was told they had to agree it was not what they had said and so the refund was appropriate. And I’m still getting her a macbook.

Back to the gym

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Today marked the start of my “Get my ass to the gym” project. Haven’t been for ages. Could make lots of excuses but it still comes down to me not walking in. So today I did.
30 mins on the x-trainer on cardio setting (while listening to 130bpm Podrunner), 30 mins on the bike doing 5 mins cardio / 2 min fitness (only because my legs hurt after 5 mins cardio) then back on the x-trainer for a 30 minute aerobic. No weights. Despite not having been for ages I didn’t get too bad and I was still able to walk after all that. I reckon it’s all the stairs use here at home. But going once isn’t really so great – if I can post in a week / month I’m still going then that will be more useful.
And my incentive? Uploading all the actual holiday pics to SmugMug and seeing that there was a little bit more of me than I would like.

Mario Kart

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SNES: Excellent game but then it was the first. Jacq and I played battle many times, I concentrated on times. Fully completed.

N64: Loved it. The karts felt right – there was traction. It felt like the karts were on a surface. Mix that with tracks where steering carefully was rewarded and the gaming result was excellent.

GC: Double Dash. The karts floated above the surface, no traction, no feel. Started the move to a more multiplayer setup and the game suffered because of it. Track design was in parts pretty good.

Wii: Played and got a few 50cc Golds when it arrived yesterday. Have since watched the girls play singly, together and on the WFC. P is particularly good (she has around 6000pts) Uses the wheel well, uses weapons well, does tricks.
So I sit and we play a few tracks. This was at 100cc. Dire. No feel, none. BIG WIDE TRACKS because they want lots of people to play online. No skill whatsoever with powersliding. Even more “if you are at the front you will be hit by blue shellls and at the front it’s yellow bananas for you” – very predictable this time. It’s less skill and more of an unpredictable fight. Which is a shame, but then Nintendo do want take up of their console and this cannot fail to shift units. Not impressed to play, love watching P.

Dumping flickr

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I was looking last night at how many places I could use my openID to sign in with. Apart from BackPack it’s not a lot but looking in flickr it seems they want to make their own ‘secure’ login (a login is only as good as the password, regardless of what little gold awards you decorate buttons with) and you will end up with a Yahoo login to all their services. That annoys me about Google but at least their pages aren’t dog-ugly and they are, you know, useful. Couple of tips there for Yahoo. I have had problems logging in to flickr before which has had me swearing and this morning I got exactly the same. I do not want to fight a login, I do not want to jump through the Yahoo hoops they have. So screw yahoo and screw flickr.

Smugmug. Costs a few $ more a year (but it’s still only about 5p a day). I get a decent url. I get a tool that imports all my flickr photos without me doing anything. I get an uploader tool just like flickr’s. If I watched them apparently there are stats and such (but I never look at stats) so overall that works for me. It means I never ever have to use anything Yahoo own again. It means I can dump all of it. It took several pages of errors to delete all the photos I had at flickr but in the end my page became a photo-free zone.

http://markr.smugmug.com/

Google Earth killed my laptop

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About 2 weeks ago J called me because the laptop had crashed. She uses it for Firefox, IE7 (for the BBC iplayer) and that’s about it. Nothing major, nothing that can even remotely stress it. She said she was checking the village out in Google Earth and it crashed. She didn’t know to hold the power button down to switch it off so I did that and it rebooted without a problem it seemed. The end of last week J is using the laptop – she uses it daily. She cannot get to the places she wants to so it brings them closer – and again opens Google Earth to check something. And in the middle of that it crashes again. Only this time it’s terminal. Nothing can bring it back. It switches on, the HDD light flickers once and then nothing. The HP people – it’s a HP dv2104eu – a very nice little laptop indeed – went through some basic ‘hold the keys when you start up’ type stuff and they declared that the graphics part of the computer is dead.
So Google Earth killed my laptop.

There is no guarantee now – it’s 4 months out – so we are looking for a new one later this week. An eeepc is too small – that’s what she is using right now for email and her website – and the others you buy have Vista on. So my plan is we buy a machine, probably in the £300-400 range, and when we get it home I ‘reinstall’ XP onto it. I’d go with Linux if I could find somewhere local that offered them and there was saving involved but I can’t. XP does not seem to be an option though I will be asking when we go to check some machines but I have a real copy anyway. Annoying all the same.

And even if Google Earth was not guilty (but it is) J will probably not use it on a laptop again. It’s the association thing. She is sure that Google Earth killed her laptop.

Shoot them. Just shoot them.

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People who use w/ or w/o should be shot. No mercy. Just drag them outside, fill the gun w/ lead and change them to being w/o life.
It’s WITH and WITHOUT you idiots.
It’s not like your are saving ink or transmission time, it’s purely because you either can’t be arsed to spell it right or you actually cannot spell a simple 4 letter word.

m4¥b3 1 $h0µ£Ð r3p£¥ 1n £337 $0 700 (4n £00|{ 70 4 (00£ 1££173r473.

Or leet + ROT13 and then MD5 it?
(“What do you mean you can’t understand my reply? It’s special and just for you“)

There was a guy in the wordpress.org forums who would litter his posts with all these made up abbreviations and despite being told otherwise just would not stop. He utterly failed to realise that questions and replies are there to also help others and writing garbage helps no-one. The word in his case was selfish.

Mac. Background downloading.

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So the mini tells me there is a 100MB update. Being Apple it does not use the word ‘Security’ (Apple? Insecure? Good god no. They’ll be pretending that the Mac was not cracked first recently. Or coming up some other excise) And being Apple it downloaded the whole lot without telling me, without asking me, without any notice whatsoever. That is WRONG. You ask first, you tell me first, you do what I want. You might say the software is licensed but the hardware it’s going into is most certainly not. And I watched as the machine shut down to restart at 16:25. It is now 16:30 and it just came back up. 5 minutes for a reboot? WTF? My XP could reboot in around 45 seconds on a cold day. And before someone says I must have a bazillion login items I have 2 – teleport and Skype. It’s not the programs that are sluggish, it’s the OS.

Ken v Max

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Ken says he’s fit for the job. Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has dismissed claims that revelations that he has five children by three different women will affect his mayoral campaign. BBC

“… there’s a difference between private and secret and I think the media’s got to understand that.”
“My private life isn’t my sole property. It’s been shared with other people and they expect it to stay private and it’s going to stay private.”

Max says …. nothing really but would say he’s fit for the job.

Max Mosley has been described by the News of the World as indulging in a five-hour orgy and performing sado-masochist acts with five women. That’s the kind of hospitality you won’t see in an F1 motorhome…
we have seen no denial from Max Mosley that he likes to spend his time with highly-paid dominatrix, giving out and receiving punishment and acting out bizarre role play. Planet-F1

I’d love to see Ken win because I totally agree with him (though Boris would be really funny). And I’d love to see Max go – but I bet Ferrari support him and because of that he stays. Max is the hypocrite here.

Tell No One it's in french

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I see a film called Tell No One. I check the sleeve – one heap of praise on the front, two on the back. Blurb is in English, it is created in partnership with among others BBC Four. It says nothing at all about what language it is in. It mentions 1 french actor, 1 american actress. I checked for language, I checked for subtitles. Finding none I assumed it was in English.
But no – it’s in french. If I had know this I would not have bought it regardless of how damn good others thought it to be. Is this some new marketing? To not show what the language is just to force some more sales? According to the DVD language menu it is in fact “unspecified” which makes it worse. So now I cannot even trust a DVD box. That’s just stupid, damn stupid. And the film? It’s heading bin-wards.