Earthquake

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

We had an earthquake last night - I was working upstairs on the PC when house began to shake.
It woke my wife up, but luckily not the kids.
As soon as it was over I wrote down this account:
“5 to 1. At first sounded like a very strong gust of wind. Then noticed the desk was shaking, got stronger, everything was shaking. Lasted about 10 seconds.”
I was quite shaken by it. I think it was the completely unnatural feeling, and the lack of control as the intensity built. This is nature and there’s nothing you can do.

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Change of theme - change in general

Friday, October 5th, 2007

I thought it was about time that I had a bit of a revamp around here, so I upgraded a couple of weeks ago and decided to try out a new theme.

Lots of stuff has happened in the last six months; our daughter arrived, which has soaked up lots of time and I’m working like stink on a project that has not been running too well.

When we started on the project in March, I thought I would be able to blog a bit about how we were pulling it together using a stack of different bits that we really didn’t know much about, but it has been so hectic that it just never happened. Maybe I’ll do a bit of reflecting on how things have gone so far and post some musings on the process.

One day.

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Customer service at Compman.co.uk

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006

For some time now I have been ordering my computer books from Computer Manuals - a UK based on-line retailer. Apart from being very reasonably priced, their big advantage was that they only sold computer books, so, if I needed to find something quickly, I could just type the author’s surname into the search box and hey presto up would come a few books to choose between - unlike Amazon for example.
Recently they have started selling other books which meant that often searching by author meant I had to look through lots of books to find the one I wanted. OK, they had a quick search box that limited the results to computer books, but I prefer to go to the advanced search and look for stuff by author name. It’s the way I work.
Last week this irritance got to me so I emailed them and had a winge (it hadn’t been the best of days). About an hour later I had a reply, which impressed me. When I explained in a bit more detail, they responded within 24 hours to tell me they had changed the site to make my searches easier. (Obviously not only my searches, but, well, I was impressed). How’s that for service?

Well done Computer Manuals. Excellent service. One happy customer.

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New machine at home

Sunday, October 9th, 2005

Got a new home PC last week - bought from pcnextday who are based in Liverpool. Chose an AMD chip this time, for a change; so I have a AMD Athlon 3400, 1Gb RAM, 250Gb HD and a GEforce 6800 for about £550. As T.J. would say: ‘tender’.

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McAfee breaks .net messageboxes

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Colleague of mine spent most of yesterday trying to work out why any message boxes that our .net applications popped up contained invisible text. The box grew when more text was added so we knew the captions were there but they just couldn’t be seen. A quick test exe confirmed that it was only a problem on his machine (elimimating the build) and a quick VB6 app worked fine on his machine (so it had to be a problem between .net and the win32 api).
Eventually he tracked down a note on the internet somewhere that pointed him to McAfee being the culprit - when he turned off ‘buffer overflow protection’ all the pretty captions came back. Not before he has reinstalled the framework though.

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Back to it

Thursday, June 30th, 2005

I’m back to looking at this now, as I have a tiny bit of spare time. Actually this post is to see if my RSS reader is picking stuff up properly. Need to look at upgrading to the next release too.

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Upgrade to 1.5

Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

Upgraded to 1.5 today, didn’t quite work OK. Might try doing a full re-install as there is nothing on here of note at the moment.

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Snowing

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

Well, I have spent half an hour getting Wordpress installed on my host. Dead, dead easy - excellent. Now I am watching the snow fall onto South Park and wondering what to do next…..

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