I’ve just been looking at the Yahoo news about the Columbus shooter capture including the slideshow of photos. What is a bit disturbing is that after 4 pictures there is an advert for a 007 James Bond game on the Yahoo games domain in which a car comes into view on the screen and a sniper scope focus’s in on it. This seems to me to be entirely inappropriate considering this is what the guy was doing and he managed to kill someone.
You can complain about this by going to Yahoo advert feedback and clicking on the ad feedback link.
A friends pc came back for diagnostics/repair after claims that the boot device was inaccessible. When I booted it up this afternoon it worked fine for about 10 minutes before crashing with a Kernel error. MS lookups showed this was an error in the SCSI plane or devices using the same interrupts. There were no SCSI devices in this box. The disk was making some nasty clunking noises though. Popped it in the other machine and ran a quick test on the disk and it failed with a Read Test Element and told me that the warrenty had run out on the 22nd Feb this year! I backed up the data using Ghost and then ran scandisk which gave no errors. Popped the disk back in the original machine and ran a quick test followed by a full test – no errors (and its nice and quiet again). I guess the first test relocated the duff sectors..
Hopefully the disk will last a bit longer now and at least it now has a backup of the machine, the latest antivirus updates (not a year old – tut tut tut!) and all the windows patches installed.
Shouldn’t have spoken so soon…first boot into windows and the clunking starts up again and the machine hangs when I try to install the AV software 🙁
Update Ok – it was the disk even though there are no errors reported by the software. I replaced the disk with an old 6gb drive and everything seems to be hunky dory. Now downloading the 42mb of patches for windows.
I tried to download the UltimateBootCD today and use (for the first time) a BitTorrent client like they asked me to. I was getting 4k/s download. In the end I stopped and went to the Alternative mirror and ended up downloading at 50k/s and bittorrent is meant to be oh so wonderful!
6 weeks and 1 day after Gateway Peugeot took my radio out of the car as it wasn’t getting a signal, the replacement has finally been fitted. The excuses for the delay ranged from “Peugeot will not send a replacement out until the old one is received” (which was the first excuse for a couple of weeks), then I got “They have to be shipped from abroad” (I could walk “abroad” and back again in 6 weeks). Finally last Wednesday I told them to have one fitted by the end of the week and was told that “we will have to contact Peugeot head office to get that authorised” so I told them they’d better hurry up and do it. I also complained to the head office last Friday @4.36pm (a week ago) via their online website contact page as there was no contact phone number supplied. Monday at 11.51 I got a reply acknowledging receipt of my email. 3pm it was given a case reference. So it looks like it takes 3 hours for emails to travel between departments in Peugeot.Yesterday (Thursday) at 6pm I got the reply “Thank you for your email dated 15th March. May I first of all say how sorry I was to learn of your disappointment with your vehicle and apologise for the delay in reply. Indeed, it is always a cause for concern should any customer express disappointment with eitherour product or the service that our dealer network provides. I should explain however, that although we are of course, interested in the overall operations of authorised dealers, they do operate independently and are therefore, responsible in their own right for their day to day trading activities. I am sure that in view of the aforesaid information, you will appreciate why it is difficult for us to comment in detail at this time and therefore, I have sent copy of your letter to Gateway Motor Co. for further investigation. You should expect to hear from myself in due course with the outcome of my investigation. In the meantime, I would like to thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Yours sincerely, Aina Ogunade-Paul Custoemr Care Manager”
So basically the company can trade under the Peugeot name, they can sell Peugeot cars (and only Peugeot), goods need to be authorised by Peugeot but they are totally independent and Head Office can’t do anything about it.
The only good side of things is that I didn’t have to order some bright paper and a pen to create a sign for the window saying “If you buy a car from this Gateway Peugeot dealer you may end up waiting 6 weeks for spare parts and have a car in the garage at frequent intervals – Beware!” and then park the car outside the showroom.
Incidentally the first song I heard on the Radio was Shania Twain’s I’m gonna get you good which has some weird misheard lyrics
Got a call from the library asking me what an XLR file was. The UK Technical Support page for file extensions beginning with X gave me the answer – a Microsoft Works file (which can be opened in Excel).
The latest in the round of virus’s is Polybot. At the time of writing (2pm on the 19th), Symantec have two patches – the Virus Definitions updated March 19th (which don’t actually exist if you try to download them, and the Virus Definitions dated March 24th. They can work out how to name a virus and how it spreads (via RPC vulnerabilitys that should have been patched) but no fix yet…..Thankfully we’ve not had any come through via email yet.
Well for once it was worth going to work today. We had a meeting with some customers and partners. Naturally the partners brought freebies for the customers. Thankfully the partners couldn’t count so there were plenty of freebies left over. The first was a stuffed tiger, the second a magnetic puzzle, where you have to put the slices of a square back together again and the third was a mousemat. I decided to “upgrade” my 2002 mousemat (with our company logo and 2002 calendar on) and was pleasantly suprised to feel the mouse being so much more responsive. Hooray for Fridays (well this one anyway)
Some nice clothes available at ComputerGear. I especially liked the “Requires Windows98 or better” one, and I’m oh so tempted to edit one of the tshirts and swap one of the words for management.
Fiddler looks like a nice proxy server that lets you debug http traffic. Will be useful to try and troubleshoot web applications such as getting my bookmarklet from geocaching to take me to the correct streetmap.co.uk webpage.
BugMeNot has a great bookmarklet that will popup a list of user supplied usernames and passwords for sites such as the NewYorkTimes and the Washington Post so you don’t have to go through their (pointless) registration process. I wouldn’t try this on sites where you give your credit card details out though!