From what Kate says about the Toronto gig, U2 played a good concert with lots of audience participation. I’ve never been to one of their concerts but would really like too, but tickets are so expensive and difficult to get. Incidentally Kate, your comments are not working with a “You need to define a comments pending” error message. Unfortunately this blog is also getting hit with trackback spam – not a good sign for a MT 3.15 installation which I thought was meant to make it harder for this thing to happen.
It was a tough job getting up early yesterday morning for the first day at work. What was also weird was that I was out of the house just as everyone else was getting up – apparently I looked like a school kid on the first day of school as I left the house with a backpack on my back (You’ll be glad to know that I wasn’t wearing grey shorts though).
The funny thing when you start a new job is that the first thing you do is fill in the forms so you can have your wage packet reduced due to all the various types of taxes that will get deducted, so a nice encouraging start there!
After a run through of the company manual it was time to go see some clients. We only got to see two clients and I spent most of the time there filling out the server checklists which is a good way of getting used to all the customer sites.
Although it wasn’t a stressful or difficult day I was really tired at the end of it and enjoyed the meal that Kristen and I had at the Old Bag of Nails pub. This is famous for its fish and chips so I was looking forward to a traditional english meal. The menu is full of jokes and funny sayings and worth reading in full before you order and we both ordered the fish and chips. It would have been nice to have had photos of the meal in the menu as we’d have realised to only order one portion between us as it came with loads of chips and two fish portions the size of a normal english portion! Although the fish and chips were nice, we did feel that the fish was rather dry inside the batter and although it was a good meal I don’t think it lived up to its hyped reputation (although it was MUCH better than the harry ramsden’s fish and chips I had from a mall in Wales one time)
Today we’re off to about 3 more customer sites. No techie hints and tips (sorry Danny 🙂 yet but I do have a couple of puzzlers that I need to research. Out of Office setups on two sites are causing problems – one client has an individual who’s ooo just doesn’t work and another site where the mailbox cleanup agent removes all the ooo data when it runs. According to Microsoft this shouldn’t happen but it does!
Microsoft have released a beta of IEDevToolbar which works similar to the web developer toolbar for firefox. Worth downloading if you need to use this browser (and you should if you develop web pages to ensure the pages look ok).
Thanks to bink
This USB2 to IDE cable converter looks like a great idea for disaster recovery/portable backup. This saves having to purchase disk caddys or boxes for drives – the one that I purchased was for laptop drives at about $40 retail (I paid $20 2nd hand only to find that the 2.5″ disk is slightly to big to fit in the case). The other advantage is that you can also attach items such as dvd drives etc.
Thanks to Kevin Devin for the link
(in my opinion) than the 5.04 release that was out a while back. At least 5.04 would boot on my machine but 5.10 doesn’t. It gets as far as detecting hot plug devices and then the machine hangs. Various messages are displayed in the other consoles (ctrl-f2 to f4 i think) but nothing obvious as to what is going on. I thought I would try 5.10 on the desktop as the 5.04 would not let me use ndiswrapper for the Hawking Technology wifi usb card that I have (which incidentally uses the zydas 1211 driver). I think that if I risked putting ubuntu onto the hard disk rather then running from the livecd then I might stand a chance of getting it to work, but ideally I want a combination of livecd & usb wifi adapter which means I can use this at other wifi enabled pc’s.
If you used to be on our wabsnwos email list about what Kristen and I are up to and didn’t receive an email this week then let me know so I can ensure you are still on the list.
I think that Microsoft Max stands for Maximum Hassle, Maximum uselessness and Maximum Waste of time. I downloaded the small stub installer yesterday and then when you install it, it insists on downloading a winfx graphics pack and some other files that it needed. This took about 40 minutes on my fast connection so I dread to think what it would be like on dialup. I find stub installers very annoying as it means you can’t burn the application setup program to cd ready for reinstallation at a later date/another machine – instead you have to spend ages downloading. Then after it had installed it insisted I signed up for an account/linked my max account to my passport account. Thats all very well and good, but the email that is meant to get sent to my passport account never arrives. I then realised that this was probably due to the fact that I have to have my hotmail junk filter to exclusive due to the amount of spam I get even on the enhanced option. A solution to this is to add [email protected] to your contacts in hotmail before you attempt to activate/log into Max.
Once signed into an account it doesn’t seem possible to sign out from that account and re-sign in with a different account as you only get prompted for your password address and not your email address. Actually after renaming store.xml and settings.xml in %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft Codename Max you can sign in as someone else, but this doesn’t do you any good as Max is a peer to peer application so you both need to be running it at the same time.
Oh and did they forget to mention the fact “If your ISP does not support IPv6, you will not be able to access websites after you install Max. ” (from the readme that doesn’t get displayed when you install the software). They also have a blog of help posts but these do not appear on the main page unless you select one of the categories.
It’s taken them long enough, but google now have a dedicated blog search which seems to be pretty uptodate. It didn’t take them long to index the content of Absoblogginlutely at all. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before this gets added to the main google site (shame this isn’t an option for it to be added with their personalisation features) and also to see if they add other features similar to feedster. If they keep it like it is at present then they will do well – Feedster seems to be bogged down with all the features they keep adding but (in my experience) are very slow to fix problems with claiming feeds etc.
Thanks to John Hesch for the headsup
The 161 photos from Dave and Katies Wedding have now been uploaded to my photo gallery. I didn’t upload them to flickr due to the fact that I don’t have a premium account and I still have 1.5 gb of disk space left on my hosting package.
Well you heard it here first – as of Monday morning I will be employed again as I was offered a job yesterday after attending a lunch interview. It certainly is a great feeling and also comes on the same day that I accepted an offer on the house back in England so hopefully we can start to settle down for good.
I will be working for a consulting company in Dublin, Ohio covering the Columbus area and I am *really* looking forward to it. This should also mean that I get back to my usual technical blogging which some readers will enjoy and others won’t.