I think I was misquoted in this article about server patching although we might have just gone through a load of security patches the previous week!
I’ve just handed in my resignation to work via email (what a chicken) this evening. Actually the reason it was done via email is that I’ve been out on a customer job today and just got back in and the last thing I want to do on a Friday night is talk work over the phone. Wonder how long it will take for the grapevine to work…..
The company that I worked for completed a buyout to another company so as of Saturday night I now work for Azur Group.
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).
Found a good site with some tips on freelance working and ensuring that you get paid on time. This page, although primarily aimed at journalists has some good links on ensuring you get paid with a very handy interest and penalty calculator to determine how much you are currently owed. So far my bad debt that I am chasing owes £18 in interest, plus a £40 debt collection charge!
Got home late last night after leaving London at 4.30pm. Amazingly the M25 was clear and I made fairly good time. 30 minutes after arriving home it started snowing. Previous to that the drive had been fairly clear of traffic, no rain or snow in sight and for once no idiots tanking at 99.99999 mph on the motorway. Woke up this morning to probably 0.9999mm of snow – wonder just how much chaos that is going to cause?
One of the servers in a remote site failed to send its usual backup email messages over the christmas holiday. When the user rang me up they explained what was on the screen (a BSOD) and I told them to reboot it. Unfortunately on the reboot the hard disk was not detected by the server. At this point I decided to jump in the car and drive to their office. An hour later I got to their site and it sounded like a cuckoo clock (sans cuckoo) was ticking in the office. The tick was the sound of the heads in the hard disk making a racket. Needless to say an order for a new hard disk was swiftly placed. When it arrives I’ll have my first live experience of doing an NT install and full restore using ntbackup. Will be interesting to see how well it goes.
As mentioned in the previous post, I had to return my Toshiba laptop for repair yesterday. The mouse has been going haywire and after being told to install the mouse drivers from the Recovery CD (of all the weird places to put drivers – personally I would have put them on the Utility and Drivers CD) and not finding it on either of the supplied cd’s I rang back up and was told they would come and collect it. Didn’t bother telling me how long it would be before I’d get it back though (and I didn’t want to depress myself by asking). Their website says that its a hardware fault so fortunately there was no arguing needed to persuade them to fix it. Shame there was no on-site warrenty purchased though.
Incidentally the nipple mouse is more politically referred to as an Accupoint mouse.
Matt Goyer had an interview with Microsoft and Amazon and has blogged about his experiences. Very interesting reading and quite daunting – especially if you are not a programmer!
With the upcoming change in law of using mobile phones whilst driving, the register has summed up the details fairly well in their document. Interesting to me is that companies that require or encourage people to use the phone whilst driving are breaking the law….wonder how that will go down with the boss! The interesting thing is that the use of two way radio’s or cb’s are not affected by this (as long as they also can’t be used as a phone). I’m not quite sure on the logic of why this is the case unless the powers that be are frightened of offending hgv drivers, or for some weird reason they reckon hgv drivers are better drivers than the rest of us.