XP Laptop back

The laptop arrived this afternoon, 10 minutes after the hard disk for the server arrived. The mouse seems to be working ok, I guess time will tell if they actually fixed it (the screen is fingerprint-smudge-less so I know they did something.) They didn’t format the hard disk which is a relief and everything looks good. I’ve even got a sticker to prove I’m virus free 🙂

Hard disk failure on server

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.

car’s better

I think that the car’s better – the mechanic came round and they tried various things, eventually taking the air filter apart and blowing some explosive air over the exposed air intake – and the car started!!!!!! It looks like there was a blockage somewhere between the outside, the air filter and the engine (you can tell I did Motor Vehicle Studies at school can’t you). Hopefully we’ll get it back tomorrow and I won’t need to ferry Kristen to work on Wednesday,especially as I’m due back at Christies for another checkup on my leg.

car’s better

I think that the car’s better – the mechanic came round and they tried various things, eventually taking the air filter apart and blowing some explosive air over the exposed air intake – and the car started!!!!!! It looks like there was a blockage somewhere between the outside, the air filter and the engine (you can tell I did Motor Vehicle Studies at school can’t you). Hopefully we’ll get it back tomorrow and I won’t need to ferry Kristen to work on Wednesday,especially as I’m due back at Christies for another checkup on my leg.

Comment Spam.

Got a comment spam on one of my pages today – fortunately they only spammed one comment, with a “I like your website” followed by loads of links to loads of different web sites. I just promptly deleted it. Then tonight when I checked my rss feeds, one guy had been hit about 15 times with the same comment, but from “different people” – the script obviously uses different names such as lisa, phil etc.
(sounds like the author might be an eastender fan)

Calendar issues with Outlook 2k3

Apparently since I upgraded my desktop pc to outlook 2k3, most of the users in the office have been unable to view my calendar, but get a message “unable to display the folder” and a grey screen. They used to be able to open it, and can access everyone elses calendar. The weird thing is that one person can open it, but they are using service release 1 of office 2000 – everyone else is not service packed (because of the annoying “do you really want to send this message” when automatic macros kick in). In the meantime, I’m enjoying the privacy which leads me to wonder if outlook didn’t have the private button functionality would it break privacy laws where employee’s can expect privacy? It would be interesting to see if outlook 97 is still able to read private events in the calendar (which it used to be able to do)