We got tickets to go to the Dublin Irish Festival so went over this afternoon. Personally I didn’t think there was much there apart from a lot of Irish shops but I wasn’t interested in buying some Irish tat ;-), a lot of overpriced food and drink stands but the Funnel cake was delicious and the first time I’d had one. It was very hot so the soft iced lemon stand was doing very well and was nice and refreshing.
After wandering around the festival we headed back to the traditional stage and watched Gaelic Storm perform a set. They were very good with a lot of audience participation. I’ve uploaded my photos of Dublin Irish Festival to my zooomr profile (as it has more space than Flickr) and also set up a smartset in case other people also upload photo’s.
I also managed to take some video of one of their drum solo’s which I uploaded to YouTube.
Edit Updated the YouTube link as I uploaded the wrong video to start with!
Kristen and I were having tea at the Old Bag of Nails pub in Upper Arlington (the fish was obviously cooked by someone who had never had real english fish and chips – you are not supposed to be able to pick the whole fish up between two fingers and it stay in one piece) and I was telling Kristen about the Trigger Happy TV that I had been watching on You Tube this morning. There were two skits in particular – one was about a man walking up a street and the other was about a man playing squash whilst on the phone (fast forward to 1:53) and as I was talking about it – someone’s phone rang in the pub – playing the very same ringtone -which is infamous if you’ve ever lived in the UK. I was so tempted to shout “HELLO? YEAH – I’M IN THE PUB – EATING FISH AND CHIPS”
The other trigger happy clip I liked was the Stop and Stop board – the funniest thing is how the car moves forward twice!
I’ve been invited to join the Friends In Tech team as a blogger which was a nice offer and an honour to take up. I’ll still be posting over here but will have some content on their site too now.
My first post was about the firefox upgrade to 1.5.06 and an easy way to get extensions to work afterwards.
Mike McBride was also invited to post and his first post is about having an appreciation folder in your email client.
If you read either of our blogs you will probably be interested in some of the other Friends in Tech blogs and their podcasts.
After installing the live toolbar from Microsoft I was really hoping to have the tabbed browser functionality (the only thing I really needed) but unfortunately it didn’t work. I logged a trouble ticket and received instructions to remove the old version and reinstall it. The instructions are in the extended entry, but I only had to remove a couple of toolbars with the windows installer cleanup utility and the msn entries in the registry. After a reinstall, the tabbed browsing option arrived. It’s not as nice as tabbed browsing in ie7 or firefox but neither of those two browsers work well with the Lotus Notes webpages we have to use for work.
Discovered that if you turn on vncserver in ubuntu it doesn’t default to asking for a password and it also defaults to let everyone access it (or at least it did on my installation). This can be fixed by going to System/Preferences/Remote Desktop and checking the box to require a password
For some reason, one of my xcopy’s did not copy the data but just the directory structure so I’ve lost 35gb worth of downloads and cd images. VERY annoying. I think i’ve got them on another hard disk somewhere but I’ll have to find it. It also wiped out my music but I know I have that safe on my mp3 player – all 35 gb of that!
I’m really thinking that the moral of the story is not to be cheap when upgrading a hard disk and get a really big one so you don’t have to keep shuffling data around when doing upgrades!
I’ve been busy this morning. I re-ghosted my windows xp partition and then reloaded it back onto my secondary disk. The performance still stays about the same so I’ll be wiping the secondary disk back to HP’s recovery cd and reloading all of the applications again *shudder*. As this is a fairly long post there is more in the extended entry.
There’s a new version of firefox out now and the notification in the current version has actually been pretty useful. Rather than telling me there is a new version, I download it and *then* discover that most of the extensions I have won’t work, this time the installation gives me the ability to find out which extensions are not set to work with the new version. The only downside is that most of the extensions that it wouldnt work with are currently disabled in the version that I am running at the moment.
I’ve been trying to backup the main pc at home as it’s getting really really slow for a 1 year old pc. Kristen blames it on all the stuff I keep installing on it which is probably true. The weird thing is that I can’t see anything in task manager or perfmon that shows why it is so slow. CPU and memory usage is low yet the machine sometimes takes ages to respond so it’s a reinstall time.
However, before doing that I wanted to image the hard disk – I’ve been attempting to do this since Saturday now. MicroCenter were doing a 160gb hard disk for $40 after rebates so I thought I’d ghost the original disk to my external usb disk and then restore the image to the second disk. (No link as the rebate was only valid until Saturday)
I had several attempts of doing this, but found that the pc would freeze whilst in the middle of the image. Yesterday morning I started the image off and when I came home from work it was still going…. until I shredded something and it crashed ghost with an error back to dos.
I then tried Acronis true image which said it would take 20 hours to ghost the image (of 40gb!) but again this morning it had frozen after running overnight.
By the end of last night I was really fed up with the thing as it shouldn’t be this difficult so I went to sleep and decided to try again this evening.
I’ve a feeling that for some reason my external usb disk is being detected as a USB1 disk instead of USB2 which is why the original ghosting is taking forever.
I’ve now had the idea of ghosting the image direct to the new hard disk from the old one – if that works (which is giving me a realistic time of about an hour to ghost) I may be able to copy the ghost image back to the original disk and then restore it back over to the new disk.
Once I have a working ghost source I can scrub the new disk and reinstall from scratch and also see if I can get vista on the machine too……
I was hoping that it would be easy to offer remote assistance from the command line – just type in something like remassistance.exe. Unfortunately the command line is so long I’m not posting it here as it will break the formatting. Instead, see JSI Tip 8047. How can I start Remote Assistance and Offer Remote Assistance from the command-line?