Well, I was performing the usual ‘tech geek’ duty this afternoon. I was fixing up a friend’s computer. It was a real mess. It had originally been split into 4 FAT partitions (that’s not FAT32), with a lot of wasted space on the disk. Using partition magic, I upgraded them to two partitions – one for the Windows 98, and the other for Windows 2000. Then I fixed the modem so it would work in Windows 2000 – it needed a driver download from the Gateway web site. Once that was completed I installed Zone Alarm (personal edition). That fixed an immediate problem – there was a computer somewhere on the Eircom network that was just barraging the machine with SMB packets – virus or hacker I don’t know, but it was causing 100% processor utilization and was killing the machine while it was connected to the internet. Mairt was of the impression that the fan was internet noise. That confirms my opinion – firewall first, the rest is just ornamentation.
What was my charge for all this work? An Indian meal, complete with a bottle of beer! I really am cheap tech support.
Internet noise… what next?
Last night in Donnybrook
Well We’ve been in the pub and we’ve arrved back to the house. It’s the last night in the house for Tara and Nicky (and myself). I am of the no fixed abode problem, so I’m just following people from house to house (:-); not really.
I need to do something!
Credit reports
this is blatantly taken from another web site about credit ratings. It is in regards to inquiries about credit ratings reducing your rating – it turns out that it does, if there are more than 2 requests in a 60 day period it will affect your rating, but that this effect will expire after 12 months. I didn’t realize that it can happen, until Dave mentioned it.
Sunny Auckland
Oh well, the holiday is nearly over. I’m in the auckand office – I spent more than a few minutes ploughing through over 3000 new email messages. I judiciously ignored anything non-project related, which means that I only had about 1000 project messages to filter on top of the 3000 in my inbox. Buried in email? you bet.
During Bungie shots
During
Side – During
Jump Wave
This is the pre bungie jump photograph of me about to jump off the Kawarau Bridge. Fun all round for me.
Crashie crashie mp4 videos
I’ve been able to play one MP4 video on the PC per boot of windows. Every subsequent time it crashed. It turns out that the intervideo mp4 video decoder was at fault. It was preventing me from enjoying the stalker trailer that gleb pointed me to.
The Solution? unregister the intervideo mp4 decoder.
How do I do that? pop up a command prompt using the run dialog, on the drive that you installed the intervideo software cd to \Program Files\InterVideo\Common\Bin. At the prompt type: regsvr32 /u MP4VDEC.ax, and it all works job oxo.
Smokeskins
SmokeSkins
Design your own covers for your cigarette packets. It’s an interesting idea.
‘medium security’
One of these days I’ll actually pay attention to stuff like this by default – it turns out that you can run unsigned .NET code from the internet by default. under medium security settings in IE. I need to test this out as it makes for interesting possibilities.
Quote for the day
Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.