Done. 66 items found in 666 documents.

Do you think I should exorcise my computer?

From the BBC:

The US Department of Homeland security has issued a warning about a flaw found in Microsoft’s Windows.

Right, they can’t find Osama but they know where Bill lives. Picking on the easy targets.

Very True Mood:  cynical

And to finish off a good, long weekend, our broadband has just been upgraded, free of charge, from 2Mb to 8Mb.

Very True Mood:  happy

This morning I got on the wrong train. I have never done that on the way to work before, and I’ve only done it twice on the way home (and drink was definitely involved in one of those cases). So I was heading towards Victoria rather than London Bridge, and having a plain return season ticket rather than a travelcard I couldn’t jump off at Balham and hop on the Northern Line. So I jumped off at Balham and waited for the next train to London Bridge, which was late and even if it hadn’t been late would have gone back through West Norwood half an hour after I left.

My web server has been up and down, but mostly down, all day. I think that one of this weekend’s jobs will include taking a complete backup of everything.

For some reason I bought another issue of .net magazine. This one comes with a free CSS reference poster. The credits for which read:

Reprinted courtesy of the W3C
www.w3schools.com

The poster is indeed a version of the w3schools CSS chart which explains why it’s not very good, ‘cos w3schools aren’t very good. w3schools are also nothing whatsoever to do with the W3C. Whoops.

Very True Mood:  grumpy

Should-have-been-obvious procedure clarification documented on the wiki at work:

The person responsible for databases is the DBA
All databse work and changes MUST be done by the DBA. With the DBA’s permission work can be done by other people but the work MUST be checked by the DBA.

But when I read it I can’t help but think of De Bellis Antiquitatis. Which probably says way too much about where my brain has been over the weekend.

Okay, so yesterday I actually managed to speak to a “genius” at the Apple Store and he restored the iPod software on my Nano. And that’s all okay, except… quite often whilst the iPod is connected to the computer it will suddenly wipe all the data. All songs, gone. I can make it happen predictably by trying to copy album artwork over with the songs, so that’s disabled now, but it’s still happening unpredictably for some other reason. Grrrr.

My computer also had trouble with the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs CD. It decided that the first track was 49 minutes long (i.e. it contained the whole album) and that the second track was 15 hours long (maybe it contained a secret message from an alien intelligence?). Track three onwards are fine. I must check it an a regular CD player to see if it’s the CD and not the computer.

Doctor Who starts two weeks yesterday, and the BBC promotions machine is in full swing. Tennant and Piper are in all the weekend newspapers (oh dear, the David Tennant fashion article in the Guardian…). But much more excitingly on the web site there are trailers and “Tardisodes” (BTW, who would pay through the nose to download these to a mobile rather than watch them online?). And Mickey’s updated his web site as well (be sure to follow all the links.).

I’m trying to catch up with the 8th Doctor novels. I’ve reached The Last Resort and now have a dilemma. I have six of the remaining nine books but not Timeless or Sometime Never. The latter is definitely crucial to the ongoing arc and I think the former is quite important as well. Yesterday I looked in three Waterstones, two Borders, two Books Etc., Forbidden Planet, Blackwells, Foyles^[1], WHSmiths and the BBC Shop. No luck. Amazon are saying that they dispatch in 4 to 6 weeks, which if past performance is anything to go by means that there’s only a 50-50 chance at best of Amazon being able to dispatch them at all.

At least Oxford have run the boat race.

Oh, and the flat is currently full of knitters. But they brought cake so that’s okay.

[Update] - I just remembered that whilst I was in Foyles I noticed a stocky, balding chap staring at me as he walked past. Just after he left the store I realised that this was almost certainly Dom Sandbrook, whom I have mentioned before on this blog. Gosh, he has a Wikipedia entry, and I wonder whether if anyone I know was responsible for the ‘vandalism’ shown in the revision history. No, scrap that, I don’t wonder “whether”, I wonder “which”.

Very True Mood:  cranky

Computers are designed to drive us mad right?

Lettice has to finish her thesis. And this computer is getting very close to death. Largely not physical problems (though the hard drive might have some dodgy sectors) just the slow software death of a Windows machine. So I can just wipe and reinstall Windows right? Hmm, except that Office is um, not something I actually own and was in fact, um, borrowed from the Home Office when I was on contract there. So I could install Open Office right? Yes, but Lettice has never used that and this week would be a very bad week to switch packages. And switching between Office and Open Office partway through writing a document isn’t always as simple as it should be.

So buy Office? Buy a new computer (where’s that cheque from the tax man?)? Cross our fingers and hope?

At least the shiny new 320Gb external hard drive means we won’t lose much data of the worst does happen.

The file or directory \iPod_Control\iTunes\iTunesDB is corrupt and unreadable.

Oh F***.

As in a warning about spoilers to be found elsewhere. See last paragraph.

Had today off work, decided that a Monday was the least painful day to try some Christmas shopping, so went up to Oxford/Regent Street. It wasn’t much worse than a normal Saturday (so slightly worse than hell itself then) and I actually had a fair amount of success.

Books in Borders (with £5 off thanks to the voucher in Saturday’s Guardian) for brother and mother. More books in the BBC Shop (always worth a look as they often have recent BBC releases at cut prices and older releases that you can’t find elsewhere anymore) for father and, um, myself.

Then to the Apple Store to buy wife’s present. That place is like some sort of strange cult. They were even running training sessions for iTunes upstairs. iTunes for heaven’s sake, one of the simplest-to-use pieces of software ever written. I wondered whether they could identify me as a Windows using apostate via mystical means? And when I got to the front of the queue I realised that the only PIN I could remember was that of my debit card, so good as I’m not building up a debt but bad as in I can’t play games with the interest free period and keep my savings intact for another month’s worth of interest.

And to make Lettice very happy I bought the Christmas Radio Times. Out came the pink highlighter as soon as I got home. I hope we get some good DVDs for Christmas because other than Doctor Who the telly looks dire this year. And speaking of RT and DW, there’s a ten page feature that spoils the Christmas special in just about every detail. Still, some people will like the pictures of David Tennant in his jim-jams. Oh, and a chance to win one of the actual Daleks from the ‘05 series…

Today a nice BT engineer fixed our line which had been down since Thursday. Whilst it was down PlusNet activated our ADSL. So now we have a nice fat 2Mb broadband connection and a wireless router. I could be posting this sitting on the loo. But I’m not … or am I?