Week of 12th May

Last Week

Monday, 12th May

10 o'clock Ingest shift starts today, for 2 weeks as usual. But I've taken the weekend off to do the May Day.

It started quiet, and then quite a bit of material arrived. I've left about 15 commercials for tomorrow, but the missing list is clear until mid-afternoon - which is good.

When I got home, Jane had me typing up some course-work for Jenny. This was apparently believed by all the girls to be a routine homework exercise, but turns out to be exam. coursework - and it's needed tomorrow. Jenny's hand-written notes are short, so I've stretched things a bit by using a larger font - yes it's a cheat, but needs must...


Of late, I've become annoyed at the obtrusive nature of some web adverts, particularly those used by Hutchinson Telecom to push their 3rd generation mobile handsets. In particular, the one used at The Register pops up over, and completely obscures, the text of the item you're trying to read. I find this intensely annoying, particularly since Intermute doesn't stop it.

The culprit is, of course, Macromedia Flash, which I see mainly as useless eye candy. It's animations are remarkably distracting, if not downright obtrusive, and the Hutchinson example above has made me say, "Enough is enough". But disabling Flash is easier talked about than done.

First, you have to find the plug-in. For IE, it's in ...windows\system\Macromedia\Flash (at least on WIN9x). But search for swflash.ocx (or flash.ocx on NT-based systems) and you'll find it. Rename it somehow (I made it swflash.ocx2) Then you need to route all requests for the player download to a null IP address - use the hosts file for this. A search for "disable macromedia flash" on Google will give you links to the procedure. And it seems to work - more as I find it.

And of course, having done that, Katy finds an exam revision site which requires Flash for the content to be readable/viewable (Flash movies illustrating concepts) Well, if Katy needs it, she can have it - I refuse. And then there's the security vulnerability in the Flash player (which is still not fixed, six months after it was first reported) - Infernal Exploiter is bad enough, I don't need another backdoor on my machine.

Back to Daynotes


Tuesday, 13th May

An absolute shed-load of commercials today - in groups, so that you nearly clear the shelves, and another lot arrive.

But when I left, there were none - oh, there were about 3 that needed to be copied for want of compliance with our specification, but all else were done. There are quite a few programmes - one for the server-only channel, several programmes (including one movie, 2½ hours of it) that air on two channels at about the same time, and 15 minute infomercials (6 of them), but I have a clear conscience about them - I did an inch of paperwork for commercials, which is enough in anyone's language.

In course of discussion, we wondered what timezone Tenerife is in. Someone insisted that it's GMT+1, all same it's parent country, Spain. Others thought GMT. I decided to fire up the Psion, which has a 'World' application capable of showing timezones among other things. But the batteries are dead. So try a spare set - and it just beeps at me, even with known good batteries. This is worrying - did I put the replacement cells in backwards, and blow it up? No way to tell at work.

At home, I found the mains power brick, and tried that - "beep". Oo-er, missus. It's dead. Then, mirabile dictu, the screen showed the main menu. Totally dead batteries, including the lithium memory backup. All the data's gone, of course, but the thing hasn't been used since the last backup, so I can do a restore. Tomorrow.

This morning 'Foxy', the DJ who does the morning show on Capital Radio, announced that the Capital Radio Party in the Park would be on July 6th, and the ticket office (Ticketmaster) would be open at 8 a.m. tomorrow to book. Why not announce it well ahead, so that people can get ready? I know - keep 'em in the dark, keep 'em listening for the anno. and boost the listener count (and the advertising revenue). 4 tickets per household only. Last year, BT's 'phone network caved in under the strain - it was impossible even to get a busy tone. But the website was working fine at about 10 a.m. I am commanded to get tickets - and they want me to do it at 8 a.m. Whoopee.

Back to Daynotes


Wednesday, 14th May

And so to try to get the tickets. First off, Capital's site was either glacially slow (complete with a Flash advert for Rimmel (a sponsor of Capital's PITP, they tell me) or inaccessible. That went double for Ticketmaster (even without the ad.) I managed to get in once, before getting dumped off at the order confirmation screen with an "ERROR" This was at about 9 a.m. Demon's mailserver (to see if the order had been accepted despite the error. If it had been, there'd have been a confirmation e-mail) was overloaded - world+dog getting their e-mail at start of business day, don't try until after about 10 a.m.

Eventually, I gave up trying to verify the status of the original attempt, and did it again, successfully this time. Good, print the confirmation page, and look for the e-mail. And I got that, too. Result.

Then Sarah 'phoned, "I can't get into the website. Can you do it? Here are my credit card details". With Sarah's card registered in Wales, I can do it. And again it worked. Another result.

By this time, Postie had delivered the mail - including 4 DVDs (or sets thereof) from Play. That's "Lord of the Rings - Fellowship of the Ring" 4-disc extended version, "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets", "Stargate SG-1" Season 3 boxed set and "Andromeda" Season 1 set 3. The rest of "Andromeda" Season 1 to come. Thank you Play, I only ordered last Thursday, and all this came from Jersey, in the Channel Isles. And "Babylon 5" Season 2 boxed set is released at the end of this month.

A local shop had also delivered the new garden sand and water play table, for Jane's minded children. But no sand. "Get some", says she. So I did, and got the replacement backup battery for the Psion. Jane also wanted another wooden bench seat for the garden, but the shop was out of stock. I'll try another branch tomorrow.

The restore of all the Psion's data worked, although something kept trying to take over Antbear's COM1, kicking PsiWin off in the process. Changing to the USB serial port (installed as COM6) fixed that, and the Psion now has a full set of data again.

In the evening, Mum's friend called from Wales. Mum has had problems with her balance, and has been admitted to hospital.

Back to Daynotes


Thursday, 15th May

Bought the extra garden bench seat today, from another (but still local) branch of the store chain. All we need to do now is assemble it.

In the afternoon, I attended the last rehearsal for the May Day festivities. All the details are confirmed to be the same as last year, including the marching band (or at least a scratch collection of brass and percussion. Full bands are conspicuous by their absence) But the weather has broken - pray for no rain, please.

Back to Daynotes


Friday, 16th May

I picked up the speakers and stands from the local school this afternoon, as arranged. And it was raining - and the forecast is for more of the same.

Our contact lady in the school office retires at the end of this academic year, so we'll have to develop a new contact for next year's celebrations.

Mum is "comfortable" in hospital, according to the nursing staff. Her friend reports that after being well-fed she looks more like herself. It would seem that her lack of desire to eat was responsible. She will be moved to a care home on Monday, for a couple of weeks 'respite care', which is normally intended to give a resident carer a rest, but in this case will hopefully improve her health. All seems to be well in hand, so I'll wait until my regular trip down to visit. Meanwhile, we've sent flowers.

Back to Daynotes


Saturday, 17th May

The local May Day celebrations are today (yes I know it's 2 weeks late by calendar!), and I'm doing the sound reinforcement, as usual. The organising committee have an arrangement with a local school to borrow their horn loudspeakers, stands and cables - I provide everything else. This has been going on now for a number of years, and is almost routine. Although my younger daughters profess no interest any more (no street cred) I still find it fun and enjoyable.

On the day:  Jane was booked to take Katy to an Open Day at King Alfred's College, Winchester, which left me to take Jenny to her violin lesson, before setting up for the May Day. And, since Jane had driven off in Hopalong, I had to use Peanut - which meant a shoe-horn exercise to get everything in. But now I know how it all fits, it'll be easier next year. I always say that...

Of course, I had made the mistake (some months ago) of breaking up one of the boxed kits I have for this job - which meant I'd mislaid a 3½ inch stereo minijack to 2 phonos lead. So I had to buy one, and the only one I could lay my hands on easily was an expensive, gold-plated job, at twice the price I wanted to pay. But needs must...

The weather was not good - at best overcast, cool and breezy. But the rain held off just long enough for the procession, the maypole dancing and a couple of country dances. And then the heavens opened, and everybody ran for shelter - except me. I had to pack up at least the electronics (rain and electronics don't mix) Luckily the borrowed speakers are weatherproof, so I left them until the rain eased - just in time to get the amplifiers, mixer and whatnot back to store before the place closed for the day.

Back to Daynotes


Sunday, 18th May

While Jane was at Church, one of the cats - I think Tom, but I'm not sure - succeeded in catching and killing a baby magpie. He then proceeded to start eating it... on the carpet in the hall. There was blood and feathers everywhere, as Jane discovered when she returned. So she scrubbed the carpet, while I buried the remains at the bottom of the garden - we'll have no more room there before long.

Then I took the chance for a bit of playtime. First I learned how to put the on-screen gridlines back into an Excel spreadsheet. They disappear when you apply and remove colour highlighting, if you don't do the removal right. Don't clear the highlight by selecting white from the colour picker - that kills the on-screen grid - do it by selecting "no colour". And you can do that across a wide selection of cells, and the grid-lines appear throughout that selection.

I've wanted to be able to set the time on the Palm M105 from a computer when I hotsync for almost as long as I've had the Palm. The canonical way, using Internet protocols, is to use (Simple) Network Time Protocol. You can get a free, open source, implementation from here, called sntp.prc. But it doesn't seem to want to work - it keeps giving a "resolve error" when I try to set the time via the infra-red port and Antbear, which suggests something not installed - probably a link to an Internet name server.

I thought, "Maybe I need Palm's Mobile Internet Kit", which came on the Palm desktop CD, but which I hadn't installed. So I tried installing it - and bounced. MIK requires Palm Desktop 3.0 - Version 3.1.1 comes with the M105. Slight cock-up there.

Another Palm app. on the CD was an SMS send/receive programme that will talk to your GSM mobile 'phone, either by cable or infrared. Nice toy, let's try it. So I installed, configured and tested. And it works! Silently, you get no feedback about success or failure, not even on the 'phone screen, unless you configure 'reports' which gives a delivery notification. This is Handphone SMS, v1.3, from Smartcode Software. It's quite big for a Palm app. - 105k - but it works fine.

In the evening, Jane asked "Is there an Internet vendor of blinds for the Velux roof windows in the loft?" So I looked, and there was. After Jenny had chosen her preferred colour, I filled in the online query form and sent it off. Now to see what results ensue.

Back to Daynotes

Next Week