Week of 6th December, 2004

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Monday, 6th December

 

10 o'clock shift starts today, on a swap (it's officially an early shift for me) And the work is not too heavy. By end of day there were only 11 commercials at 35 seconds each, and a shelf of long form material - most of which is not urgent. The missing list had only one problem, and that was a scheduling error - someone had scheduled a commercial which is delivered on the day, and therefore is only available after lunch, at 6 a.m. So I made everyone aware of the problem, and called it a day.

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Tuesday, 7th December

 

More of the same - work was sufficiently light that I could enjoy some of the short fillers for the movie channels, rather than just letting them run, and relying on the error logger within the DigiBeta playback deck. The powers-that-be require us to do this, to keep the throughput up. It's a powerful technique, but has it's problems. The bean-counters prefer the boost in throughput that can be got by running two jobs at the same time per person, and accept that some work will bounce and require reprocessing.

These fillers were short cartoons, mostly 6 or 7 minutes long, starring "Popeye" and Bugs Bunny", and all dating from the 1950s. So I had a (not so) quiet giggle at them.

My immediate boss retires this weekend, but once again I've taken the weekend off, so today was the last time I'll see him at work. We'll still meet at the Christmas party, a week Friday, but this is the last common working day. It has been a good and productive relationship over the years. Good luck in your retirement, Graham. Although it's not really retirement, he has a little business, copying archive 2 inch Quad videotape to DigiBeta for posterity - Quad VTRs are getting a bit uncommon these days, so the material is needed on a newer format. I make no doubt that in some few years there'll be another thriving little business copying DigiBeta material to some X format (which I cannot for the life of me imagine) but I'll probably be well retired myself by the time that happens.

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Wednesday, 8th December

 

Today was fun, if banging your head against the M$ brick wall can be called such. Katy created a a Hotmail address for us, but could I get into it? Could I hell... Nothing I could think of would let me into that account. So I punted, and created one myself. That worked. Of course, I'll probably not be able to use it on any other machine - that would be par for the M$ merry-go-round. We shall see.

Zaphod can still do MSN Messenger, under another ID, and he can send webcam, but cannot receive it. I'll try the webcam on Optimum next, to see if my theory about needing Win XP is borne out. If it is, I'll not be surprised.

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Thursday, 9th December

 

Well, inbound webcam on XP doesn't work either. Optimum can't see Katy's webcam via MSN messenger. So it looks like there's a problem with the Netgear router. It's probably not routing ports correctly - which means I'm going to have to do a bit of port forwarding, possibly combined with a change to the way Optimum gets his IP address.

Currently every machine in the house gets an IP address via DHCP from the Netgear. This works, so I haven't bothered to do anything about it. There's nothing that needs a fixed IP anyway.

But now, I think I'll need to port forward MSN Messenger's video ports - 6891-6901 for TCP, and 6901 for UDP - to Optimum. And to be sure that he's there to receive the forward, I may need to fix his IP address. I wish that the Netgear (a DG814) was capable of allocating constant IP addresses by MAC address.

I can do the fixed IP addresses - DHCP scope is quite narrow (192.168.x.100 - 150) so there's space. You can see that I wouldn't be considered as a network guru - an address range specified in decimal?


When Katy comes back from Uni. for Christmas, she is going to bring her machine back for me to install extra software on it. That's the desktop machine, of course. Armadillo, her laptop, will be retired, unless I can fix the screen problem, which is probably a loose/damaged ribbon cable. If I can fix it, Sarah is likely to take him over.

Meanwhile, Katy's desktop machine (whose name I will discover when I work on him) will require Privoxy, and possibly his anti-virus software replaced. Katy claims that the scan is slow - well, it is an XP machine, with Office XP, and a whole raft of other applications installed. That means lots of files.When a machine is provided on a DSA grant, they provide everything that the recipient might need, including things that are redundant. In this case, as an example, there's a copy of "Mavis Beacon" - a typing tutor - after Katy did a touch-typing course a couple of years ago. And the machine comes with a full set of install discs - everything, including Win XP (or so Katy claims. Mark you, she thought that Armadillo runs Windows 2000, because he has Office 200 Premium. It took a degree of explanation before she appreciated the difference between an operating system and an application suite)


I've mentioned before my liking for the American science fiction series "Babylon 5". Comes now news, quoted from Production Weekly, that a theatrical movie version, entitled "Babylon 5: The Memory Of Shadows" starts shooting in the UK in April 2005. Script by JMS, so it's canonical.

Incidentally, Coming Soon's web page throws a Javascript error here (on line 2, yet!) but the page displays OK. This may be a consequence of using Privoxy, I don't know - nor do I intend to find out. Production Weekly requires Flash 6 or higher, which I refuse to install, so I haven't read their pearls of wisdom.


After Sarah went to work today, I got the 'phone call, "Help, my car has a flat tyre. Please fix it before I get back, or I'll have to catch a 'bus to the swimming pool (her evening job)".

Well, I tried. But whoever changed the nearside (right) rear tyre last did the wheel nuts up so tight that the p*xy little 6 inch spanner supplied in the toolkit (sic) couldn't move them, even with my full weight on the tommy bar. So I had to call the AA, who quoted 45 minutes wait. Fair enough, the patrolman has to finish his current job, plus any others he's got queued, plus getting to me. 10 minutes later, while I was talking to Jane, comes the incoming text message bleep, "Message from the AA. Patrolman will be with you at 15:40." That's 10 minutes later - total of 20 minutes - good service.

And he was as good as his word - arrival on the dot, trolley jack under the car, lift it up, undo the wheel bolts with a rechargeable impact wrench, fit the spare, lower the car down, do the paperwork, and away. 10 minutes on site, sorted.

Then I had to get a replacement tyre. And my tame tyres and wheel balancing place has closed. But there's another nearby. So I went there. New tyre, on the original rim, UKP35, sorted.

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Friday, 10th December

 

Our mortgage lender has sent us a letter advising that we can still borrow some extra money on our motgage, if we do it before year end. This is slightly strange, because I thought we had borrowed to the limit anyway - that limit is down to ability to repay, not capital sum. Our mortgage was never more than 33% of the house value, and has since gone down to about 25%, due to the rise in house prices, which may have peaked.

Anyway, a chance to borrow some extra do$h at a low interest rate is not to be sneezed at, especially since it will only be for a few months... So we filled in the form, and submitted it to the local branch.

And got the 'phone call - "You've already borrowed everything you're allowed to. What is this?" Of course, the paperwork had arrived from Head Office, even though it was under the local branch's letterhead, and Head Office don't tell the branches.

So I undertook to take the offer letter in to the branch tomorrow, so that they can copy it and take the issue up with Head Office.

Then I had a (mild) brainstorm. There's an 0845 'phone number on that letter, I'll call it and see what they say. And it turns out that this was a Head Office-instigated offer - the computer fired off a letter that effectively offers us the chance to reborrow our repayments to date. It wasn't couched in those terms, but the 'phone slave agreed with my description, and also said that letting the branch know was a good idea. So that's the task for tomorrow morning.

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Saturday, 11th December

 

I received e-mail today, about my earlier comments (here) relating to the derivation of Murphy's Law. The e-mail includes a link to some original research in the matter, posted as a series of 5 web pages - an overview and 4 detail texts, with photos. The content was fascinating, and I was surprised to learn that the eponymous Murphy actually existed, his name was Edward A. Murphy, Capt. AUS., and he was a development engineer who had trained at West Point.

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Sunday, 12th December

 

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