Week of 26th June, 2006

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Monday, 26th June

To lunch with Jane's Mum at her favourite cafe today. Jane and Jenny came for coffee beforehand, but didn't want lunch. After that we went into the local shops to get the funds to pay the care home fees for Dad. Mum keeps monies in a Buiding Society account, not a bank, so big sums like this  - just over UKP1,000 for the five weeks to date - are paid by cheque from the Building Society.

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Tuesday, 27th June

Mum has decided that she wants access to more TV channels, having heard about our digital terrestrial receiver box - in her words, "Quite often there's nothing worth watching." This is on the original 5 analogue TV channels. So today I bought her a box - it's a Sagem (ours is a Goodmans) and wired it in. Having shown her the basics, I left her to play. I make no doubt I'll have to remind her about how to use it, and probably more than once, but never mind.

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Wednesday, 28th June

Sure enough, Mum has forgotten some of the things I showed her, and since the Sagem presents differently to our Goodmans, Jane couldn't help.

Meanwhile, at work the new system is running one channel - with the occasional glitch. I haven't got too involved with it yet, but that will change - next fortnight I'm on nights, so I'll have the ineffable pleasure of fghting flaky software while I try to convince it that, "Yes, this is what I want... Now will you do it?"

Someone else has entered the eBay auction for the HT600E charger - I've had to up my maximum bid. We'll see what happens before auction close early tomorrow evening.

Further to my comments about DVD prices, Play's prices for "Xena, Warrior Princess" are showing similar dispersion to the "Star Trek"s. So I've collected the cheap ones - the others can wait.

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Thursday, 29th June

Last day of this fortnight - and I've kept the missing lists well thinned-out. Only 4 items left within the cache lookaheads at going home time.

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Friday, 30th June

Short notice overtime today, covering for a sick colleague. This had to go out as overtime, we're using all of our freelance pool to keep up with the new work, while staff are fighting the new ingest system.

The workflow here is

This leaves all the material sitting on the ingest server. You then need to spot-check it, and preview it (separate operations)

For the moment, all material is pre-previewed, that is timed for transmission, with commercial break points recorded. So the preview step is redundant - but until someone actually does the preview, the material hangs around, blocking disc space while not being available for transmission. See what I mean about fascist?

More overtime Sunday. Oops! I was supposed to be finishing Simon's wireless network in the evening - must check if he's free in the afternoon.


Katy has come home, and gone back to Aber. - a flying visit. She wanted her computer looked at - claims of slow startup and shutdown. Well, it was a bit slower than the local machines, but that's probably down to the obtrusive Kaspersky antivirus and anti-hacker software package. It's the Personal package, installed by the supplier/maintainer of the machine - and their warranty goes away if you uninstall any software they provide.

I did check for viruses and spyware - Kaspersky and AdAware - plus a Rootkit Revealer scan. And RKR threw 57,000-plus warnings about raw filesizes not matching those reported via the Windows API. As far as I could see, all of them were due to an Alternate Data Stream associated with each reported file. Of course, with 57,000 reports, I could have missed something significant... which these files, labelled "KAVICHS" seemingly aren't. From Googling, it seem to be a characteristic of Kaspersky Antivirus, no-one knows exactly what - except Kaspersky, and they aren't telling - best guess is some form of hidden checksum to speed up virus scanning. The Personal version of Kaspersky does this without asking, and you can't disable it - the Pro version defaults to ON, but can be disabled.

The writers of RKR decided not to provide a configurable filter for this behaviour, on the grounds that malware might hide itself in files with KAV characteristics - but when you have 57,000 (probably false) positives, anything significant isn't easily visible.

But I can do nothing - that d*mned warranty. Given my 'druthers, KAV would come off, immediately.

Katy also took the Goodmans 28 inch widescreen TV, which her housemates expressed a desire for - gaming, seemingly. This allows me to set up the new widescreen LCD TV, a Philips - and properly configured (as it is, now, after a battle) it does auto-widescreen switching. And Sarah still hates widescreen pictures, displayed as such, even though incorrect display leads to tall, thin people. There's one thing I find annoying, and that's the format change on, for example, Channel 4 when they're running an older (sometimes not so old - a lot of American stuff is still shot in 4:3 ratio) programme, and they go to a commercial break. The screen jumps ratio, since all current UK commercials are widescreen.

All this only applies via the $ky digibox - terrestrial analogue pictures are transmitted with narrow black bars top and bottom, if shot widescreen.

Be all that as it may, it's a nice TV - there are a few artefacts, and the colour temperature is a little off, but I can tweak all that, over time. It was certainly over-sharpened as supplied. And Jane isn't too displeased with it . It's a lot less obtrusive than the Goodmans - a 3 inch bezel around the tube face was, I will admit, a bit much.

Oh, yes, and the latest "Star Trek: Voyager" DVDs have unskippable trailers at the start - for "Voyager"! This seems redundant - I've got a "Voyager" DVD, with a trailer for the same DVD at the head? The "unskippable" flag was supposed to be used for copyright warning captions only, not advertising, or dozens of animated logos - "Farscape" was guilty of that. But at least I've not yet seen actual product advertising. I make no doubt it will come, but as of now...

The other option is to make copies via a DVD ripper programme that will remove such flags. That's a viewing copy for my use, not distribution. And I won't link to sources for such software.

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Saturday, 1st July

I was outbid on the Motorola charger. eBay have no more single unit chargers for the HT600E transceiver on offer, but there are several 6-way chargers - slight overkill, but with a radio and 2 spare batteries, I'll use them. Plus, I've decided to buy the VHF version as well - quite rare, that. This one is probably somewhat over-priced, but given the rarity... That's 2 different vendors, the guy with the radio wants about UKP10 more for his 6-way charger than the one I've bought - note: that's bought. These were "Buy It Now!" items. And e-mail confirmations have arrived.

"Babylon 5 Scripts, Volume 8" has arrived from CafePress - their usual good service. "Xena Warrior Princess" DVDs arrived as well.

We've taken on another student - this one is a pupil of a Belgian teacher, who Jane met years ago, when she (the teacher) was a peripatetic student herself. He's here for 3 weeks. This, of course, meant a commute to the pickup point - Waterloo International station, 'cos he came by Eurostar. No congestion charge (it's Saturday) but UKP3 per hour parking - ouch!

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Sunday, 2nd July

It's Too Darned Hot...

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