Week of 4th June, 2007

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Monday, 4th June

Start of the second fortnight of 10 o'clock starts. This one is the swap - I should be doing earlies.

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Tuesday, 5th June

The rush seems to have calmed down a bit - we haven't had many commercials these last 2 days. Promos have been somewhat thin on the ground as well, except for one tape with 62 spots on it, delivered today. So the evenings are quiet (ish) Considerable line feeds, though - all PasB for repeat.

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Wednesday, 6th June

63rd Anniversary of D-Day

They've (the usual anonymous they) put me on a training course to improve my "communication skills". There was a (mandatory) web-based questionnaire, which I filled in on Monday evening, and we got the results today, at the course - held in an off-site office facility. Interesting, but I'm not sure I buy the premise, although the personality assessment they generated for me from the questionnaire results was quite accurate.

This was an off day, so I get a DOIL (day off in lieu) for attending, since this was company sponsored. And that's a 12 hour DOIL, even though the entire course lasted less than 8 hours. I drove to site, where of course, there's no visitor parking, so I had to use a multi-storey car park. And just shy of 7 hours in that car park cost me UKP15, probably because it's a shopper's car park, and they want to dissuade commuters from using it - commuters defined as long-stay users. 2 hours in that car park costs UKP1, so I had a shock. No receipt, so I can't try for expenses.

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Thursday, 7th June

Today, Katy gulled me into buying her a new laptop. It's a Philips X59 subnotebook, with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 processor, 1GB of memory and a 100GB hard disk. Windows Vista Home Premium for the OS. No option on that last - the shop had one XP machine, and that a display model. They only sell the latest kit, despite ample evidence that Vista isn't ready for prime time. A case in point - Katy couldn't get the MSN Messenger home page to display. What gives? You'd think that M$ would have properly debugged their own webpages to work on their shiny new, all-singing, all-dancing OS.

MSN Messenger is a necessity for Katy - I can survive very well without it.

But at least the wireless network installed easily - as long as you go via Control Panel|Network Connections. I recollect that XP refused to connect to my home network, insisting that I had an ad-hoc network, unencrypted, whereas I was running an access point, with WEP. The Intel drivers fixed that - this was on a Dell Centrino machine, the one Jenny now has.

And the salesman tried to b*llsh*t me, despite my making lots of comments that should have suggested to him that I know what I'm after. He even tried to suggest that Norton Internet Security isn't the resource hog that everyone knows it is. Admittedly, on a dual-core machine, some of the pigginess should go away, but what about contention for common resources - like access to mass storage?

At least you can reskin Vista to look like older versions - I don't like, or need, all the latest chrome. Give me a nice calm, monchromatic grey application window, and none of the spinning window effects.

And, of course, you don't get a full office suite - just Works, with Word. But which Word? Katy needs Office 2003, which the shop didn't have - just Office 2007 Home Student edition at UKP99. I can get the equivalent 2003 version for UKP85 including post from Misco - and have. I actually got 2 copies - one for Jenny's friend Gemma, who is getting a new computer soon. And each of those comes with a licence for 3 machines - which is unusual for M$ - they normally want do$h for every installation. Pity I can't use it on my machine - I need Access, which doesn't come in the Student edition.

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Friday, 8th June

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Saturday, 9th June

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Sunday, 10th June

A nice quiet weekend - so much so that I was bored, and spinning out what little work there was over the 3 days.

But it's all done, absent some minor problems with material identification. Each and every clip is supposed to have at least a text slate describing what it is (and we ingest these for traceability) if not a full countdown clock. Two tapes were supplied unslated. Of course, under the new regime, we don't see this until spot-check time, when most of the work is done.

Si I accepted the most urgent material, logged the fact of no idents, and left the rest sitting on the server. Hopefully, a rocket should be administered tomorrow.

2 (count 'em, two!) Dolby Digital movies accepted this weekend. Maybe the Dolby situation is settling down. And it is rumoured that there is another Dolby LM100 level meter/Digital decoder coming, so that 3 different areas don't have to share just one unit. No, now it'll be 2 areas sharing one unit, and the other guy gets exclusive use of the second. And guess who has to share...

But at least I have my own personal .pdf copy of the LM100 manual - this thing can do so many things, and the menu system is rather cryptic.Now to make up a USB thumb drive with all the manuals I need - there are 3 so far - the LM100, the FT817 and the FT8900. I make no doubt that that tally will increase over time.

On Wednesday, while I was in Uxbridge for the training course, I visited the local branch of Maplin to pick up one of their cheap GPS car navigation systems - at UKP99 you can't go far wrong, even if the thing only just works. It's a rebadged version of a Taiwanese(?) box, which runs Smart2Go navigation software, with TeleAtlas maps, over a WinCE 4.2 OS. The OS is hidden by default, but there's a thriving hacker community, and there are ways to get a WinCE shell with icons for the full WinCE programme suite and the extra applications - which I will do. This year, next year, sometime, never...

I've made a start, and backed up the SD card with all the navigation software - a 512MB card, with 180-odd MB of data. The serious hacking requires modifying files in the device flash, but ActiveSync 4.2 can see the entire machine, so that hacking should be easy, following the instructions here.

 
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