Author: admin

Just busy beyond belief right now. Thanks for asking, though 🙂

Last Friday I was out at The Master Gunner with several people from a particular technical mailing list. It’s not often I get drunk, and it’s very very rare for me to get a hangover. I managed both on this occasion.

Last week I was nicely surprised by Dell’s desktop support. The chap I ended up speaking to was helpful, knowledgeable and came back with timely and relevant information about the problem I was experiencing. It turns out that Windows XP SP3 is missing a particular hotfix that prevents machines with the Realtek ACL888 HD audio chipset from installing the driver. Trying to manually install this hotfix results in an error indicating that the hotfix should already be installed. Luckily, there’s a slightly modified version of the hotfix available that will install on SP3 allowing the Realtek driver to install correctly.

Lynda and I had a good chance in Norway to improve our DIY skills. Painting
walls and laying laminate floors aren’t especially hard things to do, you just
need time, patience and practice.

So far we’ve completely redecorated our main living room and we’re now working
on the room opposite, this can be thought of as either living room #2 or
bedroom #2. It used to be blue, very very blue indeed. It’s taken many coats
of paint just to get in back to a fairly neutral white and we’ve so far applied
one coat of the final colour, a kind of creamy white called Almond White.

When not covering myself in paint, I’ve been getting stuck into Crysis, one of
the many game titles I’ve been looking forward to playing. It’s an interesting
game, though I’m not yet in love with some of the gameplay mechanics. Perhaps I
just need a bit more time to get used to it.

Those of you who know me will know that I’m no shrinking bloom when it comes to
dealing with bad customer service (yes, Apple, I mean you) and so, for once,
I’m delighted to share with you an example of near-perfect support.

Wind the clock back a few months and Martin takes delivery of his new gaming
rig from Wired2Fire. It’s an Intel
QX6800 based machine, with 4Gb RAM, an Nvidia 8800 Ultra OC graphics card and
couple of 500Gb disks and more fans than your average harem. It’s quick, very
very quick.

After a couple of months I started noticing stability problems. The machine
would sometimes reboot at random, when it did I would struggle to get any video
output afterwards. On one occasion the machine lost all its BIOS settings.
After a couple of diagnostics sessions on the phone, Wired2Fire suggested a
Return To Base to get the motherboard swapped out. W2F are not to far away so
I drove the machine to their office and, their Head Honcho, Toby got on with
the business of sorting my machine out.

Since the motherboard swap out I’ve had zero problems. This is what you’d
expect, right? Alas it seems that people no longer expect timely fixes to their
problem, they’re happy for weeks of tooing and froing whilst a problem is
diagnosed. Congratulations to Wired2Fire for just getting the problem fixed.

I look forward to buying my next gaming rig from you in 2010.

The vast majority of commuters would like nothing more than to enjoy some peace
and quiet on our journey to and from work.

If you must listen to personal music, fine, BUT KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. Why should
normal people have to put up with the annoying relentless tinny background
susurration because you think you look cool with your iPod?

TURN IT DOWN.

Likewise the even more braindead morons who honestly truly believe that we
actually want them to play some piece of techno crap out loud on their mobile
phone.

TURN IT OFF.

Spending a couple of hours per day in a tin can with dozens of pairs of armpits
is bad enough, don’t inflict more misery on us with your crappy MP3 collection.

Thankyou.

If you’re having trouble getting Call of Duty 4 to work, try doing this:

• Right click on CoD4 and look for “Delete local content”, do so and Steam will start downloading again starting at about 92%.
• When this has completed, right click again and look for “Verify local content”, do so and Steam will start downloading again starting at about 70%.

After that, you should be good to go.

2146 on November 12th and I’m not yet able to play Call of Duty 4, despite
having parted with 70USD on the promise of “play it as soon as it’s released”,
or very similar.

I can’t say I’m entirely surprised, The Orange Box was a cock up and that
was Valve’s own content. Either way, I’m not best pleased. Come on, Valve,
you have some of the best title on the planet under your belt, you have the
delivery mechanism that puts cash straight in your bank account, SORT IT OUT!

Today I was in court for the first time ever. Lynda and I used the rather
efficient Moneyclaim site to claim back what we considered to be unjustified deductions from a deposit on a rented 1 bedroom flat.

Without going into many tedious details here, we won. Crescent House Group Limited of Wanstead have been ordered to refund most of the disputed amount.

If you’re looking to rent property in east London, you may wish to check that it’s not owned by Crescent House Group Limited, 14 High Street, Wanstead, London, E11 2AJ.

Having just attempted chicken gravy for the first time ever, I can assure you
it’s worth the effort.

It’s also self-perpetuating. The chicken you cook today becomes the stock you
use to make the gravy for the next chicken you cook. And so on.

I’ve long been thinking of replacing my trusty 2005 edition of Microsoft
Autoroute with something a little more exciting. So, a couple of weeks ago, I
picked up a TTG 720 from my local Currys. Inside the box you get the unit
itself, a combined charger and USB cradle, a manual, a CD-ROM containing the
TomTom HOME application and a sucker mount to attach to your windscreen.

The unit starts pretty quickly and, in the car park at Bluewater, almost
instantly picked up a couple of satellites, supporting up to a maximum of 12.
The interface is very very intuitive, I’ve not yet had to remove the manual
from its shrink-wrap. Plotting a route is a matter of a few taps on the screen
and the supplied postcode database has been more than sufficient to get me to
almost all of the places I’ve needed to go so far.

I quickly adapted to driving with the unit, the large clear display means you
need to do no more than flick your eyes for a second to see what the road
layout is around you. The supplied voices are more than adequate, spoken
directions are clear and unambiguous. The unit varies the notice it gives you
of a direction change depending on the speed you’re travelling at. At motorway
speeds you’ll be warned of an exit you need to take about 2 miles in advance.
At urban speeds, it’ll start instructing you a few hundred meters away.

Dynamic route recalculation works very well. I deliberately took the wrong
route once or twice, sometimes turning onto a one way street. The unit quickly
recalculated the best route and steered me back on track. When driving on the
M40 in heavy traffic I asked the unit to find an alternative route that avoided
the M40. It directed me off the motorway at the next exit, onto the A404 and
then along to the M4 to continue my trip towards London. You can subscribe to
TomTom’s traffic service which, using your mobile phone, will check for traffic
problems and try to route you around them. I have not yet tested this service
myself.

The TomTom HOME software allows you to update your unit, getting new maps, new
points of interest and map updates from the Internet. I found the version
supplied with the unit to be incredibly buggy. Luckily there was a newer
version available which has fixed many of the issues I noticed. It still does
have the annoying habit of crashing with unhelpful errors from time to time,
this seems to be related to connectivity issues to TomTom’s website.

It’s not totally perfect, there are some interface annoyances. For example,
you can’t disassociate a mobile phone from the unit without first enabling
bluetooth. Overall I’m very pleased with the unit, it does exactly what it
says on the tin.