OK, in the last week I’ve done stuff. Not that earth shattering or cosmologically significant maybe but stuff all the same.

Last weekend I visited Rachel, Graham and not so little Christopher down in Yately. T’was a fun weekend and included eating, drinking, walking along canal paths and firing rockets.

Since then it’s been a matter of getting the house ready for tomorrow’s BBQ plus an unusual work week.

At work this week is unusual in that the first two days were the graduate mini-conference, where the first and second year PhD/DPhil students have to give talks using powerpoint or equivalent and the second years have to also give a poster presentation. Much techno-hand-holding is involved with this, especially when half the students turn up with powerpoint files made on a newer version than the laptop in the lecture theatre is capable of running. (And, of course, lots of things break when you try to run the presentation on the older version.) Add to this the replacement laptop deciding that it was going to sulk when it saw the lecture theatre mouse and you can see the fun I had.

Wednesday was a sort of normallish day other than catching up with the stuff I didn’t do on Monday and Tuesday.

Yesterday was the IT Support Staff Conference, held just over the road in Keble College. It’s a good thing that it was just over the road too as during the morning workshop I got called out ‘cos “the network’s stopped working.”

As it turned out, after half an hour working out what was going wrong, I found that one of the professors had brought his laptop in and plugged it into the network and was blythly writing stuff in word while his pox ridden machine was spamming the network causing the 3Com switches to lock up. Once I banned his laptop everything was fine. I asked him when he last ran Windows update, the answer came back “Oh, since I got the machine? Never.” and then when asked about the virus software “Oh, I think I updated it quite recently, only a couple of months ago.” This is when we batter our users over the head with multiple e-mails and face-to-face sessions telling them to run Windows Update at least weekly and update the virus definitions preferably daily. Grrrr….. Oh, and the professor also started to complain about needing the machine when he goes on some trip to Eastern Europe over the weekend and why couldn’t we fix the machine now. Grrrrr!

Anyway, today I’m having to restore a laptop for another lecturer who’s off into the wilds this weekend who’s laptop has had the hard disk replaced. The disk’s been on the fritz for ages and I’ve told him that he needed it replaced multiple times in the last couple of months, so he calls out Dell 2 days before he leaves!

Right, I’m going to take a deep breath now and calm down.

Oh, and aboutn the BBQ.. of course, the weather forecast for tomorrow is for torential rain and gales to arrive at about midday tomorrow, possibly blowing through by 7pm. Typical, eh?

This evening is the undergrad leaving do so I’ve been volunteered to do pictures for that, so I have my cameras with me. Wish me luck.

After yet another reload of Windows on my laptop I finally solved the WiFi problems…

I misread a ‘b’ as ‘6’ in the WEP string… Doh!

Of course, it does beg the question, “Why did the WiFi utility tell me the link was up and running if the WEP key was wrong?”

Oh well.

OK.. how’s this for something strange…

Under Windows the wireless LAN driver can see the access point, register with it using WAP, thinks it’s sending packet but doesn’t and doesn’t receive any packets. It can see the MAC address of the AP and the signal strength etc. This is after wiping the Windows partition and reinstalling with a clean install.

Under Linux the same NDIS driver (from the same install source) loads using ndiswrapper and everything just works as it should.

Erm, what on earth can I be missing which is preventing it all working under Windows? I haven’t a clue!

If it weren’t for the Linux side of things working perfectly I would think that there was possibly a hardware fault with the receiver or antenna, so it must be software. However, this is a totally clean install of Windows with a clean install of the driver so it shouldn’t be a software problem.

From The Register a link to a little ditty.

Don’t click here!

I never thought I’d see, or rather hear this.

I was flicking around the music channels on Sky and happened by Kerrang. After listening for a couple of seconds to the song I thought I recognised the theme, but it definitely wasn’t from any heavy rock song… I was sure I was wrong, it couldn’t be.. it’s not Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” which my mum plays on her old Neil Diamond Greatest Hits cassette. But it was!

Yes, a band called “Him” have done a cover of this Neil Diamond song from the late 60’s. Of course, they’re dressed it up a little in rock clothes, but not much. It just seemed a bit inconguous that a band who’s lead singer seems to model himself on Marilyn Manson would be doing a lightly made over cover of such an “easy listening” song.

Well, well. I’m sure we’ll get a Bing Crosby ballad made over as an urban beat soon. Anyone for Eminem singing “White Christmas?” Or maybe a rap take on “Inch Worm?”

There were loads of people in the University Parks.

There were three telescopes in operation using filters and one with a projections screen, along with various posters and things.

The queues for the direct observation telescopes were rather long, so I just haddled around the projection telescope.

The weather on the Sun today is clear and calm with only a few small spots.

This morning I tried the old pin-hole camera trick to view the transit of venus.. I failed.

I could either get a very small image of the sun on which I could see nothing or a larger, far more dim image which was far too dim to see anything on. Oh well.

I think I’ll pop over to the University Parks in a bit to see if I can find the public viewing thingy they’re having.

OK, I missed spring, OK?!

This was the first useful weekend since Easter I’ve had the chance of doing much in the way of really good house work. It’s amazing how filthy a house can get when you have visitors and can’t get to do things.

Anyway, I’ve started on the mamoth job. For a start I washed out the fridge, the kitchen worktops and the tiles along with hoovering and stuff. I still have plenty to do such as washing the kitchen floor and de-icing the freezer though.

Saturday I also managed to get to the barber to get a hair cut. I’ve not had a chance to do that since about mid March so there was quite a bit to get cut off.

Other than those things I did very little over the weekend. On Saturday I was feeling really shattered through lack of a decent sleep since about Wednesday night. I was basically in a daze and forgot loads of things when I went to Sainsbury’s to do my shopping.

Anyway, today is the start of another week.. and the weather is projected to be unbarably hot. Oh well.

Well, I enjoyed the film and the food afterwards.

Grim, Holly and Matt all enjoyed it too but had far more to say about it ‘cos they’ve read the books, which I have not.

Anyway, nice evening out.

Now I think I’ll trundle off to bed and try to sleep.