July 2008 Archives

Mark's website has a mailing list attached to it that allows visitors to sign up and receive emails when he posts new articles. However, he's been having some problems with it recently. Another of his friends had tried to sort the problem with no avail and I spent the best part of 4 hours up there last night; and I've failed also. Although, it'll now send out messages fine to the list members but it appears not to be paying any attention at all to incoming messages; regardless of whether it's set up as a single opt-in or double opt-in list. Even trying to troubleshoot by creating a new dummy list has failed. I'm back up there sometime next week to sort out a comments system for him and will have another quick look at the mailing list if he hasn't managed to sort it himself.

ButtonALL is otherwise known as the Internet's Universal Remote This site helps you quickly find what you're looking for with minimal effort.

Dogpile is a metaseach site that uses multiple search engines at the same time to search for a term. The search engines used include Google, Yahoo! Search, Live Search, Ask.com, About, MIVA, LookSmart, and more.

FamilySearch.org is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and aims to encourage people to find their ancestors and preserve their family histories.

Search the National Portrait Gallery to find pictures of particular people (or 'sitters'), pictures by particular artists or particular pictures, by their titles.

I've watched a couple of movies today. First up was the action flick, Wanted, which was a lot of fun to watch and full of unbelievable special effects and stunts. If you do decide to go and watch it be aware that it's not a high-brow thriller but rather an almost comic book-like story. The second film was Adam Sandler's new movie, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, which also stars Rob Schneider and features guest appearances by Mariah Carey and Michael Buffer. It is lots of fun and well worth watching. I would give both movies solid 8/10 ratings.

The last couple of days have been absolute scorchers here. Well, by local standards anyway. The temperature has been in the high 20s and last night I had the floor fan on most of the night whilst lying atop the covers on the bed. It was way too warm to sleep in the bed. Anyway, it's a wee bit cooler today, the low 20s, but looking outside it's only a matter of time before it starts heaving it down. The sky looks dark in all directions.

In fact, just as I'm typing this, the skies have opened. It seems to be rapidly alternating between an absolute deluge and a mild shower.

A small group of friends and I went to see the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, last night.

I wish cinema seat designers would spend a good couple of hours sitting in their seats before unleashing them on the public. Although the seats were nice and wide with plenty of legroom they started to really hurt my back with about an hour or so to go and I ended up spending the last hour fidgeting around every few minutes trying to get comfortable again.

Anyway, the film is just about 2½ hours long and I started feeling that it was dragging on with about 30 minutes or so still to go. It had lulled a wee but but soon got going again. I can honestly say that it's probably one of the most fun films I've seen in quite a while. I'd give it a solid 8½/10 and would probably have given it a 9 but for the extra length. I can see Heath Ledger getting a posthumous Oscar nomination for his portrayal of The Joker.

I won't spoil any of the film for you but I will say that if you are in two minds as to whether or not to go; especially if you feel the film has been over-hyped because of Heath Ledger's death, then I would heartily recommend you go and see it.

Windows Reference is a very useful site full of articles, tips and advice for all Windows users. One of the most recent articles posted is a list of over 20 common problems and solutions for them.

GoComics is a website full of comics, editorial cartoons and comic strips. Strips include Andy Capp, Bob the Squirrel, The Boondocks, Calvin and Hobbes, Dick Tracy, Doonesbury, FoxTrot, Garfield, Gasoline Alley, Heathcliff, The Pink Panther, Tank McNamara, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Winnie the Pooh, Wizard of Id and many, many more.

I was typing up an application letter this morning when I happened to notice the amount of gunk under my keys. After finishing the letter I decided to do something about it.

I unplugged the keyboard, removed all the keys and soaked them in some soapy water whilst giving the rest of the keyboard a good brush with a stiff brush and a good rub with a damp cloth. The keys easily popped out by applying a little bit of pressure underneath them with a flat-headed screwdriver. After cleaning, drying and reinserting all the keys in the correct places it looks a million miles better than it did.

If you're not sure that you can get all the keys back into the right places a couple of suggestions include referring to another keyboard if you have one, refer to the box if you kept it and it has a picture on it, call up a website with a keyboard layout on it before you start; you can either leave it on screen or print it out, and finally, take a picture of the keyboard with a digital camera, or camera phone, before you start.

With the new football season less than a month away the time has come for the papers to start hyping their Fantasy Football games. Over the past few years I've played in the Telegraph Fantasy Football along with a bunch of work colleagues. I received an email this morning about the Guardian Fantasy Football, which is free, and since I'm not working at the moment I've decided to join up. You're given a budget of £100m and have to pick a squad of 15 players. My current first eleven is M Almunia, L King, P Evra, M Skrtel, S Warnock, G Barry, C Ronaldo, R Giggs, D Bentley, R Santa Cruz & D Berbatov. My substitutes are M Schwarzer, S Campbell, A Smertin & J Elmander.

You can sign up here and I have created a league called "Bowch's Blog League" which I have already invited a load of friends to. If I haven't invited you and you would like to participate then drop me an email and I'll give you the password.

Professor Martyn Poliakoff, CBE, of the University of Nottingham presents the Periodic Table of Videos.

A collection of pictures, and a video, that I just had to share:

• Wall-E & Eve
• PC, Mac & Linux v1
• PC, Mac & Linux v2
• Standard TV vs High Definition TV
• Pirate Encylopaedia
• Earth At Night
• Yoda Breakdancing [Video]

My mate Mark is a huge Manchester United fan and something of a stats nerd; which is something I would never have pegged him as when we were younger. Anyway, he has been running a website for about 10 years now and had recently decided it needed sprucing up.

We've sat down a few times together over the last couple of months and had come to a decision to transfer all the content over into Movable Type from Frontpage. However, after I'd transferred about ½ of the content we re-evaluated and came to the decision that Movable Type was really not suitable for the task. After further delving with Frontpage we've came up with a really elegant solution that uses more of Frontpage's core features.

The site did have a sort of uniformed design already; a header, footer, left sidebar and a right sidebar on most of the pages. The rest of the pages just had the header, footer and left sidebar. However, all the pages used inline frames for the header, footer and sidebars.

Mark has spent most of this week playing with Frontpage and has managed to come up with a set of templates that can be assigned to the entire site. The beauty of the system is that Frontpage will update all attached pages if he updates the templates. The test pages he had uploaded looked good but for one or two niggles. I've been up there this evening and have modified the templates to give them a more fluid ability. The newly updated test pages now display great at any resolution of 1024x768 or higher. Previously the right-hand sidebar had expanded to take up all the remaining screen width. Now, the entire page dynamically resizes to take advantage of the extra screen width.

An added advantage is that rather than the updating process taking most of the next month or so we can get it done in only a few nights. I'm due to pop back up to have a look at something else for him next week and fully expect the site to be fully updated to the new template design.

One of the other things we were going to do was add a redirect on his old webspace to point to the new domain. Unfortunately, his old ISP has deleted the old Index pages and won't allow him to upload any files to the space. This has prevented him from installing any sort of redirect. I think the next course of action is to delete the entire site from the old webspace and hope that Google trawls the site again soon, finds no content there, and removes the entries from it's database.

Anyway, the newly relocated site can be found here.

I feel pretty good today. No major headache and no major pain anywhere.

I was feeling rather tired yesterday evening so ended up going to bed just before 9pm. I woke up just after 1am and couldn't get back to sleep. I decided to get up, have a wee snack and watch WWE Raw. By time that finished at 4am I was feeling tired again. I went back to bed and got up just after 10am this morning.

Ankle feels a wee bit sore, my back is feeling a lot better than it has been in a while; just a twinge between the shoulder blades at the moment and I have a wee bit of a headache at the back of my head. All in all, a lot better than I tend to feel.

Like I said; I feel pretty good.

My kid sister was released from hospital today. They've diagnosed IBS with a swollen bowel. She never said if they'd prescribed any medication or if she has any follow up appointments to attend. She's still in a bit of pain but seems to be a lot better than she was on Friday night.

Chelsea are set to smash the world record transfer fee with a £119m bid for AC Milan's Brazilian midfielder Kaka.

When you browse or download from the internet in XP a small portion of your bandwidth is reserved for quality control purposes. In most cases this is a throwback to older systems and is really not required.

This tip removes that reservation and helps speed things up slightly.

Open up the Group Policy Editor (Click on Start->Run type gpedit.msc click ok) and then browse down to the following branch on the left hand side.

Local Computer Policy, Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Network, QoS Packet Scheduler

After you've highlighted 'QoS Packet Scheduler' in the left window you can double click 'Limit Reservable Bandwidth' in the right window.

Click on the Enable radio button and set the figure to '0%'.

Catherine, my kid sister, was admitted to hospital on Friday night suffering from abdominal pains and vomiting. She has been examined and they really aren't sure what's up with her. They've finally managed to stop her vomiting and are keeping her in until Monday at least; when she will get a scan. This is the second time she's been admitted to hospital with abdominal pains over the last couple of years and they weren't sure what the problem was previously either.

I put the new DVD and HDD in my sister's PC last night. After spending an age formatting the drive into 2 partitions I copied over her old Games partition and then deleted it and expanded the Windows partition to take up the newly freed space.

After rebooting I decided to install some proper defragmentation software but kept up coming across a Windows Installer error. Trying other packages I kept on coming up with the same error. I eventually decided to do a full reinstall with a slipstreamed version of XP only for Windows to hang 3 times in a row whilst trying to install the sound drivers. I finally went back to a Vanilla copy of XP and it installed fine. I then reinstalled AV, Firewall, CD/DVD and a variety of other software packages before calling it a night at about 5am.

I've now got a few other bits and pieces to install and then make a start on installing her games.

When you browse a network in XP you may find a considerable delay in viewing shared files. This is because XP searches the remote computer for 'Scheduled Tasks'. To speed up the process you can make a tweak to the registry.

Open up the Registry Editor (Click on Start->Run type regedit click ok) and then browse down to the following branch:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/RemoteComputer/NameSpace

Under this branch there should be at least two entries. The one you want is:

{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

This is the key that searches for 'Scheduled Tasks' on remote systems.

Please feel free to delete this key. You can also export this key for your own piece of mind so that you can re-import it later if you so wish. You should see an instant improvement; no reboot is required.

This tip also works on Windows 2000.

Please take care when making changes to the registry. I take no responsibility if you trash your registry.

Yesterday, I ordered a new hard drive and dvd writer for my sister's PC from CCL. Because my sister wasn't in a hurry for the parts I selected the Economy 5-7 day economy courier service. They were delivered this morning. So, that's another job I need to sort out.

I created an ISO image this morning of a CD for a friend, burnt it and then deleted the ISO. However, it transpired that the CD wouldn't read and I couldn't extract the data back off it.

A quick browse of the internet and I discovered NTFS Undelete, a free and open source solution that allows you to recover deleted files. I downloaded it, ran it and told it I was looking for a deleted *.ISO file and it soon found the file I needed. A couple of clicks later and I had the ISO file back and could burn it again at a lower speed.

OfficeRecovery.com offer a similar free product called Free Undelete, that caters for FAT16 and FAT32 file systems alongside support for NTFS. I haven't tried it but it appears to offer very similar functionality to NTFS Undelete.

GetDataBack for NTFS and FAT, from Runtime Software, is another package that I have successfully used in the past to recover accidentally deleted data. Although, unlike the other two, this is not free software.

I've gotten very little done today. I bumped into Chrissy at RPG last night and she suggested that I pop round and keep her company today. I said that I would give her a ring this morning. Unfortunately, after staying up late last night to watch the Home Run Derby I was still in bed when she phoned me at 10am.

After the normal morning routine I popped over to Chrissy's just as she was showing a guy around the house who was quoting for the insulation. Not long after we had to pop into Egremont to pick up her son and ended up having lunch in a cafe in town. Whilst her son slept most of the afternoon we nattered and caught up. We haven't really had a good chance to sit down and natter for well over a year, and probably closer to two.

Anyway, after she picked up her daughter, she invited me to stay for tea with herself, the kids and her husband. I kept the kids entertained whilst she did most of the prep-work for the meal. We had Moussaka with blanched potatoes, courgette, broccoli and salad. For a first ever attempt at Moussaka it was a very nice meal; so nice in fact that I had a second helping of everything.

It's nice to catch up with friends every now and again; even if you do get to see them on a more or less weekly basis at someting like the roleplaying club. It's refreshing to just sit down one-to-one and just see where the conversation leads.

I feel like crap today. My stomach is killing me, my back is playing up, I have a headache both at the front and rear of my head, my neck feels stiff and my eyes feel sore. Top that with a slight feeling of nausea and if I didn't have to pop to the roleplaying club to hand out a couple of things I would already be lying on/in bed.

Oh, and I've got indigestion.

Youniverse was featured on this week's BBC Click magazine show and is a site that uses photos to build a personality profile. It's quite a fascinating process and seems to work pretty well.

The press has been going nuts over the last couple of days regarding comments attributed to Cristiano Ronaldo likening himeself to s slave. This is not what he said.

What actually happened is that in an earlier interview Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, had previously stated that Ronaldo should be allowed to leave United and likened modern football contracts to slavery.

Ronaldo, hobbling on crutches along a pavement in Portugal, was asked if he agreed with Sepp Blatter's comments that he should be allowed to leave Manchester United and go wherever he wishes. His reply was "Yes, I totally agree with Mr Blatter's comments." There was no mention of Blatter's comments about slavery in the interview that took place.

The British media picked up on Ronaldo's reply, took it out of context, and implied that he felt he was a slave at Manchester United. Another case of the British media distorting the facts to suit their own ends and sell more papers.

As a Manchester United fan I'm annoyed in the extreme at Real Madrid's conduct over the last month or so in publicly courting a player under contract at another club. Roman Calderon, Real's president, can deny trying to cause unrest, but the coverage Marca, a Spanish paper, have had over the matter and the fact that every Real player has been instructed to big up Ronaldo whenever interviewed, suggests more than what Madrid are saying. FIFA's investigation of the matter and subsequent decision that Real have done nothing wrong makes a mockery of the tapping-up situation. It would appear that FIFA are saying "If you want to sign a player but don't want to approach his club, just let the papers know and they'll do the job for you."

Ronaldo is being vilified at the moment but the truth of the matter is that he has always expressed a desire to play for Real Madrid one day. All during his time at United he has said this. United fans may have hoped in the past that the day would be long in the future, if at all, but the reality is starting to appear that it could be very soon.

Carlos Quieroz leaving United to take over as Portuguese national manager doesn't help United in their cause but one can only hope that Ronaldo listens to Sir Alex and realises that the best place for him to develop further as a player is currently still in Manchester.

I'm hoping Ronaldo stays for at least one more year, and would hope that he stays until Fergie retires at least. But, I'm a realist, and if he insists on leaving now then United should agree to let him go and try and get a stupid amount of money out of Madrid. Madrid have previously said that they would pay upto €100million before backtracking and saying they would go as high as €70million. If I were the United hierarchy I would reiterate that Ronaldo is not for sale and even if he were then €100million would be a good, although unsuccessful, initial first bid.

I decided to have an early night last night; especially having had 2 late nights working away either on websites or reinstalling Dad's PC. Anyway, I woke up at about 6am this morning and felt pretty good; although I decided that was too early to get up. Went back to bed and woke up again just after 9am. I've ended up doing very little today a[art from popping to the Job Centre this morning and into town to do a wee bit of shopping this afternoon. No pressures or hassle!

Dad's PC decided not to access the internet at all yesterday afternoon. It would still access all the network shares but Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera all refused to browse the net. It wouldn't even let me update ZoneAlarm or Spybot Search & Destroy. After spending about two hours trying to diagnose the problem and come up with solutions I was still stumped. Nothing I tried seemed to work and some of the options that I wanted to try I couldn't access. I'd run checks with ZoneAlarm, HijackThis and Spybot S&D to no avail..

I finally decided that I would back up the documents, pictures, music files, video files and downloaded items he wanted to keep and reformatted. XP reinstalled a breeze and after installing a few other bits and pieces such as Avira Antivirus and Comodo Firewall I reconnected the network cable and all was good again. Started downloading updates from Windows Update and after a reboot prompted by Windows Update I again ran into problems.

As soon as Windows booted and Explorer opened nothing else would run. No matter what program I tried I would get an "inaccessible or insufficient permissions" type error. I couldn't diagnose that problem without going into Safe Mode and disabling Simple Sharing. In fact it said I didn't even have enough permissions to shut down the PC; I had to use Task Manager for that.

Anyway, in Safe Mode, all the file permissions had been blanked and this appeared to be the reason that nothing would run. After changing all the permissions back to what they should be and re-enabling Simple Sharing I rebooted into XP again, only to have the same problem. A visit back to Safe Mode revealed the permissions had again been wiped. Reset them and left Simple Sharing disabled while rebooting into XP.

The same problem was persisting and checking the permissions in XP revealed that my latest change had taken and everything should be working. A quick check of the m$ knowledgebase, thanks to a link provided by a friend, provided me with instructions on how to use the in-built security editor to reset all permissions back to their default values. Nope, still no luck; even after another reboot.

Deciding that since very little had been installed I would once again reformat and reinstall. After reinstalling, installing AV and Firewall protection and downloading updates from m$ again everything finally seemed to be working. I left the PC defragging the drives and went up to bed just after 3am; a full 11 hours after I had gone downstairs to originally see what the problem was.

Got up this morning and the PC seems to be working okay still. Dad has spent most of today reinstalling his games. What would normally take me about 2-3 hours; depending upon how much extra software I installed, took almost half a day and I didn't install a lot of the stuff that I would normally install for him. Bloody PCs!

After spending most of last night doing some work on a couple of websites that I am involved with, it was after 4:30am when I finally went to bed. Fully intending to stay in bed for as long as I could, I was rudely awakened at about 10am this morning by a couple of fighter jets screaming overhead.

The Lake District is an ideal location for the RAF to practice low-level flying and they normally take place in the valleys further to the east and south. We rarely hear them, except maybe in the distance if they get a bit closer. It must be well over a year since I can last remember any low-level drills taking place this far west of the mountains.

Anyway, I've spent most of my time this morning doing a bit more website work and am now going to take a break and watch some tv.

The current FIFA world rankings can be found at the following locations:

• Men.
• Women.

The Human Calendar is just what the name implies; a calendar. It's kind of a natural progression of The Human Clock, created by the same guy back in 2001. Apparently the idea was first dreamt up back in 2003 but didn't come to full fruition until 2007. You can even get some portable versions of the calendar to add to your own website.

One of the things I've struggled with over the last 15 years or so has been my weight. Ever since I severely injured myself playing football. I tore the cartilage in my left ankle, twisted/pulled the ligaments in my right ankle and hyper-extended my right knee. When I played football regularly my weight never fluctuated much from about 13 stone (182lbs / 82½kg). Depending on how much running I also did it sometimes was even less. In the first couple of years after stopping my weight went up to 15 stone (210lbs / 95½kg), it eventually went up to about 17 stone (238lbs / 108kg). My weight remained pretty steady there until about 7 years ago.

Within a year of starting work at Perkins my weight had ballooned to over 20 stone (280lbs / 127kg) and in the following five years it went up to approximately 24 stones (336lbs / 152½kg). After embarking on a new diet and taking some weight loss medication I got back down to under 20 stone (280lbs / 127kg) within a year. Unfortunately, I have very poor dietary control and really lack the desire to stick to a managed diet plan and am now back above 24 stone (338lbs / 157½kg) again.

Anyway, after doing some reading on the internet I've come across a few sites suggesting a regime of intermittent fasting as a potential solution. The beauty of the plan is that you don't have to strictly manage the kinds or amount of food that you eat. The plan relies on intermittently fasting, much like palaeolithic man did and most wild animals do. The plan calls for a period of fasting followed by a period of eating in a cycle. I'm going to give it a try.

My plan is that I will eat normally today until 6pm. I have already had my breakfast and will eat our main Sunday meal sometime between 4pm and 5pm as usual. I may then have a small snack before 6pm. I will then fast until 6pm tomorrow eveing at which point I will have a normal evening meal and perhaps snack a bit later. On Tuesday I will have my normal breakfast and then eat normally in the afternoon until 6pm at which point I will fast until 6pm Wednesday. I will have a normal evening of eating on Wednesday after 6pm and then have breakfast and normal afternoon eating until 6pm on Thursday at which point I will again fast until 6pm on Friday. Friday 6pm onwards to Sunday 6pm I will eat normally and then repeat the cycle next week.

• Sunday: Breakfast, Lunch, Nothing After 6pm
• Monday: Nothing Until 6pm, Dinner/Supper
• Tuesday: Breakfast, Lunch, Nothing After 6pm
• Wednesday: Nothing Until 6pm, Dinner/Supper
• Thursday: Breakfast, Lunch, Nothing After 6pm
• Friday: Nothing Until 6pm, Dinner/Supper
• Saturday: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner/Supper as Normal

Normally on a Saturday I would be going roleplaying. However, Colin and Scoot are off to a Stag Do tonight so the game isn't on today. They had mentioned last weekend that they wouldn't be about this weekend but I totally forgot. I even went and bought snacks for the game.

Anyway, rather than sitting around and just browsing the web or playing games I've decided I'm going to catch up with one of the myriad of shows that I have fallen behind on. The show I've decided to catch up with is Showtime's Dexter, based on the novels by author Jeff Lindsay. Dexter is a forensic analyst who also happens to be a serial killer, allegedly targeting the truly-deserving.

I've got both Season 1 and 2 on DVD; 24 episodes in total, and if I start now I can get 7 or 8 episodes watched before Doctor Who starts at 6:40pm. I can then get another episode in before the 3rd game of the Boston Red Sox - New York Yankees baseball. I can then make inroads into the rest of Season 1 after the baseball finishes.

Here is a nice collection of wallpapers from Western Washington University Planetarium.

Here is a nice collection of anime wallpapers.

Here is a collection of 'Demotivantional' posters.

Here is a rather large collection of cartoons. There's a few gems amongst them all.

Here is the index page of NASA's Astronomy Picture Of The Day, which has been going strong since June 1995.

One of the worst kept secrets of recent times is that Blizzard were apparently developing a third game in the Diablo franchise. The purchase of the Diablo3.com domain seemed to back that up. And recently they have added a Diablo 3 section to their website.

Coupled with the previous announcement of Starcraft 2 it would appear that things are looking good on the Blizzard front.

I've had a splitting headache all day. I had planned on getting some serious work done on a friend's website today but only managed to get 4 or 5 pages converted before giving up. I've taken some tablets for the headache but to no real avail and ended up going for a lie down about 3pm. I woke up briefly as a thunderstorm rumbled outside with rain pelting down, before falling back asleep. I finally woke back up just before 6pm to discover bright sunshine splitting the curtains and just a slightly damp ground to suggest that any rain had actually fell.

After having some problems with the bank incurring charges for unpaid Direct Debits I cancelled all my direct debits and have been paying my bills via my debit card. Unfortunately, since losing my job I've been struggling to meet bill payments, especially since I've been on hardship payments for the last 3 months, and have not paid my O2 contract bill for those 3 months. It had always been a case of I'll try and keep some money back and make a part payment with the intention of settling the full amount once I had the cash available. However, events have conspired against me time and again and I have been unable to do so.

Anyway, I received a letter the other day from the above company regarding my O2 account and the outstanding Airtime Balance and Remaining Contract Charge. The total amount comes to just about £132 and they wanted payment by 2nd July; today. After getting my benefits payments stopped for the last 3 months or so I am only now back to receiving £121 every other week and cannot meet this full payment. I phoned them earlier today to try and come to some arrangement regarding making a part payment when I next get paid and get the 3rd degree regarding payments I make for lodge, contents insurance, the internet, the normal phone bill and Sky. I was more than willing to make payments every payday to ensure that I resolved this debt as soon as I felt comfortable.

To be honest, I can't really afford to continue making payments for an O2 contract at close to £40 a month when I can just use an old O2 sim-card and top up with credit as infrequently as I like. However, after saying that I couldn't afford to pay the whole amount and that I couldn't afford to just pay the Airtime Balance and get the phone reconnected the woman on the other end of the phone wasn't interested in anything but getting half the payment today and the remainder by next Monday; going so far as to ask if I could get my Dad or other family member to loan me the money to make the payment. She even suggested making a £5 payment today and then paying the remaining amount in full next Monday. Sometimes I wonder what kind of Dream World they live in.

I probably could've made a payment today to cover the Airtime Balance but only if I didn't pay other bills due this week and next; when I don't get paid. However, this would have a knock-on effect for the rest of the month and I would potentially end up in a worse position than I already am. I felt under pressure the entire length of the call and got more and more worked up as she continued to try to get a payment out of me rather than help me come up with any sort of agreement moving forward. I eventually ended the call by telling them to take me to court.

I have since calmed down a little bit and used their online system to make an offer of paying £40 a month. If they don't accept that they can take me to court and see how they will like getting paid £10 every other week for nine months or so rather than 3 payments of £40 or so.

Although, knowing my luck recently, the court would probably end up ordering me to pay the amount in full or go to prison.

Don S. Davis, who played Major General George Hammond on Stargate SG-1, has passed away at the age of 65 years old. He suffered a massive heart attack on Sunday morning, June 29th.

One of my friends, Greg, has decided to give Linux a try on an oldish PC that he has. After seeking some advice, from yours truly, he decided to install Ubuntu. Apparently, he used the Live CD and installed via Windows. Everything was fine until he rebooted and deleted the Windows partition.

The system still booted fine but wouldn't find his CD, DVD or external Hard Drive. The system knew they were there but wouldn't mount them. Unfortunately, with me not being physically there, it proved a bit elusive and time consuming to troubleshoot what device references Ubuntu was using.

After spending a fair while browsing forums on the net we eventually managed to come up with a foolproof method of detecting the device references and it was then a pretty easy case of making a few alterations to a key configuration file.

The strange thing was that the system was detecting his usb pen drive fine but whenever it was rebooted it would detect the external hard drive on any 1 of 4 possible ports. Easiest solution I could come up with was to tell the system to mount all 4 on boot; 3 would fail but the other would be the right one.

It's probably neither an elegant or particularly smart solution but it works.