kestrel

go shopping, that is. Bristol Broadmead is horrible, filled with people with no manners, who we don’t know. But I needed a tax disc for one of the cars, so off we went to brave the horrors.

and it’s as well that we don’t go very often, as we came home with a Gap haul of three pairs of trousers, four shirts, a sweater and a leather bag. And then there was the camera tripod, and a battery and charger for perlmonger’s Canon IS90 (the latter pair costing UKP 90, if you please). And some cat fud tin covers, an extension lead, a jelly bag. Oh, and a ridiculous little Leatherman Juice XE in purple metalflake – I simply had to have it, once I realised it had a corkscrew.

oh yes – then there were the lovely little glass espresso cups with metal handles – we bought nine of them. Really, we’re not fit to be let out …

when the nice shiny new machine arrived last week, in an effort to save time I zapped the program files directory across from the old one, exported and judiciously edited the software registry, and installed over the top. Now, perhaps it was the fact that the machine kept locking up (because I didn’t, at the time, have the proper USB2 drivers to install), but a nassty case of software rot appeared to set it.

it manifested itself in sneaky little ways – the machine seemed incapable of finding an application to play streaming MP3s, Google refused to open a new window despite having its preferences set, my e-mail client (The Bat!) wouldn’t action new sorting rules.

so, today, in desperation, I zapped the XP install and started again. Reinstalling what seems like hundreds of apps from scratch, without any registry keys, ini files, etc (well, I cheated on a couple of them, like Putty). All seems stable now, and I won’t attempt to cut corners like that again.

of course, now I’m going to have to work over the weekend to finish the rugger buggers’ site … bollox :(

a sharp e-mail to the manufactures of the Pyro webcam (see LJ entry yesterday) has brought forth a set of drivers which appear to work, without timing out. No explanation or apology – they just landed in my mail box. However, we now have a working Pyro on the Imac.

needless to say, there are no cats within range, but we’ll sort out the uploady stuff later today.

another triumph of style over substance [here] … some people should have their Flash forcibly de-installed.

have nearly finished the site for the rugger buggers, thank $deity, then I can start on the Institute one – lots of CMS, and a complete redesign. They phoned on Friday wanting to move everything “right now“, as their current Very Large Hosting Company had completely fscked things up [aside: that's a surprise].

so that’s me settled with work for about 3 months, what with the ongoing wizardry, and my big charity stuff, and other various bits and pieces.

and then, out of the blue yesterday, along comes an e-mail giving the go ahead to do a shopping site I quoted for months ago, and had thought had quietly died the death … there goes any hope I had of a quiet autumn!

popped into PC Whirled today, to buy a copy of Jaguar. I’ll never learn … I stood waiting for about 3 minutes while a pair of spotty faced droids tried to work out how to use the till, and then one said “can I help you?”.

no, no – I’m just standing here admiring the scenery, you fule. It seems that they’d never heard of Jaguar, and certainly couldn’t be arsed to go and find out about it, so I shall order it from Amazon – although Amazon’s price will be cheaper, this will no doubt cost a fscking fortune, as there is about £300 worth of CDs on my wishlist. ho hum …

still, we felt the journey wasn’t a complete waste of time, as we somehow succumbed to the siren call of a little Pyro firewire webcam, which we’ve been eyeing up for some time. The webcam on the iMac failed to work once we upgraded angua.ramtops.org, as OSX doesn’t support streaming video over USB.

so we bore it home, and plugged it in. The box said the apps were shareware, which is fair enough – I have a registered webcam applet for the iMac anyway. And it is very sweet …

but after 30 minutes, it stopped working. It turns out that the drivers need to be paid for! £90 for the bloody camera, and you have to pay for the drivers, even though the box states they are included. I have sent them a “polite” e-mail, as follows:

I would like to complain in the STRONGEST POSSIBLE TERMS about the fact that you are prepared to sell a device (the Pyro webcam) which cannot be used on an iMac without the purchaser paying out for drivers – this is bordering on fraud, to me. The box states that the camera is supplied with drivers – nowhere does it say that these drivers have to be paid for, although it does state that the applications are shareware.

I shall be returning the camera to the store I bought it from in the morning, and will be enquiring of our local Trading Standards Office whether your company should be prosecuted for misleading the public.

it’s a great shame, as the camera works well. But I shall be advising anyone I know that your products are to be avoided because of your underhand tactics.

I Am Not Pleased.

have bitten the bullet and got a new machine. Is a really fast thing, with 2.2Gz and 1Gb RAM and some brand new Asus mobo and stuff … I’m just a gurlie, and so I don’t understand these things, really. But it seems a FUCK of a sight faster than my previously best beloved twin 866 box.

and it’s got this real clever bits in – DVD rewriter, Yamaha F1 CD burner. So have moved my Matrox Dualhead (so as to drive my 2 NEC 18″ TFTs), and my Creative Platinum. And have got working, so far, the house jukebox via Netjuke and MusicMatch, mIRC, Ameol (for CIX), Mozilla, LJ (obviously), and am now looking at seems like fscking thousands of bits of software …

anyway, all credit to the box builders, Computer Connection, who have, yet again, managed to relieve me of huge sums of money while I hardly felt a thing … I have to say that it gives me a small glow when the supplier says to me that the mobo makes him go .

of course, the damn thing will be obsolescent by Monday, but I’ll enjoy it while I can.

inspired by sbisson, we put Andromeda on our iMac to stream MP3s round the house. It seemed like a good idea as a) the house jukebox has just been put on external 160Gb firewire drive attached to said iMac, and b) said iMac does bugger all else. Andromeda turned out to be one of those packages that was very nearly wonderful, but failed at the last hurdle – it didn’t stream. Now, call us picky, but that was something we really wanted from a streaming MP3 server.

of course, we had the bit between our teeth now, and a bit of rummaging round Sourceforge brought forth Netjuke which, on a brief acquaintance, seems to fit the bill admirably. God knows precisely how it’s working behind the scenes – I leave that sordid grubbing about at command line level to perlmonger, but it seems to do everything we want, including things like latest music in, most played, etc.

anyway, this posting was prompted by the fact that Netjuke will generate random playlists, and this is what it has just generated for me – we certainly have catholic tastes in this house

we watched The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD on Sunday – or, at least, most of it. There were only so many “how we made the movie” things we could take, given that they all seemed to say pretty much the same thing, so we saved some for another time.

Peter Jackson’s achievement is monumental, IMO – he made such a good job of translating the book to film. And the locations are stunning – I want to go to New Zealand as soon as we can manage a month off (ho ho).

but I’m sorry – Elijah Wood just doesn’t work as Frodo, for me. I find him really irritating … too wide eyed and innocent. And yes, I KNOW Frodo was wide-eyed and innocent, but Elijah does it wrong. Actually, the only hobbit who did work for me is Ian Holm as Bilbo, and the rest of the casting is spot on.

still a stonking fillum, though – and roll on a) the director’s cut in November, and b) The Two Towers in December.

don’t you just love the British summer? 14:16 on an August afternoon, and we have lights on all over the house …

and one of the biggest social events of our year is looking as though it’s going to be washed out tomorrow, which is a real shame.