They're good short weeks like this. No sooner have you got into the swing than it's already the weekend and time for you to relax again.
Last night I finished watching the Welcome the NHK anime.
I have to say I liked it a lot more than the manga, but not enough to say I genuinely liked it.
I think part of the problem was that I was expecting it to be an out and out comedy and it isn't really. I mean in the last third it switches into straight drama so there's deliberately nothing funny in there.
Anyway, I'll do a full review at some point later.
I think I'm going to start watching Baccano next. I'm slightly afraid that mentally I've hyped this series up to much, but I remeber really loving the fansubs I sampled.
Friday, 9 October 2009
Thursday, 8 October 2009
busman's holiday
As mentioned yesterday, the weekend was something of a Busman's holiday.
Quite a few years ago, I built my sister a PC. The details of how aren't really relevant, but it essentially found itself in my Dad's possession as his machine.
Well a few weeks back he mentioned that it had essentially 'gone wrong'. One of the things he mentioned essentially sounded like the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, but it's incredibly difficult to diagnose these sorts of things over the phone, so I agreed to have a look when I visited.
Well, when he showed me it in action it was kinda obvious things had gone distinctly pear-shaped as it was indeed giving the BSOD and then immediately re-booting, so it was locked in and endless loop.
One thing that instantly struck me was that it was giving 2 separate options for booting windows, which was very odd. But it also looked like it might be having trouble accessing something properly, as that's what the BSOD message implied.
So my first port of call was the BIOS set-up screen. The last time I encountered a similar problem the RAM was unseated and a quick look at the BIOS screen can instantly show you what's connected and active, etc.
But unfortunately there was a BIOS password, so I couldn't have a look around. Which in itself was weird, because I didn't set a BIOS password on the machine. However, I knew that my sister had had some problems before and so maybe whoever fixed those problems had put the BIOS password on.
So we tried a few things and failed. Then we tried calling my sister, but she didn't know.
Then something odd transpired. My dad recognised the BIOS screen.
This stunned me, and initially I didn't believe him because I couldn't see how he would have known how to get there. But he clearly did recognise it. This would later feed into what had apparently happened, but more on that later.
So anyway, I took the case apart and reset the BIOS. I had to set a few things up again of course, but it also showed me everything was properly connected.
Of course it didn't solve the problem, because the real problem was that he'd essentially tried to re-install windows.
Again, quite how he's managed to set it so that it'll boot from the CD I don't know, but he did. Now installing windows is of course a fairly straightforward thing, but of course you wouldn't normally try to install it onto a machine with it already on without either putting it over the top or deleting the old one.
He hadn't done that. Indeed, it looked like he'd stopped the installation part of the way through.
Of course I'm sure this is probably all reversible, but the easiest thing to do was just blank the machine and re-install windows, so that's what I did. I asked whether there was anything important on the machine or if my sister had left anything, but he seemed fairly sure it was all okay.
Really this isn't a bad thing anyway, because he's just started an 'introduction to computing' type course and a clean install with few distractions is therefore a good thing.
There was a slight complication though as it meant buying a new copy of office. We got a copy at PC-World for convenience's sake, but when I got back I couldn't install it. This was because the version of XP was so old it needed Service Pack 2 installing.
My dad is planning to get broadband, but luckily I happen to have SP2 on a CD, so I sent that down to him and he seems to have installed it okay.
The real plan, and why he's interested in doing this is he wants to get into digital photography. That's why we bought him a digital camera for his birthday and obviously, being more PC-savvy is part of the next step - he can hardly learn how to adjust photos if he doesn't know how to turn the machine on!
Now as we were going on throughout the day the truth actually emerged as to what happened. Basically, he wanted to adjust the user accounts.
As mentioned, the machine was my sisters and her friends also used it. Therefore, he was logging in under their accounts, so what he wanted to do was remove them and/or add himself.
Unfortunately, he had no idea how to do that.
But what he did stumble across was the BIOS. Whether he adjusted anything else I don't know, but I'm guessing he saw the "set password" and thought that was how you did it, so he set a BIOS password by accident.
Then, for some reason that I still can't quite figure out he's tried to use the Windows XP CD. This has lead to him part-installing a new copy of XP, which was not finished properly but also broke the existing XP install.
I've always said that doing is the best was of learning, but I guess sometimes a little knowledge is needed before attempting stuff.
Quite a few years ago, I built my sister a PC. The details of how aren't really relevant, but it essentially found itself in my Dad's possession as his machine.
Well a few weeks back he mentioned that it had essentially 'gone wrong'. One of the things he mentioned essentially sounded like the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, but it's incredibly difficult to diagnose these sorts of things over the phone, so I agreed to have a look when I visited.
Well, when he showed me it in action it was kinda obvious things had gone distinctly pear-shaped as it was indeed giving the BSOD and then immediately re-booting, so it was locked in and endless loop.
One thing that instantly struck me was that it was giving 2 separate options for booting windows, which was very odd. But it also looked like it might be having trouble accessing something properly, as that's what the BSOD message implied.
So my first port of call was the BIOS set-up screen. The last time I encountered a similar problem the RAM was unseated and a quick look at the BIOS screen can instantly show you what's connected and active, etc.
But unfortunately there was a BIOS password, so I couldn't have a look around. Which in itself was weird, because I didn't set a BIOS password on the machine. However, I knew that my sister had had some problems before and so maybe whoever fixed those problems had put the BIOS password on.
So we tried a few things and failed. Then we tried calling my sister, but she didn't know.
Then something odd transpired. My dad recognised the BIOS screen.
This stunned me, and initially I didn't believe him because I couldn't see how he would have known how to get there. But he clearly did recognise it. This would later feed into what had apparently happened, but more on that later.
So anyway, I took the case apart and reset the BIOS. I had to set a few things up again of course, but it also showed me everything was properly connected.
Of course it didn't solve the problem, because the real problem was that he'd essentially tried to re-install windows.
Again, quite how he's managed to set it so that it'll boot from the CD I don't know, but he did. Now installing windows is of course a fairly straightforward thing, but of course you wouldn't normally try to install it onto a machine with it already on without either putting it over the top or deleting the old one.
He hadn't done that. Indeed, it looked like he'd stopped the installation part of the way through.
Of course I'm sure this is probably all reversible, but the easiest thing to do was just blank the machine and re-install windows, so that's what I did. I asked whether there was anything important on the machine or if my sister had left anything, but he seemed fairly sure it was all okay.
Really this isn't a bad thing anyway, because he's just started an 'introduction to computing' type course and a clean install with few distractions is therefore a good thing.
There was a slight complication though as it meant buying a new copy of office. We got a copy at PC-World for convenience's sake, but when I got back I couldn't install it. This was because the version of XP was so old it needed Service Pack 2 installing.
My dad is planning to get broadband, but luckily I happen to have SP2 on a CD, so I sent that down to him and he seems to have installed it okay.
The real plan, and why he's interested in doing this is he wants to get into digital photography. That's why we bought him a digital camera for his birthday and obviously, being more PC-savvy is part of the next step - he can hardly learn how to adjust photos if he doesn't know how to turn the machine on!
Now as we were going on throughout the day the truth actually emerged as to what happened. Basically, he wanted to adjust the user accounts.
As mentioned, the machine was my sisters and her friends also used it. Therefore, he was logging in under their accounts, so what he wanted to do was remove them and/or add himself.
Unfortunately, he had no idea how to do that.
But what he did stumble across was the BIOS. Whether he adjusted anything else I don't know, but I'm guessing he saw the "set password" and thought that was how you did it, so he set a BIOS password by accident.
Then, for some reason that I still can't quite figure out he's tried to use the Windows XP CD. This has lead to him part-installing a new copy of XP, which was not finished properly but also broke the existing XP install.
I've always said that doing is the best was of learning, but I guess sometimes a little knowledge is needed before attempting stuff.
Wednesday, 7 October 2009
gloomy
Back to work today.
:(
The weather was pretty miserable on the whole while I was on holiday, but then to be fair it is properly into Autumn now.
I didn't achieve half of the stuff I was hoping too. I mean, I did achieve some bits that were on my list, but I didn't get anywhere near doing some other stuff.
Mainly the 'sorty outy' stuff of packing away my aircon and tidying up my PCs was the type of things I ended up avoiding, but I also failed to do any scanning. I didn't even scan some DVD covers, which meant I also couldn't put together any more reviews for trismugistus.com.
I did watch some more Welcome to NHK, although I didn't finish the series.
I don't really have a proper excuse for failing to do these things - I even had a big chunk of spare time on the Tuesday when I could feasibly have done them. About as close as I can come to an excuse is that I was bloody knackered.
The reasons I was tired were multiple.
First off I've been finding work really tiring lately. I seem to be doing loads of extra hours without any benefit from it (I may blog about it later, but can't be arsed now). The upshot of this was that even though I wasn't driving down to Dad's until Friday afternoon I ended up doing very little in the morning as I was so tired.
This is also one of the big reasons I don't get much done at weekends generally - I feel really tired and so am a bit listless and un-enthusiastic. Indeed, for the last few weeks I've been going to bed really early at the weekends because I've been so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open.
I think this hasn't been helped by my general lack of holiday this year. Normally I try to take quite a few long-weekends, but with Monaco sucking up two full weeks of holiday so early in the year I've not managed to do that so much this year.
The other reason I was tired was that the drive to Devon and back was really knackering. The trip down was really busy, even though most of it was just ordinary Friday afternoon, not rush hour, although with it taking so long I did cop that too. The drive back on Sunday was better, although the traffic was surprisingly heavy again and I did get caught up at Stonehenge.
But the point is that, according to my trip computer thing, I spent nearly 8 hours driving to and from Devon - that's pretty tiring stuff by.
It also didn't help that I was basically having a bit of a "Busman's holiday". If you've not heard this expression before, it's when you go on holiday away from work somewhere and end up doing roughly what you would normally do at work.
In my case I had to fix Dad's PC (more on that tomorrow) which is something I have to do all the time. But the point here is that it's quite a tiring thing - certainly it's horribly long winded and involves having to concentrate a lot.
One of the sneakier parts though was that, with Friday, Saturday and Sunday all being written off by my visit to Devon, all the stuff I would usually do at the weekend wasn't done, so I had to do it Monday and Tuesday.
Now really, that was a big part of the reason I took Monday and Tuesday as well, but I always forget stuff like that, you see, so I add in more things and then end up getting annoyed with myself that I haven't done them all :/.
:(
The weather was pretty miserable on the whole while I was on holiday, but then to be fair it is properly into Autumn now.
I didn't achieve half of the stuff I was hoping too. I mean, I did achieve some bits that were on my list, but I didn't get anywhere near doing some other stuff.
Mainly the 'sorty outy' stuff of packing away my aircon and tidying up my PCs was the type of things I ended up avoiding, but I also failed to do any scanning. I didn't even scan some DVD covers, which meant I also couldn't put together any more reviews for trismugistus.com.
I did watch some more Welcome to NHK, although I didn't finish the series.
I don't really have a proper excuse for failing to do these things - I even had a big chunk of spare time on the Tuesday when I could feasibly have done them. About as close as I can come to an excuse is that I was bloody knackered.
The reasons I was tired were multiple.
First off I've been finding work really tiring lately. I seem to be doing loads of extra hours without any benefit from it (I may blog about it later, but can't be arsed now). The upshot of this was that even though I wasn't driving down to Dad's until Friday afternoon I ended up doing very little in the morning as I was so tired.
This is also one of the big reasons I don't get much done at weekends generally - I feel really tired and so am a bit listless and un-enthusiastic. Indeed, for the last few weeks I've been going to bed really early at the weekends because I've been so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open.
I think this hasn't been helped by my general lack of holiday this year. Normally I try to take quite a few long-weekends, but with Monaco sucking up two full weeks of holiday so early in the year I've not managed to do that so much this year.
The other reason I was tired was that the drive to Devon and back was really knackering. The trip down was really busy, even though most of it was just ordinary Friday afternoon, not rush hour, although with it taking so long I did cop that too. The drive back on Sunday was better, although the traffic was surprisingly heavy again and I did get caught up at Stonehenge.
But the point is that, according to my trip computer thing, I spent nearly 8 hours driving to and from Devon - that's pretty tiring stuff by.
It also didn't help that I was basically having a bit of a "Busman's holiday". If you've not heard this expression before, it's when you go on holiday away from work somewhere and end up doing roughly what you would normally do at work.
In my case I had to fix Dad's PC (more on that tomorrow) which is something I have to do all the time. But the point here is that it's quite a tiring thing - certainly it's horribly long winded and involves having to concentrate a lot.
One of the sneakier parts though was that, with Friday, Saturday and Sunday all being written off by my visit to Devon, all the stuff I would usually do at the weekend wasn't done, so I had to do it Monday and Tuesday.
Now really, that was a big part of the reason I took Monday and Tuesday as well, but I always forget stuff like that, you see, so I add in more things and then end up getting annoyed with myself that I haven't done them all :/.
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