I tried to open Spotify the other day and immediately it told me it needed to download a new version but couldn’t. Because my computer had disconnected from the internet. So I reset it, opened it again and the same thing happened. Which rather suggested Spotify was the culprit.

So the simplest solution was to download a new version. Which was instant. Installing it took less than a minute and it’s now fine.

However, before I installed it I first wanted to create a system restore point. In XP I just went to the link I’d pinned to the Start Menu. In Windows 7 I stare at the Start Menu for a while before giving up. Fortunately, when I got Windows 7 I found a great site with tutorials on how to work it, so I went there and found how to create a system restore point. It’s in Control Panel->System, nowhere near the System Restore menu, which is in Accessories->System.

I decided it’s really silly to keep searching for how to do it every time and ended up following another tutorial which adds a shortcut to your desktop, which you just have to click and type your restore point in and it does it. Much quicker and easier. This is why I also have shortcuts to Start Menu for user and all users because I have no idea how to get to them in Windows 7 because right clicking on the Start Menu doesn’t work.

Then I remembered that I wanted to add TextPad to the Quick Launch. In XP you dragged the shortcut. Doesn’t work in Windows 7… I ended up going back to the same website to find where the Quick Launch lived and then sticking it in there.

I know Microsoft have done all this so people can’t cock it all up (and people really can cock anything up on computers given half a chance). It’s just that, by doing that, they’ve made everything so much harder if you know what you’re doing. Which is the opposite to the version of Linux I have on my netbook, where if you don’t know what you’re doing you’re reduced to copying and pasting into scripts… (which works, mind you)

I was thinking I ought to post as it’s been a while and then thought, what do I have to say? I feel like I do nothing at the moment. Which is mostly true. I have a social life on Tuesdays with Rotaract. Last Tuesday we went bowling. I did pretty well and didn’t get too dizzy – but I did have to walk up to the lane with the ball in both hands, bend down, make sure I wasn’t going to fall over, then throw the ball.

I feel quite good at the moment, which is pretty much related to work calming down and me getting some sleep. I keep going through phases of waking up at 6 or 6.30 and if you do it occasionally then you could argue that you didn’t need that much sleep. But when you keep doing it and get tireder and tireder and have to go to bed earlier and earlier, that’s not a help. So far this week I’ve only woken up at 6.30am twice, and once dreamed I had, which was a bit surreal.

Since I actually have a brain for a change, I have managed two drafts of my Remix fic. I’m quite excited about it and quite happy with it, so hopefully I’ll get it finished soon, before I start feeling terrible again. Staying up late for the election in two weeks isn’t going to help with that, but that’s life.

I have decided that Sports Resort is my new favourite game on the Wii. I love archery on it – you hold the remote in your left hand and pull the bow back with the nunchuck, so it’s much more like archery in real life. It keeps your progress like Wii Sports does, so you can see how you’re improving (or not in tennis in my case), but there are other goals you can get (like getting 10s with your three arrows in archery for example), which makes it fun.

Speaking of, I think I’ll go and do some Wii playing now, before HIGFNY and Outnumbered…

This week was starting out as a good week – I felt great on Monday morning. Then I stayed late to help someone else on a project and the week has gone downhill from there. Although I did have a very nice cod with tomato sauce in one of the Italian restaurants last night.

Since I installed Windows 7, my printer doesn’t work with it. I had a complete arse with it in XP, but it was perfect in Vista. In theory it should just have been a case of downloading the drivers, but in practice that had no effect. So I browsed a lot of forums and tried various things, none of which had any effect.

I ended up asking HP support who told me to do lots of things I’d already done (despite telling them I’d done it), were complete idiots and treated me like an idiot and didn’t read my emails properly. And now they’ve given up. They’ve concluded that the problem must be my computer and I should contact the computer’s manufacturer and get them to format it. Beyond the obvious question of why on earth would I get Acer to format my computer, my answer to that is not just no, it’s hell, no.

So now I need a new printer that definitely, definitely works with Windows 7. So one that’s come out this year, probably. And ideally works with my current cartridges too, since I have one of each spare… I hate being printerless as well. I don’t use it that often but now I keep needing to use it!

I didn’t have anything on this weekend and I didn’t have to go anywhere, so I thought I’d get a few things done, housework and writing and so on. Well, I managed the first. I thought I was doing well for getting all my washing done, until I thought “that’s making a bit more of a watery noise than usual”, opened the kitchen door and found water on the floor. Which is just what you want from your washing machine. It was just the waste water pipe from the washing machine that had come out of the pipe that takes it to the drain, so it was at least easily fixed.

Recently I discovered Pidgin, which is the messenger program I use on my netbook, doesn’t belief AIM exists any more. Since I was awake annoyingly early this morning I thought I’d get up and see if anyone was in any of the RPG related chats. Which they weren’t, but I discovered that Trillian in your browser doesn’t do chat. After lots of searching on the forums I uninstalled Pidgin then reinstalled it. At which point it refused to open. But I did discover why it refused to open links in Firefox and just did nothing. In the end I installed Kopete, which I’ve decided I like far more than Pidgin anyway, but not as much as Astra.

Just because it seems to be that sort of weekend, the netbook keeps randomly disconnecting from the network (it just seems to be a common bug with it, which is unhelpful, but at least I know how to get it back on without restarting). And I watched a DVD using my computer as a DVD player and the wireless keyboard as a remote and twice the computer decided that every keystroke was actually me right clicking and wouldn’t acknowledge me left clicking. Why it decided it didn’t like the wireless keyboard today when it’s been fine up till now, I don’t know.

On the plus side, since Azureus kept disconnecting my computer from the internet (which also seems to be a common problem with Vista) and there’s something clearly not right with it, I thought I’d install μTorrent, which seems to work perfectly and looks pretty much the same.

So that was my weekend of trials and tribulations. Next week I have an MRI, a flu jab and a trip to the dentist and the week after is a trip to the balance clinic. So it’ll all be a bit medical.

Exciting news: Red Dwarf is getting a new series! Despite Back to Earth not living up to series I-VI I’m excited anyway.

I spent last weekend updating all my Firefoxes to 3.5. My laptop and Firefox Portable were on v3 already, so it was just a case of clicking the button and updating a couple of my add-ons manually. The netbook was a different story…

The trouble with it is that Acer made some programs dependent on Firefox 2 and disabled the check for updates button, so I hadn’t bothered updating. It was faster than my old computer, but it had got to the stage where it was really slow, specially in Gmail where my typing was ahead of what was appearing on the screen. So I found some instructions on the internet about how to install Firefox 3 alongside v2. So I copied Firefox files on the netbook so I could make sure to get back to the old version and followed the instructions.

I briefly had both versions open before I restarted, which made all my old Firefox menus and icons open v3. Which, because it wasn’t installed over the top of the old version meant that it didn’t have my profile. The instructions said that it was easy to get the old version back, but didn’t say how. After spending ages searching the internet and trying things I gave up and set up the new version of Firefox.

Which was all fine except that whenever I opened it it opened up four tabs, which wasn’t what I wanted. I assumed this was a problem with Tab Mix Plus restoring things. A week later I found this was because I’d accidentally set my home page to be all four tabs, which it didn’t even occur to me to do…

It’s worked out ok in the end because 3.5 is much faster, nothing seems to be broken, and I have the Penguin Racing game that’s on the Asus Eee on my netbook. Not that I can play it because it moves, but it’ll be there for future usage…

I’ve also watched lots of new things on TV that all seems to be American. But how exciting is Friday evenings going to look with SJA, HIGFNY and Armstrong and Miller? Read more…

At the moment, with being ill, doing a normal five day week is really hard going, and that’s 37.5 hours. This week I’ve done about 40. I managed to be able to go home an hour early on Thursday, and it was really good to be able to have a lie down before cooking dinner at a reasonable time without having to resort to eating a pot potato. Then Friday was ok, and if it had stayed like that I might have been ok. Except that I was stupidly busy from 3.30 to 6.30.

I was so tired Friday night. I wasn’t too bad this morning, but I’ve mostly felt terrible since then. But tomorrow I am determined to be well enough to go to our community project because it will take my mind off it and maybe some fresh air will help a bit. Plus there is going to be a barbecue in the cul-de-sac tomorrow afternoon (they put a note through my door after I’d gone to bed last night!), so if I was in I’d have to close the windows against the smell, and I have no intention of going to a barbecue with people I don’t know where I’d have to explain why I can’t eat anything and why I can’t stand up without holding onto something. I really don’t have the energy for that.

But today I have watched two more episodes of Teachers (I have five to go until the point where I definitely started watching it) and I’ve been reading Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, which is big and heavy, but really interesting.

And my new mp3 player arrived, which is better and brighter pink than the old one. I just have to use Windows Explorer to transfer files, and I loathe Explorer in Vista, it’s designed so you can never find anything. On my netbook I have to use Amarok, which took me ages to work out how to get it to recognise my mp3 player and transfer files to it, but that was mostly because I was looking in the wrong place.

Also, sign-ups have started for the second Sarah & Harry ficathon. There clearly needs to be a Harry ficathon too, but not till next year because this one won’t finish till October and then Yuletide will be starting up. And I’ll have a working internet connection for it this time!

I am freezing. But then I am only wearing one jumper. I have stupid heating that comes in on or off and as it’s so warm during the day I have it off, otherwise I wake up boiling. Because it’s still really cold at night, it means it’s quite cold in the mornings and evenings, plus my body clock seems to have decided it’s BST a bit early.

I’m definitely still ill. I put on a New Who episode and the beginning credits are the worst thing ever. Definitely not recommended if you’re dizzy. I have until Wednesday to get better, then I go back to the doctors, who are pretty much incapable of diagnosing anything I can’t work out for myself, so I’m not hopeful, but I just want to get better. I want my life back again.

I am going to decide what car I want this weekend, which’ll probably knock me out for the weekend with the half hour drive each way. But I definitely need a car that’s less effort to drive, because part of the reason I didn’t for so long while I was ill was because I didn’t have the energy to turn the wheel. The trouble is that they don’t make custom cars and what I really want is a Toyota Yaris at the front and a Honda Jazz at the back. And no, I don’t want James May to make me one.

I have discovered the source of one of the funny noises my car makes! I currently have four: one is something rattling in the dashboard, one is a squeaking noise when I break, two are squeaking noises when I’m going along. The squeaking noises are all louder with the window open, which hasn’t really been improving my drive home in a stuffy car with the sun right in my eyes. But while I was backing my car up after I’d turned it off, by the method of sticking my foot out of the door and giving it a push, as it’s on a slight slope, I discovered that when I move the car, it creaks. I’m quite looking forward to owning a quieter car.

I thought I’d try out a DVD in my computer this evening. It took me ages to work out which program it had installed as the DVD playing program and then I found I hate it with a passion. It’s rubbish. It takes over so much that you can hardly run any other program at the same time, and it takes the taskbar away so you can’t get to any other program (alt+tab refused to work). I couldn’t work out how to fast forward in any useful way and there’s no right click menu to tell it that actually you want subtitles/commentary. I was looking forward to getting an upgrade from WinDVD, but it turns out WinDVD was the pinnacle of DVD playing programs (and to be fair, I loved it, it’s far better than a DVD player). Am I right in thinking it’s the free version and PowerDVD is the paid for one that lets you take screenshots? Can I get it somewhere? Can I go back to Windows 98? (actually, since I have it on a virtual machine on this computer, the answer to the last one is yes, technically).

I do like my Wii.

I kept looking at my open documents this evening, thinking about how the things I needed to do before I went and couldn’t quite bring myself to get round to. And my back hurt sitting at the computer.

So I had a few games of the cow jumping game, sat back down at the computer and got it all done. Which is exactly the sort of thing I bought it for.

Now I’m sat on the sofa with the netbook, watching All Creatures Great and Small.

I’ve been trying to think about what I like about Vista vs XP. There are lots of things I like about my new computer, but none of them are related to the operating system at all. And I can think of plenty of things I hate about Vista. But when it comes to things I like about it…

There are two. The running things as administrator, as a security measure. The trouble is that I don’t get to see the benefits of it and it’s a pain every time I want to do something that requires being an administrator.

The second is the taskbar not being blue. I can now have the wallpaper I wanted on my old computer, but couldn’t have because it clashed with the taskbar. Although I’m not keen on the taskbar being such a dark grey because black icons (like TweetDeck) don’t show up well. I know there is a workaround to get it lighter, but it involves having a wallpaper that’s not darker than the taskbar, or fiddling about with the wallpaper and I can’t really be bothered.

When it comes down to it, there aren’t many things I liked about XP over 98 either. There’s only the start menu, which doesn’t scroll when you have too many icons (although I always made sure to keep mine down to one column anyway) and the recent programs on it, so you never have to go into the depths of the Start Menu where I could never find anything anyway. That was the only reason why I didn’t change to the Classic View.

I can’t remember 3.1 enough to remember whether I liked it or 98 better. But in conclusion, Microsoft shouldn’t keep changing things.

Recently I decided I’d try and write a blog post a day. It all fell apart this month – rather like the whole of this month really. I’ve put off so many things due to laziness at Christmas and then my computer dying, so now I feel like I have so much to do I don’t know where to start. Whereas in reality it would probably only take an evening if I just started. But I have nothing planned for this weekend, so hopefully I will be caught up by the end of it.

I have my shiny (and it is literally shiny) new computer now. There’s parts of Vista I really don’t like, but I have managed to replace those parts. Like I don’t use Windows Explorer and have a program that changes the Start Menu back to like XP and 98, which opens folders a lot quicker.

And that’s what I spent my (long) weekend doing (I had Friday and Monday off work). I also bought a breadmaker because my bread tastes so much better when mum makes it in her breadmaker than when I make it in my oven. And the cooker in the new place is so much slower (still electric) that it would probably be just as quick.

On the whole, this has been a bad week. But it did have some good things in it:

• I found Sainsburys did lasagne sheets made without soya flour, so I can eat soya again
• I now have a sofa and a wardrobe (even if the latter is currently in the kitchen, since that’s the only space for it) and a coffee table
• I have some friends coming tonight to go to our Cheese and Wine quiz and see my new flat
• I found some white dairy free chocolate. I haven’t tried it yet, since I ought to finish my current bar first, but I’m very excited about actually seeing some

And the bad:

• Friday last week the graphics card on my computer died. Friday, yesterday, my laptop keeps fusing, for reasons we’re not 100% sure of yet. It’s just as well I’d brought my work laptop home. You’d think two computers would be enough, but no…
• I haven’t had any emails since Thursday – turns out that actually I’ve had 34, including the test one I sent to myself. Now it’s sorted and I have them, but it would have been nice to have had them at the time…
• I worked ridiculously hard and late Tuesday and Thursday – the only days I had something on in the evening. So Thursday I didn’t get to go back to fencing again and Tuesday I got in long enough to have a pot noodle before going out, then only had the energy to go to bed when I got back in. Although part of that was because I had yesterday off.

Ok, so there aren’t any more bad things than that, but those are bad enough, I think.

This evening I thought I’d have a relaxed evening, get some stuff done, maybe have an early night, for a change. But so far all I’ve managed to do is have dinner and spend £500. And dinner required me to cook the chips twice because, due to more than one thing, managed to make one side of them completely black. And I mean completely.

And after, my computer decided that I didn’t really need to see the screen any more… After spending some time in Safe Mode, we established the graphics card is going. At the moment I have lots of coloured lines on the screen and I am copying my files from that computer to my little laptop.

I have a new one on order now, which will have Vista, unfortunately. I still can’t find anything in XP because they changed the file system from 98, so I’m just going to be even more lost. And the resolution isn’t going to be as big as on my old one.

So now I get to play on the little laptop (so glad I have two, although I can also use my work laptop), see if I can get my friend to get my stuff off my hard drive. And see if I can get a long weekend off in a couple of weeks to go home and install everything. And get all the stuff off my last backup (which, as it wasn’t the instant before the screen went, isn’t recent enough).

So my computer might have been slow and full of junk that I’ve been meaning to delete for years, but I liked it.

I now have Skype on my computers. I thought it cost somehow, although I can’t remember how now. But it turns out it’s free to Skype other people. It just costs to call landlines from Skype. Although it says it costs less than a normal call, since I have free evening and weekend calls, as long as they’re less than an hour, that would actually cost more. So it’s only actually useful for talking to people abroad. And talking to people face-to-face since my laptop has a webcam in the lid.

Which does mean it doesn’t actually do anything that you can’t do over messenger – Trillian does audio and video chat, you just have to use it with someone with Trillian, I think.

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Originally uploaded by paranoidangel

This is what I’ve spent most of my past week on (apart from looking at houses): the little blue laptop. I’ve photographed it on top of my current one to show the size difference. My computer is 15.4″, the laptop is 8.9″ (I know they’re both laptops but I have to call them both something different). It has Linux on it (Linpus, to be precise) so I’ve spent a lot of time on the forums trying to work out how to do stuff. It’s a lot like Unix, so some of it is coming back to me.

Biggest pain in the arse so far is my TV. When I plug my computer into it I set it to PC and it shows me a picture. That doesn’t work with the laptop, but it turns out what you’re supposed to do, is cycle through the options that let you watch two channels at once until you get to PC. At which point it’ll show you the picture at 640×480, no matter which computer you plug into it. Which is not helpful, since it only shows you a corner of the screen. Useful.

I’m feeling all Sunday afternoon-y at the moment: ie I have things to do, I just can’t be bothered to do any of them.

The annoying thing at the moment is I ordered a little Ace laptop (in blue, since despite them saying they were going to do red, they don’t) from Amazon a couple of weeks ago. After a while they emailed me to say they were having trouble getting hold of it, so couldn’t give me an estimated date, but they would let me know.

So I waited for a bit, checked the forum and discovered that quite a few people had had trouble with Amazon sending them theirs, so I ordered one from laptopsdirect, which cost a bit more because of delivery and them changing 0.95% to use a credit card.

A few hours later I had an email from Amazon to say they had an estimated delivery date for it, and it was later than the date I was expecting to get it from laptopsdirect, so I thought I’d wait and see who managed it first.

This morning I had an email from laptopsdirect to say they’d despatched it and I could track the order after midnight. So I thought I’d wait till midnight just to double check and then cancel the Amazon one.

This afternoon I had an email from Amazon to say they’d despatched it.

I looked on both websites and you can only cancel before despatch. So Tuesday/Wednesday ish I will have two of the things and then have the fun of sending one back and waiting for a refund. Both payments will made August’s credit card bill, I think, but the refund won’t. So September’s credit card bill will probably be a minus number.

I just know that if I’d done nothing I wouldn’t have any.

This evening I’ve enjoyed watching the diving and swimming. Now there’s some horses running and jumping. I don’t know how they get the horses to do that – in my experience horses generally do exactly what they want. It is quite amusing that when they fall off the horses carry on.

It’s annoying that all the tennis has been on during the day when I’m at work. Although it is something that’s harder to show highlights of, as opposed to swimming, where a race might only last a minute. And the fencing highlights really are highlights, ie bits of fights. With the results listed on the right of the video. So I’ll live without seeing the stuff in the week, and concentrate on watching the fencing this weekend.

Tonight I bought myself a new laptop! It’s the Acer Aspire One, which they promised would be available in red, but it turns out my choices are white and blue. So I picked blue. Although it isn’t out till next Monday because I wanted one with 1Gb RAM (rather than 512Mb) with Linux. I ordered myself a wireless keyboard with a touchpad, so I can plug the baby laptop (it weighs just over 1kg) into the 26inch TV and type on a laptop-size keyboard, while sitting on the sofa.

I kind of feel like I’ve not been updating this much recently. I’ve been making an effort to get the first draft of my TARDIS Big Bang done. So far I’ve written 17 chapters of 26, for the best part of 13,000 words. I’ve been writing a chapter or two a night and I have to fit it round my back and the other things I have to do that involve the computer.

Last night was Burns Supper – albeit a week after Burns Night. Which was good, although it got a bit confusing with women pretending to be men in the celidh. Mind you, we were confused enough as it was, but then that’s half the fun. I just wish I could still eat the haggis – it’s very nice, as long as you don’t think about what it is. I’ve remembered why I hate driving in High Wycombe – we got confused with two of us, navigating and my sat nav.

I’m quite liking the new printer. It does actually have a paper-out tray – it’s the same as the paper-in tray, but has a divider in between so they don’t get mixed up. Despite what I said I ended up getting one that’s also a scanner, since it was only £30 and had good reviews. I’m still getting used to how to use it, but I like the way it does back to back printing.

I got Hot Fuzz from Amazon rentals because it seems like everyone at work has seen it. I think it’s supposed to be funny. But it’s just a bit of a bad parody really. So now I’m doing other things while it finishes, and I’m getting the gist.

I went to Comet this morning (via Tescos, who had 8 packets of chocolate buttons, but no orange juice with calcium) to take my printer back. The bloke on the desk spent twenty minutes on the phone, as he had to tell someone or other the details and they couldn’t verify the printer’s existence. He did also, unpack the printer, then seal it up with brown tape.

After he gave up on the phone and I had another one, I said I wanted to unpack it there just in case. He got out his stanley knife to open it and pulled everything out and there was no plug or ink cartridges in there either. The bloke then suggested they might be hidden away somewhere, opened the paper tray and there they were.

Fortunately, he just let me go, but I can’t now remember if I looked in the paper tray of the other one. I definitely took the bit of tape off it, but after that I can’t remember.

Anyway, I now have a working printer, although it’s very confusing putting the paper in the front because it prints on the wrong side of the page.

Yesterday I solved all my printer problems by buying a new one. I drove to Comet, somewhere in the vicinity of Oxford and only went wrong once (it was Tom Baker’s fault, he told me to turn right and made it sound like it was a closer right turn than it actually was). I got harassed in the shop, which I hate. I much prefer to be left alone, although of course when you need someone to ask something there’s no one around.

On the way home I got all exciting by the big Tescos having space for chocolate buttons, which is a start. When I got home I was very good and did some things that needed doing before unpacking the printer. I read the setup guide and established it was all very simple. I managed to get the printer out of the box without too much difficulty. Then I went to plug it in. Read more…

The reason why I haven’t posted for so long is that I’ve had the Christmas virus with added catarrh courtesy of my mother. So I’ve been off work all week but today I have actually been able to hear properly sometimes, which is a definite improvement.

However, my printer has died. It’s only four years old too. So I’m after recommendations for a new one (inkjet).

The current one is an Epson C86. Before that I had an HP printer for six years that I only got rid of because it was slow. All I need a printer to do is to print without costing the earth. I did lots of research on this before and ruled out Canon because they didn’t bother with a tray for the paper it had printed, which just means it’ll throw them everywhere.

A handy list for what I want in a printer:

• cheap – but not so cheap it’ll be really crap and fall apart by the end of the year
• a similar size to the current one (460mm wide, 242mm deep, 198mm high)
• a similar print speed to the current one (12ppm colour, 22ppm b&w – but that does seem super-quick to me, so I can definitely cope with slower)
• I like the idea of separate colour cartridges in theory, but given that I either print just black or all colours pretty much equally, I’m not sure it makes much difference
• I don’t need it to do anything clever – like scanning or plugging my camera’s card straight into it, I just need it to plug into a USB port and print when I tell it.