Computer Woes - Again!

Ouch! I should have known. The PC was over three years old and had long since been taken for granted.

So it did what all computers do and the hard drive decided to spin no more as of Saturday morning. I swapped it to another machine but it was indeed the drive not the power.

Luckily I had backed up my photos (18,345), web pages (12,728) and music files (11,952) only a few days previously and what few photos I lost I had already uploaded to Flickr and was able to download them back to the new sparkly replacement machine. And I had backed up the main documents folder as recently as last April... ooh...

Still, what else is there other than music and photos? Oh yes... those... and those too... and those - yes alright, so I'll back this new computer up more often! After all, I do go around the country training people about risk management... [ahem!]

Windows 7 too. Ah - that means the sound recording software won't install. It was pretty old. But version 1.2 did everything I needed it to - except install on Windows 7... Oh, and the image processing software too. Paint Shop Pro v6... The new Corel PSP X2 that I bought last Christmas whacked out the entire machine and I had to take it off. I could try the new X3 - no... I'll go along with everyone else and have ordered a copy of Adobe Photo Shop. Waiting for it to arrive...

No rush because the ancient scanner (it did everything I needed it to!!!) won't work with Windows 7 either. No driver for it and no intention of making one so I gather...

Two hours spent on Sunday afternoon getting Citrix to work so I could connect to the university network on Monday morning. It does work but seems to take ages to start - there's a delay of coffee brewing proportions before the box that does nothing except say "click to continue" comes up.

And the new machine is ultra powerful. Well the memory is and the CPU is and the new gadget meters show they never go above 35% capacity but the hard drive, whilst being an impressively large one does not seem to save or read any quicker than a four year old reading Tolkein...

And my broadband is still painfully slow. It's upto 20Mb you know. I get around 300Kb which is due to the distance to the local telephone exchange which still has Big Bertha who has to rearrange her jackplugs when she sees I'm about to connect to the web. I now have a wireless connection from the PC to the router instead of the nice yellow ethernet cable. But that was faster than wireless so if ever BT sort out the infrastructure outside the house I'll be limited by the infrastructure inside the house. And by Miss Franny using the laptop to connect to QVC...

So I'm now faced with the thrill of going through the entire comics collection to check the database and add back any comics I've bought since April (not many but there again Chrissie gave me a couple of hundred...) and have a nice straight line on the graphs of Flickr and blog viewer numbers between April and October - tell you what... seeing as you are reading this anyway, can you drop me a line and tell me how many photos and blog pages you looked at with dates? Thank muchly!

Frankie & Bennies' Disaster

I mentioned recently that we were going for a meal at Frankie & Bennies.

Prophetically it was at the end of a post entitled Trials and Tribulations. We've been to Blackpool's Frankie & Bennies so many times and always had a great time but last night was unfortunately not one of them.

We went with David and Jeannie as a foursome and were told we'd have to wait 30 to 40 minutes for a table which wasn't great but we could put up with that. In the end though it was 1 hour and 20 minutes and despite asking where we were in the queue the chap on the door was obviously putting other people in first.

The manager said this would be because of bookings. I did point out that the whole point about making a booking would be so the restaurant was expecting people and could therefore surely have told us there were so many people before us in the queue and so many bookings to come in?

I think the doorman simply either hadn't a bloody clue (and I'd have to have similar thoughts about the manager) or he hadn't the courage to tell people a realistic waiting time. Had we been told it would be over an hour we would have gone somewhere else. What he did was to put both the kitchen staff and the waiting staff under so much pressure that even the meals were not as good as they should have been.

Meat ordered medium was well done and a tomato was crisped on one side and left raw on the other - classic symptoms of a chef too busy to cope. The fact that the tomato was green though wasn't good...

Once we were seated it took another 40 minutes for the starters to arrive. Now given that the restaurant is opposite the Odeon cinema and used by lots of people wanting to go onto to watch a film, you can imagine that people at just about every table were getting agitated. Some swore a lot more than we did!

Luckily we weren't going to the cinema but had we been we would have had to miss either the film or a meal. Not good!

Anyway, I'm going to look for something good to put on this blog - I'm sounding more and more like a grumpy old man...

More Floods...

I was upstairs, putting all the musical instruments etc away after last night's gig when I heard a sudden anguished cry for help.

Tigger had decided she liked the smell of a vase of flowers enough to eat them. The flowers, not wanting to be eaten, stubbornly refused to rip apart and so the vase fell over, washing the kitchen worksurfaces, then the cupboard doors, and finally the floor.

So a quick reminder of what she and her brother, Jess, have got up to in the past 5 years...

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