April 2008

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jethro's picture

Installing Vista Upgrade without valid media to upgrade from

vista logo I had a long term client come to me on Monday with his PC crashed. He went to bed Sunday night and it was working fine and Monday morning it had gone into an endless boot loop. Fortunately he had backups (I have trained him well).

We tried numerous things to get the drive to boot including safe mode and so on to no avail. The drive seemed to be physically OK so I copied all the data off the drive before trying a few more things. I ran a chkdsk on the drive and fixed errors. No luck. Then I finally did a fixmbr and fixboot command from inside the windows XP recovery console. These reported back as working, but it still refused to boot.

Finally to save the customer time I offered to rebuild his PC. Here is where the fun really started.

jethro's picture

Top 10 all time popular posts on SpyJournal 3.0

jethro's picture

Weight Loss

One side effect of being sick and not eating ( I have had 2 pieces of toast in the last 36 hours) is the weight loss - I was down to 110.9KGs this morning!

My goal is to get below 110 so it was nice seeing that number on the scales this morning. I suspect I will go back up a kg or two once I start eating again. I have lost several kgs lately as my exercise levels have ramped up with basketball and AFL. I was sitting on 113 or so before being sick.

jethro's picture

I finally succumbed to the evil virus

it hit me last night - after basketball coaching was over and after I had spent 4 hours working on taxes. I went to bed when I kept waking up with my hands holding keys down on the keyboard.

Sometime in the middle of the night I woke to a gurgling stomach. No more details are necessary, save that I haven't dared go far from the bathroom today. I am the last of the family to get it to hit me. I thought I was going to escape.

At least this is a long weekend and I have felt better enough today after spending half the day in bed to finish the tax work and even watch the Anzac Parade on TV.

Recovery is happening too slow - I want to be better now! Oh well - time now to go play with the kids before the Anzac Day football hits the big screen.

jethro's picture

Excel Media Player, Floating Point and Shadows

Joseph Chirilov has written a series of 3 posts showing exactly how to build a fully functioning media player inside Excel.

If you want to try this then follow his step 1, step 2 and step 3. I would be interested in hearing from anybody who does that.

 

While we are talking about Joseph's site I want to highlight two other posts that are there.

jethro's picture

Is money the root of all evil?

Hye over at spaceofreality wrote an article titled "Is money the root of all evil?" I decided to write a comment on that post.

Here it is

If I may I would like to sum up some of the other commenters comments.
the phrase "money is the root of all evil" is oft quoted as you wrote, but it is always quoted incorrectly. As a couple of commenters wrote the correct quote is "the love of money is the root of all evil"
This is quite an important difference.

jethro's picture

How did you get here?

amanda's picture

Back to Basics - Twitter

 

imageTim asked in a poll - Do you Twitter? Some people asked "What is Twitter?" and this article should explain it for you.

First up, what does Twitter have to say about Twitter?
They say this: "What is Twitter? Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Basically, Twitter is another way to stay connected online, but with some differences to your usual Instant Messenger.

image

Twitter is online based, but there are applications you can download in order to use it. The most popular client is Twhirl. Twhirl is a box on your desktop that you can chat in. You add people, and people add you. Anything you write in your Twhirl box, is visible to anyone you're connected to on it. It's a group connection. Same goes the other way, If you've added anyone, you see everything they write.

jethro's picture

Excel Dashboard Competition

Andreas from BonaVista Systems has let me know that they are running an Excel Dashboard competition.

You can find all the details of the competition on their website.

Winners will choose from 3 great prizes, an Apple iPhone, a Data Visualisation workshop with Stephen Few, a copy of Stephen Fews book, "Information Dashboard Design".

Some of the rules include:

The solution must be in Excel 2000 or more recent, and not require additional software other than Excel and MicroCharts 3.

If you are not an existing MicroCharts user, you can download your 30 day trial version of MicroCharts at http://www.bonavistasystems.com/DownloadMicroCharts.html

Worth a crack!

jethro's picture

Bird photos

I took some cool photos of birds while at the park last night with the kids. Check these out. I was trying to get some good group shots of cockatoos flying together, but the light was too low and the shutter speed wasn't fast enough to stop the flight of most of the birds. So I wasted a hundred or so shots to get about 1 halfway decent one. Thank goodness for digital cameras.
However I did get these three good ones, including one in flight against the evening sky. Click them to see the larger image. I particularly like the reflective content of the center shot of the water fowl. The ripples make the water look very metallic.