November 2008

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jethro's picture

Cheese reviews

Yesterday I picked up three of the Mainland Premium Reserve label cheeses.

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The Havarti is very creamy and very yummy. Jadeen liked this cheese best. I think I did too. It didn’t cut very well, being very rubbery but it had an awesome smooth creamy taste and texture.

jethro's picture

BSOD - Blue Screen of Death

Sometimes hardware just stops working. Sometimes Windows handles this well, other times it doesn’t. Jude’s PC is rather old, and she has been running Vista on a machine that was not built for it. In the weekend she experienced a blue screen of death that returned every time she logged in within about 5 minutes.

The Blue Screen of Death T-Shirt  After some initial troubleshooting turned nothing up I decided to test the Windows home server restore process. This worked wonderfully well, but the BSOD kept happening. I dug deeper, and then decided to rebuild the machine. First I tried Vista ultimate 64bit. I had this running smoothly, and was installing drivers and hardware apps when BANG – BSOD. The screen shot straight into a restart so no chance to snap a photo of it for research.

I tried a fresh install of Vista Ultimate 32 bit in case it didn’t like the UPS drivers I had just installed. No good either. After more troubleshooting I think the Motherboard has a faulty USB connector and software drivers in the BIOS. There is a patch, but in this case, the MB is just going to get junked.

So she is setup on a laptop for now or she can use the development machine when staff are not here.

Maybe I need to get her one of these t-shirts!

jethro's picture

Group Writing Project What I learned from Government

The High Calling Blogs network (of which I am a part) has a group writing project titled What I learned from Government being hosted by Robert Hruzek.

I have written a  little bit about government here on this blog, but it isn’t really a topic I write about much.

However I do have a confession – I don’t vote.

Now I am not an American so had nothing to do with the recent elections there, though I did vote Obama on the world votes and If the world could vote.

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Kiwi Party

Wow! If I lived in the Mana electorate of NZ I would vote for this guy! Renton Maclachlan gave a great speech on education recently. See it on YouTube. He is standing for the Kiwi Party.

Speech transcript on the CMI Website.

jethro's picture

Cheese for the President

More cheese last night.

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The Mersey Valley Pickled Onion cheese has a sweet but sharp taste. You can’t eat too much of it at once. But it is VERY nice. It is crumbly but does cut well. The slices however will break very quickly if not laid onto bread or a cracker quickly.

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The Apricot and Almond Fruit Cheese is a favourite of the girls. It is not so sweet that you can’t eat much, but has just the right combination of fruit and spices. It cuts very well and goes great on crackers. If I was Barack Obama I would eat some to celebrate becoming POTUS (President of the United States). Maybe if I was John McCain I would eat some and deny that I had lost!

jethro's picture

Web RoundUp

I have had so much new stuff come over my desk the last few days I haven’t got time to try it or even review it properly. There is a lot of new innovative things going on at the moment on the web.

roundup2 Here is a randomly ordered selection of stuff that I thought was cool or useful.

Large File Sharing Services

(also added to my original large file sharing post)

Pando is free P2P software that makes downloading, streaming and sharing large media files fast, easy and fun. Need to email large attachments, IM a folder, or publish your downloadable videos to the Web? Maybe you'd just like to watch full-screen HD Internet TV. Meet Pando.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Beta

Save your documents to the Web—for free!

Access files from anywhere
  • View documents from almost any computer with a Web browser
  • No more flash drives—files are there when and where you need them
  • Password-protected sharing; you control who views and edits your work
Work with programs you know
  • Save over 1,000 Microsoft Office documents in one online place
  • Open and save files from familiar programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
  • Synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook
  • Free Photo Shop tutorials at Luxa

SkyScanner is a Flight Search site that works for other countries than US.

jethro's picture

No Clean Feed - Letter to Mr Conroy

Following is the letter I wrote to Mr Stephen Conroy today. He is a Federal Senator. Senator Conroy was appointed Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy on 3 December 2007.

No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in AustraliaHe is proposing a “clean feed”. The current webpage for this policy at the ALP is “offline”. Here is the plan for cyber safety that has on page 2 the intention to provide a mandatory clean feed.

And here is the EFA Australia’s analysis of the plan and why it wont work.

In light of the furore that has erupted around the nets with this proposal I have written a letter to Mr Conroy.

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Excel Function of the Week - MOD

The MOD function is very useful in certain circumstances.

The function returns the integer remainder after a number has been divided by a divisor. For example if you divide 10 by 3, it goes in 3 times with one remaining.

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Microsoft Professional Developers Conference

Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects.

There has been a lot of news blogged from this conference over the last few days.

I have summarised and provided links for the main things from my perspective as it affects me, our business and our clients. Some of this stuff wont impact our clients for several years, but its nice to be able to see glimpses of the future.

Live Mesh

Live Mesh shifted from Tech Preview to Beta in the last few days as we indicated a few days ago it would. However there was lots of good stuff talked about the mesh platform at PDC. Some of these links are about the new features in Beta and some are blogs from PDC.

From Sarah Perez: