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I normally don’t suffer from tech woes – but – this week has been hell!

The good news is that is hasn’t affected machines I set up for clients. I set up 2 new laptops with no issues at all and delivered one – one to be delivered boxing day. Each of them has LiveMesh running successfully. When I delivered one last night I et up live mesh on their existing XP PC and synchronised their data. I then set up an old laptop of mine and a virtual machine (running in bootcamp on a Mac) and attempted to install live mesh. No joy. Tried reinstalling Vista 3 times each machine even using different SKUs. Each time Live Mesh fails to start. I have the Microsoft Live Mesh Tech Team looking at it now.

Then to top it off this morning I awake to find my backup production machine (from which I still haven’t transferred everything over to the new machine) sitting there with a blue screen of death. After restarting it and troubleshooting discovered that the main system OS which is a striped raid running on 10,000RPM drives wouldn't boot. Reason, the raid had a failed hard drive. Being a stripe there is no recovery from this. By the way – never set up your machine using a RAID Stripe for system OS unless you never store any data on that drive. I don’t. I do this to gain speed from my system. So I took both drives out, talked to the shop about the warranty, discovered that they don’t have these drives any more, they have been replaced by the 2.5” form factor drives. I will need to get it sent away and replaced. Being Christmas, that wont happen until early January now. So I whacked a 160GB drive that was sitting on my desk into the machine, booted from the Windows Home Server restore CD, (after disabling the RAID setup in BIOS), connected to the Windows Home Server and starting restoring my system. It is telling me 1 hour and 15 minutes remaining. What a blessing Windows Home Server is!

And I am trying frantically to get work one for clients before going off for my first holiday since February 2007 when I had 2 days holiday with the family and friends down at Kingscliffe in NSW. Christmas Day I fly to New Zealand to spend 3 days with my parents and siblings for a family reunion. I don’t want to think about what I need to do when I get back!

PS that’s not me in the picture – just some random lady I found when searching for tech problems. She sums up how I feel today!

This cruise liner was docked in Sydney when I was there last week. Got this snap with my phone camera through the security fence.

There’s a chap in a dinghy doing something to the anchor – gives you some idea of the scale of the vessel. She looked awesome!

Oh the things I do for you my gentle readers!

Some more nice cheeses were reviewed recently – and at the request of a reader the King Island Dairy Roaring 40’s blue cheese was selected.

I was expecting the cheese to be a raging stinky blue cheese – from the name I guess. However I was pleasantly surprised. The smell wasn't bad at all and the taste was awesome – very nice – I had it in sandwiches with hot chips and chicken – very nice!

The Mersey Valley Sharp and Crumbly series have been favourites in this house and the sweet chilli did not disappoint with kids who don’t even like sweet chilli eating it and declaring it their favourite cheese ever.

A very pleasant cheese.

Some of my take aways from this conference:

• Client apps should be experience first, tech second – e.g. they are built for the consumer to use – the back end stuff should be largely invisible.
• These apps should live on the cloud and be able to synch across devices and platforms invisibly.
• 3rd party extensibility is important.
• Authentication and login (including Open ID) on websites can now be performed using the exposed LiveID framework – 460 million LiveIDs in se on the net.
• Twitter back channels can liven up the day – thanks to @NickHodge, @laflour, @aussienick, @DamianM, @kiwitwitter and @JamesHip.
• RSS, ATOM, JSON, SOAP feed data is available from the LOE (Live Operating Environment) to describe changes, news etc from the LOE.
• Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect allHTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language. Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

May be more but that will do for now.