Duran² girl in my ceiling

The builders found this early 1980s porn magazine in our ceiling. Louise London was a famous porn queen and was in the Duran Duran video ‘Rio’. She is the woman who looks like Kate Bush and is in most of the scenes.

Ideal Home Show with Hannah Sandling

Hannah Sandling photo by Vincent Connare (c) 2005.

Hannah Sandling has been giving demonstrations and talks at the Ideal Home Show at Earls Court London.

from March 9 — April 01 2007.

Hope to see you there this weekend.

Sunshine, opens April 5th (UK)

We went to see the first ‘premier’ (as the producer Andrew MacDonald called it in his intro at the screening), of Sunshine by Danny Boyle. This was our second viewing of the movie since we saw it at a press showing at Fox’s offices in Soho London. There was a packed house of close to the max 1330 seats at the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square on Sunday 18 March 2007.

When you see it see it on the big screen with the THX sound and sit close. It was projected Digitally and it was brilliant, and the sound is fantastic.

Sorry America, you’ll have to wait probably till September for the film because the Hollywood Mafia says no to the April release. Most parts of the world will see a release in April though so if you are close to Mexico you can go south of the border. But the girls over at the Sunshine Fans site have a petition for an earlier release… go check it out.
Here is your challenge…. In the film there is a photo the crew of the Icarus I on the wall of the Icarus II. When you first see this photo you can see one of the crew members is holding a ‘HI MOM’ or ‘MUM’ sign, they are on our left of the photo. This could be Comic Sans so look for it.

Spring 2007

We have begun spring training in Great Britain for the 2007 season, we are in our 7th week. This is me hitting a double off Aeden Mcqueary Ennis, a 19yr old who is now at Georgia State.

Great Britain won 4-2. I scored both runs!!! I was 44yrs old and Aeden was 19 and he threw 93mph and I was his coach too since he played for the Richmond Flames in the League as well as the GB team.

Alienware support are Rubbish!

I have had 2 experiences with Alienware support .

The first was when I bought an Alienware Area-51M 766. It was heavy but high res screen with a 3.41 gig processor and looked cool. Problem was a BSOD (blue screen of death) on the first start up out of the box!. And then it might start again after that. But it continued to BSOD whenever the machine was fully shut down and then started up.

Support said to send it back. I said I have to use it for work and would like to know why it was sent in this state? I then tested the RAM since that was the BSOD message that there was a RAM error. Seems when I changed the two 512mb modules around but it would still BSOD. The solution was to only use one RAM module and there was no problem. I eventually bought a 1 gig RAM module. But first did a little test with one 512mb in one slot and the 1 gig RAM in the other. This worked! Seemed it would BSOD if the RAM modules were equal, not if they were of different values.

Now 2.6 years later I wanted to format the hard drive and install Vista. I first formated the drive and installed the original Windows XP Pro set-up CD that came with the Alienware. It included the drivers for all the components. Vista Ultimate upgrade installed but complained that the Nvidia GeForce FX 5700 graphics driver was not compatable and the standard VGA driver will be used.

I contacted Alienware support but again they balked, they said ‘please contact Microsoft for any updates to the Nvidia drivers’ we don’t support the driver updates.

So again I had to find my own solution. Seems Nvidia uses a universal driver for all it’s graphic cards but during the install process there is an x.ini file that lists the supported graphics cards. Mine was not one in the list of upgraded drivers on the Nvidia website. I found that there was a website, not one from Alienware or Nvidia that provided a customized .ini file for the driver installer that tells the installer to install the driver for the previously unlisted drivers. It’s unfortunate that Alienware support team can’t provide this information or provide the fixed .ini file for it’s previously released (and high priced) products.

Now I have a corrected Alienware machine with Vista that seems to now work fine and a screen finally at the correct aspect ratio and resolution. No thanks to Alienware support. I’m turning it into a game/TV machine. I doubt I would recommend an Alienware machine or every buy one ever again. I could get 2 Dell’s for their prices.

All of my old XP drivers from Alienware seemed to work fine, even though they aren’t made for Vista. But when I first tried the install Vista and Netgear said my wireless card wasn’t compatable and it didn’t work so I bought a new one (WN511B) and that seemed fine. When I reformated the hard drive to clear all the junk and install a clean XP system I used the new network card. Then I upgraded to Vista. But I couldn’t connect to the internet. I could see the wireless modem but no connection. I tried to reinstall but nothing. I though maybe it’s because between this and last time I changed my modem from WEP to WPA encryption but that surely couldn’t be the problem so I installed the old uncompatible Netgear card and WOW it worked… flawlessly… So who figures I’m just out £89.

And it seems not only me who has had graphics driver and wireless card problems with Vista.. the BBC had similar problems.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6407419.stm

WOW!

I’ve successfully loaded Vista on my MacBook Pro and have installed the Zune software.

Did a 50/50 partition on the drive so I have about 56/57 gig available to OS-X and Vista.

So far so good. Only some hickups with the Mac drivers for Vista, the sound has stopped working, but in fairness they were made for XP so we’ll see if they upgrade them.

Many of the issues are Vista related. Things so far that don’t work in Vista are:

- Netgear WG511v1 wireless card (for other PC ) is unsupported/doesn’t work. (update) I installed Vista on my Alienware since I had to put XP on the MacBook. I bought a new Netgear wireless card that said it was Vista supported…. It worked with XP but when I installed the upgrade it refused to connect to the wireless modem using WPA. So I used the Netgear WG511v1 and WOW it worked! so who knows. Vista is a bit WOW what do I do now?

- SSH Client 3.2.9 non-commercial from http://www.ssh.com/ must upgrade.

- Microsoft Visual Studio .net v2003 is unsupported and install on Vista. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948853.aspx

- FontLab 4.6 not sure but doesn’t install 5.0.2 is fine.

Seems the Mac support Drivers for XP all worked fine but this is what they do on Vista:

- Apple Keyboard works and installs an icon into the task bar, the Apple/Cmd key is the Windows key.

- The iSight camera doesn’t seem to work

- Startup disk icon in Control Panel doesn’t work. (on restart hold the -alt key to select boot drive)

- The Bluetooth loads but on some restarts needs to reinstall. So it seems unstable.

- Sound doesn’t work.

- The backlit keyboard doesn’t work but this is known since it isn’t supported by the Mac support drivers.

-Absence of a delete key is problematic but the right mouse button on an external mouse solves this. Sometimes you can use ‘cmd+backspace’ or ‘backspace’ to delete like on the Mac but in Outlook 2007 this doesn’t work.

- Haven’t found how to do a screen grab (alt+printscreen) but Vista has a neat new tool called ‘ Snipping Tool’ in Accessories that lets you do full and custom screen grabs, then loads the file into an editor. (update) Screen grabs need an Apple extended keyboard to work but on a MacBook it’s not supported. The Delete is either fn key + backspace or just backspace.

The only problem i find in general with the MacBook Pro is the new Apple power cable. It’s gimmicky and uses a magnet to hold it in place (it’s the little white cable sticking out of the left side of the MacBook in the image above. This makes it vulnerable to being knocked out. I have knocked it out 3 times in 2 days and the 3 time the battery died and the screen went black unexpectingly. After reinserting the power Vista resumed in it’s sleep mode. So no real problem but why do Apple always feel the need to make custom plugs and cables that aren’t compatible with anything?

Now I have deleted Vista from the Mac and repartitioned the drive and installed WinXP. And all is well.

I put Vista on my Alienware Area-51m 766 and upgraded from XP. The drivers seem ok, except the NVIDIA GeForce FX5700 graphic drivers doesn’t work AT ALL, so the high end screen is reduced on a 15.4 wide-screen display (native resolution 1680 x 1050) to about 1024 x 768 and uses the generic VGA driver… bugger. Alienware said ‘we don’t support the upgrades you need to contact Microsoft for an update!!!!) bastards!!! Alienware support are shit. They have been since day one.. when I had a problem with BSOD every time on boot-up and right out of the box.

Microsoft Office 2007 is also very different.

- MS Outlook needs Internet Explorer to be the default browser or you can’t click on links in emails and go to the website. If Firefox is the default browser email links won’t work.

- MS Outlook by default turns off images in emails (for security reasons). You can approve images from specific trusted emails or turn this feature off completely.

Looks like there are also issues using ‘virtualization’ programs like Parallels software that let you use 2 or more OS systems. CNN reports on Vista and virtualization apps

Wow! NO! more like ‘Oh shit!!’

Vista is here! ‘Oh Shit’ so much for Wow.

I’ve had a few hick-ups installing the upgrade on my Alien but he’s going to be sent back to his home planet and get replaced by a Mac Book Pro, yes a Mac… and I’ll put Vista on that. In the meantime here’s some Fidgets… from my first install of Vista… oh they call them Gadgets, and Apple calls them Widgets but I prefer Fidgets, Fridgettes or Fidgettes.

The long one was the first set of Fidgettes but I found two cool ones, one is for the Risk Level (I don’t know who set’s that probably that retard in the WhiteHouse) but the other is a cool Muslum Prayer clock that calls you to prayer with a nice mp3 file that lasts a good minute or so. It is similar to the prayer clocks they sell in the Middle East. We have 2 in our house one is Green and the other White. This Prayer Fidgette is the no. 1 on the MS Fidgette download list. I remember in our group at Microsoft we converted an office into a prayer room and this clock would have been very useful for the men in the group.

On a historical note, these Fidgettes have been around quite awhile since back in 1993 I remember seeing many Microsoft employees with stock tickers that floated over their Windows 3.1 screen and it showed the current Microsoft and other stock prices.

Oh and that’s my new brown Zune! in the Flickr gallery. (or it’s in the flickr stream if this is read later). The Zune doesn’t work with the Mac OS but I’m sure it will work with the Mac Book Pro with BootCamp and Vista on it. Then I can add both my Ipod in one USB and my Zune in the other. The pictures are much better for viewing, the screen is bright and it is scratch resistant unlike my Ipod Photo with it’s little screen which is rubbish for photo viewing.

And then there was Light!

Finally someone to vote for. Let’s just hope they count the votes correctly this time.

Sunshine

Dr. Brian Cox photo by Vincent Connare (c) 2005.

We got a chance to see a press viewing of the new film Sunshine, at the 20th Century Fox’s offices in Soho Square last night and it was a sci-fi thriller.

Dr. Brian Cox (not related to Brian Cox), pictured above, is the scientific consultant for the film. In many ways Cillian Murphy has used Brian as the model for his character called ‘Capa’, who is the ship’s physicist. His hand gestures and general attitude is definitely like him.

The film will probably be released in April 2007. You can’t wait to see it. So go here to see some trailers and pictures about Sunshine.

I’m an IT boy!

According to The .Net Nerd News I am now officially a ‘geek’, and an IT person (160).

Gee I thought I was more of a rocker but I do love IT girls, Tara Palmer Tomkinson and posh girls are very sexy and do rule.