Stuart's Technology (ish) Babble

Capitalizing on my better half’s desire for more sleep this Sunday morning I fired up my Sky + box to get through some of the stuff I record but never get a chance to watch ;)

You can only image my face (go on imaging it....), when after pressing the planner button I was left with the dreaded "please wait....." instead of all the programmes I'd recorded.

 

I immediately stomped back upstairs to ascertain the length of the current malaise..... After waking up the better half and asking why Sky + was broke I returned back down stairs still unclear but certain that I'd bring her something to drink on my next trip. 

 

Anyway, I found a thread on digital spy here: ( http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=934809&page=16) and it seems we have a software update from Sky that kills certain boxes, mine included.  I called Sky, they talked me through the usual stuff - it didn't work, however the thread was very useful as removing the viewing card during the restart process then switching off standby seemed to work, although not until the evening grrrr.

 

So, it's that evening Sky is working and I decide it's time to catch up on my Xbox 360 and the latest instalment of COD.  As I switch on the console and began the profile login - I'm told there is an update to Xbox live - fine let's get on with it.....

 

So something called NXE got loaded, and the console rebooted, then it started up and immediately froze.  Then I restarted it and it got slightly further, in fact I started the game, then it froze.  Then it wouldn't boot at all. 

 

I looked at both the Sky + and Xbox machines and thought about how good it would feel to unplug them and drop kick them across the garden, then box them up and send them back to the respective programming departments for a refund.

 

I'm amazed at the complete lack of testing that goes into firmware updates - still, the third failure was actually the first, my main PC started rebooting on its own.  This one I did drop kick down the stairs and it felt great - of course now it really doesn't work at all.......... ;)

 

A friend recently related the following:

 

He was working for a large client, they had a large, complex project that was time critical and severly under resourced.

He imagined the following conversation was taking place;

 

Client:

"After you have finished stabalising global warming and locating Lord Lucan, could you make sure that the Himalays are flattened?

 

He says....

"Ok, but we'll need more people and more money."

 

Client:

"No chance of that we haven't got the budget."

 

He says...

"Ok, we'll work the weekend."

....or Installing RSAT in unattended mode on Vista SP1 clients. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stick a bucket under me and call me Daisy!

 

For four days I have been spluttering through 1100 albums, fannying about trying to get all the ID3 tags and album art "just so"; ready for importation to my shiny new Vista Media Centre.  I say shiny, but this version of Media Centre has a kind of "album art fresco" thingy and looks nice if all your album art is complete.

 

My weapon of choice was AVSoft's "Album Art Fixer for WMP & MCE" freely available here;

 

Oh what fun we had.

 

After a few "frozen moments" and general shenanigans I made the brave decision to delete any "Various Artist" album that even suggested it would have a problem; so there goes the "Top Gear Anthems".......  the app is fine for something free, but it has a couple of annoying issues, like always requiring some input - even for some of the basic stuff; it shells out a Google image query when there is no album art work available and three out of ten times this could have been better... anyway it was free and seemed to do the job.

 

Now for the rest of the my media..... 

 

So today Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister of the UK.

 

Back in 1997 I started a job for the UK government about 500m from Downing Street, the week after  I started Tony Blair arrived as the newly elected Prime Minister.  With the soundtrack of "thing can only get better" ringing in everyone ears, I ran down to watch him arrive.

 

Whatever your politics, it was an exciting time.

The start of Tony's tenure also saw the start of my IT career and the steepest learning curve I can remember, with progress all around.

 

My development & test environment then consisted of Win 3.1 some Win95 and my very own NT Server for the "all new departmental Intranet".

 

Today I use a Vista host with 10 virtual machines, SMS, BDD and more acronyms than you can shake a stick at; (maybe it was always like that, but I'm too young to remember ;)

 

Why then, when I try to connect to some kind of network resource (that is not available) on my latest OS does the explorer shell still stumble and fall like it always used to?  

 

The list goes on but I wonder if the echo's of "things can only get better" are finally beginning to fade.