David Morris – brassedoff.net

Who’s the techie in this house? For once, not me.

I’m upstairs writing a blog post because although we’re all home, there’s no-one to talk to (1, 2, 3, ahh).

Mrs Woolforbrains and Daniel (he of the new computer) have discovered Club Penguin. It’s a bit like Second Life for kids. It’s a virtual world inhabited by penguins and aimed at six to fourteen year olds. It’s fully family safe and moderated. Youngsters’ penguins can be set up not to allow free chat and the environment is ad-free.

So, Daniel’s in his bedroom playing, Mrs W’s downstairs with her laptop and my niece 100 miles away is also in. In fact, Leah and Dan have just been sled racing against each other. Me? I’ve gone upstairs to write a blog post and bemoan the general lack of bandwidth available for Dad-type activities.

If you happen to pop in to Club Penguin and see a morose-looking penguin called BoringOldFart, that will be me.

(Just in case anyone is wondering, this post was written with tongue firmly superglued inside cheek!)

You may also remember from several weeks ago that I wrote about problems with noise on my broadband connection caused by the surround sound amp / DVD player? Well, I’ve fixed them

It’s a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I tried wrapping wire around the speaker leads and earthing it to try and screen them. I tried running a separate earth from the amp casing to electrical ground. I tried putting those little clip-on ferrite cores on the speaker leads. The result of all this activity was no change.

So, plan B.

I had a look around at what integrated systems were on the market in the price bracket I was in, and none of them had optical inputs (which I wanted for the XBox 360)…. go on, call me picky.

An hour or so browsing Richer Sounds web site and a quick phone call did have some payback though, and a plan was formulated.

After a few sketches on Coreldraw to work out what the wiring plan needed to look like gave me enough info to suggest that a Yamaha RX-V361 AV receiver was just what the doctor ordered. Couple this with a cheap DVD player (no need for HDMI here as our LCD TV was purchased before the advent of HD-ready branding… that’s what you get for being an early adopter), a new subwoofer and a pile of (expensive) component video cables and we were in business. I re-used the speakers from the old Sony system we had, but that had a passive sub and the new amp would only drive a powered sub, hence the big black box in the corner (:evil grin:).

The $64,000,000 question though: what has it done to the signal to noise ratios on the broadband connection?

Well, I’m pleased to say that it’s cured the problem as witnessed by this screenshot. It was the most unlikely device in the house, I would have said, to have ever caused this problem, but it’s now gone away… and we’ve got a nice shiny new toy to play with (not to mention the job of consolidating the remotes again – I hope I can reprogram our old Kameleon All-In-One!). The other thing it’s done is st us back off down the hifi separates route again which is where we were before we put the Sony box in around seven years ago.

With the camera stuck out of the bedroom window (I kid you not), this is probably the best picture of our nearest celestial neighbour I’ve ever managed to get. I think the trick was taking LOTS of exposures, bracketing the shutter speeds and realising that f4.5 may not be the best aperture to use (try f16 instead!)

I’ve just installed Office 2007 on my laptop and desktop system at work. I didn’t realy want to, but at some point we’ll have to roll it out to the userbase at work. I might as well learn it before the flurry of support calls and complaints roll in.

Cynical? Me?

On Wednesday (the last day I was in the office), all I got to play with was Outlook which was mildly annoying. I don’t like the smooth rounded lines of the application frames. I also didn’t like the default sky blue menu backgrounds but a quick google showed how that could be changed.

This morning, I decided to put a quick spec together for a project we’ve got under way at work. It was only going to be two or three pages – nothing complicated, but to make it look presentable, I decided to format it (like I do frequently) using Outline numbering.

Mistake.

It took me over 30 minutes to work out, including a significant amount of google time, to work out that the five minute outline numbering setup on Word 2003 didn’t work any more. Instead, all the functionality has been moved in to multi-level lists.

Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but it’s been in Heading styles for years and clearly worked there for thousands of users. Why completely throw it away and move it? When it comes to rolling out ‘07 for our user base, it’s unlikely there will be budget for retraining. At best, we might get a day’s training per user, but that’s only going to cover the bare essentials. Youraverage user comes along with a lot of inertia. they don’t like real change. Additionally, it slows them down. They can’t find stuff as easily in the application, so tasks taht used to be done almost without thinking now takes a few minutes and maybe a minor paradigm shift. All these things lead to angst amongst the user community, and when the user community gets stressed, they take it out on…

…yes, the IT staff and management.

On the other hand, every user knows that bigger numbers mean better toys, so they’re gong to push to get the latest greatest version because the numbers are bigger (2007 > 2003). They won’t believe IT staff when IT staff tell them it’s gong to slow them down, probably perform not so well on their aging hardware and cause general stress and grief. After all, we’re only IT people. What do we know about these things?

Also, they won’t remember when you eventually give in, install the latest greatest version with the caveat that “You’ve been warned. Don’t complain when you can’t get used to it or find anything”.

At times like this, who’d be an IT professional?

Oh, Happy Easter by the way.

Well, maybe not necessarily the ‘best things’, but there’s a lot of absolutely cracking software available free of charge…

We built Dan a PC for his birthday. He’s eight in a couple of weeks. Obviously, we’ve made sure we have the necessary protection in place to stop him inadvertently  getting access to anything on the internet of a less than savoury nature. It turns out that the version of McAfee that we have has excellent parental control features including a filtering proxy server for web access which includes content monitoring, image detection etc.

Anyway, I’d been looking for a decent media portal application to install on his new system. I’d every intention of installing ShowShifter which was only about £30 or so, but it turns out that it’s gone down the pan and although evaluations are available, it doesn’t look like new versions can be licenced.

Purely by accident I hit upon MediaPortal instead. It’s from, in part, the people responsible for XBMC – the XBox Media Center, but this is Windows based. It really looks the part, and it’s free. I’ll write more about it in the coming days I think, but I’ve got to dash now… :)

One of the winter tasks is maintenance on the Seth Ellis. I had a pass out for the morning so I rang Pete and offered up my services for doing a bit of said maintenance work on the boat. “There’s three of us going to be there already” he said, “how about helping out on the trailer instead?”.

The trailer is the Canal Trust’s new publicity trailer. It had a pitch in Retford market today, so I volunteered to go and help out. Perhaps Pete knew what my DIY skills were like and thought I’d be better off on the trailer than let loose on the Seth Ellis with a paintbrush?

When I got there, the trailer was in the process of being put up. It’s got bits and pieces all over the place so it must have taken the best part of 30 minutes to get all the relevant bits fastened together, requiring several tools and a modicum of cursing. The panels explain all about the restoration projects, both done and to do, and inside there’s an AV presentation, more information panels, maps and somewhere to store leaflets. Sadly, there’s nowhere to mash, but you can’t have everything…. Costa Coffee was only five minutes walk away!

Once assembled and with everything tucked away, it was time to try and convince the Retford locals of the need for canal restoration. Actually, they’re alright because the canal never lapsed into disuse through Retford; most of the restoration work is happening above them around us in Killamarsh, Stavely and Kiveton.

What did surprise me was that nearly all the people I spoke to this morning – a couple of dozen or so, didn’t realise that the Trust had a  trip boat operating out of Retford. Most seemed pleasantly surprised to hear about the Seth Ellis and many went away with tripboat leaflets, so hopefully we’ll get a bit of custom from the event.

The other thing I wanted to do whilst in Retford was get a picture of the Seth Ellis complete with its new magnetic panels. They do look pretty good! I can foresee another set on the run-up to Christmas in red and white. Pete: if you’re reading, remind me later and I may be up for a further donation!

After several years of expounding the virtues of mySQL, Java, Apache and PHP, I now find myself on a steep learning curve getting up to speed with Microsoft SQL Server and .NET

I had a brief flirtation with VB.NET a few years ago, decided I didn’t like it and stuck with Java. I’ve never played with SQL Server other than a quick mess about with MSDE, so the next few weeks are going to be a laugh.

I succeeded in eating up 4Gb of disc space this morning on the big Windows desktop machine installing Visual Studio 200, mitigated in some small way by the quick removal of Visual Studio 2005 which I’d forgotten was on there. I now need to find that old ASP.NET book I bought some time ago in the hope that it’s still valid.

However, I won’t be giving up on PHP any time soon, ditto Java. I like them both too much.

I’ve also got some ideas to try out on the noisy surround sound amp to see if I can cure the SNR problem I wrote about a few weeks ago.

It’s all fun stuff! Honestly. No, really. It is.

…I can tell you don’t believe me…

We’ve also acquired another PC in the house. It’s Daniel’s birthday soon and he’s had a PC. It’s fully internetted up but I’ve installed our McAfee Internet Security Center (sic) on it which has full parental control for web sites, IM etc. It’s surprisingly good, working by the looks of it through a local proxy. It may have a performance hit on the machine but seeing as he’s got a Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz with 2Gb of RAM, I don’t see that being a problem for a while. It looks really cool in his bedroom. He can sit under his cabin bed with his wireless keyboard with integrated trackpad mouse viewing the display on a 32″ LCD TV. If only I could get the TV display to run at its native resolution on the VGA connector, but I’m not going to complain… it doesn’t look too bad. He’s also got my old set of Creative 2.1 speakers, so sound-wise it isn’t too bad either. Using VLC we can play DVDs and I’ve installed Winamp so he can get at our audio library from the Linux box. I’m also hoping that now he’s got his own PC, he’ll show a little more interest in things computer related and get more PC-savvy.

What more could a little boy want? (What more could his Dad want as well!)

Dan’s brass teacher rang my mobile just as I was about to get on my bike on the way home from work this evening with the good news that Dan passed his Grade I Euphonium with Merit. He got around 75% and, according to his teacher, got one of the best scores of any of her pupils she put forward for exams this round.

Needless to say, we’re all very pleased and will probably be going out on Friday to celebrate!

Ok, I know I’ve been very infrequent with my postings recently. The past couple of weeks have been taken up with, as well as all the usual boating and work-type stuff, rehearsals for the Area Brass Band contest in Bradford which was today. We had to be there for a pre-contest rehearsal at 8am which meant I was up at around 6:10 to get there in time, so it’s been a long day. I don’t currently know how we did. I left before the results were announced and I’m trying to avoid looking, fearing the worse.

On the plus side, we think Dan’s Grade I went off ok this week. We had a bit of a scare when we got there because it seemed like we’d missed part of his work – the lip flexibility exercises. These are important for brass players because they cover important things like lip slurs. Fortunately, we were asked beforehand which ones we were doing, and once the panic had died down, Dan sat there pre-exam and did them… not perfectly, but (hopefully) well enough.  Results should be available on Wednesday. We’ve promised a celebratory feast at TGI Fridays.

I didn’t get to the Scimitars game last night because of contest rehearsals which was a pity. The Scims beat Bracknell Bees 3-2 in what finished up a close game, but it sounds like there was a bit of a panic because they only just realised in time I wasn’t at the game so wasn’t there to play the National Anthem. It’s funny how things seem to slip into routine!

We’ve got a hotel booked for the EPL (English Premier League) Ice Hockey Finals in Coventry in April, so regardless of wheter the Scims qualify now, we’re off to the finals. That’s ‘we’ as in Daniel, David and Mrs Woolforbrains. She will doubtless be taking her knitting along :)

Finally, I hope the winds die down a bit now. It’s been a  blustery couple of days and I really don’t like cycling in high winds. Rain I can cope with. Wind is not fun.