Catching up

I have been trying unsuccessfully to sort out the photos and videos from the holiday. The PCs going on and off have totally scuppered attempts to capture videos, change them to the right format and to burn them to DVD.

The worst thing is you have to wait so long and often the results are variable to say the least. Silly things like an e-mail coming through or opening up an application can throw the recording and so you have to leave the PC to go and do its own thing. Then the PC decides to hibernate and the next shot is ruined.

I shall keep persevering, the videos and photos look great - getting them onto external media so other people can see is the difficult bit!

Some Drink

Wow.

Well - it is gone midnight! There is very little money in my wallet. I have just had to have cooked myself:
A Toasted Bacon Sandwich, with grated cheese, tomato sauce and just bordering on the crispy side - back bacon.

Now that IS a great night out n'est pas?

Cheers K! I wish my wife would come and pick me up from the pub at chucking out time - you don't know how lucky you are. It was also very civilised of you to give me a lift home even though I said I would walk :-)

OK - Who's next?

Hic!

Off down the pub

Well it seems like the only civilised thing to do on a Friday night after the two weeks of chaos I returned to. I've had 4 or is it 5 blue screens from one of my PCs today. Each time that is a full systems check to make sure nothing is broken (software wise).

So a friend phoned and said did I fancy a pint. I nearly ripped his arm off - do I ever fancy a pint. I'm off in 5 minutes

Yippee.

Two weeks trials and tribulations

I hope have now come to an end as the internet has behaved itself for 24 hours now. I had a look at some of the forums online and many people were suffering problems. Some reckon that it is all to do with the new upgrade to super-speed broadband coming later this year.

Whatever it is - it is a damned nuisance as my productivity has been at best a few hours a day and trying to catch up when all you have are crashing PCs and various stuff in a state of being powered up or down has been tiresome to say the least. Today, finally, I have been able to get a few hours of uninterrupted work done. With a bit of luck by this time next week I will have run far enough, fast enough to have caught up.

At least it keeps my mind off of other things I suppose :-)

The song in my head

Finally we tracked it down. On the Ship they did introductions to your ports of call and there were slide shows with nice photos and "this music" that just seemed appropriate and fitted with the scenery and the "mood" of the holiday. I think the holiday can be said to have a mood or a feeling about it.

Anyway, we had been racking our brains. Id heard it before and A had taken a snip on her mobile phone so we managed to pull out a few lyrics. So it snapped yesterday that I thought it sounded a bit like Enya and I played a bit of Caribbean Blue and Orinoco Flow. We then looked it up and our "theme for the holiday" turned out to be......

Enya and "Anywhere Is" - so with one of my birthday vouchers we purchased "Paint the Sky with Stars" or Enya's Greatest Hits and now we have played it to pieces.

However, it really does still bring a bit of a lump to my throat and makes the hairs stand up on my arms when I remember the photos of Iceland set to this music - Cool!

F1, F1, F1

Or as the IT types might recognise Help, Help, HELP.

This morning it finally looks as if the internet is back properly and the past few day's worth of e-mails are happily downloading and I can actually get in to see this site and a number of others which appear to have remained hidden.

Looking at the service page there appears to have been some very serious outages and some areas lost their TV as well as their Internet. The disruption - almost two weeks of it has been incredible and it worries me that I am quite as reliant on this technology for communication and work as I am. What are the alternatives? Well we used to do fine with letters, phones and telex, no mobile phones, bleepers, PDAs, PCs or anything - now I am sounding old - I can even remember all gathering in amazement around my mate's desk when he bought his first calculator - it was a week's wages and was brilliant. Now you can pick these up for a few pounds.

I must stop this I am obviously getting old - which reminds me - don't the policemen look young. Doh!

Short of

Bolting a thumping great copper cable to some server - I can't see that my internet chums - Virgin Media or NT Hell are doing that well. Let me see it is now 10 days of disruption and I have no e-mail and I've been without the internet for perhaps 6 hours or more today.

I'm resigning myself to the fact that this will probably continue for a little while longer.

Short of pinging their server every few seconds I'm not certain how else I can keep the connection from crashing and making me go through a now - well rehearsed routine or routines to get service back.

"Our engineers are aware of and working for a resolution to this problem" hardly seems reassuring. A glance at their web site shows massive outages all over the country. Lord alone knows what other NT Hell and Virgin Media customers must be going through.

My blogging activities are being seriously curtailed - sorry about that. If you would like to complain about that - then I have set up a premium phone number that you can ring and pay an extortionate amount whilst I slowly take your details, check your account, ask you some stupid security question and then take you through all of the steps you've already been through (because you aren't stupid are you?) and then at the end of that I might agree with you that your opening statement was in fact correct!

Getting Started

It is really difficult to get myself motivated to get going. I had two meetings yesterday which were very good, a bit longer than I wanted them to be and so another day went begging.

Today I am trying to catch up on the lost production of last week and the difficult thing is prioritising it. Last week it would have been quite easy to sort out as all I needed to do was to tackle things in order and get one out of the way at a time. Now - well everything needs to be done at once. Oh the fun of it all. The fall out from the IT problems is also that I have been fiddling around with the IT settings to ensure that firewalls and the like wouldn't block getting me reconnected. Now I have had to reset all the settings and to learn a few new skills especially now that I have a remote firewall.

All good fun :-) NOT.

I beginning to feel a lot better as well now. I've lost almost 1 kilo this week and sensible eating and a bit of exercise seem to have helped. Anyway, I can't keep on chatting to you all day - back to work!

Health Update

I appear to have 'gotten over' last week's dizzy spells and just not feeling me - "A Change in the Water" as my Mum would have me believe!

I think it was getting my land legs back and the massive change in eating habits. You really can eat for your country on board. I also have had it confirmed that the ship shouldn't have been that bad and vibrating as much as it did - which I'm certain is the root cause of all of this.

So other than that I've realised it isn't too long to go until I get back into the swing of things and get my next lot of tests. I haven't done my exercises since I've been back but I intend to change that in the next day or so. I've cut back my food to what I used to eat before the holiday and so now I need to get back into the routines I had before.

That is about it for now. The Internet has been up all day so far and let's hope it stays that way. I'm hopeful of actually getting some work done tomorrow.

And on the seventh day

He was still re-booting PCs, routers, cable modems and reviewing the status notices which still do not mention this particular problem.

Seven days! So apologies for no real meaningful posts apart from those aimed at keeping me sane.

I hope that this will change this week..

Still Having Connectivity Problems

Sorry folks,

I am still having intermittent disconnection problems with the ISP. So far today we have suffered about 10 outages. I am DEFINATELY going to have a sense of humour failure tomorrow, I've worked hard for it, I need one and I just deserve it. After all - I believe that NTL or Virgin Media should have the benefit of my experience of being a customer of theirs.

Hopes for a calming weekend

After a week of battling with minor officialdom and people who are not paid to use their initiative and with businesses who upset their customers I think that I ought to take a calming down weekend.

Frankly I lost the whole week to having no real IT and I have written that off ready to start on Monday. It looks to be set fair for the weekend so beer and barbecue would appear to be the order of the day.

I'm going outside now - I may be some time!

Faroe Islands, Iceland and Norway

Wonderful destinations and each different. Of all though Norway was how I thought it would be, steep fjords and waterfalls. The Faroe Islands were just enchanting - very quiet and peaceful and a nice quiet place to go. Iceland was by the far the biggest surprise. I'd expected all the geysers and boiling mud etc but it was a land of huge changes - almost every turn or valley took you to a different landscape. You could be driving through a green valley, pop over the hill and be confronted with miles of lava fields or perhaps some geysers letting off steam. I'd love to spend more time in all three places but as an independent traveller next time.

Dodging the tourists would be the difficult bit in Norway - in the Faroes and Iceland I reckon you could easily dodge them all day.

Could it possibly be

That the internet has been up all morning and that the problem is now fixed? Am I tempting fate?

I can hardly believe how much this has affected my work this week. It is now Friday afternoon and I cannot claim to have had one substantial call or conversation or to have managed to get more than a few minutes work done at a time. What with re-booting the complete network and getting all the PCs working - then finding that the internet had gone down again and having to keep on re-logging in and resetting everything I have had a total sense of humour failure this week, no work done and I am going to write off this week entirely.

Ho hum!

Owww - Cramps

2 am. One leg and then the other, fell out of bed in agony! It still hurts this morning. It has been threatening all week and I have been feeling my calf muscle twinging but blimey did that ever hurt. I haven't had that for years and years.

It could be related to this cold/flu/dizzy stuff or perhaps the Statins which apparently have cramp as a side effect :-(

Anyway - I suppose the better news is that the internet is back working and I am not having to spend all day booting and re-bootings PCs, Routers and Cable Modems! Will have to see how that goes on today.

Peculiar

Still feeling quite peculiar - still a little dizzy and disorientated. I'm sure the IT issues haven't helped but I'm sure this has to do with finding my land legs again.

I hope so I sure don't want to feel like I do at the moment for much longer it is quite disturbing as when sitting you can feel your body shaking and when standing moving from side to side, almost imperceptibly but you can definitely feel it.

NT Hell

What an utter nightmare the last few days have been. Trying to resolve what should be an easy issue. Finally, we got somewhere today and had to "bite the bullet" and pay 25p to report the fault. This after having checked the service announcements (looked at the service announcements online - helpful but if you can't connect a bit pointless).

After dealing with whoever from Mumbai - it turns out that IT IS NTL/Virgin Media's problem after all - it isn't on their announcements on the phone which I have diligently checked. The Internet is back on line now (not sure for how long though they expect another 48 hours worth of trouble).

To say I was getting irate would be an understatement - some-body's head was going to get chewed up the way things were going and no one was interested - customer support is now outsourced at 25p a minute, reporting a fault - 25p a minute - what is that all about.

Luckily they have decided to refund the cost of my phone call - bit it was a known fault and frankly it was driving me utterly mental trying to solve it as the acknowledgement page said that all was OK and yet after re-booting PCs, Modems and Routers (all in sequence) the same provisioning screen kept turning up and then every now and then the Internet would come back and I'd re-boot the PCs around the house and re-set everything only for it to go down again.

I am one very unhappy camper. You'd have thought Branson and his army would have brought some sense and sanity to the customer service department - perhaps some over ambitious number crunching, greasy pole climbing spotty Herbert after consulting his life coach made an executive decision to screw up the people that pay for the service. Perhaps I should go back to BT? Now there's something I never thought I'd say!

Holiday

The holiday was great, no doubt about it I am 3 Kg heavier :-(

There is a lot to be said for cruising and - possibly because we have always independently travelled - quite a bit that we didn't particularly like as well.

The stuff we didn't like included:

Excursions - a necessary evil to give you a flavour of the places you are visiting - you are at the mercy of the other 40 odd people in your party.

Lots of people - we are used to staying in remote farm houses or on board our own Canal Boat or in an RV or something similar. We are not used to so many people being around us. Not that the ship was crowded just lots of people.

The Ship was a "bit tired" it shook and rolled more than perhaps a larger or newer vessel.


Stuff we liked:

The ports of call were fantastic

The food was good

You were made to feel special

The scenery came to you at a slow pace.

So where did he get to?

Well.......

My Internet router died on Sunday and I could just about use the Internet as long as I was three inches from the wireless antenna!

On Monday we got a new Router and then my trouble started:

1. I really haven't felt well since I got home - I felt a lot worse on Monday and yesterday
2. My provider (not recognising the MAC address of my new PC(s)) wouldn't let me connect
3. When I did manage to get connected it wouldn't let me set up the router and I had to go through the re-connection process again ( a BIG pain as it demands renaming PCs, re-entering Pins and passwords and all that, re-booting PCs, Modems etc.

So finally today I used my old PC and set that up downstairs and managed to sort out the router, the pcs and now I am back to where I was on Saturday afternoon/Sunday morning trying to catch up with 1500+ e-mails.

I'm feeling a bit better but still quite dizzy and with a sore throat. A friend reckons that the dizziness is having come off the Ship and getting used to being back on land - which may well be right. I remember that even when we have been on Canal boat holidays.

I could do without the swaying which I am still doing now!

Back on Dry Land

Trying to get used to this sun and heat here. We had a great time. No time to put too much on here now -more as the week goes on as we are off to a birthday party now - my friend's 60th!

Needless to say - had a great time, fascinating places we visited and things we got up to.