WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

It doesn’t seem right to be sweating in Winter. Although I did have a =
coffee and walk a few kilometres. Still, it’s not THAT cold here even =
though it’s Winter.

I was talking to a friend from the UK the other day and she was having =
trouble trying to sleep due to the heat wave over there. I saw on the news =
it’s also reducing the population there which ain’t that good either.

Winter never gets TOO chilly here at any rate. Sienna and I just had shorts =
and Tshirts on all weekend. We kicked the doona off as well since we didn’t =
really need it.

Okay so it looks like Linux is going to be of no use to me.

I have 3 PCI modems.. all are Winmodems (eg Conexant) and the only way to get drivers for them is to pay Linuxant USD$20. Since the modems all cost much less than that I don’t see any reason to shell out that much just to use Linux. It’s a shame, really. I had installed SUSE 10.1 on my old Vista partition and was looking forward to using it and eventually kicking XP out the window.

So far the partition has had: Windows XP, OSX86, Vista and now SUSE 10.1  That’s a lot of OS’s for one lil partition

Looks like SUSE will be going, too. I’m tempted to back up all my data and repartition my HDD and install XP again and set things up properly the way I like it. Thanks to Vista and SUSE I now have two different bootup programs and no way to default to XP, so I probably have to fixmbr the PC anyway. It boots into Grub, then the Vista boot application (which can be edited using the Vista bcdedit.exe application of which I no longer have). First I have to select "Windows" then "Previous version of Windows" to get into XP. If I blow away SUSE I’d still have to do that. I can FIXMBR it but I’d probably be happier wiping the whole hard drive and starting from scratch.

On the other hand, I had time today while Sienna was playing to set up my friend’s website properly with header.php and footer.php files so I don’t have to edit 7-8 files if I add another webpage and hence a link in the navigation bar. I tidied up some other stuff as well while I was there and am much happier with the way it’s laid out.

Sienna has gone home again so it’s all quiet again. I did have a fantastic time with her as usual. I miss her so much.

Vista is dead. R.I.P Long live Vista.

Well, the 14 days ran out, so I’m back to XP. Fortunately, XP is working again properly so it’s usable heh.

I spent most of yesterday updating a website for a friend. There’s a little more to go, but I think I’m going to fix it up properly. Each .html and .php file has the navigation menu in it which means you have to update each document if you add a new page. I’m going to separate the nav menu, header and footer into separate files so they can just be included using PHP commands. Saves time and makes things so much easier. Plus the form values were set up badly so you couldn’t tell what people were requesting. I’ve already fixed that up and sent a test email, so things should be a lot better.

I had a crap night’s sleep last night. I woke at 3ish with a massive neck pain. Felt like I had whiplash or something. I lay there for about an hour trying different positions to get back to sleep but in the end gave up and got up to get some Panadol. That didn’t help for ages so I put the TV on and veged to that for about 20 minutes. I also felt like I was going to throw up so had the bucket but nothing came out. Eventually I gave up nearly falling asleep on the couch and went back to bed and after many agonizing minutes drifted off, only to wake about an hour later. I kept waking and going back to sleep several times during the night.

I’ve been putting Sienna to sleep in her own bed. Eventually she comes back to see me but at least she spends some time in her own room.

First, yes I know there are two posts almost identical. That’s what you get for sending two photos to Flickr and letting it forward the images to your blog.

Which brings me on to the title of this post.

How is it? Vista, that is.

Well, for starters my Windows XP Pro partition is pretty much useless now. You cannot use anything that spawns explorer.exe This includes starting it from a Windows Explorer icon, using it to explore my PocketPC, using the START:RUN feature, etc. None of that works now. As I have made no changes to XP for the last week or two, spending most of my time in Vista, I can only assume one of two things: Vista fuct it up / Writing to the HDD stuffed up while in Vista and somehow corrupted something.

How about Vista itself? Internet Explorer no longer works. No updates nor changes were made to it or Vista, but if you start IE7 then type in a URL, it locks up and has to be killed.  Vista has rebooted spontaneously a couple of times. No idea why, exactly. I think the only thing I was doing at the time (for the last situation anyway) was scrolling a webpage down with my mouse wheel.

So, yeah. Vista is goooood

How about my quest for changing to Linux? It’s not going that well either. None of the Live CDs I’ve liked can dial up the internet using my internal modem. They seem to detect it and set it up as /dev/modem or /dev/modem0 but cannot dial with it. Add in all the configs and hit DIAL and the dialog just locks up. Tested using SUSE’s dialer and also KPPP. The very latest release of the Simply Mepis live CD could not dial either. Until I can actually do something with it to make dialup work, there’s no point in installing Linux at all.

So… not that happy with any OS’s yet. At some stage I’ll back up anything interesting on my HDD and blow everything away and re-partition it, then install whichever is the winning OS. At the moment, it looks like XP Pro.. however, there is a new beta of Vista which has just been released. It’s supposed to be less resource-hungry and contains an extra 100Mb of PHAT FAT!

In order to keep the odd program going, I’d probably ideally set my PC up with Linux on most of the HDD and a smaller partition just with XP. Just for Oblivion and Game Editor (if I ever get to use either of them. I’m usually way too busy most evenings).

Good news: Sienna is a lot better. The antibiotics must be helping immensely and I will be picking her up after work tomorrow for the weekend! YAY! I can’t wait! 

I haven’t the foggiest..

Originally uploaded by WauloK.

Today I had to drive to the train station with the lights on as it was extremely foggy outside.

I haven’t the foggiest..

Originally uploaded by WauloK.

Today I had to drive to the train station with the lights on as it was extremely foggy outside.