Chris Hansen’s blog

Well, it’s been a rather uninteresting week. I’ve been commuting up to Nuneaton/Hinckley all week, and this leaves me unable to blog much, although my Twitter entries, filed each day in LifeJournal courtesy of LoudTwitter, do give some picture of what I’ve been up to.

I had a tour of the control room for the national high-pressure gas distribution network on Thursday in connection with the project I’m working on at the moment. It was most interesting, and I have an appreciation, yet again, of what the work I’m doing actually means in the real world. I won’t describe the room, except to say it was quite small, with stations for each section of the country. The system itself is necessary to keep our ovens cooking and our boilers boiling. The people in that room are responsible for ensuring that enough gas is pumped into the gas accumulators at times of low usage to supply the country’s gas needs at times of high usage. Thousands of sensors all over the country send their reading every few minutes to the control room, where they are shown on these screens. If pressure falls too low, or gets too high, the operator is responsible for operating the valves and controls to fix the problem. Most remarkable.

Other than that, we had a fairly quiet week. I had a coffee with our friend M, on Thursday, and offered him my shoulder and a listening ear. Last night we had Chinese food with our friend Stuart, who will be celebrating his 45th birthday next week, and some of his friends. Lovely meal at a restaurant we’d never tried before. I had dumplings, which were really good, and Szechuan beef, which was also really good and not excessively filling.

I am getting to grips with Vista. Somehow (I think that an update from NVidia came through) the resolution problems with my monitor seem to have gone away. I had to repair iTunes and QuickTime in order for them to work with Vista, and I expect that other little surprises will trickle in, kind of like when you’re burgled and, for weeks and months thereafter, you discover that little things have disappeared from your home. I still can’t get Vista to recognise Eudora sufficiently to open a new email when I click on a “mailto” link on a webpage. Still working on that and may have another step towards a solution. MailWasher Pro (my spam killer) throws up error messages when it starts, and then works. The makers of MailWasher promise that it will be updated “soon”. I hope so; I depend on it to keep the 419ers and the pill-pushers and the porn-masters from overwhelming my mailbox. Windows is still pushing lots of updates my way; I wish they’d finish and be done with it.

I am still having troubles with backups. Windows Backup says that a file or folder is corrupted and won’t finish off a backup. Ghost is so hopeless that I have to uninstall it, I think. I know that recommended another backup utility; I must search for that reply and get it, as I’m getting more and more nervous about it. Why are backups so hard and yet, every time a system crashes, people get caned for not doing them?

Off soon to get ready for the day: shower, shave, and then go off to the Pride Run in Victoria Park in East London, where HWMBO is going to run and M and I are going to cheer him on. Then lunch, and back home for a restful afternoon and evening, I hope.

BTW, I am an Olympic widow most nights; I, on the other hand, have watched about 1 minute of the Games, I think.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 06:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.