The Sturdy Soapbox

Pedigree Dalek

OK, I'll be back...

Since announcing the closure of the soapbox, I've had a stream of e mails and a couple of phone calls from people saying I shouldn't do it.

Some messages were from people I don't even know, others from people I've come to know online like Average Jane.

Then there was PMG on the phone, rambling on incomprehensibly after a few bottles of local vino over there in New Zealand.

I shall come back, but I need to get some of these problems out the way first.

Thanks for the messages of support, everyone.

The soapbox is closing

Well, I've been doing this for 8 years now and I think it is time to move on.

A combination of health problems, lack of money and the fact I always wrote on here to entertain and things I am experiencing right now fail to meet what I think people might want to read.

I don't know when the page will disappear.  I may post before month end, but only if something worthwhile happens.

Made some good friends on here and I hope they will keep on touch.

So, to quote Douglas Adams "So long and thanks for all the fish".

If you like Daleks, you'll LOVE this quiz

And it's quite difficult.  I got 4 exterminations and am therefore a pig slave - D'oh.

 

Gone past punch drunk, try numb

I have had two weeks of utter shite.

Things have gone wrong on a large scale.  I already told you about the laptop going pear shaped and all the grief I had having to get a new hard drive on my very limited funds.

The laptop I bought with the money I raised from selling all my DVDs on E Bay has proved to be nothing but a pain and no improvement on what I already had, in fact with a new HD and op system, the Gateway which Anita now has, was running fantastically.

Someone gave me a hard drive to go in the caddy I bought to try access data on the fried one (which failed), that too refuses to play ball despite the guy giving me a routine to carry out I didn't even knew existed in Windows.

Everyone's been excited about the new Android Ice Cream Sandwich op system that has been rolled out across all brands of smartphone and via various carriers.

Vodafone were due to do this last week and postponed.  It was released yesterday and a push message came through to say you could get an over the air update using wi fi.

I moved it closer to the router so it had a strong signal and pressed the go ahead button.  It semed to be going well and I went off to make some toast.  Came back and saw a message that the connection had failed.

Tried to re establish only to find it saying no updates are available.  There's a lot of chatter about this on the Vodafone tech forum and some are saying the servers were probably busy.  I don't buy this, because I know of someone who updated no problems after me.

I followed advice and re installed Samsungs unpopular Kies software on the big PC.  When I plugged the phone in via cable, it actually recognised it and a message came up that there was an upgrade available.

It crashed saying there was insufficient disk space.  It didn't actually inform me where it was trying to load to and a check revealed that there was 10 Gig in the phone, 3.6 on the SD card and loads on the PC, so it was an inaccurate message.

Back to the forum, I followed tips such as reboot, go back to factory settings, strip naked and face due north, but none of these worked,

All this took place over about four hours, so imagine my mood by bed time.

Charlie Chalk made a comment about removing the SD card altogether just for the hell of it, which I did this morning.  I was amazed the Kies installation went way past what it had done yeaterday, but my delight was short lived. Installation crashed and I got a nice friendly "do you want to conduct an emergency recovery".  Yes I did, and this failed twice, the last one prompting yet another friendly message which contradicted the friendly message on the screen of the now useless phone.

I phoned Samsung, who I will say, were excellent.  To the point, none of this bluster you get from call centres and statements of the bleedin obvious or, stupid unrelated bit of advice read from a manual of pointless soultions.

Unfortunately the phone has to go back to Samsung for repair which will take up to 10 days.

Speaking as someone who worked in a large consumer electronics organisation (Tandy) and has a lot of experience from manufacture to sale.  One of the watchwords of anything to do with electronice for the public, is to keep things as simple and as prat proof as possible.

Just reading the problems being experience with both the update and Kies online, it is clear Samsung have got this wrong, or in the case of the update which contains "bloatware" from the carriers like Vodafone, is it their adulterations that are causing all the problems ?

Unfortunately, all I could see on the Vodafone forum were loads of threads being created with a variety of messes caused by this update and the only comfort available was we're all in the same boat.  No one on the tech side seemed to have any advice of a specific nature, just "have you tried this" options.

As an op system, I hear good reports.  Charlie Chalk had the upgrade go pretty smoothly on his HTC recently and he loved the new O/S.

As you might imagine, I am not in the best of moods right now.  We all have stuff go wrong in our lives and we deal with it, but sometimes things pile up and when you've no reseources to deal with them, small problems can become big ones.

I've a list of them at the moment which need working through.  So tiresome.

Told OBC I was tempted to jump off the balcony.  He felt this was a bit extreme for someone with a bost phone !  I suppose he's right.

 

Another movie

 

Done from clips taken over about three weeks, including some nice cold misty morning ones at the arboretum lake.

Yeah, yeah yeah

Bought this watch dead cheap off E Bay ages ago from someone in Hong Kong.  First time I put it on the strap broke as it was too small.

Anita managed to get me a grown ups sized strap and she had a replacement battery too, yeah, yeah yeah. Fab gear.

Boy, could they party in the sixties

There'a a junk shop right by my bus stop where I wait on Saturday morning to that bustling metropolis that is Walsall with all its lights and culture...

Been a dearth of interesting stuff in the window for quite a while now, since the Bex Bissell carpet shampoo machine with 67 shillings and sixpence printed on the box.

You can picture it now, those teens have had a fab night at the milk bar and have decided to continue the party back at auntie Doris' maisonette. They roll back the carpet and put a bit of Russ Conway on the Dansette.

Note the soft drinks with straws on the table, no tabs of e or Red Bull and vodka for these swingin kids.

Ooh, how I hanker for the says of Bri Nylon, Butterkist and Kia Ora...

Give me the tools and I'll do the job

The other day, I was discussing the recent computer gremlins with OBC and he smugly opined "I thought you was the bloke who says he can fix bosted laptops n things".

Well, the hard disk in this laptop (notice I say this, I am indeed typing on it now), was six years old.

Hard drives will occasionally just stop working, rather like the Seagate external I had about 18 months ago which did the same and no amount of coaxing would allow me access to the data.

I did try also with the fried disk from this machine, buying a caddy off E Bay to make the disk into an external which I could plug into the USB port of another PC.  Did that and got nothing.  Wouldn't recognise it as a drive.

I got also off E Bay a hard drive which I was going to get for a tenner til some idiot got into a pissing contest at the last minute and ended up costing almost twice that, but still a good price for a second hand 60 Gb drive.

Within two hours, I'd installed it, reinstalled XP and was updating the OS and all the Gateway drivers, so that sort of pisses on OBC's fireworks and his doubt in my abilities.

Don't worry, I'll get my own back.  I'll just tell Val I saw him eating a bag of scratchings and she'll give him a clockwinder.

Now I've got to turn my attention to the main PC which is acting very oddly...

What flies across the room at 70mph ?

Fried laptop hard drive after you've spent money on a caddy to try read the contents.  Wasn't having any of it, useless piece of shit.