More Than One Way to Skin a Cat

Or so the saying goes…

The IT department at work provided me with a developmental PC for my project. This means I am not always asking them to install software, and that I am allowed to use a modem with it.

THe problem (obviously) is trying to share the data that I have onboard this PC. A lot of my reults appear in chart form, but I have a simple solution to these… When I tried printing the other day I forgot that the machine was not networked, and therfore I wouldnt see the usal printers, but I did have the option to use an “Acrobat” printer. Ooooh. Previous user of the machine had a full copy of Adobe Acrobat. so I dont even have to transfer screendumps, just pdf documents… which actually in this case are quite economic with the disk space whilst still giving a decent resolution. Lovelly.

Sometiems Acrobat is a real pain (especially as people are using the newer versions to put data on the web, but its not quite annoying enough to bother raising it on the help desk yet….) and the same when people manage to provide huge documents with colour backgrounds which just take ages to download when an html formatted text would be far far quicker…. But sometimes a pdf file is really useful.

But remember, Acrobat reader is not an open standard, pdfs are a transferable medium beacuse I can use other software to view them too. If you rely on everyone having acrobat reader you may as well say that the best file type is “.doc”

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Anecdotes…

Of late i have turned into an avid reader of el Reg usually for the news and comment, as well as BOFH of course…

Sometimes it is the readers comments that are the funniest. Take the latest letters page which includes the following

One of my mates is head of In-Flight Services at a certain popular airline that had in-flight phones in 1994. The subsidised charge was USD10 per minute at the time.

He once showed me a usage graph and 99% of calls lasted less than two minutes. This big peak then dropped until it reached about 25 minutes and then it spiked again. The 25 minute plus calls were generally by execs that were usually making business deals that more than covered the charge.

The two minute calls were made by people who called their friends and did the HELLO…I’M ON A PLANE…YES…A PLANE!! thing but didn’t hang up before the first minute was reached. I think he said these calls usually lasted one minute and five seconds…

Now I love mobile phones, and I hate the quiet coach on trains (cos i cannot listen to my radio, especially over the sounds of screaming children…) but i dont like someone shouting away on the phone…. much better if people show a little consideration and head for the vestibules.

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Bricks and Morter of my Own

I have been itching to do this post for the last few days, but wanted to ensure that sailors could find what they may be looking for first.

Some of you may know I have been looking for a new home for the last couple of weeks. Well, it seems i have put a deposit on a new apartment in Hampton Vale. Thanks to my parents for finding that for me… but seriosuly its amazing!

Happilly I probably have enough furniture and white goods to move in with. One day and a transit van should do the job when the Big day Comes

In the meantime a crash course in buying homes… and hopefully it will be sorted by 15th October.

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For fellow Sailors

Voyage Photos are now online. well, some of them. Check back in a few days for the others once I unpack….

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I love August

As someone else pointed out, this is the silly season. We have to put up with lots of rubbish on the news, like whihc unmarried man had a fling with a secretary…. And now Radio 4’s World Tonight is going on about Magic Mushrooms.

Trippy.

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Out of this World

I am just about to head for wales to join a sailing ship. Back sunday 19th September….

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Lessons I Should Have Learnt About Touring

On saturday I am going on tour. Well, I am taking my condiiton monitoring project to site, where it shall be installed (I am getting some mechanical help) and commisioned.

So now I think of all the things that could go wrong, and what I am going to do to stop them. A bit more plannign would have been helpfull, but it was rather hard to get good advice until this point in time….

Lets just hope the software is up to it… :-s

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Another Minor Crisis

I was trying to boot up my machine, and check that Ants user ID worked alright. got errors, it wouldnt work. Ok,decided to boot up as my self.

Same errors. Oh. Something wrong here. The error says it cannot find "/home" hmmmm…. but bizarly "/mnt/music" does exist.

Interestingly it seems logging in as root is not an option. So, this is what failsafe is for, right? we boot up again. And find that there is no home according to the system. Not Good ™

A crash course in "vi" follows. I remember to back up, and then edit the fstab file. I remove some options, and reboot. Ooooh it found it.

/Home Sweet /Home

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