A work colleague sent this link around the team today: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q276304/
The support title says it all, really:
Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords
Yeah, go figure!!
Last night I finished reading a great book about an ‘energetic’ dog and its journalist owner: Marley and Me.
It had me in tears of grief at the end—not because of any cataclysmic event in the story, but because of the memories it evoked. I read somewhere recently that we are never really given time or permission to grieve for a beloved pet; there’s always that “Oh, you can get always a new dog/cat/whatever.” But the grief is real, and it lasts for a long time.
In this case I was grieving for my childhood boxer—Cassie—who I grew up with and who had to be put down the afternoon of my Year 12 Ball (Senior Prom for the Americans). I sure didn’t enjoy that night, but I held in my grief as it wouldn’t have been cool to be in tears the whole night.
And I was grieving for Anouschka, my beloved cat for some 17 years, who I held in my arms when she was put to sleep in 1995.
The grief never goes. You think it has, then you read a book like this, and it comes welling back up.
Update (19 February 2008): I just read that this great book is being made into a movie, starring Owen Wilson.
My Aeron chairs arrived yesterday! Woohoo! So far, they are GREAT. I spent a few hours editing a PhD thesis last night after a full day’s work, and doing it like I usually wouldn’t—but only because the chair allowed me to.
I ramped up the font size in the Word doc to some 250%, sat back in the chair, and was still close enough to the keyboard and mouse to make the punctuation and spelling changes I needed to make on this first pass. One of the features of the chair is the ability to adjust each arm’s height, so I had my left arm resting nicely at the height of the desk/keyboard and the right arm adjusted slightly higher to account for the mouse.
The body of the chair is also really comfortable too, but not like ‘fall asleep on the sofa’ comfortable—a good working comfort. The seat base and back are made of some high tech flexible material which adapts to your body and allows it to ‘breathe’. And there’s great lumbar support.
Sweet!
After the “memory card error” on my Canon IXUS 400 yesterday, I decided enough was enough! I’ve had this error on and off for ages now, and it usually goes away by itself. But today I did something about it.
I searched the internet and found a whole slew of disgruntled Canon IXUS 400 owners out there who get the same error message, and who, after trying many various things, put it down to an error in the camera, not the memory card or the removable battery. One solution that seemed to work for many of them was to take apart the camera case and remove the internal lithium battery, then reinsert it. All those who did this advised to make a note of the screw location as these screws are tiny, and some are longer than others. But no site I found had a simple diagram of where these screws are located (one screw is hidden!), and no-one said how many there are (11), so I’ve added a simple diagram at the end of this post for anyone else who wants to try this solution (which, BTW, didn’t work for me… so the camera is off to Sydney for ‘repair’).
Here are some of the forums and websites where the problem is discussed (and whined about!), and where various solutions are offered (NOTE: I’ve used TinyURL to shorten the very long web addresses):
Diagram of the location of the 11 screws that hold the casing together
NOTE: On the left side, one screw is hidden behind the rubber flap.
Update 4 November: After almost a month away with the technicians in Sydney (why so long??), I got my camera back late last month. Supposedly it was fixed. There was no charge as it was a ‘known error’. I popped in my 256MB CF card in anticipation—and got “Memory Card Error” straight away. My words are NOT fit for printing here. I popped in the 32MB CF card—no error message. Over the past few days, I’ve tried the 256MB card several times, each time with the same error message. I called Canon in Sydney—they said to try a new CF card. Yeah right—like they’re going to pay for it, not! I’m a 90 min drive from where I can buy one, so I’ll have to wait until Friday to test out another one. I’ll take my old card with me too, as I really don’t think it’s the card. This 256MB card has worked well for a few years—the “Memory Card Error” has always been intermittent and doesn’t seem to be associated with just the one card. I’ll get my CF card tested in the camera shop, and will try out one of theirs that I hope they have available for testing. To be honest, I might even consider getting a new digital camera. The prices are MUCH cheaper now and this one is 4+ years old. I hate throwing away stuff though—especially stuff that I paid hundreds of dollars for and works perfectly well except for this intermittent issue. Mutter, mutter, mumble, mumble…
Update 9 November 2007: I took the camera and CF card in to the camera shop (Camera House, Bunbury, Western Australia). The nice guy behind the counter asked if I’d reformatted the card since the fix. I hadn’t. Didn’t know I should. I definitely hadn’t reformatted the 32MB card, and it worked fine first up. He reformatted the 256MB card and it worked fine! We tested it a few times with no error. He recommended that I reformat after I download photos instead of deleting them off the card. There was no charge for this service or advice, but I purchased a couple of spare cards anyway—his advice and ‘fix’ was a lot cheaper than getting a new camera!
We took a drive through the backroads today to go to Boddington. Why Boddington? Well, the local Arts Council in this very small community had their sixth annual “Field of Quilts” exhibition.
They hold the exhibition in a field near the town hall and string up the quilts as though they’re on a washing line. There were heaps of quilts flapping away in the sunshine (and the rain showers), and even more in the hall. Some quilt vendors had stalls selling fat quarters, notions, and other goodies, but I didn’t buy any. Even my husband appreciated some of them—he’s been taping Simply Quilts for me whenever I’m away, and he takes out the ads, which means he has to watch the show! He’s obviously learned something because when I talked about the ‘stained glass’ effect created by black bias fabric used on some of the quilts, he knew what I was talking about. And he pointed out the stippling on some quilts, ‘cos he’s seen me do it!
The exhibition is just that—an exhibition, not a judged competition. Anyone can enter their work. If the visitors want to, they can vote for the quilt they think is the best and the winner gets a $250 prize.
Unfortunately, my camera’s memory card is playing up at the moment, so I got maybe one photo (which I’ll share if I can get it to download…).
It took longer to get to Boddington than I thought. I expected it to take about two hours, but it was closer to two and a half. We did a big loop going up the inland backroads, then back on Albany highway and cutting in towards to coast. (Reason: It’s a long weekend and none of the little towns—including Boddington—had a fuel outlet open. Go figure! So we had to get on to Albany Highway to get fuel at Williams.) So it was about a five hour drive, plus an hour or so at the quilt exhibition. A gorgeous spring day, marred by a few rain showers. The pastures and crops are looking magnificent! And there were lots of wildflowers on the sides on many of the roads, with the best display on the Collie to Williams road.
Where we went:
The only bummer of the day was coming across a motorcycle accident on the Boyup Brook to Mumballup road, near Noggerup. Police and ambulance were in attendance, but unfortunately there was a silver foil blanket over the body on the side of the road. I’ve never seen that before, except on TV. It’s very different when it’s real. A very sobering wake up call. May he rest in peace.
I bought a 3kg bag of fresh, juicy, sweet Harvey oranges on our drive today. And as soon as I got home, I zested four of them. I popped the zest into an ice cube tray and hope that it freezes OK. If it does, I’ll pop out the cubes tomorrow and put them in a zip bag and back into the freezer.
The math:
Hint: The juice tasted FANTASTIC! It could’ve been that the oranges were really fresh and sweet, but it also could’ve been because I juiced the oranges after they’d sat out overnight on the kitchen counter – I hadn’t refrigerated them, and I think that having them at room temperature really enhanced the flavour. Yum!
The Gurus at PC Guru have been a godsend – again! I’ve written about them before, but yesterday they finally got something sorted out that’s been an issue for over a month and that my ISP’s technical support said was a faulty router/modem or perhaps a dicky phone line, amongst other things.
For the past month or so I’ve had intermittent connection problems – some websites (like Google!) wouldn’t connect; I was getting “Access is Denied” messages when I tried to FTP changed web pages to a client’s website and my own; some of my RSS feeds weren’t coming through; and most recently, Microsoft Live Messenger wouldn’t connect. All through this other services worked fine – Skype, email, most websites, VPN, etc.
I had spent hours on the phone with iinet‘s tech support and some time with the guys at PC Guru – mostly bouncing off them the random ideas that the various iinet people came up with. After many days, being shunted from one support person to the next (and having to explain the issues EVERY TIME [don’t these people use a tracking system????] ) and doing pings and trace routes and all manner of things, someone finally suggested that the modem (I have a router) was faulty and that they’d send me a test modem. Another week went by. Then a phone call to say that it’d be another week…
Just over a week ago I got the test modem. And guess what? The problems were the same whether I was using theirs or mine! I did about 3-4 hours of isolation testing and various configurations of phone line, filters, modems, routers, phone cables, servers, PCs, laptops, etc. Frustrating! I was just glad that I’d worked in tech support myself for some years and realised why I had to do all these tests, as well as having enough knowledge to be able to do all this stuff. My husband or my Mum would’ve been way out of their depth, and my Dad would’ve thrown everything in the bin and given up on the internet and computer forever!
Anyhow, after reporting the results of the isolation tests to yet another tech support person at iinet, this one suggested that maybe it was a patchy phone line and that he’d lodge a fault with Telstra. Next day I get an SMS saying they’re closing the call! No fair – it’s not fixed!!! So I call them back and ask them not to close the call. This new person asks about the problem… so again I go through the whole raft of issues. To say I’m heartily sick of telling this story by now would be an understatement. But this time the person I’m speaking to offers up something new – she suggested that Bundle 1 of the issues was different from Bundle 2! Bundle 1 seemed to be fine now, and she said that the Bundle 2 problems appeared to be somewhere between my system and iinet.
So back to the PC guru guys with this latest ‘idea’… (they must’ve been getting sick of hearing me too!). Aaron agreed and said he suspected that something had got screwed in my ISA Server’s firewall settings (no, I don’t know what an ISA Server is either, or how the settings got screwed – perhaps one of those insidious Microsoft Auto Updates??), and that I really didn’t need ISA Server for such a small network and how about we uninstall it? Well, I still had a week’s work to do, so we arranged for him to call me yesterday morning.
Long story short… after 3.5 hours on the phone with Aaron with him doing some stuff remotely on my Server and me doing stuff while the connection was reset, and fiddling with the proxy settings, everything is now working 100%!!!! Yay! This has been a long and arduous journey – I just hope it lasts.
Lessons learned from this:
Oh, and read Pamela Slims’ excellent post on “Your company brand is only as strong as your technical support“. The title says it all really.
Our quick trip to Melbourne to watch the AFL Preliminary Final had some other features:
<sigh> Collingwood were just *so* close to winning the Preliminary Final against Geelong. Had there been another 30 seconds in the game, it could’ve happened—it was *that* close. Collingwood were scrambling for possession on their 50m line when the siren went… and it was all over. Geelong won by 5 points, and history will show that that’s all that matters. Geelong now play Port Adelaide in the Grand Final this Saturday, and if they win, it’ll break a 44 year drought of not winning a Grand Final.
Now, let’s look at the positives…
Was it worth it? Absolutely! Even despite the loss.
I’m SO excited! Even two days out from the game…
An hour ago I spoke to my nephew – he’s got our tickets sorted for Friday night’s Preliminary Final between Geelong and Collingwood. We just have to pick them up on Friday morning and we’re done.
I asked him if he was nervous and excited – he sure is! He will be playing his biggest game *ever* in front of his biggest crowd ever. Some 90,000+ people are expected at the MCG. The biggest crowd he’s played of before this is around 50,000.
He said that in some ways this was going to be a better game than the Grand Final as the MCG will be filled with supporters from the two Victorian teams, whereas the Grand Final is packed with people who aren’t necessarily supporters of the teams that are playing. He has a point! The roar of the crowd should be deafening. Of course, the Grand Final has all the atmosphere and hype and everything else. And just to play in a Grand Final is a privilege reserved for very few. However, to play in a Preliminary Final is pretty damned good too and we are VERY PROUD of him. Of course, if they win on Friday night, then he *will* be in a Grand Final (if selected…).
I was doing some calculations on this the other day… (yes, I need to get a life!) For round figure purposes, let’s assume there are 20 million people in Australia (I think it’s closer to 21M, but I’m not counting!). Only 16 teams are in the AFL. Each team has a squad of 50-70 young men. Of those 50-70, about 22 get named in their playing side any one week, and only 18 are on the ground at once. So for your standard weekend footy games during the season, only some 300 (round figures) guys are playing at the highest level – out of a total population of 20 million. To even be one of the chosen ones in an AFL team during the season, you’ve got a 0.0000144% chance! Now, by the time you get to the preliminary finals (the week before the Grand Final), only 4 teams remain – some 72 players. To be one of the final 72 in the Preliminary Finals, the chance is now 0.0000036%, and by the Grand Final, only 36 are left – 0.0000018%. Infinitesimal!!!
This will probably be my last post until it’s all over and we’re back home. I pick up Mum tomorrow morning and we drive to Perth to catch the flight to Melbourne. We’re not home until early Saturday evening. Bounce down is at 7:50pm Melbourne time, Friday night. Can’t wait!!!
And yes, Suzanne, this is the same nephew we all saw playing in Launceston 18 months ago. The drive from Hobart may have just been worth it! 😉
Rhonda Bracey: At Random 