Category: Computing

Simone can’t come to the phone

She’s off hanging with the cool people now.

On saturday (after a week of tech troubles, the details of which I won’t bore you with) Simone bought herself a shiny new white MacBook macintosh laptop.

It does everything her old computer did, just without her having to know anything about settings or configurations or the like.

And of course since all the cool people have Mac’s, she’s been getting invites to avant garde poetry readings, exclusive coffee tastings, and other understatedly cool social events since then.

Don’t know what Jack and I will do while she’s off at these. Maybe there will be a bland movie on TV for us… 🙂

(Of corurse the other thing is that as it has been a while since I last used a Mac to any great extent, I will be ringing all my Mac user friends and relatives to find out how to do all the tricky and fiddly little things I can never remember how to do. Mac owners – you have been warned).

Very uncharacteristic

Historically, I have had… how should I put it… something of a nack for turning my computers (individually or collectively) into very expensive paper weights for short periods of time, while trying to do things that wiser people would avoid (usually involving playing with bits of operating systems in ways they probably weren’t designed to handle).

I play with the registry, and then have to reinstall my computer.

I resize partitions, and when it fails (as it usually does for me) I have to reinstall my computer.

Sometimes I don’t even do anything particuarly exciting, like upgrading software, or moving files, or upgrading hard-drives, and.. well I think you’re probably sensing a theme by now.

Now my family and friends know this is how I do things, and just point and snigger that “Dave’s done it again”, while I find it a (generally) a combination of a great way to learn about how operating systems are set up, and a pleasant little activity to keep me happily amused for a period of time usually equivalent to an afternoon (if you ignore the irritation when my efforts cause me to loose old emails or files or the like).

To quote Douglas Adams “I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Ten seconds, I tell myself, is ten seconds. Time is valuable and ten seconds’ worth of it is well worth the investment of a day’s happy activity working out a way of saving it.”
So to get to the actual point of this blog entry, I have (and I should probably touch wood right now, although the fake veneer on my desk will have to do) somehow managed to navigate my way through a veritable mine-field of re-install-your-computer prone activities this afternoon, and have somehow managed to come out the other side without having to reinstall anything.

Having finally gotten a computer with a large enough hard drive for me to reasonably run two operating systems at once, I decided to install Linux to dual boot on my machine (ie. my machine can load Linux or Windows, depending on which one I select).

Now to set this up I had to resize the partition that Windows is currently installed on, create 3 new partitions, and install Linux, making sure it didn’t do anything stupid (like putting the program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to load onto the same drive as Windows – apparently windows really really doesn’t like that).

Any one of these things could have (and historically would have) gone wrong and required me to delete everything and set everything up again from scratch, and yet strangely they didn’t and here I am, writing this blog from within Linux.

Foolish things to do with cordial

A few weeks back I did something rather stupid.

I was drinking a glass of cordial and put it down on my desk as I was playing on my computer.

Jack being his usual rumbunctious self jumped up onto the desk, and started sniffing my cordial with a view to drinking it (he likes human drinks, but thankfully hasn’t figured out how to get into the grog cupboard yet).

Simone trying to be helpful shifted the drink closer to me so that I could stop Jack from drinking it, and somewhere in the subsequent confusion Jack moved, I reacted, and the cordial spilled onto my computer’s keyboard.

Now in the past I had heard stories about people drying their keyboards and continuing without any problems, but that didn’t seem to work.

Then I recalled some-one who swore that they had washed their keyboard and hung it out to dry, and had it back working the next day. Obviously they didn’t have a laptop keyboard, because that didn’t work either.

In the end I just had to bite the bullet and buy a replacement keyboard.

Turned out to be the most expensive cup of cordial I’ve ever had.

Anyway, for everyone’s amusement, here is a pretty picture of my keyboard in the bathroom sink. Kids, don’t try this without asking your parents first.

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Cultivating my Evil side

Following my opera purchase today I spent a portion of this evening cultivating my Evil side

I sat at my oversized desk, in my swivelling chair, playing Evil Genius (one of my current favorite computer games, where you control minions, build secret lairs, comit acts of infamy across the globe, and plot to take over the world (it really is an awful lot of fun)), listening to opera playing loudly in the background, and stroking the cat who was sitting on my knee.

I half expected Sean Connery to bust into my study to try and stop me. 🙂

Golf day

Over easter Simone and I went down to Canberra to visit our best people (my best man and best friend James and his cool wife Chantelle, and Simone’s matron of honour Tash (best woman would be a perfectly accurate term, but sounds a little odd somehow), and her great husband Dave (bloody Dave’s. Far to many of ’em. Bloody everywhere they are)).

It was superbly good to get away, and even better to spend the time with such great friends.

And on the monday we had a golf day.

Now apart from Simone, I don’t think that any of us have done much more than watch golf on TV, but I must explain that we had a really good time none the less.

In the morning we had a lazy sleep in and went for a bit of a walk around the neighborhood after coffee at a local bar. Then we went and played a quick 18 at the local minigolf course, after which we had take-away-lunch-of-your-choice, topped off with easter eggs, and spent the remainder of the afternoon playing 4 player “Mario Golf: Toadstool tour” on James and Chantelle’s Nintendo gamecube.

It was so much fun that since arriving home I have been forced to go out and buy a gamecube and Mario Golf, so that Simone and I can continue the fun.

As if we didn’t have enough to do with our time as it was…. 🙂

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming

Some of you may have noticed that over the last week or so this blog has been changing color, shape and viewability (ie. it’s been on the fritz and offline fairly frequently while I fix it).

It all relates to the fact that I use a program called Gallery2 to display my photos, and a program called WPG2 to display those photos within my blog.

Now WPG2 did a good enough job, but it had a few annoyances, particularly in relation to navigating between different photo galleries, so I was all excited when I found that there was a newer version available, which apparently solved many of my bothers.

The only problem was that it required a newer version of Gallery2 as well.

And there was a newer version of the display theme I used for both the blog and the photo galleries.

So I set about upgrading all of these bits, and is always the way I ran into a few… well shall we say hiccups…

Now computer hiccups are nothing new to me, and in fact for me constitute quite a bit of fun I have with computers, as they present an opportunity for a happy afternoon of problem solving. And this was not a particularly serious problem (all my photos were still there, and all my blog entries were still there. They just weren’t immediately accesible), but because it was a problem with files on the opposite side of the world it took a little while (and a couple of attempts (or 5)) to rectify.

Anyway. Long story short everything is now updated, and working fine (apparently), so it’s back to blogging as normal. Hooray.

What Dave wants (apparently…)

While reading through a friend of a friend‘s blog today I came across a funny and slightly disturbing little internet based game.

Type “[your name] needs” into google and see what comes back.

Apparently Dave needs:

  • DAVE NEEDS VACATION FROM CARRYING HIS FIANCEE’S BAGS
  • Dave needs Firefox and BugMeNot
  • Dave needs plywood
  • Dave needs to have that mole looked at
  • Dave needs a Shave(this at least is true)
  • Dave needs a big hand for what he has done
  • Dave needs to start paying more attention to what Judi does around here

And that was only on the first 2 pages of results…

That new computer smell

I have finally gotten my new computer. Yay. It’s so fast and shiny!!!

I picked it up friday afternoon, missed out on playing with it yesterday as I ended up doing an unexpected additional ED shift until 10pm, and plan on spending almost all today ensconsed infront of it’s softly glowing screen happily emersed in mindless tinkering.

I have to copy all my files and settings from my old computer onto my new computer, then copy all simone’s stuff from her computer onto my old one so that she can have it, and then set up Simone’s old computer for her parents to have. I don’t remember the last time I’ve gotten to do this much under the hood computer tinkering, and I certainly don’t remember when I last (if ever) set up 3 computers in one day.

I’m going to be like a pig in mud!!!

Strugling against the machines

We have recently started using a new computer system at work, which allows (to a limited extent) electronic record keeping and note taking for patient charts.

Old chart entries are scanned in, so that you can pull up old charts from any computer in the hospital, and things like xray reports and blood test results are all accessible through it.

I personally find this a godsend, as it allows me to do a fair bit of my work without writing, and from anywhere I want to do it, rather than being tediously paper based from wherever the charts are kept (on the ward, in medical records, etc).

Recently however they added a new feature which allows you to directly add notes into the online charts, with the idea that in certain situations (especially outpatient clinics) doctors would simply type in notes, rather than writing things and having them scanned later.

Brilliant, I thought, and promptly started entering notes left right and centre, and taking to it like I’m sure the IT people were hoping everyone would, however I have been quite bewildered by the fierce resistance I have seen in my fellow doctors to the system.

Even the relatively tech literate and young (comparatively speaking) doctors seem to resist using it, not because they can’t, but seemingly because they don’t want to, and it is new technology. They want to keep on writing illegibly. They want to sort through piles of crusty old paper charts. They like being able to winge about the system, even though it really is quite a good piece of software, and both an improvement on the previous version that was in use last year, and a monumental improvement (in my opinion at least) on the paper systems of old.

I suppose that that is just the way the world works. Some day it will be me being tech illiterate, and some other young upstart winging at my intransigence.

More thoughts on copyright

The BBC has an interesting discussion piece about the appartent push by certain industry lobby groups in Britain to extend copyright from it’s current 50 years.

Regular readers will be quite familiar with my opinions on matters of copyright and IP as it pertains to popular culture, so I will forgo my usual tired tirade, but the piece is certainly an interesting and quite fairly balanced discussion of the issue.