Failure is the Key to Success

About a month ago, Mum’s computer crashed just before we went on holiday. I managed to coax it back into life, but the disc was failing. Last Monday, I replaced the hard disc, but after copying that data over the system was in a worse state than I thought. On Friday, I took the computer away and rebuilt it.

The computer is now back and working. When I took the computer back today, I looked at the VOIP router that I got Mum for her birthday. I got a Draytek Vigor 2510V ADSL router with VOIP; this was an all in one solution for ADSL and had built in VOIP (Voice over IP). However, when I first installed it last weekend, the call quality was poor with a lot of echo on the line. I changed the codec used to G.711 today and now the call quality is fine. It is configured using VOIPCheap the same as our VOIP service. [previous post]

I bought tickets today for the signing of Raymond E. Feist’s new book, Into a Dark Realm. On the evening of 25th September, Raymond E. Feist will be at Ottakar’s Milton Keynes store to talk about and sign his new book. I have been a fan of his since about 1986, when someone lent me a copy of Magician. Since then, I have read all of the books within a few weeks of them being published, some, like Mistress of the Empire, on the day that it was available.

Although there were seven books published before I started to collect the hardcovers, I have managed to get copies of all of the original versions in hardcover except Magician, which I have the hardcover anniversary edition.

Tags:darkwar saga,raymond e feist

I spent some time about a week ago entering the information that my mum had found out for the Cakebread line of my family. Today, I have got around to updating my online databases with the new information.

A few month’s ago I wrote to the funeral directors for my great great grandparents [link]. I had hoped that they would be able to help me with burial records and cleaning and repairing the memorial.

They did write back quite quickly at the beginning of July. It is never a good sign when someone cannot copy your name or address correctly from a word processed letter. There was no information regarding the burial, but they did quote for refurbishing the memorial. However, at just under £1000, I think I will need to come into some money before pursuing this. I’m not sure if it is a good or bad price, but I seems a lot to me.

I have added weather icons to some of the earlier blogs and will try to remember to add one each time I post from now on. This morning when we got up, it was raining quite heavily, but now it is dry and overcast, with the sun trying to break through.

I went into the school today to work on a couple of outstanding issues.

Primarily my visit was to retire the old Linux pc that was acting as the local proxy server and DHCP server. Over the last year, this had become increasingly unreliable and a couple of weeks ago it wasn’t giving out IP addresses, which was a bit of an issue. The DHCP pool was activated on the Windows server and the second network card was plugged into the broadband connection. In common with the county configuration, a static route to the county servers was created and no gateway settings are made. This ensures that all Internet access from the school computers can only be via the county filtered proxy service. The computer suite and all classroom computers have been configured to use the new proxy server. While visiting the classrooms to make the proxy settings, I took an inventory of the computer equipment in each classroom. This will allow a replacement schedule to be drawn up.

One of the computers in the suite had been showing an unmountable volume error on boot. This was resolved by running chkdsk /r from the recovery console.

In addition to this, the classroom computers running Windows 98, were configured to log onto the domain. This gave them access to the shared class data area and shortcuts to the appropriate year groups were added to each class computer. I had to use TweakUI to configure the autologon, as just setting the registry keys didn’t work.

I managed to install the Espresso software on most of the classroom computers. Most needed Internet Explorer 6, so this took a while to download first. Two of the computers will not run Espresso; when you launch it, it crashes Internet Explorer, so that needs looking into. One of these computers had a lot of MALware that I removed using Adaware, but I’m still not convinced its clean.

There’s still work to be done, but after seven hours it was time to call it a day.