Index | Reply

Home News 21st March 1998

Time for a much overdue Home News edition me thinks. It was way back in January when the last weekly edition of Home News appeared - so that was a pretty long week.

A synopsis to begin the catch up.

Not much has changed, I am still working at Winterthur, Maggie is still doing her course at Eastleigh. Nicky and Tarryn are still juggling school and various after school activities. Red Monster and Batmobile are still the two major modes of transport, apart from the occasional experience of South West Trains, which is cunningly designed to remind one why we put up with high petrol prices and jammed motorways.

The friends on the Datak LAN, Hooligan (NT Server), Tomcat and Chatterbox (Win95 Workstations) have been slightly beefed up but suffered a setback last week when one of Hooligan's 7Gb Maxtors started burning. We now have ISDN, and a Motorola BitSurfer linked to Hooligan who runs a dial up Proxy Server. I have switched service provider to Golbalnet, after Interalpha started using South West Trains as a role model for reliability and cost.

OK, so what's been going on here at 5 Parliament Place.

Nicky is busy packing for her exchange student trip to Italy for 10 weeks tomorrow. Maggie is nagging her about all the essentials (clothes and the like), as mothers do. And I am suggesting that she packs a nice frilly pink dress, and getting "Oh dad you are SO SAD" looks. As fathers do. We went clothes shopping yesterday, and she played the game of "if mom or dad like the shop or the clothes then it must be sad", and "if they don't like the shop or the clothes then I definitely like them". The game raged on for an hour. She won.

We finally got all the passports and paperwork sorted out after two trips to South Africa house (using the so called rail service, South Worst Trains), and one to the Home Office in Croydon. The Home Office has this super sophisticated queuing system (the British consider themselves the masters of queues and never miss the opportunity of enjoying a really good queue). Unfortunately the sophistication ends after you finally get to the front of the queue. After explaining the whole story to the mentally challenged and socially unstable behind the sound proof glass partition - I was met with the slightly unexpected response of "Ticket Please". And then "What do you want." It appeared as if this genetic mutation behind the sound proof glass required a queuing ticket to activate his hearing.

After being initially impressed by being told by the ticket that we would be in the queue for 18 minutes (not bad really considering the milling throng of humanity), the true horror dawned upon us that that was for the queue to get into the real queue. They had been on the National Health school of queue management. You reduce the reported queue for operations by making people queue to join the queue in the first place.

Déjà vu. Two weeks earlier I had presented myself at the Hampshire County Hospital after getting an appointment in May 1997, after getting an appointment to see the GP two weeks earlier, to see the specialist to have the plate removed from my arm. I had the vague hope that they would do the operation under local anaesthetic at the hospital. After all how hard can it be to remove six little screws and pull out a metal bar. So anyway, I figured it could take a while, what with the recovery and what not, so I splashed out on two hours of parking for the Red Monster. I then sat in a queue waiting to be told to go sit in another queue for an X-Ray, after which I sat in a queue waiting for the photo to be developed. And then in another one for the "doctor" to glance at it (and I am talking about a sub second glance here). His prognosis - "we will let you know when you have been put on the waiting list for the operation". So just two more queues to go then…

I think I might just put the Black And Decker electric screwdriver and circular saw to good use and save them the bother.

Back to the thread of the Home News. Nicky is off to Castel San Pietro Terme, near Bolongne, and we have some helpful phrases written on the white board, like "Pronto! Passo palave con Nicky per favore", which she assures us means "Hi, please can I talk to Nicky". At the end of April we are reciprocating with an exchange student from Italy, one Yasmin Hassanin with whom Nicky is staying.

All the queuing has had one good side effect though, I have passed three of the Microsoft Certification exams after chewing through the reading material at such exciting locations as the first floor of the Home Office, Hampshire County Hospital and of course various carriages of South Worst Trains.

So far I have written and passed the Visual Basic 5, Windows 95 and SQL Server 6.5 exams. On perusing the Microsoft web site this afternoon, I have learnt that the Windows 95 exam has been dropped in place of a new improved Windows 98 exam, and the SQL Server exam replace with a new improved, with added zest and sparkle, SQL Server 7 exam. Goodie, now if I hurry and get my NT4 server and workstation exams, TCP/IP, IIS, Proxy and Exchange server exams done quickly just before they too become superseded, I can me certified in all the obsolete Microsoft products. At least there was no queuing.

Maggie is also studying for them, the major objective being to get two of us MCP certified (Microsoft Certified Professionals, not the other more common meaning), so that we can register the company as a "Microsoft Solutions Provider". This means that if anyone wants help with any of the obsolete Microsoft products they can come to us and we can advise them with confidence that they need to upgrade to the latest version, which unfortunately we can't help them with as we haven't written the exam yet.

She (Maggie) has also been studying for the Microsoft Office 97 (Word, Excel, Access, Power Point, and Outlook) expert user exams. But now that she is ready to write them, we have learnt from Microsoft that it will be another couple of months before they will be able to test people for those exams. Obviously they want to time the release of their Office 97 exams with the release of their Office 98 software so that they can maximise the treadmill effect.

Her (Maggie still) Eastleigh course is going well and she got distinctions for her last exams.

Nicky and Tarryn have got all fired up for their school work after the new "pay for results" pocket money scheme was introduced. They have a credit system at Kings where they get credits for good work, and credits count towards commendations which finally add up to Kings Laureates which they aim to get before finishing their final year. So in place of the previous £10.00 per month pocket money, we have switched over to a £5.00 per credit system. Last month Nicky earned about £45.00 and Tarryn about £30.00. Looks like the new scheme could be expensive, but at least for now it is having the desired effect on the quality of homework and studying. We also have various new and exciting shades of lip gloss and new and intoxicating perfumes wafting around the house as the new found disposable income is disposed of. The Saturday afternoon leisure activity has also move on to "shopping with my friends". Never with parents of course - that would be SAD.

The musical activities are also progressing well, and both wrote their theory exams recently and did quite well. Piano, flute, violin, occasionally Maggie on the cello and rarely me on the saxophone continue to create a slightly less than harmonious cacophony for a few hours a day.

Nicky has started high board diving, and apart from a few sore tummies from less than elegant belly flops, is doing quite well at it. Tarryn is keeping up her hockey. I have my gym card, which is the first step. Unfortunately having another plastic card in my wallet seems to be doing nothing to help the fitness and weight.

The hair (for those who witnessed the spectacle), has been drastically cut back. I think I lost a few kilos with one trip to the barbers, much more effective than the plastic gym card. Nicky reliably informed me that 70's were over and that long hair was another indication of just how sad her parents were. So in a vain attempt to win social acceptance amongst the teenagers of Britain, I coughed up £14.00 at "Way Ahead", and had it all cut off. The beard has gone too, and what with the cold weather returning after a false start to Spring, I am flipping freezing.

Red Monster has been behaving himself rather well. I would say "touch wood", but I think with BMW's the correct expression is "touch wallet". He went for a service the other day which cost an acceptable £190.00 after I declined putting new gas struts in the boot which cost a cool £45.00 each. So the guillotining of unwary shopping from the boot removers is still continuing.

Batmobile (aka little green bubble car) is also still going well. Pretty boring car news really, which makes a change.

The Datak LAN is still running well despite a hiccup last week when one of the 7Gb Maxtors started using an alternative low tech signalling mechanism, by resorting to smoke signals to communicate across the LAN. I suspect a faulty power supply which I have now changed, but am still hoping for a replacement drive from Maxtor. In the meantime, disk space is a bit tight as we are now down to 45Gb in place of the usual 52. The backups worked well, and the only loss was some recent internet downloads and a bit of VB hacking.

The big recent change on the LAN was the introduction of an ISDN line, a BitSurfer and Proxy Server running on Hooligan. This us given us near permanent internet access from all the PC's, and nice fast access too. The ISDN connection allows us to run two analogue lines concurrently, so we can still fax and make/receive calls while we are connected to the net. The kids are dominating the home phone organising shopping expeditions to the wilds of Winchester with their friends, so the extra lines are most welcome. Simultaneous net access and the ability to finally connect from Tomcat is a great bonus too. We had a bit of a glitch with "dial on demand" and some tray applications like wetsock (weather watch) and ICQ looking across the net every half hour or so. This caused a bit of panic with automatic phone calls happening just so that the computers could check on the weather while we were out in the rain experiencing it. Expensive little 16x16 pixels showing a rain symbol on a powered down 21" monitor, not that BT were complaining.

With all this new access ability I have jazzed up the home page and built a pretty decent online family tree. For those who have still not visited, point your browser to http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/7622/ and enjoy. For those who have already visited, return again soon, and please don't forget to sign the visitors book. We also have some more web space at our new ISP, Globalnet. The address is http://www.globalnet.users.co.uk/~datak/ At the moment it just contains most of what is in the GeoCities site. Nicky and Tarryn also have their own sites at Enchanted Forest within GeoCities, and you can link to them from Eureka/7622.

Email addresses remain as before, but you can also use datak@globalnet.co.uk if you are having trouble with ricky@datak.co.uk We will be ending our connection through InterAlpha soon, but will move the domain name (datak.co.uk) across to globalnet so there shouldn't be any change for you.

The bread maker machine is still churning out the loaves, and it has all become a bit ho hum routine. I have made some speciality garlic, sun dried tomato breads, which were very nice but tended to counteract the plastic gym card in the wallet. The cedar wood plank, which we bought in Seattle, is also still doing wonders to Salmon and helping to stack the odds against the plastic gym card in the wallet.

So that's the news,

I hope a giant meteor doesn't wipe us all out before the next Home News appears. I will try my best to return the service to something slightly better than that offered be South Worst Trains, and will try and let the fingers jump the multitude of queue to the keyboard on Sunday afternoons. Let me just save this on a non smoking 8Gb Maxtor UDMA disk, and splat it through the Proxy, Bit Surfer and ISDN box without delay.

Have a good week all…

Ricky

Last 5 Visitors

© 1998 - 2009