General

A catch all category for posts that are neither specific to a Microsoft technology which has its own dedicated category or posts that aren’t based on a Microsoft technology, as rare as those are.

Me Thinks the EU Aren’t Too Bright

http://uk.gizmodo.com/2009/01/07/nonetoobright_consumers_snap_u.html

So I just read the article at the link above, and according to it, a newly passed EU Directive now bans the sale of 100W lightbulbs and you will only be able to get energy-saving style 100W bulbs in their place.

Hang on? So your telling me that instead of using a bulb which comes on straight away when I press the light switch and will actually light a room as opposed to a glow warm in a jam jar that takes half a light year to warm up to the point where it begins to emit light, not to mention the toxic gas emitted from energy saving bulbs when they smash which means I need to evacuate the room for 5-10mins to let it clear?

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Virgin Media Give Great Service as Usual for Christmas

 

Virgin Media Broadband: The Mother of all Broadband Size: XL Half Price Broadband

So I wouldn’t expect anything less from Virgin after the failed to manage to install our broadband and telephone after three attempts and extra delays because they forgot to submit work permits or something to the council, but this just takes the biscuit.

So We got our first bill from Virgin today, and I opened it up and guess what? It’s totally wrong?

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Widescreen for VMware

If your using VMware on a laptop or a monitor which is widescreen you’ll probably realize by now that VMware doesn’t like you much because the video driver it installs is a SVGA driver and you can’t configure that, however I found out today you can configure the GPU RAM size and the resolution it uses.

To force this enter the following additional lines into your VMX file. If you don’t know how to edit VMX files, then open the file with Notepad and all will become clear.

svga.maxHeight = 900
svga.maxWidth = 1440
mks.enable3d = “TRUE”
svga.vramSize = “134217728”

The maxHeight and maxWidth lines specify the resolution whilst mks.enable3d although I can’t confirm if this line does anything is supposed to improve performance for Direct3D.

Finally, the vramSize value specifies the GPU RAM size that will be displayed to the guest OS. 134217728 represent 128MB – The value is in bytes (Divide by 1024 twice to get Megabytes).

Long Time No Post, but PDC Rocks

So it’s been a while since I wrote anything on here since my latest outbursts against Virgin Media due to their inability to provide us with broadband, and low and behold we still don’t have our super fast 20MB internet.

Virgin rescheduled us for late October and the day before the appointment called to cancel because there is no T-Piece outside our property and they need to get council planning permission to install the piece so we are now going to be waiting until November 14th.

Why on earth they couldn’t have just seen in advance that they needed this piece and that they could have done the work in the three weeks between our first and most recent appointments I don’t know! Bless their little cotton socks.

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More Lies: Revenge of the Stupid

So after the post titled Why Do People Lie, I continued to phone Virgin to chase them and on my final call of the day I got put through to the installation manager for our area, although he was actually quite possibly the tea boy in the office.

He gave me some story that the first guy should have done the cabling inside the house and left the outside part for another crew: Contrary to the engineers comments that if he did the work he would have to mark the install as completed hence making it very difficult to get someone out to finish the job.

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Why Do People Lie?

So the guy from Virgin Media just came to install our 20MB broadband and phone…..hang on a minute I said to him: You shouldn’t need to do anything to the phone as the old BT line is being converted.

In response the guy tells me that actually they will run two cables to the house – One for the phone line which converts at the socket from the fibre/co-ax cable that Virgin put to POTS cabling for regular telephone lines and the other cable they run is for the broadband.

So if this is the case, why did the person at Virgin I spoke to tell the that they old run one cable and that all of the existing BT cabling is used and simply converted over? Why? Lack of knowledge and understanding.

Is a good job that the telephone master socket in the study is in the same place as where the cable modem will be going otherwise I wouldn’t be a happy bunny at this point.

As it happens the guy was very friendly but said he couldn’t do the installation because the person who came from Virgin on Saturday to inspect the existing cabling at the house didn’t actually tell anyone that they would need to run a new cable to the house and he doesn’t have the tools or the kit to perform the installation – Nice work Virgin.

Lets see if they can mange to install the broadband and the phone this afternoon with a new crew without managing to screw up Nicky’s work phone line in the process and let’s see if they manage to remember to bring the NetGear wireless router with them – I’m not sure about that one either!

Wish me luck x

Oh Mickey Your So Fine You Blow My Mind

Ok…I’m not talking about the somewhat dodgy song, but actually Disneyland in Los Angeles which is where we spent our Saturday just gone.

Tom kindly let me leave work a bit early on Friday and I came home to get the three girlies. We got in the car and headed for I-5, the interstate down to LA. It was a long journey – About 5 and a half hours all together and was a really tiring drive due to the fact that I-5 is just a big long straight with nothing to keep your mind on the edge, but we made it safe and sound without any drama. We checked into the Castle Inn hotel about a five to ten minute walk from Disneyland park entrance and swiftly headed into the bed for a long overdue sleep as by now it was about 1am after a long drive.

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The Blog After the Blog Before

So I couldn’t think of a good title for this entry, so the random title will just have to do. I haven’t written anything for a week now, so I’m going to play catch up.

Last week Monday was Labour Day here which means bank holiday: Made up for missing the bank holiday Monday in England as that day was a working day here. The four of us went to Gilroy shopping outlets on the Monday and probably spent too much money, but it was all so cheap and people did give us spending money to spend after all.

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Good Day Santa Cruz

Today was another great day.

After writing my blog from last night I continued my search for my Black 80GB Zune and I found a store called CircuitCity which had them in stock at the San Jose branch. Needless to say, I swiftly placed my reservation and we collected them first thing this morning, so Gaz – it’s in the bag.

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Jessie and the Teeth

Although I just wrote a blog, I thought I would blog this one seperatly.

Jessie is no longer Jessie two fang: She has been upgraded to Jessie 4 fang. Her top two teeth have been teetering on the edge of coming through for the past few days and today it’s pretty must offical that they are through, so say hello to four fang!

What a cute little podge 🙂