Cable TV is back

Ho ho, the cable TV service is back and working now. NTL delivered a new digital box this morning. The engineer apparently took an hour
to get it back up working.
Because it was a new box, I had to re-register with the broadband service when I got home 🙁
Also, only the basic TV channels were working not the ones I’m subscribed to. I phoned a friend on the ‘inside’ who got them all back on for me.

So Jamie will be happy again, the Disney Channel is back! She was ‘forced’ to watch a video this afternoon!

More later.

Mike

Blackout!

We had a blackout at home yesterday morning! It was a real nasty “down then up immediately” one.

It took down ALL of the computers. Only one came back up cleanly!
Igloo the firewall came back unable to detect one of it’s network cards — hence no internet for the rest of the network.
Pingu powered back up, but didn’t actually boot! Pingo, my machine and the newest, came back up but couldn’t detect the keyboard!
At least I could laugh at the “No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue” message 🙂
I’m not sure what happened to Pinga — Jan was at home at the time. She phoned me at work, but she’d already re-started the PC by that time.
Pingi wasn’t powered up at the time and didn’t notice. And finally greenland is in pieces in a cardboard box, so it definitely wasn’t affected.

I just found out tonight that it fried the NTL digital cable box. But only the TV side. Broadband Internet connection is still working. They are coming to fit a new one tomorrow morning.

This seems to be a lesson in using old equipment. The old ones seem to fare better in brownouts. Pingu did not notice the last two, whereas Pingo rebooted. But they all did badly in the blackout.

At least no costly permanent damage occurred. (the NTL digital box doesn’t count coz they’ll replace it).

Later days…
Mike

Lazy/Tired

Not blogged for a couple of days now. Too lazy or too tired. Not sure which.
Anyway, to catch up. At work I’m still working on the same document I’ve been working on for the last work week!
At home, pingu is still not fully recovered. He’s now running Mandrake 8.2, but I’ve not configured him properly and I haven’t restored all my backed-up data.
I’ve not worked on my J2EE project for a few days now. I really need to get my a**e in gear!

On a positive note, I’ve just finished “A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming” by David Astels et al. published by Prentice Hall. An excellent book. If you are looking in to XP then this is a good book. I’m very excited (sad, I know) and would love to start working on some of these practices.

More to come

Mike

Rain, rain, rain

Pooh, it’s been raining today.
Busy day. Up late, Jan and Jamie went to a local Spring Fare. Jan was helping out on the chocolate stall run by Jamie’s Brownie troop.
I stayed at home paying bills and dealing with the last couple of days mail.

We lost our internet connection at lunch time ! Thanks NTL!

Lunch, then off to dancing lessons for Jamie. Only I couldn’t park in the school car park as there was a big church service on (the bishop was coming). A little bit of shopping, collect Jamie and back home. Did some tidying and cleaning.

The cable modem came back on at some point this afternoon.

Steve and KIm came round with Megan. Apparently Megan is having a sleep over with Jamie (the first I’d heard of it!). We’ll see how it goes. The last two times she’s come for a sleep over, she’s wanted to go home about an hour after going to bed!

Megan said a funny thing at one point this afternoon. She asked if she could use the computer and go on the internet. I said yes of course. She then asked what ‘dot coms’ we had! “Have you got the same ones as me?” she asked. I should point out that she is only five.

Steve was going on about the ‘fact’ that Nasa never actually sent a man to the moon. He’s been hunting round the web and found more ‘evidence’! He went off with Kim to watch a big football match on cable (Manchester United versus some other team).

The girls are in bed now and so far Megan hasn’t asked to go home. Fingers crossed.

Later
Mike