This is the end...... Almost

Well it is not looking good for this CAD Monkeys career...

Whilst U2 may have No Line on the Horizon, we have No Work on the Horizon, and that, as we all know, is not good news.

Oh well.

The life of an Irish Commuter....

I would like to say that the film below is all lies... I would like to, but I can't. It would be funny if it was not true!

Good news... Bad News....

Good news first... My mortgage is dropping again.

Bad news.... The 1% Govt. levy on all salaries has come in to effect...

I guess I need to tighten the belt even more!

419 Scam....

This is incredible... How stupid or greedy do you have to be to believe that someone you have never met wants to give you $12.8 million???

Seriously....

Click here for the full story....

The story of Outlook 2000 and the Magical Pixie Dust...

I do a bit of IT Consultancy for a local business (see, I am a monkey of many many talents).

Yesterday, there was a bit of an issue with one of their PCs and Outlook. The PST file was just under 2GB and as we all know, Outlook 2000 struggles with a file of that size.

Anyway, I scanned the pst file to see if there was any corruption to it, it turned out fine, but still would not load. It didn't matter how long it was left, it just would not work.

I thought, well maybe there is an issue with the AV software, it has happened before on other sites, so why not here. I disabled the AV, tried again, nada...

Right, if it is not the pst file and not the AV software, could Outlook system files have got corrupted somehow??? Uninstall, reinstall. Still a no go. My head was wrecked by this stage, 3 hours and no joy. I finally suggested the famous, why don't I just reformat and reinstall everything. It will take a couple of hours, you will lose nothing as it is backed up.

Fair enough, we scheduled a time to do it.

Somehow, somewhere, the pixies (no not the band!!!) got into the office last night and poured some of their magical pixie dust over the PC. When the PC was turned on this morning, lo and behold, Outlook worked!!!!

Since we could now get into Outlook, I decided it was best for them to trim down the size of the PST file. 3000 emails later and it is working like a dream, or so I thought.

I get a phone call later in the afternoon... "Ehhh... where is my send and receive button gone?? I can't send or receive any email." I log on remotely (the whole thing was done remotely) and yeap, sure enough there is no send receive button. Ahh sure I will just add it from the customised option... Eh no, no I won't because it is not there!!

Now, I don't have that much spare hair that I can pull it out when ever I get stressed (I'm not going bald you understand, but as I get older, I find I am more attached to what hair I have), but this had me tugging at the roots!!

Much googling later, I still had no solution. Then, for no other reason than checking the blindingly obvious, I took a look at the account settings. Y'know, it is hard to send and receive email when there is no email account set up!!!

As I don't have their account details, I did not set it up, but I did tell them that the account had to be created before they could access the mail (there is a guy on site who looks after the simple stuff). He forgot..... Oops.

Anyway, the moral of this story.... Pixies and their magical pixie dust rule!!!
Oh and secondly, check the blindingly obvious first!!

Dia duit Barack...

Well, thats it, Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States of America.

I have seen some great things in my 30 odd years... The first Space Shuttle mission, The fall of the Iron Curtain, relative peace in Northern Ireland, Nelson Mandela a free man, my niece, then my nephew.........

Where does this rank with them? Hmmm... Well it is certainly up there with the best of them. Depending on his term of office, this could rank as the greatest so far.

I read something interesting today. Jamie Foxx said "Now we don’t have an excuse. We can’t say it’s the man’s fault when you are the man.”

Looking back though.. It will probably never ever beat Ray Houghtons looping header of Peter Shilton at 15:36 on the 12th of June 1988 in the Neckarstadion in Stuttgart.

Bye bye Dell..

So Dell are moving their plant from Limerick to somewhere in Poland. It had to happen sooner or later, workers are just far cheaper to hire in Poland than they are here in Ireland. It is a sad fact of life that companies will go where labour is cheaper. In 10 years time, Dell will move on from Poland to the next cheap European country.

Obviously workers at the Dell plant won't take any comfort in the fact that we knew it would happen sooner rather than later. From where I am sitting though, their redundancy package looks a lot sweeter than the statutory one I will be receiving if things do not pick up.

According to the press, they are getting 6 weeks for each year they are there up to a maximum of 52 weeks pay. Me? I am facing 2 weeks pay for each year I am with the company... I think we can all agree that there is a massive difference between statutory payments and what Dell are giving.

I can't help but feel that Dell will lose a lot of good will purchases in this country. Many businesses bought Dell because they were made here in Ireland. By buying Dell, you were supporting job creation and the local economy.

For others, they stopped buying Dell when Dell decided to move its Customer Service & Tech support to India.

At the best of times, it is difficult enough to get Tech. Support to understand your problems. throw an obvious language and accent barrier in to the mix and it makes for mayhem. If I can't properly understand the Tech. Support Technician and he cannot understand me, then how are we going to fix the problem quickly?

It also seems many companies are using VOIP to transfer calls between Ireland and their Tech. Support base. This adds in a frustrating lag in the conversation and also makes it incredibly difficult to hear the agent.

Is it too difficult to ask that the Tech. Support / Customer Support agent have as their native language, the laguage for the country he or she is supporting??

Anyway, back to Dell. I find it hard to believe that Dell will not suffer from a drop of sales here in Ireland. There is a general feeling of ill will against them now. People generally do not believe that Dell only made the decision to quit Ireland withing the last few weeks. It is widely believed that the descision was taken at least 3 years ago when they started looking at sites in Poland.

Anyway.... back to the drawing board.

Windows 7 Beta...

1.5 hrs to download the beta... Not too bad for a 2.5GB download here in Ireland.

Just under 3 hrs for an upgrade from Vista to W7.

10 minutes to realise that it just would not connect to my wireless network regardless of what I did. It could see it, it just would not or could not connect to it.

1.5 hrs doing a fresh install of Vista.

2 hours of updates.

Time well spent??? Hmmmm....

To be fair, I did not give W7 a fair chance after I discovered it would not connect to the wireless network, but then, the whole point of having wifi and a laptop is so that networking would be wireless.

Maybe I'll try it on a different PC, one without wireless.

For the record, the laptop was a Sony Vaio VGN N38e.

Roll out the old and in with the... old

New year, same story. Still on a 3 day week. To be honest, I am getting used to it. Sure the lack of money hurts a bit, but it is somewhat manageable. Right, it is nearly the weekend for me, time to start relaxing!!