19.7.03

This is priceless and true and I got it from the News Quiz programme on BBC Radio 4 last night. An amendment slip relating to a Sexual Offences Bill being tabled before the House of Lords contained this: Page 32 paragraph 3 line 3 extract genitals inset penis I wonder if anyone even thought what they were doing when they wrote that? DW

17.7.03

It has been very hot here over the last week or so, prompting the newspapers to declare Britain the 'new Mediterranean'. It all came crashing down over night and this morning I woke to deliciously cool temperatures and lashing rain. The good news is that the garden gets watered free of charge and effort ... and so does my Italian neighbour's garden that I am tending during his three week sojourn in and around Bologna! DW
Mrs W finally got me into Homebase to buy some garden furniture but on Sunday we had decided to buy X only to find that the desk we needed to use to get the stuff delivered was not manned ... we waited 10 minutes and as no one appeared and I said let's come back tomorrow. Tomorrow arrived and we made our final choices and went to that desk again ... no one! We went to the information desk now and I asked, rhetorically, if there should be someone at the special order desk. Young whippersnapper replied that there was 'no one there'. I didn't like his tone, especially since I was in a shop (aaaaagh!) and barked back, 'How will I place an order then?' A very tall, pale and ginger haired young chappie was pointed at and I was entreated to bide my time and wait for him. Ginger nut did the business quite well I'd say and even offered to let me keep my money off vouchers so that I could use them again but it was more than his job was worth to do that! (I did ask and he did say he'd like to help!) During the admin procedures, though, he was faced with a problem that he couldn't process my money off vouchers immediately becasue only one person at a time in the entire shop can do that so I had to wait for 5 minutes as the other person doing that logged off that part of the system. Homebase, rethink that part of your strategy. On the way out as we paid for the plant food that Mrs W said we NEEDED, the young whippersnapper who had answered my rhetorical question so badly was the cashier who was serving us and he redeemed himself by asking 'Did you get everything you wanted?' I took him off the hit list!! We now await Friday and the delivery of our furniture. I'll report back. DW
Today's massive piece of advice: don't mess with your computer's registry. It's a good job I've got a capacity for staring at a computer screen ad infinitum! On Monday I decided, with Dima away, that it was time to sort out the computer and strip out all of the stuff we didn't need. I'd already offloaded 4 Giga bytes of rubbish from the hard disk over the weekend and decided to tidy up the registry. I used some trial software to analyse the registry and it told me there was a huge amount wrong but wouldn't do anything about it until I bought the software. So, I trolled over to Microsoft and found RegMaid. I ran RegMaid, free of charge, and it showed me what I thought were my problems so I deleted the whole lot. WRONG! What RegMaid had done was to show me the whole registry and not just the problems. I was then, apparently, to take the decision as to what was problematic and what wasn't. Now rebooting was a problem. I had to reactivate my Windows XP software and then reinstall all software. I called the Microsoft help desk as I had a particular problem with Outlook and whilst the chap tried, I had called at around 5:30 pm and the problem I had was a toughie for him so come six pm he told me to run detect and repair and he would call back tomorrow ... six pm is his finishing time and he clearly wasn't up to working even one second of overtime. I did what they said but if failed so I worked through the problem myself and solved it ... with a residual error that I solved later, again alone. The MS chap did call back whilst I was at work and away from the computer so we couldn't solve my remaining Outlook problem: I can't send any messages from it! DW

13.7.03

Oh, nearly forgot. Yesterday, Saturday, was another driving special: Abingdon Wembley Abingdon in the morning to take my laptop to be repaired. I went to www.rac.co.uk and got them to provide me with directions to my destination ... for the first time ever they let me down and sent me down a route that turned out to be daft! Two and a half hours that was mainly plain sailing but was too circuitous but I had accepted their directions without question. For the return journey I consulted my road atlas and found my own extremely direct route that took us just one and a half hours. Just goes to show, what? Dima was able to sleep for the last half hour or so! Then to get Dima and his companion Florance to France Abingdon Heathrow Airport Abingdon in the evening. I've done this journey many times now and usually go through Henley on Thames but be advised that last week they had the Regatta that caused some snarl ups and yesterday they were in the middle of another extravaganza and that caused a major snarl: that was me snarling, by the way. So, an hour and 20 minutes to get there and 50 minutes to get home, via the M40 this time as we gave Henley a large swerve for the return journey. Mrs W was able to sleep on the return journey this time! DW
It's gloriously hot here now. We took a detour from our weekly shop this morning to go to Homebase as Mrs W feels that we NEED a barbecue and a garden furniture set. We haggled over the furniture as she wants something vast whereas our patio is ten quid short of vast! I am absolutely indifferent to the barbecue since I'm a vegetarian, too. In the end, we agreed on a course of action but then Homebase played a blinder by failing to have their special order desk manned. So, they may well have lost our order. Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer and they are unable to organise their staff. Shareholders and management take note. They won't, of course. This message will have no impact whatsoever! DW
What's happening? I've lost the will to Blog by the look of it. All of a sudden I've gone from being someone who keeps a diary religiously on a daily basis to being someone who writes a catch up diary. Anyway, last weekend we drove many miles. On Saturday 5 July we drove from Abingdon to Bath then on to Cheddar Gorge, to Wells, to Stonehenge and finally back to Abingdon: a total of around 230 miles. A lot to take in in one day. Non drivers please note, for your edification and entertainment, you lot can sleep whilst your driver has to stay awake and alert: for hours and hours on end at times. The following day we took a spin to Windsor and Eton. Had a picnic in Windsor Great Park: well, the bits down the edge where they let the likes of us to sit on roughly hewn logs and look on admiringly at the vast expense of exceptionally expensive land that our glorious Royal family inherits for its sole usage from generation to generation. Don't let that comment stop them from bestowing a Knighthood or Peerage on me as and when they see fit! We arrived too late to take a tour round Eton College but we saw bits from outside. Good wheeze that, by the way. Set up a school hundreds of years ago and then wait for society to feel the need to have expensively educated children wherein the schools they attend are private and exclusive. Then allow the likes of you and me to wander round at £3 a head. Good business as lots of people are prepared to pay for the privilege of gawping in that manner on that pile of bricks. How about this: Dima has trolled off to France for a spell and I told him as he was leaving that if he didn't tidy up his section of the hard drive on family computer before he left, I'd kindly do it for him. So a couple of hours this morning were dedicated to that task: I deleted over 3 Gigabytes of games software. I also got rid of a shed load of programs that were just clogging up the system: media players, dating software ... what young lads get up to these days! In the middle of it all I wanted to uninstall the Office XP Media Content package that I'd installed ... all 610 Mb of it. I have used it but not for a while and I can always reinstall it from my pukkah disks if needs be. Anyway, I let the dratted machine whirr and click for around 10 minutes as it told me it was looking for components ... I stopped it ... it then took five more minutes to stop looking for those wretched components. It's still there, then!! In the middle of all of that, the computer hung and wouldn't do anything but make me wait. Thank you and come on down Bill Gates III. DW