we had a wet winter

a repeat of a picture from a couple of years ago shows a very different picture: a full chesbro reservoir.

my ride is restored

sometime in may/june last year i managed to crash my race bike, a cannondale supersix and crack one of the carbon fibre tubes. cannondale offered a reasonable crash replacement cost compared with the retail price, but as i got a great deal for the original frame through ffrt, it didn't make sense financially.

so, off to calfee for a quote for a repair and that seems far more reasonable given the level of damage. in december i finally got round to stripping the bike and sending it off. i got it back at new year and today was the day that the rebuild was completed.

i managed to find a gap in the rain long enough for the roads to dry and out i went for a short spin. and what a great ride i had! it is difficult to describe, but this bike is brilliant. it fits well and it incredibly well balanced when out of the saddle as well as being rock-solid. i came home with such a grin on my face.

vista to win7 - in-place upgrade?

don't do it. my story:

ok, so a laptop bought in the middle of last year came with a free upgrade to windows 7. excellent - the ability to future-proof help with the sale.

of course, being an hp laptop meant that it came with a fair amount of bloat-ware so it wasn't particularly quick to boot. it was livable, but experiences with win7 on another machine caused the urge to benefit from the new interface on the laptop.

after christmas it was time to do the upgrade. reading about in-place upgrades led me to believe that ms has got their act together with the vista to win7 in-place process so I decided to try it.

let's just say that with all the backing up and the upgrade itself, it took 2 days... yuk! still, at the end there was windows 7 installed on the machine! pretty, and functional. unfortunately, a previously slow boot had been significantly slowed, leading to a boot time of at least 10 minutes. and then it developed a regular blue screen associated with sleep/hibernate... from bad to worse!

nothing for it but to rebuild the bugger.

a clean win7 installation is less than 30 minutes - impressive. of course, recovering user data & getting all the apps installed, updated & configured is the real trick. add another day and a half and the new installation is usable. by not installing hp's bloat, the boot time is also far improved.

a properly working computer is a beautiful thing...

a really important question

referencing this post: i used to understand this.

has the large hadron collider destroyed the world yet?

click here for the answer!

windows7

i moved our first computer to windows 7 these last few days.

i decided to do the home theatre pc (htpc) first as this is the least important of our machines, but one we use every day due to it having windows media center for dvr and using the mymovies collection plugin for our hd/dvd/blu-ray rips.

the move was relatively painless. it did take a little while to get media center properly configured to correctly determine what tv channels we have available from the various sources (over-the-air digital, hd local stations on cable, std cable through a cable box).

[really looking forward to being able to record our encrypted hd cable on the htpc. soon!]

one quirk - when wmc looks for the ir-blaster, it requires both ir-blasters to be plugged in, even if you are only using one. strange, and different from vista.

the ability for win7 media center to juggle which tuner is doing what is very nice. with vista you had to configure a tuner to a source, say analogue cable, and even though it could also tune qam digital signals, it was not available to do so. win7 lifts this restriction - today i was recording two qam sources simultaneously while watching one on about a 2 hour delay. awesome!

now it is time to work out when to upgrade the other computers to win7 - high on the list is K's hp touchsmart laptop. anything that helps this heavily used machine run quicker is worth doing. K bought it during the "upgrade to win 7 free" promotion, so the upgrade if free. guess who will be spending the time doing it though???

now that's cool...

the lhc at cern has been cooled to operating temperatue: 1.7°K! as the bbc points out, that is colder than outer space which as we all know (thanks to cobe) is 2.726°K

did you check your power relays today?

headed downstairs this morning to find one of our external a/c units still running. it had obviously been running all night even though temperatures inside had cooled enough that the forced air circulation fan was switched off.

as this happened to our other unit last year i knew the likely cause - a stuck power relay contact in the a/c unit. i was very pleased that i ordered a second relay last year anticipating the second unit of the same vintage having the same problem. the problem was found, diagnosed and fixed in around 30 minutes. not bad at all...

though it still made me a little late for work.