News
31st May 2007
Whoops! Rather a long time since the last posting.
Cinderella got great reviews, and played to mostly full houses throughout it's run. Details on Riverside site, plus links to press reviews.
Surf had a minor crunchette back in February, while commuting in the snow. The third party came off rather the worse of the two, but it has taken the insurers until quite recently to authorise the repairs.
14th November 2006
No updates for a while now.
Oliver! played to packed houses in August, and got excellent reviews in the local press and from letters received via the Riverside Players website (see side bar).
Rehearsals are now under way for the 2007 pantomime, Cinderella. More details, again, on the Riverside site. Surf is due for a service when I get the time...
9th April 2006
Just back from the south of France - a 2000 mile trip. Surf didn't miss a beat, and got taken off-road (properly) for the first time - see the Surf page for a photo.
23rd February 2006
I have managed to trash the rear fog light on the Surf - it is mounted in the usual place, stuck down from the towbar bracket, so it is rather prone to damage. I suppose I should be grateful it has lasted this long...
Off to the parts shop at the weekend.
19th February 2006
Auditions today for the Riverside Players production of Oliver! - show in August, at Eynsford Castle in Kent.
For details, visit the Riverside website here.
Link to Riverside Players site added to side bar.
16th January 2006
PC has now been completely reloaded - new Win 2000 build, suitably cut down by Shane Brooks' XPLite/2000Lite installer. Boot-up time is down by a factor of 4, and log-in time down by a factor of 8.
Norton Antivirus 2006 has been dumped in favour of AVG, and now running 2 anti-spyware progs and a firewall.
On my system, I could not get NAV 2006 to run correctly, even after several protracted chat sessions with the helpdesk. Your mileage may, of course, vary...
Hardware router/firewall planned for the near future.
3rd January 2006
Happy New Year to everyone.
The management is back at work today, but the kids don't start term until tomorrow, so an extra day at home!
Links to Firefox and Thunderbird pages added.
Have you ever tried getting parts for anything made in the USA? The normal response seems to be, "Sorry, we don't supply parts to the public, due to product liability regulations".
This even happens with Gerber, manufacturers of knives, torches and multi-tools for the rugged outdoorsman/hiker/rufty-tufty mechanic types, whose website proclaims, "Fend for Yourself!"
All I wanted was a replacement spring for the Fiskars scissors on one of their multi-pliers, but no, "you need to return the tool to Gerber (i.e to the States) for a warranty repair or replacement at our discretion". Hmmm - how much is the postage and packing to the US?
One piece of 0.8mm spring wire and half an hour later, I have fended for myself...
Still having problems with NAV2006 - PC is now crashing regularly, and still haven't managed to do a full system scan, as I am being constantly nagged to do by the "Norton Protection Centre" applet.
30th December 2005
Completed the migration to Firefox and Thunderbird - Internet Exploder has been uninstalled, and all the Outlook stuff archived.
Firefox seems to do all that IE does, and the tabbed pages mean that it doesn't open multiple copies of itself at the drop of a mouse, hogging resources and causing a general slowdown.
Thunderbird is making a good impression - spam/junkmail detection seems better and more user-friendly than Outlook, and it is easy to have multiple email addresses and identities displayed on one screen.
Upgraded to Norton Antivirus 2006, bringing a whole new set of problems - system crashes completely when doing a system scan... Chat with helpline pending.
9th December
Back from the last day of a course - NEBOSH General Certificate, so I have just had 2 days of exams. I now have to wait until February to find out whether or not I have passed.
Back to reality on Monday, then.
Added a Surf page this evening, with stuff about the burgundy monster above. Again, work in progress, so don't expect too much at the moment.
16th November 2005 (later)
Tried reloading the template, and that seems to work... In case the eagle-eyed out there have spotted it, yes this is a standard Dreamweaver template, but all the editing has been done in N-VU, as I don't fancy the idea of lashing out huge amounts of beer-tokens on an expensive program like DW8, when there are perfectly good open source programs out there.
N-VU will also run under many flavours of Linux, which is a future bonus for my planned migration away from the Redmond behemoth.
16th November 2005
Finally worked out what I did wrong, uploaded prototype index page,
added pictures of Surf and link to Hilux Surf forums.
If you have found this page, please drop me a line and tell me how you
found it! Email link at bottom of page.
Can't work out how to make the page load as it appears in the editor,
but it isn't a WYSIWYG set-up, so will have to work on that one!
13th November 2005
Website created, but having problems uploading - email fired off to Tech Support helpdesk.
