I’m no longer here at wordpress.com

You can now find me at http://blog.alikatnz.com – please update your bookmarks!

After spending the evening getting my blog here running really nicely, I decided to bite the bullet and register a domain and get some hosting. Sure what I do really doesn’t justify any need for hosting, but there are a few things I would love to play with and wordpress is one of them. once its all up and running, I will let you know, but keep an eye on – http://www.alikatnz.com – coming to a PC near you!

Here’s a report and photos of a car/log truck collision in NZ

Pete/Paul. Incident: 521 – Ford Telstar ran up rear of stems unit.
Driver: 521 Bill G.
Location of accident: Goudies Road , approx 2 Km south from Burn Rd intersection.
What happened: An idiot driving a Telstar TX5 was travelling at what appears to be excessive speed ran up the rear of 521. Two overhanging stems passed through the windscreen and out the rear window, missing the three occupants of the car. The car travelled 7 meters up the logs before hitting the rear bumper of the truck with such force that the car was jammed under the bumper and suspended off the ground by the two logs. The occupants of the car jumped out onto the road. The driver of 521 was unaware of the incident and continued on his journey along Goudies for 2.8 kms and down Pukapuka Road for a further 3.4Kms. 655 RFH stems unit was travelling up Pukapuka empty. 521 slowed to pass. In doing so the dust reduced to the stage where Bill saw a part of the car’s front bumper in his rear vision mirror. He asked Jimmy (on R/T) what was behind him. Jimmy advise a car was hanging off the stems unit. On inspection the found no passengers in the car. Bill left the truck and went with Jimmy to locate the driver etc. They found them on the side of the road near to the scene of the collision on Goudies Rd. (The ambulance and police arrived)

Details – 521:

Mack tractor with stems dolly.
Loaded 32 stems ex Harley 15 for the K.P.P.
Gross weight 86 tonne
V.I. issued 5 December 2001.
Markings: Well marked with pink fluoro paint (5 extremely well
marked with 2 others)
Stem overhang: max log 8m
Stems hit 7m

Cause:

Excessive speed after leaving the seal and not slowing to dusty conditions. Driver of car stated he was familiar with the Road and stems trucks. Also stated he was travelling in light dust but did not think a truck was ahead of him even when he drove into thick dust. States he applied the brakes and when he saw the truck he looked at his speedo and was travelling at 80 kph.

THIS TIME THE TRUCKIE WAS NOT AT FAULT.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I love Windows 7. Today I made the decision that I was going to install Windows 7 release candidate on my laptop seeing as its the worst performing computer in this house.

The release candidate is already available for download for TechNet and MSDN members, and will be available to the general public from the 5th May 2009 (PST) through until the end of July. The excellent thing about this release is that unlike the Beta, which starts expiring on July 1st 2009 and will be really dead by August 1st, the release candidate has a life span to June 2010 as reported by The Guardian recently.

Whats the minimum specifications for running Windows 7, well, a 1ghz processor, 1gb of ram among other things. This acer laptop which performs so poorly under Vista should be a slender athlete under Windows 7.

With all that said, I am planning on increasing the ram in the laptop to 4gb as the 1gb it has, is always at least 80% in use by Vista OS on its own and gets so hot sometimes I’m left with a laptop shaped pink spot on my legs, and it makes an excellent heating device in winter.

So why was I disposing of the linux partition? I couldn’t wait to have a little attempt at Windows 7 on the laptop, so I’m installing the original beta just to get a taste. I have no patience, but I do urge people to have some when the release candidate is available. I’m certain every every man and their dog and their fish will want to download it. But if you want a sneak peak at the asthetics, I suggest you go here.

I tried and failed to shake the shackles of the Bill Gates empire. I had my laptop dual booting Ubuntu and Windows Vista. Today is struck me that I never really use my Ubuntu partition, prefering the flexibility of having all my apps in Vista.

Its not easy to dispose of an unloved linux/ubuntu partition. Simply formating the partition from Vista leads down a nasty path with GRUBB not found, Error 22. I know, I went there. I had to reload Linux onto the 20gb partition and start again.

Once there, I found a nifty little app on the net, EasyBCD. Using that, you can put Vista back in charge of the booting process, eliminating the GRUBB.

Using the write MBR and reinstall vista bootloader, I was able to eliminate the GRUBB and put Vista back in charge. This had the effect of that familiar dual boot screen you get when you have two windows partitions sharing a computer, yet you can select Linux as well, with a few additional settings.

Once I put Vista back in charge, a reboot and yes, it was showing me the windows vista and linux partitions. Once in Vista, I deleted the linux partition and remove the linux entries from the EasyBCD, saved settings and rebooted.

Now my system reboots just like a factory vista install.

And whats the reason for all this extended nonsense? See my post tomorrow for more details.

Its been a wee while since I booted up into that particular OS, but I was thinking today, that yes, I would take the plunge, maybe on my laptop first, where I have rescue disks.

What would I like to see from Windows 7? I have searched for some specs to the different ‘flavours’ that might be on offer. As I have been taking the odd trip down the HTPC path, I want something with Media Centre. My laptop has this. I found it recently in Hamilton. My XP installation is XP Pro, which isn’t very media friendly and XP is sooo last decade, well, sooo 2002.

I also love what Microsoft have done with Office. You can install on up to 3 computers under the one license key. This is fantastic. It makes software that was out of my reach more appealing. We have 3 computers in our house. Imagine having to buy 3 licenses at $200 a pop? Ouch.

If I got Windows 7 on my laptop, would I keep the ubuntu partition? Hell no. The whole point of the Ubuntu partition is that sometimes its too painful to boot into Vista and if you want to find something quick, why not boot up into a bloat-free OS like Ubuntu? From what I have seen W7 has eliminated a lot of code behind its shiny facade.

And yes, then there is the facade, the user interface, the experience. I like vista because it is shiny, modern looking and the W7 experience goes further than before. Both systems make XP look tired, dated. Its the Susan Boyle of the computing world, it fell from the ugly tree, hit each branch on the way down, only to be bashed my the garden gnome with the ugly stick, but when its on song, its amazing.

I want to go 64bit too, I have 8gb of ram at my fingertips, yet my favourite game doesn’t opperate on 64bit systems. Maybe game makers need to sit up and take notice? Infact, when I have the 8gb in there, under 32bit XP, my game runs SLOWER than usual.

Well, thats something to chew on for today.

Its a Saturday night here in the city, and the weather is pretty eugh outside. I am left sitting here pondering the question, why has my laptop remained on my desk for the last fortnight.

My laptop and I are in a relationship. My husband frequently refers to my laptop as my “boyfriend” and claims it gets more attention than he does, and there could be some truth to that, except laptops don’t open jars, can’t do the laundry, well, not yet anyway.

But for the past two weeks since moving into my new office, my laptop has remained on my desk, connected at all times to the mains power, so not even so much as a flat batter for which Acer laptops are notorious. Tonight I pondered this question with fellowing #geekzone people and this is my conculsion, its more than a laptop now, its become another desktop because of the 2nd monitor connected to it.

I have a 19″ monitor connected to my laptop. I make no bones about it, I have gotten used to having a 2nd monitor on my laptop for the last few months, but now more than ever. Open and running on the 2nd monitor is XChat, MSN, TweetDeck and Windows Sidebar which is showing me a clock, a post it note, CPU useage, Wireless Network Meter, A Google Box, the weather outside in the real world, the date and a Gmail notifier.

What does this information tell me, it tells me whats happening. Its my communications hub. I even had Skype open on the screen at one stage.

But what was the real sign I had a problem. Last night we had a small child in the house. She wanted to watch Playhouse Disney on my TV here in the cave. She came in and I had my desktop and laptop running. Aunty Alikat, Why do you have three computers?

But in the mean time, I’m using 92% of my ram, pondering the high road toll, twittering about nothing in particular, like how todays Gossip Girl marathon has turned my brain to mush, but I have a strong wireless signal, regardless I could hardwire myself to the network switch because it is within arms length.

Sure I revisited going mobile in Hamilton and it was great. I had my Vodafone 3G mobile interwebs to keep me connected, and I watched Gossip Girl episodes in the bedroom while the boys watched rugby in the lounge. But maybe it’s time for me to break free from the desk and check out other rooms of the house I haven’t seen in a while.

Over the last weekend, I had the “pleasure” of working at the Hamilton 400. This is a weekend of hard work and hard play, so I thought I would share a few anecdotes as to what monkey business we get up to.

Winding up my husband that he was going to be random breath tested by event staff.

Grumpy Old Little Man taking the top off a burn digging in his pocket for change to buy a pie because I’d gone to the loo with his $50, and then getting medical attention for him because he was bleeding on his white overalls.

The Channel 7 Cameraman souveniring my ‘WHINCUP PARKING ONLY’ sign, only to have him display it in Race Control via his Camera. Nice one mate.

Wog Boy and Myself talking our way in to the VIP Drivers Party at The Bank on Victoria Street where we saw Lowndes, Murphy, The Giz, Coulthard, D’Alberto, Holdsworth, Caruso, Whincup, Courtney, and a few B-Grade celebs like Johnny Mac and his Daddy Mac and also Shane Drake, who for a while was worried he wasn’t going to be recognised by anyone. Awww. We still love you Drakey.

We renamed our station from “Point 13” to “Stallag 13”

Wog Boy doing the whole Nascar “boogerty boogerty lets go racing” thing down the radio to Race Control.

Kudos to Lowndes, Winterbottom, The Giz, Coulthard and Tander for signing my shirt and posing for photos, also posing for photos, Radisich and Steve Richards.

FAIL at the 6am sign on and then waiting three hours for action on the track.

Radisich in posing for a photo commented on my height and said “I was made for him”

Ford Dominance was the key undertone of the weekend. Amazing racing and some awesome memories.

You can see a selection of pics on my flickr page

Sorry for the delay between blog posts – in case you weren’t aware or don’t live near the motorsport cave, I was working trackside at the Hamilton 400.

Before I departed, thanks to a #geekzone idler, found the joys of using up my data cap with torrents. To get started, I am using a client called utorrent. The main goal of this was getting rid of left over data cap before Telecom rolled over to my next 40gb allowance, and also to give me something to watch on my Laptop while at the Hotel.

As a side note, I will do a blog post later about the Supercars & related side events before my memory fades into my bourbon & coke.

On return to Auckland and civilisation and a packet of Toffee Pops on the desk, I set about experimenting with connecting my Samsung 32” TV to my computer. This is something I wasn’t too sure of. The video card installed on my desktop is an Asus Nvidia 9400GT Silent/HTP/512M. It more than does the job as far as video cards go, and while the double depth of the card limits me to one other PCI card on my motherboard, I don’t quite know what I would put in the other PCI slot anyway, unless I urgently need more USB ports?

Back to the Television experiment. After reading the manual that came with the TV and some hair pulling later, I had it. The Nvidia Control Panel needed updating to support multiview, and once I had that sorted, I could set my resolution on my TV to the optimum as recommended by Samsung and connect the sound to it as well.

Now before I get too carried away, I am struck with a problem. I can either have sound through my PC speakers or through the Television, which is no good when watching Sky. Also, each time I want to watch television through my PC, I have to go to medium lengths to set up the television and configure the display setups.

So as of now, I am currently researching my way around this medium problem. Is this a case for Hardware Profiles? Basically I want to set it up so I have my usual desktop setting, and then I can say have my TV setting, which changes my audio and visual output over to the Samsung. Can this be done?

Then I am lead down the HDMI path. At present, the television is connected to the desktop via a D-Sub or VGA cable. Obviously most modern video cards are HDCP compliant, and also capable of an HD signal, of which I know the Nvidia 9400GT is, but only through the DVI connector, of which I am running my AOC monitor. So that leaves me with the quandary of should I look at getting a new video card with DVI for my AOC monitor and an HDMI output for TV. Or will the component connector on the rear of the give me the same desired HD output? I don’t know, but it sure is something for me to play around with!

One thing I know for sure if, if the torrent thing keeps happening for me, I will need to buy bigger hard drives!