Update 20/02/2007

I think it's time to provide people with an update on what's happening.

To be blunt I am at present busier than a one legged man at a kicking contest. (thanks George)

I have been helping a friend set up her computer. Imagine that, ME helping someone to set up their PC. I have to admit to some smug sense of self satisfaction when I managed to actually find all the right cables and plug them into the right locations WITHOUT damaging anything!

Then came the next set of tasks - taking an existing DVD on which the person had managed to get a private firm to back up her data from the machine that had died.

Yeah well that was exciting!

At my home I can read the files and actually see them easily.

At her home - the disk goes into the drive and absolutely nothing appears on the screen.

Why?

Rang the firm that did the work and of course they have some really interesting suggestions ranging from the DVD drive can't read their brand of DVD through to "It's all the fault of the manufacturer"

Gnashing teeth is not a well known way of getting things fixed. So I tried to avoid that approach.

Rang the manufacturer of a piece of software that the person has used to record financial data and found that they no longer support some of the older versions of their program and that there is actually a policy that only the Australian version of the program is supported here while programs purchase overseas are in the "too bad, so sad' arena.

So I have to confess I am defeated - I have no idea how to take the data that she has from this program on a back up disk and actually get it to load or to export it to anything else. I suspect that there is an export facility - but it's beyond me!

So if anyone out there has a shares in Quickentm - this might be a good time consider your investment!

Anyway managed to install some basic programs, configure things like screen savers and such and even managed to ensure that most of the stuff on the system like the virus protection etc worked. Then finally crawled home to look forward to some well earned rest.

The day before this was even busier.

An old friend came to visit from Sydney bringing an overseas tourist with her. Drove them to see the Tidbinbilla deep space centre and then off to see kangaroos and wallabies in the wild on a reserve. I cannot believe that in a few days of travelling around this traveller has managed to shoot over 400 pictures! In days gone by when the cost of developing photos would have made this prohibitive she would have felt deprived. With digital photography, the cost is minimal and the cost of transfer to a more stable medium like a CD more affordable. 400 shots! Just imagine what the home screen show will be like.

Tomorrow will be another busy day.

I am confirming, at least to my own satisfaction, that I am pure evil. They say that there is no rest for the wicked!