Well, at this very moment I’m listening to James Blunt’s ‘Back to Bedlam’.

It’s quite good, the two singles I think are ‘High’ and ‘Beautiful’, but I quite like Wisemen, Tears & Rain, Out of my Mind, and No Bravery as well.  This puts it into the rare an unusualy ‘great album’ category in my life, at the moment the only other member is Missy Higgins ‘Sound of White’.

Okay, okay, I’m an easy listening freak, but it goes with my slippers.

 

The replacement hard drive arrived as promised today.

So, the time frames for the whole thing are:

• Sunday, 7pm - machine crashes with screen distortion
• Monday, 9am - called Dell, placed on hold
• Monday, 9.10am - got through to an Indian gentleman who took me thorough some diagnoistics
• Monday, 9.20am - Call center diagnosis was a video card failure, arranged service visit.
• Monday, 12.00am - Second call to check service visit was okay for tomorrow.
• Tuesday, 9.00am - Service agent called to arrange visit (in half an hour)
• Tuesday, 9.30am - Service agent turned up, to fix onsite (despite the fact my warrenty was return to base!)
• Tuesday, 10.30am - Machine working, agent diagnosed hard drive was on way out as well, ordered new hard drive
• Tuesday, 4pm - Dell called to check if hard drive could be delivered tomorrow.
• Wednesday, 2pm - New hard drive arrived.

I have no complaints, their service has been prompt, worked as promised and has been through!

Empire Earth II and the Nvidia GForce 4200 Go…

Well, as I’ve extensively remarked, they replaced my video card – and now, Empire Earth II runs!

I bought the game about 2 weeks ago and was very disappointed to find out it crashed on startup.

The only online help was saying I had an unsupported video card, but that didn’t make sense.  And now the mystery is solved… it must have been the early signs of the video card dying.

So, awesome stuff!

Well, they didn’t come and pick it up.

They came and fixed it, despite the fact my warrenty didn’t have that feature.

It was a faulty video card apparently, and now my screen is actually clearer!

He also found a fault with the drive, so a new drive will also hopefully be posted out to me.

So, from call to resolution, 10 working hours, their only fault was that their phone support number wasn’t published, otherwise it could even have been fixed on monday.

So my sort lived experience with linux on my backup laptop is over before it really began. I’ll post my brief thoughts another time.

Well, I was on hold for about 10 minutes this morning before I spoke to a gentleman from India

After going through a few checks, he arranged a pickup, so sometime in the next day or so, it will be collected for repair.

And then, were into a whole new world of possibilities But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt - first hurdle crossed.

2 years and 40 days old my Dell Inspiron 8500 has shuffled off its mortal coil.

Luckily its under warranty but we’ll see how we go, Dell service is apparently bad, but I’ll let you know!

Well, I just spent a couple of hours upgrading my version of gallery from 1.5 to 2.0.1.

Even though i used the ‘1-click install’ feature of my hosting company (I thought I’d be lazy), it still took quite some time to import and configure.

Now its up and running (and on its own sub-domain) I’m happy. The new theme from Pedro Gilberto is very swish and its alot easier to use.

Now I just have to try out the Windows XP upload integration… which looks like it could be a time saver.

Now, if i could just do it straight from Picassa2, I’d be a happy man indeed!

(Yes, i need to get out more)

“‘Parents should not be worried about their kids catching bird flu this year unless they’re planning on visiting a chicken farm in Vietnam,’ Kaye said.”

CNN.com - No advice from CDC on Tamiflu hoarding - Oct 28, 2005:

Here here!

Chanel Cole, isn’t she lovely?

sigh

Credit’s to my wife who saw her at the ARIA’s and was thoughtful enough to take a picture for me. 

I really don’t know if I should be alarmed by this or not: God to help set wages, says Harper - National - smh.com.au

On one hand, being ‘christian’ might make him a little more socially aware than a pure blooded economics man who thinks cheap labour will save the day.

On the other hand, the fact than ANY public servant mentions god in a decision making sense disturbs me greatly, and being religious is no guarantee to be nice!