….. nothing much got updated. Well they where quite uneventful anyway so I didn’t see any reason to post anything either. I’ve helped out a friend of my girlfriend who had some computer problems. It was a mild case of malware which caused certain problems but overal just acted up within internet explorer causing blank windows to open and some overall slowness. Took a bit of time to get rid off though but in the end the system decided to listen to me. Played my second round of Twilight Imperium, a Sci Fi based board game. A while ago I bought some GameCube games and I’ve been playing around with ‘Beyond Good & Evil’ for a while. Of course I’ve been reading, I’m just about halfway through ‘Treasure of Khan’ by now. Last weekend I also continued with our bathroom, hopefully I can finish it up in the coming weekend or two. That would be great, after that a new DIY project can start.

As my girlfriend wanted to see something this weekend, I thought it would be nice to visit ‘Archeon‘. This is a themepark about the past of Holland. It contains dozens of buildings from the prehistoric, roman and medieval periods. Most buildings are based on archeological finds within the Netherlands. I’ve never been there so it’s also interesting to me, and I have to admit it is, you can visit the link above to find out more, it also contains an English section. Now I have to think about another destination for the next week or the week after that. After those two weeks it’s not interesting anymore as the holiday season kicked in full gear and it becomes to busy in most cases. She’ll have to wait until September then. Pictures will be published in the photo album.

Since today we are the owners of two dancemats for the Nintendo GameCube (previous console from Nintendo, the Wii is 100% GC compatible, as such also these mats will work normally). Including two games which belong to those mats. Dance Dance Revolutions Mario Mix and Mc Groovz Dance Craze. Sunny claimed to have had something similar when she was still in China. She has not tested them yet as she was not there, maybe tomorrow. However I tried Mario Mix on easy mode but that was actually a bit too easy for my taste. Might be nice for my 5 y/o nice or the daughter of a friend of mine. Still have to try the other settings, maybe they can make me tired.

Well happy 端午节 to all the Chinese here…. For those of you wondering what that is, you can look up ‘Dragon Boat Festival‘ on Wikipedia. That will give a nice and clear description of what it is, and you will see that Dragon Boats are just part of the story.

It was not my girlfriend who triggered this, it was a colleague of mine who suddenly dropped by with zong zi (that’s what the Chinese in the title of this posts means) today. It is a kind of Chinese dumpling usually eaten at this particular festival. We’ve eaten them with a little suger and maple sirup added to them…. Yummy.

As most of you know my work is IT related and as such you sometimes get into or see funny situations.

My colleague got a call where there was a complaint that within Excel (spreadsheet application) the left mouse button behaved like a the right mouse button and the user had no idea how to get rid of this issue. Well as such he went over to the user thinking it was a mouse driver issue.

After arriving he went over the configuration finding nothing. He called me (as such I’m aware of this happening) to see if I had a solution. Going over the office help system, options in Excel and finally some abuse in Google also I came up empty handed. Already busy for more then 15 minutes we gave up on finding any clues and he went on.

I heard later he first repaired office, then reinstalled the Excel application and finally asked the user if he could take the system (laptop) with him. He setup a nearby system so the user could continue working. The user in question asked him what could have caused this kind of behaviour and my colleague responded with some options and one of the things he  mentioned was a wrong keyboard combination, to which the user replied : Yes, my husband was busy with my system last evening and he pressed this button which is now stuck…….

The mentioned button was the Menu key which is used by windows to do what normally was done by the secondary mouse button. This only had an effect in Excel as all other application responded normally. But in excel suddenly both mouse buttons appeared to do the same thing. After the button was released Excel worked normally again and the call was resolved after one hour……… Gee, I miss the days I was working on a helpdesk………

Not!

Picked up a book again after a while, still had the latest Dirk Pitt novel lying around. If you like adventure novels you can’t go wrong with Clive Cussler. So I will enjoy ‘Treasure of Khan’ for the time being. It might win over the Wii the coming days. This time an old Fokker (former Dutch manufacturer) aircraft and most likely a remote island and the mysterious burial site of Genghis Khan will make one thrill ride in reading.

If it comes to reading I mostly read Science Fiction novels where my favourites are Greg Bear and the combination of Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. The above mentioned author is actually the only non SF I read. Well except any work related materials that is ofcourse…….