She loved it….. too much. I’m tired, I can feel my feet hurt a bit which hopefully will be gone tomorrow. Need some exercise…. buy this. But now I’m being forced to compete against her again this evening. Phew, never knew she could be this demanding. These games win if it comes to exercise compared to Wii Sports, at least that’s my opinion. Got no problem playing tennis for three hours, but I will not survive this for the same amount of time, that’s for sure. And yes, I’m referring to yesterdays post.
Monthly Archives: June 2007
You should be dancing
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.
Ai ai ai, killed the website (for 15 minutes)…..
While fooling around with so called master pages I uploaded a corrupt one as such bringing down the homepage yesterday, only the blogs where accessible if you knew the URL directly. As there is was no way I could access it as well I had to restore the backup I’ve made. If you’ve noticed it (guess not) this is what we mean with ‘we will be playing around with it’ on the mainpage. 15 Minutes is not the record, that stands on roughly three weeks due to a local telco cutting the wrong line while I was on a business trip and had no idea what went wrong, only that something did. The three weeks can be divided into two weeks while I was not in, and one week for the telco and service provider to find out what the problem was and to solve it. If this site has maintenance or goes off the air for reasons I know before hand those are put on the homepage announcements as they should for a couple of days, and after that date it will be replaced with the result if necessary.
粽子 Today
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.
For those that wonder why I’m not married
I’m just being careful……… As last year a friend of mine upgraded from Girlfriend 4.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it’s a memory hog leaving few system resources for other applications. He is also now noticing the Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child-processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product documentation, though other users have informed me that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application.
Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself so that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. Some applications such as GameNite 6.3 , Bachelor Party 2.5, and Pubnite 5.0 are no longer able to run on the system at all, causing the system to lockup when launched (even though the apps worked fine before).
Wife 1.0 provides no installation options. Thus, the installation of undesired plug-ins such as Mother-in-law 55.8 and the Brother-in-law Beta is unavoidable unless you run the Chinese version on a foreign system. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.
Some features my friend would like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:
– A “don’t remind me again” button.
– Minimize button.
– Ability to delete the “headache” file.
– An install feature that provides an option to uninstall 2.0 version without loss loss of other system resources.
– An option to run the network driver in “promiscuous mode” allowing the the system’s Hardware Probe feature to be much more useful/effective.
He wished he had decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 3.0 Even here, however, he has found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 4.0 on top of girlfriend 3.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 3.0 first, otherwise the two versions of Girlfriend will have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. Other friends have told me that this is a long-standing problem that he should have been aware of. Guess that explains what happened to his version 1 and 2.
To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 3.0 doesn’t work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. Another identified problem is that all versions of Girlfriend have annoying little messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0!
My friend also was troubled with the following bug:
All users should be aware that Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Once that happens, Mistress 1.1 won’t install and you will get an “insufficient resources” error message. To avoid the aforementioned bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and make sure that those systems never share any data over the network. It’s best to install Mistress 1.1 on a completely stand alone system.
Helpdesk Call
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!
Dirk Pitt
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…….
Wii time
My parents are very pleased with their Wii. Now they can play tennis, bowling etc. with each other as it came with two complete sets of controllers. When I left they where still playing tennis in Wii Sports. I’ll lend them a game or two on occasion from my own collection so they have something else to play as well. Although I do not see them play SplinterCell: Double Agent or Medal of Honour, but Wii Play or Kororinpa might work out just well. Krystelle, this beats the Sims which you’ve been playing when you where here. I read today it rains badly in the New South Wales coastal areas. But not enough to remove the water restrictions which are in effect these days. So whenever you will feel fit to come to Holland again, you can play the Wii at my parents place.
Passed the 280000
Today, my old car passed the 280000km. I know that an avarage taxi in Beijing does it in a year and a half or so, it took mine 14 years and 3 months to get this far.
Currently it has a few minor issues but nothing that cannot be fixed as far as I know so I will continue driving it until it really falls apart. Got the spares for the issues at hand and after the weekend has passed it should be running as usual again.
As this is the first time mentioning the car I’ll tell you a little bit about the history. When I was younger and just got my driving license I always wanted a sporty looking car. In those days there where two cars that I would consider nice but both I couldn’t afford so I stuck with an old Toyota Corolla Liftback from 1980. The two cars where the newly released MX-5 (we are talking 1990 here) and the MR-2 from Toyota. Six years later I bought an MX-5 as my 25th birthday present. Yup, it was bought on my birthday in 1996 (you figure out how old I’m now). It is the eighth car I own and has broken all records in ownership so far. It was the newest car (1993, so three years old when purchased) I ever owned, and by now it’s the oldest car I have ever owned. It came with the least mileage and now has the most. And so on and so on (that includes things like accidents and consumables like tires, exhaust pipes, shock absorbers etc. etc.). For the rest it’s very reliable, in all it’s years of service it never ever let me down once. Let’s hope it will stay that way for the coming period as well, but I don’t think I’ll stick with it until it’s 28 years old. Somehow I do doubt that.