So last night it got a little late and my GF decided that cooking was off limits, so pizza was the culinary delight of choice ~ phone call, 30 minutes and about £10ish later and we are filling our faces eagerly.

The pizza was goooooood :mrgreen:

Sleep came a little slowly as I decide to compute rather than the (probably) more sensible option. Pretty typical for me though
Not far from the midnight hour, fatigue overwhelms the desire to play and I’m heading for the land of nod…
Cue “REVENGE OF THE PEPPERONI PIZZA” ~ loud stomach growls precede a night of discomfort… :twisted:

2-3 hours of sleep later and it’s up-time. Doing my best Neanderthal impression I drag myself to the bathroom, in a vain attempt to achieve full consciousness. Failing miserably I vacate the premises.

Rolls into the office, only to be confronted with a heap of stuff to do (not normally a bad thing), plus several issues clients need resolving via the remote support. By this time my keyboard is starting to look like the image, blurred to say the least…

At this point what I didn’t need was to confront the Micro$oft licensing beast; In this case a client needed access to his volume license keys to upgrade his [old] version of Office.

Just so you know ~ Microsoft’s website is RUBBISH!
Their own licensing documentation points you to a ‘Page not found’ error and, with little information of what you actually need, searching is practically impossible.
The ‘low tech’ solution to this problem?
TELEPHONE CALL TO MICROSOFT! Manually request the VLKs. Problem solved…

An early home time, sleep, and a good chicken dinner sorted me out, as will this early night

Nighty night…

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Back fresh from our Bulgarian odyssey, here’s a quick shake down of what and where we went…

Country: Bulgaria
Location: Sunny Beach on the Black Sea coast
Accommodation: Helena Sands (5*)
Duration: 7 Days
Weather: Sunny and hot all week ~ We didn’t see any bad weather at all
Overall Experience: A bit disappointing really
In general, the Hotel was the main let down for the holiday, along with the organised trips.

It’s a little hard to write this as I feel that I’m being a little unfair, but indulge me for a bit and I’ll try to explain.

Upon arrival (the flights here are at a stupid time – we arrived at the hotel at 05:20 local time), we were greeted with a friendly smile and little else, not much by the way of explanation of what was expected apart from the welcome meeting arranged for 15:30 the same day ~ bedtime then…

The meeting went ahead and we learned little of the protocols and rules of the hotel ~ the whole things wasn’t worth the bother beyond the booking of the organised trips. This may have been down to the rep, but it would have been good to know what to expect at meal times and what/where things were.
After this we were set free to holiday, this is where the second problem ensued. because of the timings, we struggled to find some reasonable food at the hotel! (bear in mind this was a 5* place!).

There were NO facilities for tea/coffee in our rooms (we were told this was a Bulgarian law and due to ‘safety’ ~ I think I can handle a kettle…).
No Iron/pressing facilities beyond the ridiculously priced laundry service.
The mini-bar prices would not have looked out of place in London.
The, on site, ‘wellness centre’ offered treatments which were more expensive than the same over here! (one girl we got on with arranged a hair trim for 15 BGN (lev), about £7.50 ish, and was charged 25 Lev once it was done ~ conned )

The room safe cost us 40 lev for the week ~ a little steep for something that was already there I felt…

It has to be said, that the food at this place was AWFUL ~ As there were lots of guests from Germany, we could only surmise that the food was tailored to their tastes, but I find it hard to believe that the Germanic people enjoy over/under cooked meats and extremely greasy vegetables.
I’m not a fussy eater, not at all, but I struggled every day to find something even vaguely edible ~ I have actually lost weight on this trip and am not alone in that…
The food was so bad, it became a comedy situation with all the English guests we talked to ~ sad really…
The attitude of the waiting staff gets a special mention – nearly having an argument on the second day with the wine waiter, and watching bored staff member playing with the food, deserve highlighting. Everyone in the restaurant needs to go on a customer service course, at least to learn how to smile!

The organised trips, something we usually enjoy as we like to see a country when we visit, left another bad taste in the mouth. They were all over long and expensive for what you got. We were left in several locations with hours to explore, when you could walk the entire place in 30 minutes…
Most of us felt bored and let down as a result…
Again the included lunch on the trips was positively disgusting – We had local, very bland soups followed by a main course, one of which I fed several local cats with, as the chicken meat in the dish was almost raw, and cheap ice-cream for dessert every time.

On the day of  leaving the hotel we were kicked out of our room at 12:00, a big pain as our airport transfer was due at 01:30 and our flight wasn’t until 04:50 the following morning. We could have extended our room stay for 15 lev PER HOUR (about £100 in total!), an option most guests decided against.

Having said all that, there ARE some positives!
The rooms at the hotel were clean and tidy, the pool area was immaculate, and the location of the hotel is in a great, quiet location.

Bulgaria itself seemed to me to have lost it’s identity. My lasting feeling is it’s been invaded/liberated by several nations and hasn’t regained it’s own sense of who it is. The country has lots of history but didn’t present me with a strong picture of ‘This is Bulgaria’, more a feeling of a country that is a place between other places.

I may be being unfair, but that’s my opinion (and the same as the people who were holidaying with us it seems).
I would recommend a trip there with a big caveat to not expect too much and to try a different hotel (the Riu Evrika got a good review from some of the people we met, but it’s away from the beach)

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As some may or may not know, my mum is over in sunny Spain, living the high life (she sold her house just at the peak of the housing boom, made a killing and is living off the proceeds!).

So, like any diligent son, when she makes a request (read ‘demand’) I try to honour it.

“Can you get me some Yorkshire tea please?”
Not an unreasonable demand methinks ~ this turns out to be the start of an epic journey for said tea.

It’s a simple enough start, I have the correct address (having sent things there before) and after a brief sojourn to the shopping temple of Tes-Co I had the tea and some funky brown paper kit thing for wrapping.
A minor interlude whilst we re-enact the usual Christmas tide frustration of trying to wrap something ~ I’m not too good at it!
Finished and proud. A small brown paper package resulted Complete with address label AND return address, just in case…

Posted – £6ish – expensive tea…
Days pass – not parental call thanking me for my thoughtfulness.
Finally I get a ‘Package undelivered’ through the door – somewhat confused I collect my now international tea from the Post Office. no reason given for the lack of delivery.
Off to Post Office where they too couldn’t find a reason; Delivery attempt no. 2 (another £6)

More days pass and I get flagged down on my way to work by the post lady who just so happens to have a package from Spain.
The effin tea! (now quite battered and VERY expensive looking tea 2x £6 + £2.50 = £14.50 to date!)
Again, no reason for the lack of delivery…
This tea has travelled 4400 miles so far PLUS the miles it took to get to the supermarket. So much for food miles then…

I asked the post lady to try again and this time get a bloomin’ reason if it’s not delivered.!

We live in hope of a “I got my tea” conversation and not another ‘undelivered’ note.
Once more and we’ll have another ‘Donkey Award’…

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I had an interesting issue the other day ~ redirecting the print job in a terminal services session!

Ok, that sounded WAY too geeky for the majority of readers so I’ll attempt to explain (bear in mind I AM a geek, so this might not make any sense at all!)

Terminal Services (TS) is a technology which enables users to log into a ‘session’ on a server and use resources from that machine instead of the local machine.
It’s a great technology for businesses with a head office and branches, as it means that the branches can use the same resources as the HQ.

In practice, imagine a business with several branch offices and one HQ all trying to share a database like Act! for instance.
Terminal Services allows the branch offices to log into a ‘session’ on the server and use the database as if they were in the HQ ~ mainly to speed up the process and configure specific security.

Now that sounds interesting :?:, but what happens when you print? You might think that the system would simply use your own local printer, but it’s not that simple. By logging in to a TS session you are using the server as a PC and not your local machine so in theory, if you print, it would use the SERVER’s local printer, not yours. In practice, it should use your PCs local printer, thanks to some clever technology called ‘Easy Print’.

Easy print, simply detects you local printer and sends the job to that instead of the servers printer. Microsoft say you don’t even need a printer driver whist using this (though I found out that is not true )

In my case, one branch office could print locally, another could only print out at the head office (pretty useless, this branch office was in Leeds, the HQ in Dewsbury!)

The solution was to configure the TS server as a printer manager and install the drivers for the local printer on to it ~ the EXACT version of the driver is important as any difference stops it from working. Once I realised this, then everything worked as expected
Simply using the same driver as I installed on the print manager worked fine, and any future printers will just need to have the drivers added to the print manager.

Let’s hope this little nugget saves some other techies’ some frustration

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On a more personal note…
My GF has the week off – this is a good thing BUT – usually I get to leave the house later than her and get a good lie in whilst she gets ready and heads off.
Not this week
She’s left luxuriating whilst I drag myself to conciousness and head out into the world at large…

I don’t think I like it! :eek:

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It seems like yesterday since I posted here ~ but a quick glance at the calendar shames me!

Flouting the ‘Credit Crunch’ we seem to be going from strength to strength – GOOD!!

We are doing so well, we’ve taken on a third person, making this duumvirate into a triumvirate.
He’s starting on Monday, all things being equal…
I’ll get him to post here from time to time ~ hopefully a little more often than Tor does

Business wise we’ve been asked to quote for all sorts of stuff:

• A client moving offices and creating a new textiles mill
• A client building a new office building for himself
• A website for a client to manage their business and automate processes

The list goes on, but these are the more interesting projects at the moment…

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On Friday, I spoke to a new client about backing up her systems and suggested an online backup solution, not the USB pen drive that she had been using (and which had got out of date…)
I also suggested she should make a move toward getting an up to date backup.
Oddly prophetic words, as she had a catastrophic system failure that very evening ~ losing all her data
Now I have her and her son’s laptop on my desk ~ hers for a rebuild ~ his for a networking issue.

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At the weekend we ‘did’ the Kettlewell scarecrow festival (lots of scarecrows dotted around the village) and the Bolton Abbey Duck race.
We had a fab day out in Kettlewell, walking round the village. We even snook in an ice cream :mrgreen:
The duck race was an attempt by Bolton Abbey, to get the world record for racing rubber ducks down a river.
In this case 120,000 of them
There was something extremely surreal, sitting on the banks of the river, eating a lovely picnic, watching all these little white ducks floating past

Decidedly odd!!

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Coming to something on a more recent note~ a client rang up with a strange issue with their website, it started asking for confirmation of her security certificate
Odd
I called the ISP and had it fixed in about 5 minutes :) Apparently I’m a wizard

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