Preparing for the big break away.

I've been busy today checking that the caravan attaches to my car and tows okay. I've had the car for four and a half years, but in that time have never used it to tow. It turns out that everything is fine and it tows better even than the car my parents use. On the way back from the caravan storage site, we called in at a scrapyard where I haqd eyeballed a Volvo 850 saloon on the stack of cars a few weeks ago. The reason - I needed a new driver's side wing mirror as mine had begun to work loose and flap at speed. Certainly not a good thing when using mirror extensions for towing.

It cost £25, and I've fitted it this afternoon. It's more of a faff than hard, but I've done it and it works first time. I feel really accomplished, and happy that for the first time in four and a half years I don't have flappy wing mirrors. Up until now I've been wary of car washes, but I might treat my car to a trip through the local one to celebrate. Or not.

An update, a suntan, and a day spent finally sailing.

The website - http://www.jennifer-kirk.com - has been spruced to allow for the publkishing of 'Bringing home the stars'. There a new front page, and the Bibliography has been revamped too. As 'Bringing home the stars' replaces the short story of the same name, you'll find that the link to the short story has been removed in favour of the book. The book, in any road, contains much of the material of the short story, as it grew from that initial piece written for 'Folio'. As a new feature, 'Buy now' buttons have appeared, and this is to make it easier for those who want to buy books to get to where they can buy them at the best prices. Well, it beats working for a living!

I've spent the weekend sailing boats after having slaved so long to rebuild them. It was very sunny, and I now have a healthy reddish glow. I'm just hoping that it turns into a healthy brown tanned glow! With hindsight, I think that if you are going to get a radical tan, it is worth paying attention to some little details. Like where your fringe is if you have long hair (I can see where mine was yesterday, regardless on how I style my hair today! Ooops!) and what top you were wearing (a vest top seems to have allowed the maximum flexibility to wear something different without having white lines showing). I also wore very short shorts, so my legs have, for the first time in living memory, turned from a Goth-as-f**k white to a healthy darker colour higher than any skirt I wear will go. Result.

Sailing, it seems, is like riding a bike. It's been some fifteen years since I last stepped foot in a sailing boat, much less sailed it. So it was with some trepidation that I stepped foot in a type of boat I have never sailed before, and took it for a spin on the lake. Actually, I came back to the sport rather well, though the voids of my memory need to be refreshed a little on tacking technique as I'm sure there's some tips for sail positions that I forgot. However, whilst the novices were complainging "there's not enough wind!" I was zipping up and down the lake at high speed, amazing quite a few. On the journey back to the jetty, I had got twice as far as anyone else, yet managed to arrive back at the jetty at the same time as two other boats just by knowing how to catch the wind better. No wind my arse! It was actually breezy enough for me to get the dinghy leant over enough that my feet ended up grazing the water.

All in all a rather fun day, even if I did spend most of it manning the safety boat. Now that's a difficult task akin to herding cats to keep seven other boats all marshalled together and get in to help them whenever there is a problem. Especially when they are all novices. Still, I'm sure all the children had fun, and that's the main thing. This thirty year old child certainly enjoyed herself!

The scariest horror story you will ever read

"A lone man confronts his personal demons in an urban myth made real. Dezza is a gritty hard-nosed salvager in a harsh World. Forced to confront an urban myth made real, he finds himself pitched into a nightmare aboard a floating derelict in deep uncharted space, and in the process loses his friends, his livelihood and his reputation. Upon return to civilisation he struggles to come to terms with society's prejudices and the demons that lurk within his own mind, plaguing him with the memories of his mistakes. Crawling inside the bottom of a bottle, he is eventually thrown a lifeline by the one person who might believe him, on the condition he returns to the derelict. He is offered the chance of redemption, and to confront those personal demons, but in the process he will have to go back and face the horrors that took his whole world from him."

'Bringing home the Stars' available from DS Press.

http://www.jennifer-kirk.com



Finally got the little git of a book into print. Phew!

The weather knows what I'm up to.

Typical isn't it:

It's been sunny and warm for the last week. Tonight I am due to go and finish off the painting of a boat I'm helping to rebuild. It's due to be launched this weekend. The weather has strangely turned to rain. Great. That's really conducive to painting something that's out in the great outdoors, isn't it?

Bow down and grovel before the computing Goddess!

Well, not quite.

I have finished messing with today's computer niggles, and have fixed it. It turns out that my patented pull-every-piece-of-hardware from the case approach yielded a sinister wedge of fluff right over the IDE controller's chip on the motherboard. One quick vacuum later, and the thing allowed me to boot from CD to repair the NTLDR and ntdetect.com. Boots fine now. I should have known as I've had PCI and ISA cards stop responding in the past because of minor shorts caused by fluff build up.

It struck me though that Microsoft's recovery console is not for the faint hearted. It boots you to what looks like a DOS prompt, and lets you type in commands. Only, have a guess which basic yet massively helpful command isn't available? Yes, DIR. So I have to guess the contents of directories, or even for that matter, the existence of directories. I managed to fix the files on the second attempt though.

The thought occured that even I was on the verge of thinking the motherboard might be expired after all my usual repair methods failed. Without a means to boot from a CD or hard disk, there would have been no way of using this computer. Most users would have considered their computer beyond economical repair and felt forced to replace it.

All because of a secret wedge of fluff. Thanks for the comments and advice left by peeps in my last post - all appreciated that peer group tech support still works!

Evil computing hell - day 2

Why am I plagued by computer issues? Is it too much to ask for a computer to just f*!$£^g work?

Yesterday was spent trying to find the issue with a computer in Zoë's office. I spent nearly five hours checking through all of its hardware after it began hanging at the memory test. In the end, the very last - and I mean very last - thing I checked seemed to be the problem. Namely that the PSU was doing something to the voltages causing the computer to hang at the memory check. With the PSU swapped out, all worked fine again and I was able to add back in all the hardware. Of course then Windows threw a wobbler over networking drivers, and that took a further hour of wasted time to fix.

Today's issue? My main computer decided to hang on booting with an "NTLDR is missing" message. I've tried changing IDE cables with no joy. I've tried booting from the Win XP CD-ROM to try and fix the issue, but I get the same error message when booting from the disk. I tried the disk on this computer and it booted fine, so it isn't the disk. Strangely my old Win 98SE disk allows the computer to boot, but then refuses to let me run the Win XP setup programme. I'm at a loss, and getting quite angry. This computer is about to buy itself a one-way trip to the municipal dump after I've beaten the crap out of it with a lump hammer.

Does anyone have any suggestions on fixing this issue? The computer returns the same "NTLDR is missing" bullshit with any Win XP cd.

Computers - Grrrr! *shakes fist*

After getting the required battery in Tesco, my Father's computer was repaired with the easiest computer repair job I have ever had. How it makes a change to have his computer fixed in seconds rather than hours!

I stopped off at Scan computers which is in the estate behind Tesco too and got a couple of other bits for other computers. I've grown tired of having a tempremental ex-server as a paperweight, so decided it was time to fix that. The problem was graphics - a PCI-E card that was having issues. A BIOS flash didn't fix it, but as an old PCI card worked fine, I risked eight quid on a new cheap PCI-E card, and it now works pretty well.

One of my other computers has an iffy USB2 controller. One false move, and USB2 devices just disappear, never to return. I bought a swish replacement, but then spent all day fruitlessly trying to get it to work. USB1 devices showed up and worked fine. Plugging USB2 devices to it though caused the computer to slow to a crawl and the devices not be recognised. Interestingly, plugging a USB1 hub to the controller, then plugging the USB2 devices downstream of that had them recognised and working, but far too slowly to be useful (ever tried moving 60Gb on USB1?). After six hours of frustration I've ended up putting the old card back in. Guess what? Plugged the USB2 devices in and the damn thing is working again. Grrrr! I'll test the new card in Zoë's computer in case it is an issue with the chipset, but on the face of it, the USB2 side of the card appears buggered.

There's a hole in my speedboat, dear Liza, dear Liza...

I've been working hard on Fridays and weekends these last couple of weeks repairing boats for a local Sea Cadet unit. It's been quite good fun - fifteen years ago I did much the same when I was a cadet there. It's sad to see now boats I rebuilt from the hull up then languishing in undergrowth now full of rot. But the powerboat still looks okay, especially after I helped rebuild the starter moter, alternator and scraped and painted the hull. There's only one problem though: there's a hole in the bottom. We found it when tipping some water into the bilges to test the pump.

Water started trickling from part of the keel under the diesel tank. I tested the spot with my little finger and found I could push it through inside the hull, resulting in a torrent of water. Oh dear! Well, better to find it now than when it gets taken up to the lake. It's being left to dry out before I have to clean out and fill the hole with resin. Grrr! And that was the boat I had worked

Computer niggles

I have a super-duper computer. Only one problem - it hasn't booted to be stable in over a year since it was assembled out of parts. I've finally done a complete strip down to bare essentials today, and initially found that the problem was nothing to do with sound card, motherboard peripherals or indeed any of the drives or RAID cards. In a flash of inspiration, I took out the rather dandy PCI-E graphics card and gingerly plugged another graphics card that I have owned since the dawn of time* (almost) into a PCI slot. Bugger me, it worked! Booted fine and was stable. It seems that there is actually an issue with the motherboard BIOS and the graphics card. All I need to do now is download the most recent BIOS for the board and work out how to flash it.

*Guillemont Voodoo Phoenix Banshee. Computing graphical power, 90s style. I cannot believe I've owned this baby from new for the last 11 years. I thought at the time that its manufacturer's ten year garentee was long, but it's outlived even that. "Feel the scorching power of 16Mb on board GRAM!" - I think that's along the lines of what it said on the box it originally came in. Quite.

My Father's computer appears to have a flat CMOS battery. The computer is seven years old, but thanks to a bit of extra RAM over the years, still does what he needs it to do perfectly well. However, a flat CMOS battery means the BIOS clock resets to the 1st of January 2002 every time it is turned on. This, understandably, causes some issues with his software, which is not happy at thinking that it was installed way in the future.

Can CMOS batteries be replaced? I seem to recall they look just like watch batteries. What would be a good source of a replacement? I'm thinking that watch repairers might be a good point of call, but is there anything I need to watch out for?