Uninteresting Trivial Facts

[ckn]

How do you know it was squirrels and not rats/mice/voles/neighbours?

The squirrels have previous for this sort of thing.  They were caught chewing the cables coming from the satellite dish last year, a quick blast from the garden hose discouraged them but too late for anything but the cable being replaced.  Also, the bit of garden light cable chewed was suspended from the fence making it less likely to be ground rats rather than tree rats.

[ckn]

Try 3-phase.

Hard to find standard garden lights that use it!

Realistically, I think I'll bury the cable in the spring or when I can be bothered.  I did it for the lights in the front of the house a few years ago and it worked quite well, I've been too lazy to do it for the second set that serves the side and back of the house as that's a long old bit of cable and goes near some quite nice plants.

[Larry the Leit]

I shot a couple of squirrels in June, not had any in the garden since.

[timtum]

The Champagne Bar on the second floor of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris is now a Starbucks.  Announcements throughout the shop are made in American English every five minutes.  On the fifth floor (home of the previously marvellous experience of the boudoir garments) there is now a McDonalds.

 

On the other hand, the canal up from the Gare du Nord to the Villette is now rather lovely in its regeneration with bars, theatres and the floating opera house.

 

…and for the first time in my life, I was called grandad.

[Larry the Leit]

The Champagne Bar on the second floor of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris is now a Starbucks. Announcements throughout the shop are made in American English every five minutes. On the fifth floor (home of the previously marvellous experience of the boudoir garments) there is now a McDonalds.

On the other hand, the canal up from the Gare du Nord to the Villette is now rather lovely in its regeneration with bars, theatres and the floating opera house.

…and for the first time in my life, I was called grandad.

Congratulations.

[timtum]

Congratulations.

 

It was assumed wherever we went that my wife is my daughter, so I suppose that congratulations are in order.

 

I went to Paris to see a couple of bands play. Very disappointed that you weren't touring the city of lights yourself.

[timtum]

I was also in that there Paris mistaken for Luc Besson whose ex wife's mother in law lives upstairs from my mum.

[Futtocks]

It was assumed wherever we went that my wife is my daughter.

Are you Nicolas Sarkozy or Bernie Ecclestone?  

[timtum]

Are you Nicolas Sarkozy or Bernie Ecclestone?

 

I am the Primark version...

 

….who coincidentally are apparently the new owners of the Galleries Lafayette. 

[ckn]

The average hourly billing rate of a top 5 law firm partner is £850 per hour.

The average hourly billing rate of a top 5 law firm newly qualified solicitor is £350 per hour.

[ckn]

I just realised that I missed going over 15,000 posts   I was going to post a special post about it but I forgot.  I tracked back and this was my 15,000th post, a bit naff really...

[ckn]

I was reviewing the bannings and suspensions list for the last week (3 people got booted for refusing to listen to John's warnings on the England v NZ thread) and I noticed the older list of suspensions, we have one member who was suspended but not banned but his suspension doesn't expire until 11:13 AM on June 4th 5881619.  Another one's suspension ends Aug 11 12002 at 08:59 PM.  Yet another's ends Aug 18 29387 at 12:26 PM

 

I think they must have really got under John's skin there then...

[Tiny Tim]

I was reviewing the bannings and suspensions list for the last week (3 people got booted for refusing to listen to John's warnings on the England v NZ thread) and I noticed the older list of suspensions, we have one member who was suspended but not banned but his suspension doesn't expire until 11:13 AM on June 4th 5881619.  Another one's suspension ends Aug 11 12002 at 08:59 PM.  Yet another's ends Aug 18 29387 at 12:26 PM

 

I think they must have really got under John's skin there then...

Hopefully the future generations of these miscreants will behave better and have learnt the lessons of their forefathers!!!

 

I've just amended my will in case I upset John and find myself in a similar situation so that my great, great, great, great, great grandchildren can carry on where I left off.....

[Futtocks]

Before he was famous...

 

[ckn]

I'm absolutely exhausted today.  No energy at all and even a huge cup of tar thick coffee hasn't made a dent in it.  I think I'll go back to bed if I've not picked up a bit by lunchtime.

 

I did achieve one thing today though, I finally completed ripping all my DVDs to my media server.  I would have finished a while ago but I had to re-rip about 100 because I'd forgotten to add the subtitles option to the rip tool and I'm trying to future-proof them, especially with my hearing not being the best.  1.65TB in total, backed up to two separate devices, one a mirrored drive in the server itself and a second to a USB hard drive on the other side of the house to try to protect from fires, etc.

[Futtocks]

I'm absolutely exhausted today.  No energy at all and even a huge cup of tar thick coffee hasn't made a dent in it.  I think I'll go back to bed if I've not picked up a bit by lunchtime.

 

I did achieve one thing today though, I finally completed ripping all my DVDs to my media server.  I would have finished a while ago but I had to re-rip about 100 because I'd forgotten to add the subtitles option to the rip tool and I'm trying to future-proof them, especially with my hearing not being the best.  1.65TB in total, backed up to two separate devices, one a mirrored drive in the server itself and a second to a USB hard drive on the other side of the house to try to protect from fires, etc.

What backup software do you use? I used to have a very good one on my last laptop, but I lost the disc and can't remember what it was called.

[ckn]

What backup software do you use? I used to have a very good one on my last laptop, but I lost the disc and can't remember what it was called.

I just have a robocopy script set to run at 6am every day.  It runs these commands that do it all.  The /mir option mirrors the folders meaning you have to be careful if you accidentally delete anything and don't notice.

 

robocopy "f:\iTunes" "e:\iTunes" *.* /mir

robocopy "f:\iTunes" "\\home2\iTunes" *.* /mir

 

I suppose an alternative would be to stick another drive in and add another copy that only runs once a month to get a historical backup.  Drives are so cheap these days that it's a false economy to try to save money on critical backups.

 

Edit: The first run of the backup takes forever as it's one hell of a lot of data but after that it's just incremental copies of new stuff and deleting old stuff.  The benefit of this is that I have multiple copies of the data, if I go on holiday I just take the USB hard drive with me and I have my entire media library.

[Futtocks]

Never could get Robocopy to work.

 

The backup software I'm using at the moment's working okay, apart from giving you a splash screen every time you restart the system.

[ckn]

Never could get Robocopy to work.

 

The backup software I'm using at the moment's working okay, apart from giving you a splash screen every time you restart the system.

I find robocopy quite a simple and elegant solution, it also has the great benefit of being free...

 

I created a file that I stick in my server's c:\windows\system32 folder called itunesbackup.bat  It contains those two lines in it, make sure there's a line break after the last line.  I then open task scheduler and set it to run that file every day at 6am.  It's elegant and I can leave my system to do its thing without intervention from me.  About once a month, I run the script manually to check that it's working fine.

 

I've actually just amended the script, thinking about it.  I've left the server drive replication happening but have deleted the copy to my other computer.  I'll run that manually every so often to remove the very slim chance of an automated computer mess-up happening.

[Futtocks]

I can remember when my full backups took minutes (well, less than an hour, anyway). Now I have to make sure I've got the right power settings, so the laptop will stay on. Luckily, the current software allows multiple schedules, so my external music folder gets done on one day of the month, the video folder on another, C drive on another etc.

[Wolford6]

Is there a programme that allows you to transfer your own tracks onto a Nokia Lumia phone to be used  as the ringtone(s)?

Nokia's own Zune service won't let you do it.

[ckn]

My computer has decided that none of the emails on my email server have been downloaded before and is happily downloading over 10,000 emails...  It's done it before and there's nowt I can do to stop it as next time I open Outlook it'll do the same, no choice but to leave it to finish the download to mark them as downloaded again.  I think it's a bug with the Mac version of Office.

 

Thankfully I've a script that checks emails for duplicates and deletes them.

[hindle xiii]

When I was young I coveted a video game Sonic Chaos, and even though I knew the word "chaos" I hadn't read it, and even to this day when I think of the video game I think Sonic Chose.

[hindle xiii]

When I was young I was obsessed with grappling hooks and would make dozens from 3 paper clips for all my action figures.

[hindle xiii]

Even though I've never bought or owned an album by them, whenever I hear their music I can't help but think how many brilliant songs the Manic Street Preachers have.