My patience is almost in shreds!

It all started a few weeks ago. I had a neighbour knock on my door.

"Your hedge round the side of your house needs to be cut back. When are you going to do it?" He said.

"Er, hopefully later this week, if the weather is fine. Thanks for letting me know." I replied.

Of course, every time I had a day off, the weather put a stop to any possibility of making a start, until last Wednesday, 9th September.

The weather was beautiful, I had a couple of days rest from work, so I started to cut the hedge. That's when I ran into trouble. First I found that the hedge trimmer I had had for 20 years, just wasn't up to the task of cutting the woody stems of the hedge. So after searching the Internet, I finally decided to purchase a new on from Homebase, as I would also get an extra 5% discount off my household bills next month.

So far, so good. Then the garden shredder, I had, started to play up. It kept jamming. Every time I switched it off to clear the jam, it then wouldn't start again for another 10 minutes. I was steadily getting more, and more frustrated and annoyed with the machine. I couldn't continue to cut the hedge, without shredding the cuttings, as I only had a limited amount of space left in my wheelie bin!

On Friday, I finally lost patience, and decided to replace the shredder. Again, I searched the Internet, and I found that Homebase had a Sovereign shredder on special offer for only £120. Again I thought the £40 discount from the shop, plus the 5% discount on my home bills was a pretty good bargain. So off I trundled to the local Homebase store and brought home my new shredder. When I first started to use it, it seemed to work alright. Then my wife came out to help me, and that is when things started to go wrong.

This shredder had a capture bin for the waste. My wife didn't notice it was getting full, and continued to add more branches into the hopper. Eventually she could put no more in. Now this machine is supposed to automatically stop when the bin gets full. It didn't. After 10 minutes of clearing out the debris, I started up the machine again. This time, the machine would not shred the material at all! That was when I discovered that the cutting adjuster was broken!

I took the machine back to Homebase on the same day that I had bought it. They immediately exchanged it for a new one. I went home that evening, vowing I would return the next day with the shredder in it's box unopened, and try and get a refund, as I was not impressed with it's ability to do the job. My wife, persuaded me to give this new machine a try, as she thought that she might have been the cause of the previous machine failing. So, the next day, I assembled the shredder, and gave it a try.

Immediately, I discovered that this machine would not shred anything. No matter how much I tried to adjust the cutters, it simply just kept feeding the branches straight through into the capture bin! This time, when I took it back to Homebase, I got a full refund.

Now my old shredder, had been a Bosch model, and it had worked fine for about 10 years without any problems. I decided that I would go for another Bosch model this time. I spent an evening searching the Internet, to find which one would best suit my needs. I finally settled on one of the top of the range shredders, that will be happy to mulch leaves, as well as thick, woody, branches. My only problem was that I could not find any shop that had this particular model in stock. They all seemed to have sold out! So I have had to order it from an online retailer. Hopefully, it will arrive within the next few days, and I can then continue to cut the bloody hedge again!

Utility Man goes International... Well, sort of?!

My colleague WarrenJoffre had added a link to another blog called "Along the Central Line". Out of curiosity, I took a look at the sight, and I was immediately struck with the language translator gadget available. Between WarrenJoffre and myself, we tried to install our own translators to our sites, with out any success.

Every time I installed a translator, either it would not show the little flag icons, or it simply wouldn't translate at all! At first I thought it might be because of the computer at work, which has severe Internet restrictions, but I had the same problem when I got home.

I then spent a couple of hours searching the Internet for the html code that would actually do what I wanted it to do. Eventually I found the code, and now I have the translation facility placed on my Blog! The original code only had 9 languages available. I needed it to have one extra language - Russian, so that my wife's family could read it if they wanted to.

Another hour of Internet searching, and I finally found the code for the Russian translator. Now if anyone knows how to find the code for any other languages, then I would be glad to hear from you. For some reason, when I try and add the code on this page, it changes when it is posted. So I don't know yet how to get the HTML code to stay as it is when posted and not get partially executed, as it seems to be at present.

Modern Electronics Guru Required!!!

I have just spent the last 5 days trying to sort out a couple of problems at home. More specifically, my computer and my TV.

Let's start with the computer. Recently, I noticed that every time I used Windows Explorer it would take up to 30 seconds to execute a command, such as move, rename, copy, paste or delete. Basically anything that required a right-click of the mouse.

I had checked on various forums, and the general consensus of this problem was caused by the DNS or DHCP settings on the internet connection. After trying to discover exactly whereabouts on the computer these settings were stored and finding how difficult it would be to change, I decided to leave well alone and just live with this problem.

My brother sent me an e-mail last week and when I replied to him, my e-mail was bounced back with the cryptic message that an IP address had been blacklisted because the computer was being used remotely to send spam e-mails! I phoned my brother and told him of the message as I thought the IP address belonged to his computer. He checked his computer and found the IP address wasn't his, it was mine!

After spending a day running every anti-virus, spy ware, and firewall program I had, without finding the Trojan implanted on my computer, I decided there was only one option left. Format the Hard Drive!

It took me 2 days to get the Operating system and essential programs and settings set up once again. I am pleased to say that the computer is now working properly again, and I did not lose any of my data files in the process either, as I have done on previous occasions!

While the problem with the computer was unfolding, I discovered I also now have a problem with my TV. Every time I try to watch anything through the Co-Axial cable (RF cable) the sound and picture keeps appearing and disappearing every few seconds. At first I thought it might be a fault with the TV. Then I discovered that I had no problems if all the equipment was connected using scart leads.

As I do not have enough scart connections on my TV for all the equipment I have (digital tuner, satellite receiver, VCR, and DVD player), I visited my local electronics store to see what I could do about it. While at the shop, I learned that the probable cause of the fluctuation is that "the RF signal is looping back on itself".

The state of play now is that I have managed to connect everything back together but I now have to leave the VCR on permanently if I am to get anything to show on the TV! It is by no means a perfect solution, and I know I will not be happy until I have got everything working the way it was before!

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Picking someone elses brains can be very useful!

Yesterday evening, and all this morning, I have been trying to connect this blog to Twitterfeed. For some reason I could not get Twitterfeed to recognise the RSS feed from this site. I asked for help on both this Blogger forum and also on the Twitterfeed forums, and then headed off to work expecting to get an answer later today or tomorrow.

When I arrived at work, and told my colleague of my problem, he explained to me exactly what to do in about 30 seconds! So now every time I update this blog, I should have a nice shiny new Twitter update informing other Twiterers that they can see my blog update if they want to!

Not so much Tortoise pace, more like snail pace!

Back in January, I went to 2 seminars for the business I am slowly building up. I decided to take my camcorder with me to film the events, with the view to creating a DVD to pass on to my active team members.

The first Seminar was nearly 5 hours long, and I made the mistake of not bringing enough spare tapes with me, so consequently I didn't capture the last hour of the seminar! The second seminar, I took enough tapes, but forgot the mains lead! So again, I missed the last hour of the seminar. Next year I will do much better!

The videos were successfully transferred onto my computer using Pinnacle Studio. When I tried to edit the footage within the program, I kept losing the audio which makes the editing process impossible! No matter what I tried, I constantly lost the audio, and could not edit it.

Every few weeks I would go back to it and try something different, hoping I would discover a solution. Earlier this week, I suddenly began to make progress at last!

First I had to combine all the video clips to make one movie of 3 hours. Then I had to convert it from an AVI file to an MPEG file, this time there was audio in the converted product. Next I had to the 45GB file through DivX into a 1.5GB file. Finally, yesterday, I loaded this file into Roxio Easy Media Creator, and started to edit the movie, creating a menu, and adding chapters. This last process requires me to actually watch the footage in real time to place and name the chapter headings. I hope that in a few days time I will have managed to complete the task, and have a fully functioning DVD of the event, that will be fully accessible to any particular bit of the seminar for someone to watch and learn from!

Just spent the entire morning trying to find out how to switch on the GPS facility on my Blackberry 8120 phone. So far with total lack of success. I contacted my network provider to see if it is enabled by them. They came back and told me that I have to enable the GPS facility direct from Blackberry.

I cannot find any straight forward instructions on the Blackberry site, or on the Web giving me a clue as to the step by step tasks required to enable the GPS facility on the phone.

At least I have found out that my phone has some updates that need to be downloaded, so whilst it is doing that, it is time for a spot of Brunch!