When I first entered the PC market, I purchased a Hewlett Packard Pavillion 7310.  An astonishing beast for its time with around 32mb of RAM (from memory I later upgraded this to an astounding 48mb of RAM!), Hard disk (Huge thing.. 5 1/4 size.. can't remember the size), 33.6kbps dial up modem and best of of... Windows 95!

Now it's sitting back in my computer room once again, after swapping it out for a higher spec'd PC for my mum, running Windows XP.  She certainly noticed the speed increase from a 166mhz to 1.6ghz PC! ;)

Now what to do with the old HP Pavillion.... *ponders*  Currently I'm loading the original OS back on it off the original recovery CD (That took some work to get going!  No matter what it wouldn't boot.. until I found the hidden startup.img on the cd and managed to convert it to a bootable floppy).

I'm thinking of donating it to the Sallies... even though it's old, someone might be able to get a kick-start into the world of computers for next to nothing in cost...  Thoughts?  Ship anchor?  Telephone Answering System for The Cheese?  Commit it to a PC museum? :)

Just two years ago, The Cheese was a mere glimmer in my eye. ;)
July 1st sees my little radio station celebrating it's second birthday (a rather quiet affair really.. no cake, no party) but none the less a little milestone.

Since The Cheese started we've had some little milestones.

• Getting a website up and running
• Starting streaming on the Internet
• Using up all our internet bandwidth and needing to go to bigger plan
• Being added to lots of radio directories
• Using up even more bandwidth and needed to move to a bigger plan again
• Being added to Spodtronic and Nokia Mobile Radio
• Using up still more internet bandwidth and needing to move to the largest plan available ;)
• Being added to TelstraClear InHome Digital TV.

Maybe one day the station might be a money spinner... always nice.  Right now it's just funded as a hobby still but will look at seeking sponsorships sometime soon since the cost of living is so darned expensive at the moment (as are weddings!) :)

/rant on

It's been a fair bad last 4 weeks, after we decided to deal with a Porirua based Bathroom company.
Our bathroom was looking the worse for wear and really needed a re-fit.
We decided on a Porirua based company, which has a local Hutt Valley project manager/quotes guy.

The short project (2 weeks we were told) turned into over 4 weeks with a bathroom with less than perfect finish.

Issues we had were:

• Poor Paint Job (requiring painters to come back, still not a good job even though theres now 4 coats!)
• Bad sealing around the bath/shower.  Why use white sealant on a silver frame??
• Contractors whom thought drinking our coffee and sitting around smoking was more important than getting the job done
• A project manager who seemed to care little about the job, not 'owning' the project and not keeping us up to date with what was happening
• Damage to already painted walls
• Mess left on our brand new carpet
• Using our cleaning products to clean up (I thought this was particuarly cheeky)

The biggest fault of all is no one at the business cares a less about comments we have about the project and how it was managed (who manages the project manager?).

We were glad to see the rear end of them, little to say they were very quick to send us the final account.

So, if you're getting a new bathroom done be very wary of who you use. Do not rely on 'customers feedback' that they use to promote themselves.  Instead do your own homework and ask friends/family/work collegues for recommendations.

/rant off

It's been a long day. I awoke at 9am to find my radio station suffering from major audio glitches on air.
Rather peculiar as everything was fine last night. 4:29pm and I've given up for now and had to email PP to get assistance (they built the PC).

The audio seems to be stuttering with disk access/cpu usage (particuarly noticed if you defrag the drive, with the audio playing at, what seems to be, half speed).

Running the station via winamp for several hours has been a nightmare, something that I had to do to be able to troubleshoot (abeit unsuccessfully).  Many reboots, reinstallations of soundcard drivers and windows updates has had me resort to running the PC on the PCI Audigy card.  Whilst still the occasional 'stutter' it means The Cheese is back on air and streaming once again (as long as I keep background tasks to a minimum).

Ah technology! Wonderful when it works... a pain in the a$$ when it breaks!

My partner and I just came back from a week away in Sunny Nelson and surrounding areas. The trip away was to go to a cousin's wedding in Totaranui (a lovely place, if not somewhat off the beaten track!).

On Tuesday of last week, I proposed to my partner of 1 1/2 years, and she accepted (all good!) :)
We are to wed sometime early next year in Napier.

Well, today my partner decided it was about time she had a website.
She's a qualified Naturopath and also a registered nurse, so her website will have all sorts of stuff (much I don't understand) about health, nutrition, iridology and much more.

In an aim to make the website low maintenance I've installed Wordpress.  This makes it easy for her to post stuff without me having to leave the comfort of my chair here in the office ;)   It's certainly a learning curve 'modifying' a theme to suit individual requirements, and no doubt I will make an awful mess of it somewhere down the line. ;)

Signed up for GoDaddy.com hosting for the site (deluxe plan) with the intention of hosting my website (thecheese.co.nz) there also.  Just a small stumbling block with the email as I've set her website up as the main website and mine as a sub-domain.  Do you think I can configure email for thecheese.co.nz? Nope. *sigh* so waiting for my support 'ticket' to be answered.  Hopefully I haven't screwed up the setting up.

Watch this space... for fun, mirth, mayhem and a touch of frustration along the way. :)

It's been a long and grinding road to get The Cheese ready for going to air on TelstraClear InHome Digital TV.

Late November 2007 and the on air pc which was to be used developed a major fault. We're talking of random reboots with the 'driver error' message (who really knows where to start looking anyway?) and random audio playout issues.

Several weeks later (and many annoyed looks from my partner) and I finally gave up and bought a new PC (tied in the purchase with a new 'play' PC to do video editing etc). Yep, the credit card got a hammering that month.

Sync software purchased late December failed to deliver (syncing files that hadn't been updated or modified in any way and crashes when it tried to download a file that was being modified at the time). In the end I counted my losses and purchased "GoodSync" for $20USD. Far cheaper than the other piece of software with more 'intelligence' built in. In fact, this software works great, so now all issues have been resolved. Amazing how a low cost piece of software can be the solution!

Little to say everything seems to be running sweet now and testing proves it all hangs together. The next part is happening shortly and no doubt I will put out a 'press release' to mention the fact. There's something about knowing it will make the possible listening audience grow by several thousand people in two main centres make all the effort worthwhile.

The Cheese website can be found here: www.thecheese.co.nz

Well.. Welcome to my blog... it's new so it's..er.. rather blank at present. :)