Goodness, is it that long since I've posted?

A brief summary of the year so far...

Had a small but distinguished gathering for a New Year's party. Fun was had by all. Thankfully, we managed to get our heading fixed in time for it.

Caught a cold and was housebound for a few days causing me to...

Messed up on madangie's birthday. Got her a Foot Spa, but no cake. Bad me. Things picked up a bit, as we had a nice Chinese for dinner. I think the local chinese nearly know to get our order ready when we walk in the door by now...

The stormy weather came and blew over our patio heater. It's rather badly bent, but I'm hoping it can be beaten back into some semblance of its former self. It's now in the shed where it should have been.

Went snowboarding with Stef, jamesb, reverendjim and a bunch of other lovely people. The trip over was a bit of a nightmare, despite having managed to arrange direct flights from Dublin. Four hours in a bus with a 4-year old and no legroom is never a good thing. The portable DVD helped a little.

Jack was a little under the weather the first day, and didn't make his ski lesson. The second day he got to the class, but some of them had started on Sunday, while we were travelling, which I though was a little unfair. He seemed to have a great time on the lesson, but in the afternoon he was unwell, so I took him to the doctor. He didn't make the rest of his lessons, and we were very grateful for the protable DVD and Lego to keep him amused.

The snowboarding was fantastic, even though it didn't snow while we were there, and the off-piste wasn't as good as we might have hoped. Val D'esire is a fantastic resort, and we boarded over to Tignes too. Pulled something in my knee on the last day, but still managed to make it down a black slope afterwards (for those not familiar with the lingo, slopes are classed from green to black, with black being the steepest and most difficult).

We've all been a bit under the weather since getting back. I've had sneezes and sniffles, and my nose has got all raw, but Rescue Remedy Cream seems to be helping.

jamesb came over last weekend and we had lots of fun with Lego trains. Set up a big track layout, and Jack sat in the middle changing points at the critical moment to cause a big crash. Thousands dead and wounded.

Work is quite busy, but the current phase of the project winding down a little and gearing up for the next.

I've been busy writing a short story on the Psion. I've been trying to get 500 words written on the train journeys each day, which is easier some days than others. I decided I needed to add a character yesterday, so I've been going back and reworking it to fit her in, and she definitely seems to make the story flow better, and even with reworking I'm getting my 500 words written, though I know there is plenty of superflous stuff that will have to be cut at the editing stage.

Angie booked a mystery mid-week break away in February. It's a surprise, but she thought it best to tell me the dates so I could book time off work. I have no idea where we're going, though. Isn't she wonderful.

I also have a training course in the London area in mid-February. I'm not sure where I'll be yet, but hopefully I'll be able to meet up with some of the London crowd.

Well, that's it so far. Hopefully we'll see semi-regular updates from here on.

LJ inspired Spam?

Anyone noticed spammers seemed to have been influenced by livejournal?

I've got several messages with "Reply to your post" and "Reply to your comment" in the subject that clearly don't originate from LJ.

I deleted them, of course.

A question...

Why would someone get on the train with a large coffee, sit down and drink it, then try to sleep for the journey?

Someone at work suggested to could be decaf, but I don't buy it.

Must become a paid member again so i can have the rest of my icons back.

Before I get sent off to Ebayers Anonymous...

I can see why NASA use eBay to look for spare parts for their aging shuttle fleet (and old mainframes and just about anything built out of off the shelf parts).

I have a HP LaserJet 1100 laser printer, which I bought around 1998. The print quality has always been excellent, and the speed reasonable. Its only drawback was that 2MB of memory is a bit stingy for a 600DPI printer, and printing a full page of complex graphics tended to cause it to sit down. I could usually get around this by tweaking the page settings, but every so often I'd have to roll up my sleves and try to seperate the page elements onto two pages and feed the page through twice and hope they'd line up. Not very satisfactory.

On several occasions I'd tried to remedy the situation. The first time, I was quoted an outragous price for a memory upgrade. I can't remember what it was, but I think it was more than I'd paid for the printer. Later on, I got a more reasonable quote, and asked them to order the part, but the lazy sod in the company I was dealing with never got around to placing the order despite me reminding him a couple of times.

I tried again a while later, with a couple of specialist memory companies, but by this stage I was told that the printer was too old and the part was no longer available.

Recently, it occurred to me to try eBay. After a couple of attempts, I found an auction for 16MB memory expansion for the printer. I bid on it and got it for $10. It arrived yesterday, and inside the bubble-wrap was a blue, white and pink HP box. It was clear the box had been resealed, which was a little worrying. I opened it and out popped a antistatic bag containing three DIMMs. Three? I only ordered one.

Closer inspection revealed one was a 32MB DIMM and the other two were 16MB, all stamped with the HP logo. I know the 1100 can only take 16MB, and it only has one memory slot.

Deciding I can't do anything worse than fry my printer, I pick up one of the 16MB cards and slot it into the back of the printer and switch it on. It goes through the usual warm-up cycle, and the normal "on-line" light shows. Encouraging. I press the button to print a test page. After a few seconds it spits out a page, and lo and behold, it reports "18MB RAM". I load up a document with a page that I know gave trouble and ask it to print. It thinks about it for what seems like an age, then out comes a perfect printout.

It seems to be 100% successful so far - and I have two spare 100-pin EDO DIMMs for HP printers. if anyone has any need for one, give me a shout. I don't know what models take the same DIMMs as the 1100, but there must be a few if they went to 32MB DIMMs.

Now I'm just waiting for a new pick-up roller to fix a paper-feeding problem.