Tips for a Happy Life

1. If you refill your own ink cartridges, expect to have oddly coloured fingers for a day or two afterwards.

2. To ensure the effects of 1 are kept to a minimum, always store your ink bottles upright once opened.

3. Never, ever buy your wife a cookbook for Christmas.

Malware

My sister's laptop has been sitting on a shelf for a couple of months, waiting for me to get around to sorting out its problems. It's a somewhat elderly Sony Vaio that had picked up some very nasty Spyware type things that didn't seem to want to go away.

After a bit of fiddling, I came to the conclusion that a full reinstall might be in order. Unfortunately, this isn't possible because the CD drive ain't working, and so far efforts to get into the case to see if it can be repaired/replaced have been fruitless.

So back to plan A. I installed latest Antivirus and Antispyware from a USB drive and did a full scan, which seemed to remove some problems. The only problem is that most of these programs don't arrive in a very up to date state, and seem to depend on being able to update themselves from the internet. So after some more struggles I managed to get a WiFi card working in it. Adaware ran and immediately found 163 "critical problems". I asked it to remove them and rebooted, and suddenly things seemed a lot more normal and happy.

It's currently installing a service pack, and it will soon be returned with instructions for keeping it up-to-date, as I'm not sure what we'll do if anything terminal should happen to the current OS.

Spencer Dock

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Originally uploaded by LostCarPark.

This is North Wall station, which has been closed for many years. In its hay day, it was the last building thousands of Irish people set foot in before shipping off to England in search of work, in many cases never to return. Now Ireland needs 50000 foreign workers each year, and the station building is to become part of Spencer Dock, which will become a major commuter hub and interchange station between DART trains and Luas trans.

How times have changed.