A Family Safari
I have finally ironed out all the kinks in this site. We’ve migrated to a nice shiny eco server in bunker somewhere in the rolling hills of England (thanks to EcoBee), we’ve finally up graded to the latest WordPress (2.3.3), have integrated the lastest SVN revision for the K2 theme (646) and all plugins are up to date. Now all I have to do is actually start posting stuff…
…and cross my fingers that the update to WordPress 2.5 won’t totally hose all this hard work
Well, well, well, just as one Orange Livebox problem is resolved - without the help of Orange themselves, mind - what a surprise, another one comes along to replace it…
Having recently recovered from the dreaded “PPP server is down” problem with my broadband internet access (using the wonderful Speedtouch 330 USB modem + latest drivers solution), I discovered this morning that we had been hit with the equally awful “no VOIP dialtone” on our Orange second home phone line. Although this is seemingly not as dire as losing broadband access, our lodger has been using the service to call New Zealand for free which is, naturally, quite a significant saving on… er… not free…
Having just switched (back) over to a dedicated Linux PC (dual boot begone!) I was re-he-he-healy not looking forward to calling Orange technical (un)support to find a solution so I decided to do a thorough internet scan for fixes. My first port of call for such problems was, as always, the orangeproblems.co.uk and broadbandbuyer.co.uk forums. Unfortunately, despite finding many people who have been suffering with the same problems for months, I found no one proffering a solution.
Fortunately, I found a very obvious one. I managed to solve the problem at my first attempt without recourse to Orange Technical Support at all and I’d like to pass on a very simple tip to anyone else who is having the same problem and who has a cordless DECT phone and has been using the BT phone adaptor provided with the Livebox. You may not need to have a DECT phone, but since I’m not a telephone expert and I only have a DECT wireless phone at present, this is the only phone type for which I can say this fix works. Chances are, there are quite a few of you out there who have this sort of phone and have this exact problem. However as is always the case with these things, your mileage may vary (YMMV) with this solution. On the other hand, if this tip sorts just one person out, I’ll be happy.
So another year in the life of Master Thomas J. Scannell rolls around and I can quite definitely declare that he is now four. He assures us that he is now a grown up and is no longer a baby in any way. Furthermore, he has decreed that the booster seat he uses at the dinner table is no longer necessary and he intends - in the very near future - to ride his brand new bike to school.
This is a photo of Tommy, Hannah, Sonny and I taken today at the National Railway Museum in York - the destination for Tommy’s birthday treat. I’ll add some more pictures later. Tommy is calling for his bath to be filled!
Hannah isn’t very well, so I have been trying to keep a very bored Tommy occupied. He’s really missing school and we haven’t managed to get him in to one in the UK as yet (hell, we don’t even have our own home back yet, so perhaps this is to be expected).
Today, we visited Tommy’s favourite educational website, Starfall and he ran through nearly the whole ABC section all by himself. Very clever, I thought…
Have you ever had one of those moments where…
Well, initially, the lead in text here was going to read “where the ground opens up and makes you vanish”, however, due to me possibly being a bit too smart for my own good, it probably now should read:
“Have you ever had one of those moments where you actually knew where the nearest internet cafe was before you promised to do something that needs the internet”
What am I on about? Well, if I got my punctuation right on the sheet of paper I left on a desk at The Tea Factory, Liverpool, at least three people reading this should know exactly. For anyone else passing by, this post is in response to the final task set by the panel interviewing candidates for the position of Digital Content and Communications Coordinator with Liverpool Biennial.
At the end of the interview, I was asked to editorialise the interview process in the form of a blog post. I was then presented with a piece of paper on which to write. I’ve never written a blog post with pen and paper before and felt it would be difficult to complete the task satisfactorily. Should I be creative - write a Haiku? A limerick? Should I be cryptic – turn the sheet into a paper model? A plane? All these ideas came to me, but not a blog post. Not on paper. With a pen.
Continue reading ‘Have you ever had one of those moments where…’