First week and Technical Bit & Bobs...

Well LittleMissNaughty is getting to the end of her first week at work, she is finding it a little stressful, not surprising really given the last time she started a new job was 17+ years ago. MrGrumpy thinks that it won't take her long to put MrLegalEagle into his place and realise who is boss.

After lugging his old Windoze laptop back to the US, MrGrumpy decided to see if he could make it a usable machine again. It was so slow, you could measure the startup time on a calendar. So what could he do with a 2006 vintage laptop? It originally came with WindozeXP, he had updated it to Windoze7 (which was fun as none of the drivers were available from the suppliers site). With only had 2GB of memory the machine was maxxed out, OK, "it's only a 32bit 1.6Ghz CPU and OS but should be able to squeeze it up to 4GB" MrGrumpy thought. MrFarSide supplied some memory that was destined for the skip, he put in 2 x 2GB modules and to his surprise it showed up as 4GB (well 3GB available) - so that was a win.
Next step, SSD, this would cost a little but after some deliberation he decided the machine would at least get some extra life if it was usable, so he ordered a 120GB Samsung SSD from MrAmazon... which arrived next day. 30 Mins later he swapped over the cloned SSD into the laptop and it booted... Not amazingly quick, but better (and silent, except for the fan), few tweeks here and there and it seems much better.

Happy iPhone5 Day

It was the release of the iPhone5 today, would MrGrumpy's one arrive today? Yes it did, MrFarSide set it up on the corporate network and away MrGrumpy went.

MrGrumpy's first impressions are that it is a quality product, refined and polished, not cutting edge in technology, more Aston Martin Vantage than Nissan Skyline GT-R. 

For the first time ever he is able to use the supplied ear phones, the old ones did not fit his ears, they constantly fell out and would hurt after a few minutes. The new ones even sound quite good, almost as good as full in-ear ones that he has been using. He will have to compress his music selection or use the 128KB AAC option, given his iPhone4 was 32GB and the new iPhone5 is only 16GB. 

With the iCloud automatically syncing photos, he may be able to delete some photos from the phone to make more space for music and apps.

MrGrumpy is quite impressed with the quality of the camera, it is pretty quick as well (especially for a phone camera).

Given how good the mobile phone cameras are getting and the fact you generally have a phone with you. He is interested to see how much longer, dedicated point and shoot cameras can compete. 

Yes, Just Another Day... now with Wifi...

MrGrumpy got up, cycled to work at 6:54am (without any near falling incident), arrived 43 mins later, shower and change, Fruit and Pastry, Meeting 1, Meeting 2, Lunch, Meeting 2 continued, 7pm Drive Home.

He did have Wifi issues today, as he was in meetings all day he tried to get his MacBook on the company wifi (it used to work), but it would not authenticate today. He tried to use the Network cable in the meeting room, assuming it was connected to something, nothing... He had a chat with MrFarSide who sits near the room he was in, he went off and checked if the port was connected to the network, he returned after patching it into the network. Still nothing...
Eventually after a bit of googling from his cube, he found a solution which involved creating an iPhone wifi profile and using those setting on the desktop. It worked for a while and then without warning, dropped the connection and would not reconnect..
After re-doing the same thing again, he got it going again, just in time to leave the office at 7pm...

Work Work Work and then some more

MrGrumpy has been pretty busy at work today, he had some lunch in the canteen (another $4.50) and the he went out for a little walk to the local Costco again.
When he got there the MrDoorJobsworth would not let him, he did not have a membership card.
This was not a problem when he walked in there yesterday. Anyway why would he pay $55 for membership if he did not know what stuff he might want to buy?
He simply headed back to the office, he was only going for the walk.

Some people may have noticed that there have been no pictures of beer posted since Sunday, MrGrumpy is trying to abstain from beer on school nights. He is eating grapes and rasins instead.

He has had to admit that using a PC is necessary sometimes, some of the issues he has been working on have been made much more difficult to diagnose on the virtual PC. Thanks to MrFarSide, he now has a not so new or fast additional windows laptop to assist him.

MrGrumpy spent over an hour in the CubeFarm Gym, using the various machines before heading home about 8:30pm.

MrGrumpy and the return of the warning light

MrGrumpy had just arrived at the CubeFarm car park this morning as "bling" the tyre warning light on the Toymota appeared again. He parked the car, looked and kicked the tyres, they all still look fine, not having a tyre pressure gauge on him, he decided to ignore it again (for now).

 mmmmmmm, Donuts...

Being a Thursday, MrGrumpy had a nice donut with his coffee in the morning. Today there was also fresh fruit and other healthy stuff, he managed to bypass that and go for the tasty goodies. Later on he did have a bowl of fruit as some had been put in the 3rd floor coffee room. 

MrGrumpy did not eat all of this,
only one of the smaller bowls.

At midday MrGrumpy went with MrFarSide to fetch the mustang. MrGrumpy found it good to see that even locals take the wrong freeway junctions sometimes, as they took a slight detour past the power station. 

The seat on the mustang had now been rebuilt and while doing that they had fixed the electric adjustment which was apparently stuck on the high setting. This is a good thing, as MrGrumpy needs the seat on its lowest setting to stop his head hitting the soft top (now it has padding on the seat). 

There will be no room for MrGrumpy's sombrero, ten gallon or top hat, he will have to resort to a knotted hanky when the soft top is up.

MrGrumpy continued his work, mid way through the afternoon he decided it was time for another coffee, he found the dispensers were empty, so he would have to use MrBeanToCup, which never seems to deliver what MrGrumpy expects. So MrGrumpy put his cup under the machine and pressed the "Milk Coffee" button, lots of steam, grinding noises and then out dribbled some brown coffee looking liquid. But as usual, what MrGrumpy ended up with was not a cup of coffee with milk, but about an expresso cup of coffee and no milk... MrGrumpy grumbled to himself and added some "half and half" to the tiny amount of coffee and returned to his desk.