Life…

…has been getting in the way of blogging lately. I’m just so busy all the time. I don’t have much to show for it though, so it’s making it all a tad annoying.

At work I’m currently scripting and testing the roll-out of XP SP2. As soon as the end of life of XP SP1a was announced a big rush call came in to get this sorted. So far, it’s not a complete disaster. I had a few issues with it:

Hardware – Dell D410 laptops BSOD a lot, and I only have a D410 for initial testing;
Firewall – after installing SP2 and rebooting the firewall automatically kicks in, meaning we can’t remotely access anything (we are supporting over 5,000 machines, most of those remotely… so this is bad), hopefully got this sorted with a change in ActiveDirectory;
Windows Joy – for some reason you can’t enable the firewall service until you delete out a registry key…. at least I know how to script that;
Users – as this is a major change to the OS, we need people from all departments to test this out to make sure it doesn’t stop anyone from being able to work. So far the Business side have given me a grand total of 0 users for testing… grrrr
Timing – I have until Wednesday to get this into Live as a number of conferences are taking place from Thursday. These are ideal for installing patches, etc. onto laptops that rarely come into an office.

EEK!

Other than all that, I’ve bought myself a shiny new black Nintendo DS Lite. Yes, it gathers fingerprints like crazy, but who cares they also wipe off just as easily. If only Nintendo had released this in the first place, people wouldn’t have mocked my decision to get a DS as well as a PSP quite so much.

I have also bought a copy of Brain Age for the DS. It’s awesome! After only 1 day (of doing appallingly in the tests) I actually felt a bit more alert. I swam through the script writing. Writing the entire thing manually from scratch without using previous scripts for notes or any of the capture tools. I don’t expect it to work first time, but it looked pretty good and took me about 15 minutes. Compare this with the 2 weeks it took me to work out the intricacies of scripting some other patches… it’s an impressive improvement. My brain age has gone from 75 -> 64 -> 49 -> 37 as well. Not in it’s 20s yet, but I am remembering how to do mental arithmetic again. I’ve got so lazy what with calculators on my desktop, and my spelling is now awful because I rely so heavily on spell-checkers (F7!). Let’s see if I can’t claw some of it back ;o)

Brain Age also has Sudoku games on it. I’d never played before, as every time I had it explained to me it looked complicated and didn’t really make any sense. Using the basic training on the DS I now understand how to do it and my times for the individual games have gone from 28 minutes down to 4 minutes! Go me! :oD

I’m also doing pretty well with my eating. I’m not on a diet or anything, I just thought I’d see if I could cut down on chocolate and junk while I’m at work cos my eating at home is OK. It’s just when I’m at work and bored I end up snacking on total junk and feeling bloated. So I started taking in a tub of sliced vegetables & a low-fat dip every day & filling up a couple of pots with cashew nuts, pistachios, sunflower seeds, etc. Imagine my shock when I realised: it’s Saturday and I haven’t eaten ANY chocolate since Tuesday. Like I say, it’s not a diet, and I’ll probably still have a pizza tonight (or maybe a curry… mmmmm), but it’s not doing any harm and isn’t costing me any more money. If I lose weight by doing it, then that’s a bonus. I do seem to be sleeping better and I’m therefore more alert. That could just be down to the weather though as it’s cooled down a lot and I can sleep without the aircon on again now.

Well, I may not have posted anything for ages… but it’s bundled into one big one :oD