I know I always complain about shops being full of Christmas stuff in September but I havoc some sympathy with retailers. I’m only going to buy one cake / tree/ present for uncle Fred and if I buy it from shop X in September I’m never going to buy from shop Y later on.

What I can’t understand is people - I have already received one card and one parcel and yes the parcel does have Christmas paper showing through the torn brown paper. And I drove past a house with their lights on already.

It’s advent Sunday this Sunday, 4 weeks to prepare for the 12 days of Christmas - except we want Christmas over by Boxing Day so we can get to the sales.

What happened to waiting? I remember queuing for phone boxes and waiting for libraries but I’m old, I guess mobiles and Google are all part of the Now society.

So we aren’t going to have to pay to use cash machines to make up for banks having to pay back overdraft fees.

That sounds good to me because I am a self righteous type who has never (once I think & they waived the charges) had an unauthorised overdraft. I could rant (and probably have) about how it is wrong for those of us who manage our money sensibly to pay for the careless who don’t but I have heard about the other side of this.

I expect I was ranting about it when someone I was with said that they had struggled for sometime to get out of debt and they felt the bank deliberately targeted them, bunging on fees at the end of the month that just took them into the red and then charging huge fees because they were in the red.

So I don’t know, society seems more prepared to help those in debt than those losing savings, giving no incentive to be careful but the robbing (or charging) the poor to pay the rich can’t be right either.

Hi - I’m back!!! Sorry for the blog absence but it’s taken me a while to get me main PC up and running again. Yes it could have been quicker but I was getting by with an old one and my work one. I did post a bit from the old one but obviously I couldn’t use a work machine for personal stuff - I’ve attended company trainign that explains that any such use is really theft.

Of course, like most stuff with my company that is a one way street. So much so in fact that although I mustn’t use their kit for anything but work I am no longer to be reimbersed for my home Internet access or second phone line. This is despite the fact I work exclusively from home, couldn’t work without the net, have to pay for a top line service as I down load megs of data on a regullar basis and am expected to spend 3 hours at a time on company calls. As long as I type in a 14 digit key I won’t be charged for the calls so that’s OK. Just a shame if anyone else in the house wants to use the phone eh?

I suspect I could just not do any work, presumably they couldn’t sack me as they haven’t given me the means to do the work. However, I’m not ready for redundancy so I guess I’ve got to cough up.
 

Don’t drive drunk, don’t shop hungry and don’t install tired. As I said in my last post my main PC is reduced to safe mode only and after a very long and tiring Saturday I vegetated most of Sunday but in a fit of “I must do something” I installed XP on a second disk in my knackered machine.

I meant to fit a new drive and install the old one as a slave but I was too weary and just slipped a removable drive in. I now get a choice of Win 2k or XP now but the 2K won’t boot at all, in safe mode it says the SYSTEM is missing, a R from the old 2k CD didn’t help so it looks like I’ve truly knackered it this time.

Arrg, I have so many apps installed I can’t remember them all, I just wanted a look through all programs - I guess I just have to explore it from XP.

How do I get my favourites though? MS help explains it from IE 7 or 8 - I’m still on 6! I expect firefox can do it.

It took me ages to navigate my way into this blog entry page without them - one reason it’s been so long (did you miss me?).

Then I’ve got to drag all my Outlook express mails across - I seem to remember that is a pain. Do I have to recreate the folder structure by hand?

I do have back ups - just not simple restore the whole system ones. Now that external HD’s are cheap(ish) maybe I should look at something like the Mac time machine - any recommendations?