Idiot Printing

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Last night I thought I’d print out some pictures for my office walls. I’ve just switched back to using my venerable HP inkjet as I think it prints better colours than the Canon one I got last year. And 7dayshop were doing a good deal on proper ink cartridges for it. So off I went. Of course, I’d forgotten how horrid HP printer drivers are, and coupled with the “quirkiness” of Photoshop Elements (I’m being very generous here) I had a much rougher time than I expected.

I discovered that if you are daft/clever enough to try and print with the preview enabled in the printer driver (which is one way I try to avoid wasting a quid's worth of paper and ink) the driver just hangs up, with no way of clearing the print job. You have to delete the printer and make a new one. Of course I didn’t find this out straight away, I had to waste half an hour doing reboots and trying lots of other things before I finally managed to get the thing to work.

And the printing looked horrid. There were awful smears showing through on the page. I stared (and this is true) at the page coming out of the printer for at least 30 seconds before it dawned on me what I’d done. I’d put an already printed page through the printer. I’d used some enormously expensive amount of ink ruining a perfectly good picture, which I’d popped into the paper box to stop it from getting creased.

Idiot.

bing in Quite Good Shock

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Google is a verb. It means “to search for on the internet”. Perhaps one day it will also mean “to take over the world”. Perhaps not.

Anyhoo, like everyone else I’ve used Google for all my searching needs since forever. Today I had a go with the Microsoft competitor, bing. I’d heard nice things about it, and so I thought I’d give it a go. And the big surprise is that it is actually quite good. I’m not convinced it is as good as Google for everything, but it is certainly good enough to make make wish I had two search boxes on my browser toolbar, one for Google searching and another for Bing. The two actually complement each other quite nicely.

Bing is good for entertainment and travel, and displays its home page and the search results with a graphical pizzazz that Google lacks. Google is good for stuff a bit more off the beaten track and does maps better. But it is nice to see some proper competition in the search arena.

Imogen Heap – Ellipse

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Imogen Heap is ace. We saw her live in York ages ago and she has gone from strength to strength since then. She has just (today) released a new album, Ellipse, which I downloaded first thing this morning before going to work. It is a wonderful thing this internets, you can go from wanting to having in a remarkably short time.

Anyhoo, on first hearing the album is nice and tuneful with some neat vocal touches and sound effects. I’ve not heard anything to top “The Moment I Said It” from her previous album “Speak For Yourself”, but that is actually quite a tall order and these things do grow on you.

Worth checking out.

Scarborough Sea Battles

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We went off today for a day trip to Scarborough. They say that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” and I’m starting from a fairly dull base, and so we went off for some fun and games. Took the big camera.

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Scarborough Seaside

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Posh Hotel

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Artistic Nets

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Sea Battle

They have this thing where they re-enact naval battles in a boating lake. No, really. Number one daughter didn’t believe me either, until I took her along. Great fun.

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If you look carefully you can see that there is actually a man in the ship..

Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard

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One of the great things about being a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) is that you get a bit of money to spend at the Microsoft company store each year. This means that I can keep my keyboard up to date. I really like using the bendy ergonomic ones. They help with my wrists and I think they are the main reason I’ve never had any problems even though I type quite a lot. The other nice thing about them is that it is quite fun watching someone who has not seen one before trying to type using it…

Anyhoo, each year that goes by I worry that Microsoft might stop making bendy keyboards and so I buy another one for stock with my MVP award. Fortunately they seem to be alive and kicking, and the new keyboard I’ve just got is about the nicest I’ve seen. It has a very quiet key action and a few extra buttons and neat features including a zoom lever in the middle which you can use to change the magnification in apps like Word and PowerPoint.

If you have ever had any kind of RSI problems, or you are concerned about this aspect of computer use I’d strongly advise taking a look at such a keyboard. Once you get use to it I think you will find it very helpful.

Pain

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Went up town today. Bought a copy of a game called Pain for the PS3. It is not what you would consider intellectually demanding (but then again I don’t want any demands made of my intellect just at the moment).

Anyhoo, Pain just gives you a destructible environment, a very large catapult. And a victim. You just fire the victim out of the catapult and watch as they bounce off the scenery suffering all manner of impact damage.

There are quite a few different scenes, a number of different people to fire (including David Hasselhoff if you pay an extra pound – not worth it though) and some themed games where you have to hit targets and stuff.

I think long term appeal is somewhat restricted, but as a quick blast it is quite fun.

Bed Dismantling

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Today was a bit of a break, which was nice. I’d bought a bed on ebay (as you do) and so we had to get the old bed to pieces and round to next door.

Then we had to make space in the bedroom, put the new bed in, find it fits exactly (wahay!) and then I went off and picked up my new car. Turns out that buying new cars is another good displacement activity. And no, I didn’t get it on ebay.

True Story

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I’ve not been writing all the time I suppose. Last week I had to take my computer in to the mender to have a working cpu board replaced with another working one.

Some time back, just hours before my trip to Cairo, my lovely MacBook became a lot less lovely by dropping dead on me. Fortunately I had a tiny spare machine in the form of my Advent notebook which did a sterling job of standing in for my shiny paperweight.

When I got back I took the laptop to the menders and they put a new cpu board in which worked fine. Unfortunately the board they fitted was the wrong one, and so last week I had to take two hour break from the courseware while my machine was back in the workshop having the board replaced with one that was 0.2 GHz faster. I’d like to be able to say that I can tell the difference, but I really can’t.