I've been given the sack

Not quite a 'gadget', but |I've just taken delivery of a new rucksack.  Hardly earth-shaking, but it looks like it will resolve a couple of problems.  I've been looking for a reasonably discrete way of carrying both a laptop and my camera gear round, and the Lowepro Fastpack 250 fills the bill.  It holds a 15.4" widescreen laptop (Dell - tick), a large camera (translate - Nikon plus battery pack - tick), extra lenses, memory cards, something termed 'personal accessories', etc.  About the only area where I'd take issue with the description is that the bag is intended to hold a flash unit - so far, I haven't been able to find a way of fitting my SB-600 in without straining the zips unmercifully.  So it stays out for the time being.

The rucksack has a waist strap, and fully loaded is relatively comfortable when worn properly.  Lots of pockets and little hideaways for, well, hiding things away.

The nice bit about it is that it's a side-loader, i.e. by swinging the bag around on the left shoulder you can remove the camera without taking the bag off completely.  Whilst this is helpful in that you don't need to shrug the bag off completely, I'm thinking it will take some time to get the hang of it to get to the stage where it's much quicker.

The bag is described as meeting airline restrictions for carry-on luggage, and while I'd think it was stretching the limits a bit, it's certainly nowhere near the size of some bags I've seen being slung into an overhead locker.  I seriously wonder how the passengers involved can think these are reasonable - I swear I saw one the size of a cricket bag (that's the luggage, not the passenger) once.

Conclusion - looks like I'm going to recommend this.  Of course, it will have to stand up to the wear and tear of daily trips, probably not always fully loaded with gear, but my bags tend to either fail early, or make the grade over extended use.  By all reports, the Lowepro's are reasonably well-made and don't seem to suffer from poor workmanship.  Some of the zips seems a little small for the loads they are expected to take, but perhaps that's just because I always try to cram more in than the bag is designed to take.  Time will tell.

It's high time

About 25 metres high, if the kite lines stretch to that.  Yes, time to invest in some new nylon and string in the form of another power kite.  Having taken the 3 m2 one out last weekend, and only just got it airborne due to lack of sufficient wind, a larger model is clearly necessary.

OK, this is me getting 'need' and 'want' mixed up again, but it's in a good cause.  Really!  Kite flying is just about the most exercise you can have without actually have to get up and do something strenuous.  Yes, it's really good for you, promotes health (if not wealth).  You're concentrating on what that sheet of fabric is doing (or, if you're better at it than I am, what it is about to do) so much that you don't realise until after half an hour or so just what strain this has been putting on your arms.  But at that point it's brought home with startling clarity just what a strain it has been - the forearm muscles are screaming with cramp, the shoulders ache, and you have a crick in the neck from trying to watch where the kite is, your feet are, and what that horrible little dog is about to do just down the beach - although with a little bit of practice, you can sweep the kite low enough and fast enough to give the dog enough of a fright that it ends up doing whatever it was a long way further down the beach.

So I'm now wondering what to move up to - a kite with sufficient lift to start jumping?  Or something with even more traction for pulling me along the ground (scudding)?  The thought of trying kite-powered buggying is also attractive, albeit even more expensive.  That would suggest the lift option is less likely - but the whole idea of grabbing air just seems to say go for it.  Then the idea of the damage I'm likely to do to my knees says "no way".  I'll probably settle for a 5 or possibly 7 metre intermediate kite - nothing too basic, but not a sports model.  Although kites used to be a kid's game, I suspect the extreme powerkites  have not matured quite enough to be suited to my advanced years.

Coincidence? I don't think so

As mentioned here before, I'm looking at ways of communicating, partly out of academic interest, and partly because there may be some merit in some new systems for work.  My foray into Twitter didn't really take off - I guess I can't find anything valuable enough to say which isn't equally valuable to keep private.  Not being one to let such a simple matter put me off, I recently signed up to the identi.ca service, thinking that not only would this let me stake yet another claim to the 'pemur' tag, but it would also open up the world of openID - which again may have some use ion the future.

Two days or so later, I start getting people following me on Twitter.  Now bear in mind that I haven't updated Twitter for over 50 days - what is the chance that I'll get new followers now?

What's really interesting is the complex way that the various openID sites seem to be integrated: I thought I had a fairly good and simple subscription to one, only to find that it gets difficult to navigate all the possible sibling sites, not to mention those which use openID for authentication.  I now seem to have at least three openIDs, but they are all the same, if you see what I mean.  And if anyone does see what I mean, can you please explain it to me?

We are approaching normality

There are about fifty applications or tools installed on this PC.  That's quite a bunch to recover from just about a standing start.  And ensuring that everything is up-to-date and taking as many measures as possible to ensure that the sources are clean means a lot of work.

Even so, there are some oddities: Whisper, used for password management, at first refused to install.  It seems that I have about four different variants lying about.  I eventually found one that does at least install, but it's windows behaviour deviates from the norm - the minimize and maximise buttons are weird, and the frame certainly doesn't meet Vista expectations.  Forte Agent wouldn't recognise my legitimate key at first, but a downloaded version of the same files suddenly decides to work.

On the other hand, reinstalling does seem to have fixed some problems.  For six months now, the network configuration wouldn't automatically connect to my wifi link.  All the settings were perfectly OK, and manually forcing the connection worked 75% of the time (the remaining one time out of four, I'd have to delete and recreate the security settings).  Now it just connects each and every time, without problems, so I have no fears about rebooting.

It will probably take a month or so to get the box bedded in again, and get rid of the occasional crash or other hiccup.  It's clear that PCs do require a running in period from a new install of software - I don't know what it is, it's not hardware related at all, but any system will eventually settle down and become more reliable after a few weeks.  Of course, that's just before it goes over the other end of the graph and starts to fail, indicating another rebuild is necessary.

And I thought yesterday was bad!

The day didn't start well.  The desktop system, which had been running relatively well for six months, started to throw up odd errors.  If I was any more suspicious than I am, I'd think there had been a recent update that was causing problems here and at work, but there's been nothing recently.

So I thought I'd rebuild.  Got all the data off on to a spare portable drive, got updated copies of all the software etc.  Initially, it looked good - I remembered the problems about multiple disks and RAM limitations, put the Intel RAID drivers on as part of the OS install, and got a quick Vista install up and running in no time.  Then I added the extra RAM - still OK - and the extra disk.  Ah, that was a mistake.  Vista couldn't see the disk at all.  The BIOS knew it was there, Intel's RAID tool knew it was there, Vista said "what disk?".

Unfortunately, the resolution to this seems to be to run the SATA disks in IDE mode, losing all that performance from AHCI.  I'm still unhappy about this, but having built the box with separate drives (not crossing the RAID systems as I did last time - RAID 0 and RAID 1 on the same disks.  Weird but it worked), I reckon I can rebuild it later if and when I find an answer.  Right now, I need an Internet fix.

Most of the software has gone back on OK, but I am having some problems with software configuration, in particular with Forte's Agent usenet reader software.  I have a legitimate licence, but I think it expired with version 2, and I cannot source a copy that old from anywhere.  I do remember declining to update (at extra cost) to the newer versions, because the increased emphasis on email and HTML wasn't what I wanted.  I enjoy the simple text presentation of the older product, and have alternative email programs.  Unfortunately, nothing else seems to come near to Agent's completely intuitive thread handling.   The upshot of all this is that my version 2 key won't do to activate the version 3 software which is all I have at present.  I could stick with the Free Agent version, but this lacks one or two extras that I've come to depend on.

I suspect this will be the pattern of the next few days.  I've already had a an argument with my Azureus install - it keeps on trying to run some sort of Web 2.0 interface, offering video downloads.  I want the old version back.  In fact, I want my old PC setup back - this has to be the biggest change in the computing environment (application-wise) that I've suffered for years.

Not one of my better days...

I guess I should have known when I got to work without my keys - had to wait to be let into the office by a co-worker.  However, I thought I'd make up time, because the laptop was only in sleep mode last night - no need for the long and occasionally laborious wait for it to boot, find the network and sort out downloading my ballooning profile.  No way.  It started fine, opened Outlook, and then stopped dead.

Despite all the IT support jokes, very often the best way of dealing with this sort of thing really is to reboot, which I dutifully did.  And the machine hung again.  And then a third time.

Now it may have just been coincidence, but it was only yesterday that I wiped my previous system, which had a vanilla XP install with no software now.  Who says computers don't have a sense of humour?

So I was simultaneously trying to pull together enough software to make the desktop system usable, while going through all the repair steps I could to get the laptop back to life, and still handling internal and external support questions.  Nothing worked on the laptop until I went for the full reinstall.  Dell reinstallation CDs are good, but apparently not good enough. I was left without drivers for half the hardware, and of course most of the software I'd spent the last week carefully collecting and installing had gone.  Definitely downhill.

Suffice it to say that it's just about back together now.  And it looks as though it may have been prophetic.  I'm trying to look on it as a dry run, getting up to speed for rebuilding the home desktop, because the bad news is that this latter system is now showing signs of imminent failure.  It's just been one of those days.