The voice prostitute

There is a series on English TV, it’s been going for years, called “Time Team”. A small team of genuine archaeologists plus one other person spend three days excavating a small area of the British Isles, talk about finds (if there are any) and show computer-generated reconstructions of what the houses, pot, or whatever will (possibly) have looked like. It’s sometimes a bit far-fetched when they find a 1″ square piece of pottery and suddenly you see the computer generated picture of an ornate bowl overflowing with fruits.. but it’s good entertainment and to give them the archaeologists’ due, they have to date discovered one example of the rarest Celtic gold coin ever found on British soil.
Well, this would be a great program except for an annoying little man by the name of Tony Robinson, whose main role appears to run around fields waving his arms about, shouting in his nasal, whiny voice in order to attract the onlookers’ attention to himself and away from the archaeologists doing their work. The man is so annoying and so patently false, that he spoils the entire program with his continual whine.
The income he receives from this program is obviously not enough for Mr Robinson – he has now begun to prostitute his voice to all and sundry companies for TV advertising – so we hear his whines and shouts in adverts for things from toilet cleaner and washing aids to soft drinks. I will NEVER buy the products this little man advertises.
And now he is doing a new series on one of the British Four channels, about the history of British Law. What a pity, I would have enjoyed the series, but with this horrible little man doing the talking – no thankyou, I’ll stick with Heartbeat and Judge Judy.

Crikey, what a heritage

I often buy books about Roman coin hoards to add previously unknown types found in such hoards to my RIC lists. (http://www.catbikes.ch/coinstuff/coins-ric.htm)

From one of my favourite s/h book suppliers in Great Britain, I just received a couple of skinny little booklets (one is about the Bicester hoard, by C.E. King, and the other, published in 1908, is called “Roman Coins From Croydon, Constantius II, Constans, Magnentius and Gallus“) plus the large Coin Hoards of Roman Britain, vol. X

Well, it appears that the Coin Hoards book and the Croydon booklet were previously in the personal collection of Dr. John Kent, the author of RIC VIII. The Coin Hoards book had an empty envelope stuck inside the pages (probably used to mark a page), postmarked 11.2.99, addressed to Dr. John Kent, from the University of Birmingham. It’s a fancy, odd-sized envelope and probably contained an invitation (it’s that kind of square size).

The Croydon booklet has the name “J Kent” beneath an older stamp “From the collection of Walter J. Zimmerman” on the first page, and it is full of underlining and numerous notes in a small, academic hand.

Wow. This Croydon booklet is probably one of the information sources for RIC VIII and is certainly part of our numismatic heritage.

Dell Inspiron 9400 slow start-up and shutdown

To be honest, I am not a fan of Dell. In my opinion, companies who find it necessary to spam people that have never had anything to do with them, in order to drum up business, are not to be trusted with my money. Dell spammed me for 2 years several years ago and it wasn’t until I finally called their head office in the US telling them to tell their German importers to stop (German companies often spam Swiss people) otherwise I would take drastic measures, that they finally stopped.

But our son-in-law, bless him, is a fan of Dell and when my husband decided that he wanted a laptop - the first computer he’d ever owned – our son-in-law recommended a Dell and we ordered one.

At this point, I must add that I also have a laptop (besides normally using my PC). I have a Toshiba Satellite, bought unseen in an emergency situation (I was going to France and my Sony had given up the ghost after I tried upgrading it from Win98 to XP) from “Top D” Biel. My Toshiba has XP on it (the only conditions I set Top D were XP and WiFi). I LOVE my Toshiba. It’s fast, beautiful, has connectors for about everything (except camera memory cards but that’s no problem as I have a little USB Hama card reader).

Anyway, on 24th April 2007 my husband’s Dell arrived, very pretty, but with Vista on it. It took absolutely AGES to start up – I timed it. It took over 10 minutes for everything to be loaded and ready to go. Disabling that stupid, stupid “widget” sidebar knocked nearly 2 minutes off the startup time and getting rid of McCaffey AV and replacing it with AGV reduced the startup time to just over 5 minutes. A restart would take 10 minutes. 5 minutes for “shutting down” and 5 minutes to start up.

Then he started getting error messages about Roxio.. I found out that this was part of the bloatware which Dell put on their PCs. Thanks to very useful information on another wordpress blogger:

http://teknobabble.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/removal-of-roxio-software-from-dell-vista-system-%E2%80%93-probably-a-good-idea/

I was able completely remove the damn thing yesterday and the startup today took about 2 minutes. So many thanks to teknobabble!

PC graphic card woes

For the second time in 2 years, the fan on a new Radeon graphics board in my 2 year old Medion PC (Windows XP), had started to howl. Using low-pressure compressed air to clean it shut it up for about 4 days then it would start its howling again. Nothing – not even a dab of that magical WD40 applied to the underneath of the actual fan, using a microscopically small paintbrush would shut it up.

My PC tower has loads of ventilation, and the tower has lots of airspace between the case and the walls of my office.

When, in May 08, the “new” Radeon started howling, a light slap on the top of the tower would shut it up for a day but the slaps were having less and less result. It was a PCI express card, and unfortunately I didn’t have any spare boards in what I call my “computer store” in the loft. I didn’t have the time to drive the 9 km to the nearest computer store so for the moment we (my husband and I) simply disconnected the little wire going from the graphics board to its fan and I re-installed it.

All went well for 3 weeks. I still hadn’t had the chance to drive 9 km to the nearest computer store for a new board and the Radeon seemed to be working ok.

Then last Friday, I switched the PC on as usual, my desktop with all its icons appeared ok, I clicked on the IE shortcut at the bottom to look for something in google but although the IE window opened, it stayed absolutely empty, no headers, no taskbar, nothing. Suddenly I received a popup warning that an ATI driver couldn’t be found or couldn’t be started up. Immediately after that I got the blue screen of death. I scarcely had time to note down what was causing it, something like “ati2dvag” when the screen went black and computer switched itself off.

That’s odd, I thought.. I tried switching the computer back on but no luck, poor little Medion was dead. I opened the PC and there was a distinct “electrical” smell, not too strong, but I noticed it all the same.

After various tests, I took out the power supply, carefully noting which wired went where, and plugged it in to the mains. Nothing, not a dicky bird… I had also taken out the graphics board and noticed a slight brown discolouration on the underside where the  fan’s heatsink connections were.

So – the graphics board had got too hot, and the over-heating had killed my power supply. I drove out to “Top D”, the computer store in our area, got a new power supply for 29 SFr and a new graphics board (NOT one with a fan but with a large alu heat-sink or whatever they are called), installed them and all is well again.