All posts by Stephen Brennan

About Stephen Brennan

Computer Scientist, Network and Communications Engineer and former Professional Photographer, located near Cardiff, South Wales.

A dry and bright Monday

I finally received a response from Symantec technical support relating to the problems I’m experiencing with the upgrade to Internet Security 2007. Unfortunately it isn’t possible to complete the steps outlined in the fix as yet another one of Symantec’s fixing tools fails to run! The instructions are also contradictary, in one section I’m advised to remove a complete folder but a little further along I’m advised not to remove that complete folder. In reality it isn’t possible to remove any of the items in the folder by following the instructions as access to the folder is denied when Internet Security is running even after switching off product protection. The only way to remove the folder or any items contained within it involves starting the computer in safe mode. I’ve responded to the support email advising that the fix process cannot be completed and asking for some less ambiguous instructions. I wonder if any of the support people actually try to follow the processes they suggest?

I really hope this doesn’t follow the same path as the support request I raised several months ago where we went round in circles for weeks and weeks with senior support technicians before I finally threw in the towel and removed Internet Security from one of my systems. It worked fine until you ran a LiveUpdate and then the hard disk would continually access and the system would grind to a halt. That was a very time consuming lesson in how purchased software sometimes cannot be made to work, perhaps I could have had a refund but I was so frustrated by the amount of time I’d already wasted following the lengthy ‘fixing’ processes and then each time having to restore my hard disk from a Ghost image to get back to a working system that I’d really had enough of the whole process.

A bright Friday

This morning I finally received the last piece of information I needed to complete my tax return, so a little more work in Tax Calc entering the details and the return has been completed, calculated and filed on-line – technology is great when it works well.

I ordered a few extra 4GB compact flash cards this morning as a supplier had them on special offer, the extra cards will be very useful as each raw image from the Nikon D2X camera is about 10MB in size so a 4GB card holds around 400 images which means I can usually shoot most (up to 4 hour) weddings on a single card.

I’ve completed the code changes to the website, it’s nice to see a steady stream of wedding enquiries coming through following the tweaks.

I didn’t receive any reply from Symantec to the support enquiry I raised a few days ago regarding installation issues with the upgrade to Internet Security 2007 so I’ve raised another query, hopefully I’ll hear back from them this time, not too sure what is going wrong with their on-line support at the moment as it used to be extreemly good.

I’ve been looking at some low light high iso images taken with the new Fuji S5 pro camera, it seems to perform very well, I’ll be keeping a close eye on this new camera as it may eventually be a good system to use in place of my current first back up system (we currently use two other camera systems as back up to the Nikon D2X).

I went into Caerphilly this afternoon for a little shopping, I used the turbo sport Passat which I haven’t driven for a while it certainly has much faster acceleration than the 4.2 litre diesel Nissan Patrol that I’ve been using recently. 🙂

A very cold Tuesday

Welsh class again this morning, continuing to work on the current assessments, firing questions at each other and making notes of the answers. No rain today which makes a welcome change but the weather has become much colder with quite a frost last night.

A new release of the blog software today, quite a few changes to options and plugins, I’ve completed the upgrade and it seems to be working as planned.

The problems with email on my webhost appear to have been resolved, they’ve been undertaking a server upgrade and for several days recently email access has been dreadful. Apparently no emails sent to me have been lost but they have been taking a significant time to arrive, the backlog has now been cleared so fingers crossed!

I’ve also upgraded to Norton Internet Security 2007 on my notebook computer, a tortuous upgrade that probably needs a complete uninstall and reinstall which may sort out the problems. In typical Norton / Symantec style the uninstallation fails, I’ve raised a support query but as my last one went unanswered I’m not holding my breath. I have two months left with my current subscription so the jury’s still out on whether I’ll continue using the product or revert to my previous security products.

It’s still raining!

Welsh class this morning, my first for quite some time what with the Christmas break and before that my hospital treatment but nice to start getting back into the swing of things. I also need to once more start attending the weekly Welsh language coffee mornings to gain extra practice.

David and Hannah spent the evening with us.

Happy New Year – Blwyddyn Newydd Dda i chi i gyd

I haven’t posted for a little while, decided to take a couple of weeks break over Christmas.

Upgraded the software on the main server just before Christmas following the rebuild after the mother board failure, it’s now running Suse Linux 10.2 and is performing very well. Following the upgrade to BT Total Broadband we’re getting much better download and upload speeds which certainly helps with uploading galleries to our web site and sending images to the lab for printing. I upgraded my blog software this morning to the latest version which was released a few hours ago, everything seems to be working well and a much smoother upgrade process than previous updates.

We’re quite busy again at the moment, it’s one of those times of the year when we’re handling a number of bookings for new weddings, I really enjoy meeting with new couples and finding out their plans for their special day.

I’ve also nearly competed my tax return so should be ready to submit it on-line next week ahead of the end of month cut off date, luckily my accounts are fully computerised so it’s largely a manual transfer of information from my accounts to the tax return with some manual calculations, fortunately the Tax Calc software carries out a check on the details entered and performs all those tedious tax calculations, it’s excellent value at around £20 for each new release and saves me several hours of work.

A windy Wednesday

My BT Home Hub arrived yesterday, it’s a pretty naff looking device that is quite flimsy, the web based configuration software is not at all user friendly. The hub phone works very well though. One important thing with configuring the home hub is to locate the software CD and ensure it doesn’t go anywhere near the pc as all it does is load rather a lot of unnecessary software – fortunately I was aware of this before my hub arrived. In typical BT style the order tracking details on their web site shows that my hub is due to be despatched tomorrow for delivery the following day. Quite a few set up issues with the BT Home Hub mainly involving Windows networking. I think it’s all working at the moment.

Rachel was discharged from hospital today. 🙂

A very wet Thursday

I’ve been catching up with the folk podcast run by Ken Nicol (Steeleye Span) and Phil Widdows, I’m quite new to listening to podcasts (the term comes from an amalgamation of i-pod and broadcasts although you don’t need an i-pod), the folk podcast is produced monthly and is in essence a ‘radio’ programme accessible on the web, you can listen to it in Windows Media Player (or any other media player) or copy it to a personal MP3 player. You can access individual programmes directly from the folk podcast web site or install a free RSS Podcast Client (rather like a blog aggregator) which will keep you up to date with selected podcasts. I downloaded the free Juice software which seems to work very well.

The heavy rain and high winds have continued through the day and we also had a brief power cut.

I managed to complete the upgrade process for BT Total Broadband today by telephone, having failed to make it happen on-line on the BT website, both times I tried on their web site I received a confirmation page that stated the upgrade had been accepted but that was where the upgrade process ended! Fingers crossed that everything will be working next week.