Posts from April 17, 2006

You start to feel small and insignificant. [ Via Populicious ]

I enjoyed these quotes from airline staff with a sense of humour (via Tom Kyte).

A couple of years ago, I was on a British Airways flight that was making its final approach to some anonymous airport in Scandinavia.

Quite suddenly and without any warning, the landing was aborted. The plane stopped descending, quickly started to climb, levelled out and then resumed a familiar, circular holding pattern.

I was a little perturbed but no-one else seemed bothered as though this was perfectly normal so I stopped screaming, apologised to my immediate neighbours, dabbed the sweat from my brow with a napkin and picked up my copy of 'High Life'.

The pilot announced:

'Ladies and Gentlemen. You have probably noticed that we have been unable to land and are in a now holding pattern. This is because the aircraft in front struck a bird during landing and the ground staff are currently clearing the runway of debris so it is safe for us to land. British Airways apologises for the delay to your onward journey and the inconvenience caused. However, please spare a thought for the poor bird.'

Of course, the last sentence was my input but what a glorious, wasted opportunity.

I go away to spend a few days sitting on the UKs gridlocked motorway network and I discover those chaps at WordPress have been making yet more changes.

The Regulus theme has been upgraded to 2.1.1 and now includes bug fixes, support for sidebar widgets, personalised header graphic and lots more besides.

In addition, every single post is now prefixed by 'Posted by Andy C'. This is completely superfluous in my case and I would dearly like to turn it off. This is my personal blog. Who else is going to be posting to it ?

Also, the categories and 'Add comment' now appear at the top of the article rather than the bottom which I also dislike intensely as it adds distracting clutter.

WordPress have also added feed statistics which is a welcome addition although the statistics are not as comprehensive as those provided by FeedBurner so I'll continue to keep the Feedburner feed alive for now.

Oh - and before you all jump to signup at once - WordPress had an outage over the Easter weekend.

Buoyed by my recent, successful firmware upgrade of my Linksys wireless router, and for the sake of completeness, I decided to upgrade the driver software of the Linksys Wireless USB adapters to the latest version (2.0.2).

In addition, prompted by my wife's perceptive question of 'Is it not working because someone has hacked into it ?', I also decided to increase the security on my embryonic wireless network by disabling SSID broadcasts and enabling MAC address filtering so only specified PC's can connect.

Apologies to all my neighbours. This is probably undue paranoia on my part but if only you could have provided demerara sugar instead of fobbing me off with caster sugar all those years ago, none of this would have been necessary.

These simple configuration changes and software upgrades went surprisingly smoothly. Until, of course, I came to complete the very final task of upgrading the driver of USB adapter #2. This USB adapter is identical to the (upgraded) USB adapter #1, was purchased around the same time and was working perfectly on the old 1.x driver.

Inevitably, when I upgraded this driver, it stubbornly refused to connect to the wireless network. I uninstalled, reinstalled, rebooted, reinstated the original driver to confirm the adapter was still working in the new wireless configuration but, still no joy. So this irritating minor issue will now continue to nag away like a dripping tap until I can be bothered to revisit it.