We bought Rich's Dad a table football game for part of his Christmas present. On Boxing Day he brought it down to our house and we all had fun playing it - including my parents (something I never thought I'd see!).
December 30, 2001
So, that was 2001.
We started the year in New Zealand for just under 3 weeks (and didn't really get a New Years day). We spent a lot of time driving around both the North and the South Islands, and got a good feel for the country. We had a lot to think about when we came back as we really liked Auckland, and were offered jobs there, this led to the question should we emigrate? The discussions about this went on until at least March, and we ended up going to Wales for a weekend to discuss it more. Eventually we decided not to go as most of our friends are busy producing children at the moment and so wouldn't be able to visit us. We still plan to return to New Zealand at some point for a longer time, and so we can do some of the exploring we didn't get to do this time.
In April time we decided it was time to move house, and so we started looking for houses - in Brighton! We'd decided that Brighton had many of the aspects we were looking for in a City.
The whole process of buying a house and selling the flat was painful, and it felt that anything that could go wrong, did. What with management agents who were a bit useless, solicitors who were very, very picky, and a bomb going off in Ealing town centre it took us until August to move.
In July we went to Pembrey in Wales to learn how to parakart. This was really good fun and we ended up buying a traction kite not long afterwards.
In late November, I was made redundant from Aspect, the place where I'd worked for the past 2 years. I got to spend most of December at home doing some geek playing with PHP and MySQL, and managed to find a new job which starts in January (and is in nearby Portslade so I won't need to sit on a Thameslink train for 3.5 hours per day).
I spent a very enjoyable Christmas in Brighton, and even managed a walk on the beach on Christmas Day.
So, its now New Years Eve and we're disapointed to find out that there are no special events laid on by the council. So, we've had to buy some fireworks from a very knowledgable guy who sold us a selection of rockets and fireworks. We're planning to let them off down at the beach at some appropriate cold point this evening.
Posted by Jane at 6:00 PM
December 23, 2001
We bought Rich's Dad a table football game for part of his Christmas present. On Boxing Day he brought it down to our house and we all had fun playing it - including my parents (something I never thought I'd see!).
Posted by Jane at 7:07 PM
The guy on the left (without the beard) is my grand nephew, Reece. The main post office in Canterbury has one of those photo booths which allows you to get your face on a book of stamps. So Reece did, and the above is a scan is off the envelope from the Christmas card he sent to us.
I think he looks worryingly like Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes).
Posted by Richard at 7:28 PM
Richard has been doing some work on the photos section of the site over the last couple of weeks. This has meant a bit of a delay getting some of the photos onto the site. Today I've put another 3 albums up. The first is from the 13th December when Joe came down and we had a "photo play day" (too cold really if truth be told). The second are just some shots I took in the Churchill Square shopping centre of the decorations. And the last are from our day out along the coast yesterday with my parents (who have come down for Christmas).
Posted by Jane at 6:09 PM
December 22, 2001
I got a new laptop delivered on Thursday, and mostly installation has gone very smoothly (took Windows ME off and put 2000 on instead). One issue did arise however, and that was to do with the error message "Can't open ACPI ATK0100 kernel mode driver". Reinstalling the supplied drivers from the CD didn't help either (altho it might have done if I had known then what I know now). We looked on google for suggestions, and found a site which had lots of new drivers for the Asus notebooks. I downloaded one of them, and then started the "Reinstall driver" process again. Each time, it still decided that the oem6.inf file in the Winnt\inf folder was newer than the one I told it to look at. In the end, the only way to get this to work properly was to rename the file to be oem6.inf.bak. This time, it looked at the location I told it too, and the driver was installed correctly. Hurrah! During the driver installation it recreated this oem6.inf file so there was no need to rename the .bak version.
Posted by Jane at 11:52 AM
- ACPI ATK0100
Hi,
I am searching for the oem6.inf file, and that's how I got
to your site. Could you please mail this file to me, I lost
it somehow in the process.
Thanks
Ludwig
Posted by Ludwig Scheiblreiter on 2002-05-26 17:48:20
- RE: ACPI ATK0100 Kernel Mode Driver
Wanted to say thanks for posting your comment about the Asus ATKACPI Kernel Mode Driver problem. I run XP and the fix for the problem is a little different, but it let me know that I wasn't the only one, so there had to be a work around. For anyone on XP with this problem, to go to ASUS.com & download the drivers specific for your machine, unzip them, then go to your devise manager and click on any that are yellow (indicating unknown devises) and search for the drivers where you extracted them. I had to install a new hard drive, and it took me 1/2 the day to figure this out - I hope I can save someone the time and effort!
Posted by Bob on 2005-04-29 14:18:18
- Thanks!
I found your site in google, the link was great! Cheers!
Posted by Ian from Kent on 2005-10-28 08:56:10
- Thanks for your sites
I had encountered the same problem, so your sites let me know the reason, but the site cited in your saying donont work now. Can you send this driver to my email addr.? Thanks again.
Aeolusfeng@yahoo.com.cn
Posted by Aeolus on 2006-05-07 02:45:31
- Send me this driver to my email addr. please.I have lost it.
plainboy17@hotmail.com
THANKS
Posted by Ruben on 2007-04-02 12:36:29
- Re: ACPI ATK0100 Kernel Mode Driver Error on VMware
Hi there, thanks for the hint about the ATK0100 Driver. It helped me fix a little bug when I loaded a ghost image inside VMware and it would always come up with that error. Turn out the camera drive did not work properly.
Thank you.
Posted by Will on 2008-08-03 10:33:17
December 20, 2001
I finally finished the Lord of the Rings trilogy on Friday. Finally. After many, many months. Its a really great book and I really enjoyed it, but I think its the kind of book that works best if you can dedicate good reading time to it.
Posted by Jane at 10:25 PM
Pah! Last night, after much debate, we attempted to book a trip to Lisbon through LastMinute for 3 days in January. This afternoon at around 5pm we get a call to tell us that the flights are booked up and we can't go. Can't be helped I suppose, but what is really annoying is that LastMinute is still showing these dates as available. They offered us a trip to Rome instead, but we really wanted somewhere a bit warmer than that. So, we called up Crystal instead and they've found us a trip to Malta. We know very little about the place, but I'm sure it'll be a nice break before I start my new job on the 7th January.
Posted by Jane at 5:55 PM
December 18, 2001
Stargate SG1
One of the programmes that Tivo started to record for us as one of its suggestions is Stargate SG1. We ignored them for a while, generally we don't like the whole film spin off thing, but then decided to give it a go one day when there wasn't much else worth watching around. And now we're hooked. Fortunately for us Tivo finds us lots of them, both from Channel 4 and from Sky One (although this does mean that we watch them in a strange order). I've just been taking a look through the episode guide and know I've never seen any of Season One. Must look out for that some point. And if you've never seen any Stargate SG1 it's kind of a cross between the X-files and Star Trek, and very watchable.
Posted by Jane at 10:31 AM
- Stargate SG1
Hi Jane!
I know that you probably dismiss me as some sort of cyber-
stalker, but I really like your site. However, I'm getting
a bit spooked by the way in which you & Richard seem to be
interested in many of the things Jim & I like.
As you may or may not remember, I originally found your
site whilst planning our trip to New Zealand. I emailed
thanks for your tips, along with some similarity spotting
including Divine Comedy, books etc. I now see that not
only have you read "I Am An Oil Tanker" (enjoyed by us both
immensely due to our work in local radio & Jim's high-
ranking anorak status) but that you've now been seduced by
Stargate SG1! I find this somewhat difficult to swallow,
bearing in mind that most people (a) haven't heard of/ seen
the show, and (b) wouldn't find it entertaining anyway.
Are you doppelgangers (albeit sophisticated southern ones)?
Thanks for the site - it's better than any soap opera.
Carin
PS If you haven't seen AMELIE yet, then do go - it's
excellent.
Posted by Carin on 2001-12-20 14:13:10
I tried another recipe from the Low fat, Low Sugar cook book today, and made some oatcakes. They taste okay, but I had a real problem rolling them out as almost everytime I put the rolling pin on the mixture, it broke up into pieces. Anyone got any ideas how to prevent this happening? Or happen to have an email address for Rose Elliot (the author)?
Posted by Jane at 2:02 PM
December 13, 2001
I accepted a job offer today. I'm going to be working for a small company in Portslade doing internet/intranet stuff and I start on the 7th of January. Hurrah!
Unfortunately, the news isn't as good for most of the other guys that I was made redundant with. There don't seem to be many jobs around at the moment, and there seem to be agencies listing jobs that don't exist, or agencies that won't give you more details about a job before you send them your cv - all a bit suspicious.
For the record, here is a list of the job sites I've been using, ranked with the best at the top:
- jobserve - always has a lot on offer (not all of them exist though)
- gojobsite - again has a lot on offer, and there isn't much cross over with jobserve
- wired sussex - doesn't have much on offer, but it is all local (to me anyways)
- monster - allows you to create an online cv so potential employers can find out more about you
- planetrecruit - not a bad site, but seems to have many of the same jobs as gojobsite, and I prefer the gojobsite layout
Posted by Jane at 1:29 PM
We bought and dressed our Christmas tree last weekend. I've never had a real Christmas tree before (in fact, I've never owned a tree before as this is the first year that I'll be spending Christmas at my house rather than at my folks') and so it's all quite exciting (okay, not really exciting but different anyways).
It's not all that easy to tell from this picture, but the tree is only about 1.5 feet tall. We bought one in a pot in the hope that we can convince it to live.
Posted by Jane at 11:15 AM
- tree, photos
Did you ever coax your christmas tree to grow? If not and you try again, be sure to plant it in sandy, gravelly soil. Evergreens don't like fertile soil, but they do need good drainage.
How do you manage to append photos to your e-mails?
I found your site by looking for a solution to the Asus driver.
Posted by John Newell on 2003-07-12 16:15:04
December 12, 2001
Scary old stuff
Google have made the last 20 years of Usenet news available of searching.
Searching on your own name brings back some interesting things. In my case, things I'd forgotten about. It seems that in 1989 I was posting in comp.ai.neural-nets. In the first half of the 1990s I was spending a lot of time writing LaTeX macros, by 1995 I was worried about Pro*C and Oracle, but by 1996 everything was web related.
The first result from google for me is a posting to rec.pets. I had no idea what it was about, but a bit of digging revealed that some one in San Diego was offering to digitize pictures of a cat for me. In the days when scanners were not commonplace.
There's a nice write up about what google have dug up from the archive.
Posted by Richard at 9:49 AM
December 06, 2001
Hmmm, our server is currently experiencing some technical issues, like seeing the internet... so, if you've tried to view our site over the last couple of days, sorry... Normal service will be resumed shortly - I hope!
Posted by Jane at 6:32 PM
December 05, 2001
The world cup (football, soccer) is still six months away, but I've started to prepare for it. I've keyed in the fixtures and you can download them for your Palm PDA. Sad, isn't it?
Posted by Richard at 12:12 PM
It took me ages to get the blog below to publish. It was complaining of an ftp error, saying that the connection didn't exist (which it did). Big thanks go to Onno Zweers of the Netherlands for coming up with a solution to the problem.
Posted by Jane at 7:16 PM
December 01, 2001
We bought a new recipe book a couple of weeks ago, and it's full or really tasty recipes, and they're healthy too. The recipes are designed to be low fat and low sugar, and best of all tasty. We've tried 5 or 6 recipes so far, and only one of them was slightly dissapointing, the others have been great.
Posted by Jane at 4:37 PM
World Cup Draw
BBC2 have been showing the draw for the Japan and Korea World Cup in 2002. They really padded the show out, with musicians, and singers, and the like all doing their turns but eventually, they got around to doing the draw. Here is England's group:
Group F
- Argentina
- Nigeria
- England
- Sweden
And England's matches are going to be:
2 June 7.30am England v Sweden at Saitama
7 June 12.30pm Argentina v England at Sapporo
12 June 7.30am Nigeria v England at Osaka
Posted by Jane at 11:52 AM
