out and about at the hog's head in Kingston

look's like Mike isn't enjoying the Hofbrauhaus

That Weisbier is pretty evil stuff - especially if you drink 10 Steins

Mike at the Berlin Wall

Mike and Alan do 'Polish' Woodstock...

All love and peace at 'Polish' music festival - Mike wasn't allowed to bring his AK47



Don't really understand what a Polish music festival is doing in Germany - but I promised I'd just post some of the MMS messages they sent to me (well, all the ones where they have their clothes on anyway)

Mike & co. in Bonn

So I'm lucky to be getting lots of picture messages from Mike and Alan on holiday in Germany this week. They've invited me to party with them in Berlin this Friday and Saturday but I don't think I'm up to it after being ill for a week! The other reason is that I'm down to finish clearing the box-room and creating/decorating the nursery... Oh the joys of preparing to be a responsible parent!

Fatter Pipe

Hurrah! BT recently dropped the price for my 512Kbps ADSL line from £29.99 to £26.99. But at the same time they also introduced a traffic cap (15Gbytes per month) - which I thought was a bit cheeky as I used to have an unlimited allowance.



But at the same time they also had an offer to upgrade to a 1Mbps ADSL for £29.99. So as I was used to paying that much anyway I signed up for the upgrade - also it comes with an increased allowance of 30Gbytes per month - which I think I'll manage to stay within.



The good news was that they did the upgrade yesterday. Didn't see a speed increase (using internet bandwidth tester) until I re-booted my router - but then was getting 900Kbps+



The bad news was that they've screwed up the normal voice line at the exchange!

Success with the CipherLab 1000!

Brought the crappy cipherlab 1000 barcode scanner home tonight - thought I'd have another go at getting it working.



So maybe they've improved the downloadable manual (or maybe I just read it better this time....) I'd completely missed the really obvious:-



When you use 'Scan Manager' s/w to 'configure scanner' - and you change lots of settings, then see that they've been changed - then try scanner in Word for the 100th time (only to get gobbledeegook) - maybe its because you haven't configured scanner. A good test of this (which I did tonight) is change the 'beep' frequency on the scanner. Lo and behold - no change when you try scanner.



Hang-on - why does it keep trying to talk to scanner over RS232 when you go 'download settings' - its not connected via rs232 - only via keyboard...?!?



DOH! The only way to 'configure' the scanner from the scanman program is to PRINT OUT CONFIGURATION BARCODES THEN SCAN THEM IN!!!!



Ok - so I'm an idiot for not realizing this earlier - but this is like so 80's tech!



Anyway, set the scanner up to recognize EAN13 barcodes and to convert to ISBN. Works a treat on all my UK books (that either are just ISBN or EAN13 beginning 978...). Haven't quite got it setup for American books yet - but will.



The other nice thing is that it stores its setup in Non-Volatile memory - so you only need to program it once.



Also downloaded latest Microsoft VB.Net Express Beta 1 tools - plan on writing Amazon Web Services application (as the VBA word AWS routing doesn't work on my desktop as I only have old Office 2000 I think)