Thoughts from the Vortex

1) happy Christmas, or other celebrated holiday. This means you!
2) I am out of my shitty office. This makes me feel so damned good.
3) I want to go dancing.

Work slows pre-Christmas.
Spent the afternoon writing
All mails in haiku.

So. The Eurostar is still exploding. And will be tomorrow too. This, as you may well imagine, upsets me.

It is time for Plan B. The nuclear option.

7h22 train from Paris. Ferry. Travel very much 1.0.

This does however mean I should be able to make Bazmas. Would kind, generous souls please make sure caffeine in some form exists there for when I arrive?

I am still in Paris.

Woe is me.

The Eurostar is shite. Shitty shite.


Will try to escape tomorrow. Can not guarantee presence at Baz's Pagan Revival Festival, but will try my hardest.
It will be warmer tomorrow, so inshallah the trains will stop exploding.

fuck you work! Fuck you in your stupid arsehole!

Bad to worse. It just keeps going from bad to worse.

I am now on holidays. Part of the break will be stressful (I'll be on family duty, which always is), but at the moment that doesn't matter. What matters is that I'm on holidays, and that tomorrow I don't have to get up at six thirty. It is good.

Yes, you maybe surprised to learn that sometimes (just sometimes) I am actually happy with the service I receive from a technology distributor or manufacturer. In this case, I am very happy with the service provided by Overclockers.co.uk.

Having put in an RMA request, I sent the broken Antec HD enclosure back to them by normal Royal Fail packet post last Friday. I was kept informed throughout the process with email updates to inform me when they'd received it, what action they were taking, when the supplier had approved a replacement and when it finally shipped. I received it yesterday (via a good courier company - so not Home Delivery Network), and it's all happily set up and installed now.

This is how customer service is supposed to work. Acer, take note. The number of times I should have to ship products back to you to achieve a satisfactory resolution is one. No more. Just one.

Recently, I have actually been using the Windows XP install my netbook came with, as there are a couple of useful apps that don't work too well under wine. However, one thing that is pissing me off about Windows is the way it handles TCP/IP connection profiles.

On Mac and Linux, I can easily set TCP/IP profiles on a per network basis for wifi. So I can have the connections at home set to DHCP and the connection at work set to static IP. Windows doesn't seem to do this... it seems to only allow me one TCP/IP profile per network adapter, so I have to keep changing the settings. More annoyingly, unlike many other bits of software (e.g. Firefox proxy config), if I switch from static back to DHCP the manual config boxes don't just inactivate, they also delete their contents.

Am I doing something wrong? Can I set up per-network TCP/IP profiles in Windows XP bog standard Home edition?

If not, can I get a piece of freeware that will allow me to do this? It seems like such a simple thing, I'm sure I must be missing something...