Monday 31 August 2009

Winter's Tail

Posted by speedygeoff on Monday, August 31, 2009 with
It's the last day of winter; still pretty cold and wet.

Low Point X. Yesterday was a bit of a shocker with a number of incidents. Such as Jenny's 88 year old mother slipping and falling and breaking her leg, at home just after she'd been here for lunch. A couple of other incidents as well. As I said yesterday, the only way is up.

And breaking news - http://www.theage.com.au/national/water-minister-tim-holding-missing-on-freezing-mountain-20090831-f488.html. Let's hope he's OK.

Last week my weight stayed the same despite doing little running. Usually that's an indicator that I'm not well, but there are no other symptoms so far. Other than tiredness. If I am well, the only other time it happens like that is when I am away on holidays. So perhaps I am in holiday mode. Tiredness is not unusual at the best of times.

Plans this week
Today
- training at Parliament House; 4:30pm for a jog, 5:30pm to meet the larger group and warm-up for intervals.
Wednesday - see if I can resurrect some form at the BBQ Stakes.
After that I am having a break, taking a long hard look at myself (erk!),  and doing long slow runs for a while. Training will continue at Dickson (Thursdays) and Parliament House (Mondays) delegated to my enthusiastic and not at all reluctant team of assistant coaches.

Wonderful spam, glorious spam
I thought I'd note what has been happening with my PC. I reported that during winter it was "unstable." Eventually I managed to fix this when I uninstalled Nortons then re-installed it, probably a newer version. All good now!

Except I cannot access many control panel features. There are ways around some of these, but notably I cannot run "automatic updates" nor turn them on nor see what they are, and the Microsoft websites don't store these updates as they used to pre-Vista, rather refer you back to the Control Panel, and there are no other short cuts or system commands for running them, I have tried everything and searched everywhere.

The other problem I have is that all thumbnails are not working properly; today's Canberra Times Techno section answers someone else's similar problem but my educated guess is that their solution won't work for me.

A PC issue I have "fixed" is that of spam emails. No-one need tolerate spam; some ISPs deal with spam better than others. But here is the solution which I have implemented for a couple of other people with huge success. I use gmail (google mail). Google mail blocks spam better than any other system I know. You can change to google mail, or better still, keep your current email address and forward email straight through to gmail and let it filter out the spam.

Here is my recommendation:
1. Create a new "gmail" email account.
2. Go into your current email account and change settings to allow all emails sent to your current email address to be re-directed (forwarded) to your new gmail address.
3. You can and should also specify not to save a copy in the current account. Maybe do so temporarily just to prove to your satisfaction how well the spam blocking is working.
4. In gmail if you wish, you can set it up so that when you send new emails or reply to existing emails, it gives your old email address in the "From" field. This means to other users it looks as if you are still operating completely as you were.
4. Then of course you have to use gmail for all emails. Gmail has other very nice features you will soon learn to like.

And what happens if you do the above? Very rarely will you see a spam email message ever again!

Finals footy
I have been suggesting Collingwood will make the grand final, only to be thumped by the Crows. The way it has panned out, the only way that will now happen is, for a start, Collingwood must beat St kilda this weekend. Highly likely!!

Brett in the Half

If Brett's Carlton gets past Brisbane in Brisbane this weekend they will have Geelong or the Bulldogs to contend with in the semis. Not easy! It is a very interesting and potentially close and exciting finals series.

Brett relaxing yesterday after the Vets handicap