quack's blog

Working Hard

2010-01-31T20:00:00Z

I've been working for McDonald's now for 2 months.

I work overnights Sun-Thurs, at a 24 hour store.

The restaurant is the closest to UWO.

I serve a lot of drunk students.

Thursday nights are very busy.

I enjoy the work.

Oops, Broken Feed URL

2009-11-24T06:34:57Z

I just realised I'd somehow broken my feed URL, and now I've probably lost all of my old subscribers. Ho hum.

It's fixed now.

New Job

2009-11-24T06:24:44Z

I have finally got a job!

I went for an interview at McDonald's today, and they hired me. I start next week, in the kitchen.

After being out of work since June, I'm very happy right now to be getting back into employment.

I Miss You Bonita

2009-10-29T04:45:00Z

A year ago today, my best friend Bonita died in a car crash, tragically the day after her wedding.

The pain of losing her is still fresh and what makes it worse is that we'd not spoken for months before it happened. We just... drifted apart. I was too busy in my own affairs. She, I imagine, was busy in hers. She'd recently started flying again, she really did love to be a flight attendant. I sometimes wonder how many passengers she'd actually ordered out of her galley over the years.

I regret that we had drifted apart. I realise that there's nothing I can do, but it still doesn't help ease my mind any.

She was such a positive person, never a bad word to say about anyone. She lit up the lives of everyone who met her. Even those who hadn't met her, and had only chatted online to her, knew she was someone special. She could always make you laugh. We shared some really good times, I just wish we could've spent more time together.

I miss her so much.

Requiescat in pace Bonita.

Life In Canada

2009-08-04T02:40:53Z

So I've been living in Canada since 24th June, and so far I'm enjoying it immensely. I love this country, although making the adjustment is hard. There are of course things I miss from back home in the UK but most of the time there is something similar to replace it here.

I'm still not working but interest in me is building so hopefully I'll get an interview very soon.

One thing that is annoying me about being in Canada instead of UK is the fact I have no Canadian credit card which makes purchasing things online so much harder, as half the places I'd want to buy from require me to ship to the billing address which of course is in the UK. Oh well!

Removing Public Folders From Exchange 2007

2009-06-22T03:10:00Z

PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

I TAKE ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSIBILITY IF YOU ATTEMPT TO FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS AND DESTROY YOUR EXCHANGE SERVER IN THE PROCESS!

If you have Exchange 2003, please read these instructions.

If you are in the situation where you want to remove the last public folders from your organisation, and you only have one Exchange server so are not worried about replicas - then the following commands will help you do so.

Using the Exchange Management Shell, enter the following 3 commands and then from the Management Console you can remove the Public Folder store.

Get-PublicFolder -Server <servername> "\" -Recurse -ResultSize:Unlimited | Remove-PublicFolder -Server <servername> -Recurse -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue


Get-PublicFolder -Server <servername> "\Non_Ipm_Subtree" -Recurse -ResultSize:Unlimited | Remove-PublicFolder -Server <servername> -Recurse -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue


Get-PublicFolderStatistics -Server <servername> | fl

PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Movable Type 4.261

2009-06-18T06:16:50Z

Just released, fixing the perl error I had. Thank you Six Apart!

Movable Type 4.26

2009-06-11T22:58:53Z

Just upgraded to 4.26, mainly bug fixes in this release.

Update: Ugh, downgraded to 4.25 as I'm getting a Perl error from one of the scripts. Will upgrade again once I know what's wrong.

Out Of Work

2009-06-11T02:45:00Z

My last day at my old job was Friday. So now I am currently out of work, with a lot of packing ahead of me. Only 13 days to go until I fly out to Canada to start my new life.

Today I was up in the loft, working on cleaning up all the spider webs, and sorting out all the boxes we've stored up there over the years. I'm also sawing the ends off the horizontal roof beams that jut out into the loft, just waiting for someone to bang their head into them.

I started quite late today, so I'll try to get up earlier tomorrow morning and give myself more time... otherwise I'll just run out of days to get everything done in; and that would be bad.

Feed URL

2009-06-03T17:11:45Z

I have just changed the URL registered with FeedBurner from its old doesitecho one. Hopefully no one will be left behind as I set up a redirect from the old URL to the new one, and most readers should be able to handle that with ease.

Tidying The Loft

2009-05-26T19:45:02Z

As I'll be storing the majority of my belongings due to be shipped over to Canada when they can be in my parents' loft, I needed to clear out some of the crap we/I've accumulated. I completed half of the clearance over the weekend just gone, so now one end of the loft is totally empty, with all the icky spider webs vacuumed up and all the sawdust, gravel and everything else swept up.

The other half of the loft is full of spider webs, and empty boxes. Cleaning that half is not going to be fun. Luckily the vacuum has a long extension to the hose so I can keep my distance and not get covered in spider webs. Bleh!

The job will be made harder by the fact that there are roofing beams jutting out waiting for you to bang your head on, which I managed to do yesterday... it hurt. I think I might take a saw into the loft next time and cut off the dangerous bits. We removed a couple years ago, but using a hand saw was way too much work in those cramped conditions, maybe a jigsaw might be easier to handle.

I'll have to make a start on the other half soon, as I leave for Canada in less than a month.

Found In My Drawer

2009-05-21T19:10:19Z

quack http://quack.me/

Jaunty

2009-05-08T20:38:00Z

I started to upgrade my Slice to Jaunty Jackalope from Intrepid Ibex about 30 minutes ago, only took about 10-15 minutes. It's really quite impressive to simply issue one command, with the minimum of queries about user-modified config files, and within a few minutes you're running a brand new operating system.

Beats the pants off the 40+ minutes it takes to upgrade to another version of Windows!

Boxen

2009-04-27T16:39:00Z

I ordered some large cardboard boxes yesterday, along with ordinary bubble wrap, anti-static bubble wrap and some silica gel packets.

As I can't take all my belongings with me until I am a Permanent Resident, I will be storing everything in my parents' loft, which can get quite humid explaining the silica gel - I don't particularly want anything ruined while it's in storage! Packing will start soon-ish. Already it's only 57 days till I fly out.

I have quite a few computers and spare components that will need storing as well. Including my main PC. Luckily I kept the boxes the case and monitor came in, so I can re-use those. I will probably partially dismantle my PCs before they get stored so that transportation doesn't cause any damage to the motherboard or add-in cards. My heatsinks are pretty heavy, so I'll probably remove them, and my graphics card too.

I've got a load of stuff I need to put on eBay - 2 or 3 car stereos, subwoofer, 2 speakers with tweeters, 2 amps, subwoofer box, mini CD/radio Hi-Fi... maybe a couple of other things. I've taken a few box loads of things not worth selling to the local charity shop, and dumped an incredible amount of junk that I accumulated over the past 15 years, recycling what can be.

In June, I will be entering Canada with 2 full suitcases, which will be mostly clothes and just a few necessities. Saying goodbye to the stuff I'm keeping will be hard, but at least it won't be forever.

New Domain!

2009-04-19T05:19:00Z

Ever since I bought a .me back in July 2008 when registration was opened, I've wanted sort out the multiple domains I had, as I had no clear plan of what I should do with them.

I started out using planetquack.co.uk in 1999, the first domain I ever bought, but then registered zquack.net in 2001. I didn't really do anything with zquack.net for years. I bought planetquack.net in 2004, and pretty much replaced the .co.uk with it.

After starting a blog in 2003, I used a few different subdomains off planetquack.net before deciding to move it to doesitecho.com in 2005, where it stayed until last week.

I still couldn't quite decide what I should do with planetquack.net or zquack.net and they stayed separate sites for many years, until last year when I merged them into zquack.net. Even though I'd done that, I still wasn't completely happy.

Fast forward to 2009, and I finally made a choice that I am happy with. When they opened the .me registrations, I snapped up QUACK.ME. Last week I decided to use this as my main domain for my website, instead of using multiple different domain names.

So now planetquack.net, planetquack.co.uk, zquack.net and doesitecho.com all forward to quack.me.

Since I started using quack.me, I've spent many hours re-coding my templates, trying to get everything just right. I set up a lifestream powered by the Action Streams plugin. I did have a lifestream set up on zquack.net but that was in Wordpress using data from Profilactic. Now it's Movable Type based, just like my blog.

I shifted a few things around in the sidebar, and removed the Plurk and Twitter widgets as they now appear on the lifestream page; I decided to leave the last.fm ones as I like them. I added thumbnails to my Flickr posts. I moved the search box from the sidebar to the header under the big RSS icon.

I'll probably keep finding new things to fiddle around with on my site, as I always do.