Author Archives: jon

The Second Eurovision Party Of The Year

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The second qualifying heat of the Eurovision Song Contest gave us the opportunity to host a little get-together with Chris, Tanya and Mats yesterday evening. We ate pizza, drank varying amounts of alcohol, and had a generally excellent evening. I actually didn’t get into the mood of things as much as I’d wanted to, this being due to shaking off some kind of illness, but I appreciated the company nonetheless.

As it turned out, the two chaps spent a solid three hours in front of the screen trying to sort out our problem with connecting the Nintendo DS through a recently purchased USB wifi connector. This is a fair amount of time for anyone (or, in this case, two), but these guys know their stuff when it comes to computers, so I’m mightily impresses with the result, which looks like the problem is solved. I just have to wait for Carrie to get back to her house so I can check the connection. Even if there are further problems, huge steps have been taken in the right direction.

Personally, I have learnt a bit about my firewall, which is where the problem stems from.

It was a long time ago we socialised with these three, and considering they all live within a few kilometres of us, it’s ridiculous we don’t do it more often. Hopefully we’ll “see” a bit more of Chris, though, since he’s looking to buy a DS himself.

Tales Of The Toilet

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It just goes to show how effective it has been in drilling Freya with certain routines. The other night, at 4am, Freya woke up needing a wee. She walked to the toilet, turned on the light, went to toilet, dried herself, drew out the chair, climbed up on it, washed and then dried her hands, turned out the light and went back to bed.

It is really amazing how well she has learned these routines, and she has yet to wee the bed.

Boys Will Be Boys

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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes it is only worth two, but those two in themselves are worth more than a thousand words. Or something like that.

I was searching through the Jysk website to try and find a picture of the wicked hand-chair that we bought for Freya today for a mere £10, when I came across the children’s bedroom section. I would not have paid to much attention to the page, but for the two pictures shown, illustrating what one could do with a few Jysk products and no imagination.

First, something for the small lady in your life:

And now for something completely different:

The only things missing from the latter bedroom is a couple of beer-cans and a few porn mags under the bed. I’m not saying that this is a totally unjust picture of the world we live in, where girls jump about in their pinkdom, singing carefree songs about the colour purple, but this is pandering to gender-stereotypes.

Oh, those were the two words I was meaning when I wrote about two words being worth more than a thousand. Or something like that.

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Who’s Your Daddy?

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I like to call my father “Daddy Jon”. Mum is simply “Mum”, Nan is “Nan”, and Mormor is “Mormor”. Of course, Dad and Mum think this is very cute, and at the same time perplexing. I wonder what other nicknames I can come up with that’ll have them guessing?

An Evening Playing Games (Of The Wrong Kind)

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For the year we have been living in our flat we have been going through a mini-port to connect to the internet. This has, apart from the fact that we shouldn’t have to, been of no real concern. Everything we need to do gets done, and with no loss of bandwidth. Until yesterday.

I’ve been considering the best way to connect Jo’s Nintendo DS for online play of Animal Crossing: Wild World. The first option is to purchase a wi-fi router, which will also allow us to connect the unowned Nintendo Wii and X-Box 360, as well as securing us for the wi-fi future.

Ideally we’d like to get the router that our IP provides free of charge, but despite their claims on the website we cannot have one. It appears that the station which we are connected to has compatibility issues with our IP’s modems. This is a ridiculous set of circumstances, and the only thing for us to do is await some kind of executive decision to manufacture new modems that do not suffer this problem.

Another option is to buy a wi-fi router ourselves, and simply place it between our current modem and the computer. This would hopefully work (mental note: contact Jack to make sure), but I decided on a cheaper and easier solution: a wifi USB dongle.

All I have to do is run the software, attach the dongle, turn on the DS, and let the hardware do the maths. I’ve done this, and it doesn’t work (the DS connection to the computer works, but not to the server), so I search the internet for a solution. One idea is to run an updated version of the software, after going through several steps to remove all trace of the original. After fiddling about for a while I am rid of the offending software and reinstall the new, improved upgrade. This time I can’t even laod the software, getting a “Internet sharing error (6)” message. So, I uninstall the new version, using the same method as I went through the first time, and installed the old version. Same message appears.

Jo rings up our IP server, gets the miniport taken away, we realise we can’t connect at all to the internet, and go back to to the miniport (this part of the story is condensed, but involves both a minor success and complete failure of connecting to the internet).

After all this, we are back to a regular connection (no miniport), whilst being unable to connect to the Animal Crossing server. All in all, a waste of time time very well spent.

Now, I love technology, and am constantly amazed just how well .exe files work, considering the infinite amount of hardware set-ups available. When working on their own, hardware does a sterling job, but it’s when it comes to interacting that things really go arse up.

I shall be in contact with Jack to talk about the wi-fi router.