Job Hunting

It's been a short week at work this week for me at one end it's been the start of the Easter break and at the other (last week end) we had a trip to the Isle of Wight for a couple of days. Carol attended an interview at IOW council for a more senior job in HR and was offerred it, before we even got back home!! For a number of reasons she decided not to take it but at least she had the choice. Just need to keep on looking for something closer to home really.

The Easter break is a welcome one and so far - as I write this - the weather is really good. Carol is in he midst of revision for her final exam of what has been a challenging course in may ways, not least the academic level that is expected of the student and trying to fit the course around work too. It takes me back to when I did my degree, I used to complain a lot about the work involved and nobody really understands or appreciates it unless they have done the same themselves - they usually can't understand what the fuss is about, until they try it then they feel like they have been hit around the head with a cricket bat and keep getting beaten for the next 3-4 years. The sense of achievement is worth it though in the end and I am particulary proud and impressed how Carol has stuck with it over the last 3 years. I hope that her hard work brings the just rewards.

Anyway what that has meant is that I have been doing a few jobs, visiting the Gym and due to go sailing on Bank Holiday Monday. The longer days are great and really make you feel like doing more outside rather than vegging out in front of the telly. Still finding time for a curry and a pint or two though.

The broadband order has gone through now with a connection date of 16th April so not too long to wait. I decided to add a extra hard drive this week and it turned out to be a bit of nightmare. Windows refused to recognise it in explorer and then when I got it to see it, Windows couldn't format the drive. After messing around at 4.00 am on Thursday morning I finally got it to work and now the data is split across 2 No. 300 GByte drives. As there was no spare SATA port on the motherboard I had to buy a card from EBay that provided an internal SATA port, 4 USB 2.0, an IDE port and an external SATA port. It offers RAID too but I'm not sure how that would work with an external plug in drive!! The new drive sits on this card now though and at the moment it seems fine.

Finally not content to leave things working as they are I am considering the reinstallation of Vista on the PC. The reason is that I would like a clean image of Vista to reload in the future when the OS becomes bloated and in playing around with Vista over the past few weeks I have loaded software, drivers etc that really aren't required. In some bizzare set of circumstances that usually only happens to me I have the machine set up as dual boot with XP and while it isn't really a problem I would like to change that. Should be straightforward now that I know which programs work with Vista and which don't - but hey you have heard me say that before haven't you.