It was 30 years ago today…
August 16, 1977.
If you’re of a certain age, you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot. If you’re not old enough to remember that, you remember where you were when Armstrong walked on the moon. If you’re not old enough to remember that, you may well remember where you were when you heard that Elvis Presley had passed away.
I was born in 1968 so I missed the Kennedy assassination by five years, and I was too young to know anything about the moon landing in 1969, but I remember exactly where and when I found out about Elvis’ death.
I’ve always been into music, ever since I was a kid. I liked all sorts of things growing up, but in the early 70’s I was into glitter, tartan and rock ‘n’ roll. Chief among these was rock ‘n’ roll, and the main man Elvis. I can only imagine what it was like in 1956 when he first burst upon the world stage, but when I first discovered his records in my Mum’s collection, to my young ears it was magic. I loved everything - from Heartbreak Hotel, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole through to Hawaiian Wedding Song and Stay Away Joe. I loved the movies, too and all the songs they contained.
I remember watching the Aloha Hawaii broadcast in 1973 (maybe 1974), seeing a man who to me owned the world and had as much fun with it as he could. Sometime later, I saw the 1968 Comeback Special and was blown away once again. That broadcast is probably still my all-time favourite music DVD.
It was only as the years went on and I grew older that I began to realise that all was not as it seemed in Graceland. The stories of the drugs, the women, the burgers! Even if only half of it is only half true, that’s still too much for one man to take. When you add in the shadowy figure of “Colonel” Tom Parker, who was not a man who had the best interest of his star at heart, it’s a wonder that Elvis made it to 1977.
Elvis made a huge impact on me as a kid; he was the man I wanted to be - the helicopter pilot, the reformed criminal, the roustabout, the guy that got the girl (or girls). He was handsome, he was cool, he was everything I wanted to be and everything I wasn’t. When he got the chance he could really rock out, but he could also sing gospel like an angel. He could even act when given half a chance (King Creole). That influence has never gone away - even now, I’m sitting here with a Greatest Hits album playing. Every now and again, I’ll see a picture of him from the last three years or so of his life and it’s heartbreaking to see what he became in the end.
From 1956 to 1977, one man ruled the world. Sure, he had his moments; he came and went like any fashion, but through it all he remained. Until that fateful day in 1977, when he died at about four o’clock in the afternoon in a sunny back garden in an English south coast town.
sometimes there’ll be the feeling things are going wrong
the morning star is fading, lord the Mississippi’s cold
you can still be Marlon Brando and the king of rock and roll
but it’s a ways to go back to Tupelo
Wolfie’s July Project 3
Avid followers of The Wolf’s Howl (I know there are some, I see the stats) will know of my drive to cut down on the booze and to lose a bit of weight. However, its been a while since I posted on the subject so you might be wondering what’s going on. Well, I haven’t really got anything to report.
The Project continues and it seems to be going pretty well. Had a day off from not drinking last Saturday, to celebrate the third birthday of the daughter of some friends (you know the sort of thing; sunshine, barbecue, kids playing while the adults gradually get more and more “merry”) and had one hell of a hangover the next day. It really is amazing how quickly you lose your tolerance for the stuff. Having a couple of beers this evening, as a friend of mine had some that he was getting rid of so it seemed churlish to refuse.
The Konjac Fibre regime remains. I must admit I don’t take this as diligently as I should - I generally miss the morning one as I don’t get up in time to take it - but I am still taking it. From a healthy digestion point of view, it is definitely working well!
As far as losing weight is concerned, I don’t know if this is happening as I don’t own a set of scales. What I do know is that I feel better, my clothes feel looser even if they really aren’t and I feel good about myself. At the end of the day, that’s all that really matters.
(Oh, by the way, could the person who stole my last July Project entry please not steal this one? Have an original thought, eh? I don’t mind you linking to the post, I don’t mind you ripping the piss out of it, but I do object to you stealing the whole thing and passing it off as your own work)
Customer service? Not us!
The Internet can be a wonderful place; lots of new things to experience - social networking, blogging, photo-sharing. Lots of things that we all enjoy and can’t live without.
Shopping is also a big part of life on the Net. We’ve moved on hugely from when the only people selling were Amazon and no-one thought the idea would catch on. Now, businesses rise and fall on how well they do on the Net. Indeed, some businesses (like the aforementioned Amazon) don’t exist as a physical shop - the High Street is so 1980’s!
Which makes my last two days at work even more frustrating. We run a mail-order business, selling nutritional supplements. We’ve always sold by direct mail, but have been getting more and more business through our website over the last few years, especially in the last six or eight months after we gave the site a major overhaul. We don’t host the site ourselves, but instead pay a hosting provider called Legend (who are now part of the Thus plc group).
We’ve been with them for about 10 years now, but have noticed that each time they get bought out or merge with another company their service slips another notch down. Previous issues with email problems have left us missing orders from the site, and were met with no reaction. Letters written received only a standard “you’ll get a full reply from us in 7 to 10 days” letter, with no full reply coming at all. Telephone calls to “first line support” revealed that they know even less than their customers about the state of their network, and don’t give a damn about it. That’s when you can get through; if you’ve got nothing better to do for at least 20 minutes, by all means stay on hold.
Yesterday, their whole service went down. I noticed this at 8am when I tried to check email for the first time that day. The website was also down. Telephoning the support line, I was greeted with a message saying that there was a major network outage and they were working on it. No indication of how long it had been down or when we could expect their engineers to solve the problem. Apparently, the issue was also effecting connectivity but thankfully we weren’t touched by that as we get our Net access from another provider.
At about 1.30pm, a message was finally posted on their Network Status page but it gave no more information than had been available on the recorded message. Further telephone calls went unanswered (I have got better things to do than be on hold for 20 minutes). By the end of the day, the situation had not been resolved.
This morning, nothing had changed. A telephone call to support gave no further information, although I did manage to speak to a very uninterested individual who was able to give me no answers and didn’t seem to care that his customers were losing money by not being able to send and receive email, or have their websites visible to the world. After all, it’s not like we pay them lots of money each year for the privilege of being their customer!
The problem was finally corrected around 1pm this afternoon, about 30 hours after I noticed it and up to 40 hours after it may have first happened. I still have not been able to get a good explanation of what the problem was; the person I spoke to about 3pm muttered something about firewalls. There are two things that amaze me about this whole situation. First is that an ISP in this day and age does not have redundancy built into their hardware to take up slack on occasions like this; surely they must have a back-up of everything at a different site which they can re-route everything to?
Second - and more importantly - is that they don’t care. “Oh, a bunch of websites were down, some emails have been lost. Never mind. It’s only the Net. It’s not important. Compensation? No, mate!” As a small company, one of hundreds of thousands in the UK, we don’t have the resources to host the site ourselves so rely on companies like this. They know this and are laughing all the way to the bank.
Usbport.sys - Update
Back on 29 June, I wrote a post detailing my experiences with a constantly locking-up Windows laptop. For no reason, it would freeze and need to be restarted. It would do this whether I was running one application or five, or even if the PC was just sitting there doing nothing.
By chance, I came across usbport.sys and changed the version of the file from the SP2 one back to the SP1 version. The result seemed to be good and that’s when I wrote the post.
This post is just to update you a little bit. Changing usbport.sys definitely helped the PC lock-up less and, initially, seemed to have solved the problem completely. That did not prove to be long-lasting, though. Whilst never going back to previous levels, the laptop did return to its bad ways. About once every four or five days of use I’d get an unexpected BSOD - usually with some reference to IRQL_NOT_ EQUAL - which seems to be quite common for Windows users.
My solution has been to change my old laptop for a nice shiny new iMac and it is a solution that has been 100% successful and I would recommend it to everyone.
Having the Audacity
Since moving to the Mac, I’ve been discovering lots of different software. One of the most useful so far is called Audacity.
Audacity is a free utility that lets you turn your old analogue music (you know, cassettes, vinyl, etc) into shiny 21st Century digital media - all at the click of a button. I’ve been looking for just this for ages now, but didn’t want to spend too much money on it - I’ve only got a small number of tapes and vinyl LP’s that I’d want to transfer over. So, I saw this mentioned in a blog post (which I now can’t find) and thought I’d give it a go.
Once you’ve downloaded (there are versions for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows) the software and installed it all you have to do is connect up your source. I’m using an old tape deck that I picked up cheap a few months ago. I’ve connected the left and right outputs on the deck to my Mac’s input socket using a two-into-one cable. To record, just run Audacity start your source and click the big red button. That’s it.
When you’ve finished recording (I’m transferring my old Jasper Carrott tapes at the moment so each recording takes 45 minutes), you’ve then got the option of what to do with the file. You can export as .WAV, .MP3 or Ogg Vorbis. I haven’t tried that last one, and to make MP3’s directly from Audacity requires a plug-in that looked a little complicated to install so I export as .WAV. I then open the file in iTunes and convert it to MP3 from there. Job done.
I only started using this software the other day, so haven’t had a chance to really delve deeply into it and see what it can do but so far I’m really quite impressed. I’m fairly sure that it also has more advanced features like removing noise, etc, which I’ll want when I start moving some of my vinyl over. I’ll keep you posted on how I get on.
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
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