All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Defridgeration

Food, Hardware, Life

Last weekend, our refridgerator started showing a warning signal that something wasn’t quite right and by midweek it had decided it was a good time to stop refridgerating.

When it stopped cooling properly, I opened up the phone book and started calling around to service people to come and fix the fridge. I naively thought that it’d be a simple process and someone would be out that same day, it turns out that wasn’t the case. After calling 15-20 different businesses, the standard responses were that they didn’t service Fisher & Paykel fridges or they were too busy.

Of the ones that did service Fisher & Paykel fridges, the soonest we might be able to get someone out was going to be the following Monday. Now comes the amazing part, of the ones that did performed fridge repairs on Fisher & Paykel, their fees varied from a $100 to $150 for the call out fee. Once they were on site, they billed a similar amount per hour for labor and of course parts were extra.

Apparently, refridgeration is a license to print money like plumbing.

27th Birthday

General, Life

Another year has lapsed and another birthday with it! A quick synopsis of the day in question:

  • Slept in and then Claire and I puddled our way down to McDonalds for breakfast.
  • Fluffed about in the middle of the day and had to head over to the shops for a few incidentals
  • Mid afternoon, Andrew, Michael, Lucy, Emily, Anita and Oliver arrived
  • We all headed to Hogs Breath on the spit for dinner at about 6pm and Brendan & Lin met us there and we consumed plenty of fine steak
  • After dinner, we returned home to eat some birthday cake and have a few drinks

A nice relaxing day and I was even lucky enough to receive some great bootie as well:

  • Bourne Ultimatum DVD
  • The Orange Box, a collection of expansions for Half Life 2
  • A ticket to go zorbing
  • A specially brewed bottle of WK-40 tailored to kill wasps after my recent encounters
  • The Dangerous Book For Boys
  • A nice blue polo shirt
  • Movie tickets
  • Lindt chocolates

Thank you to everyone who could make it up to the coast and for the phone calls and SMS’s I received. Now I just have another three hundred and sixty something days to wait for it to happen again!

HP Laserjet & Windows Vista Driver Support

Hardware, Software

I had heard that the driver support for Windows Vista was a little patchy in places, however I didn’t realise it was just so patchy.

I have a HP Laserjet 1010, which isn’t a new printer by anyones account and I expected that Vista would have picked it up on its own but that wasn’t the case. Some people might take the opportunity to stone Microsoft for not providing a driver out of the box but that isn’t fair in my opinion; you can’t expect them to support every device under the sun.

Off to the Hewlett Packard web site, where I wander my way into the driver download area. I plugin the model number of the printer expecting to see a nice list of drivers for Windows Vista, only to be told that they haven’t released them yet and that I should check back soon.

It could be just me, but when a company like HP don’t provide a driver for one of their staple home/small business printers for Windows Vista six months after it has been released – it isn’t coming anytime soon; in fact it may never come.

Fortunately, Microsoft provide a driver for the Laserjet 1015 which appears to be compatible. It’s lucky really because Hewlett Packard don’t provide a Windows Vista driver for the 1015 either.

Rebuilding Continued

Hardware

After getting stung again by a wasp on Friday afternoon, I wasn’t able to put my new computer bits together because of the Hellboy hand. Feeling a bit like an invilid, I called Brendan to see if he was able to lend me a hand.

Putting all the new components together didn’t take very long at all and it posted successfully on the first attempt! Back in July, I mentioned that I had won a copy of Windows Vista Business, so with the new found speed it seemed like a good time to give that a go. Installing Windows Vista was absolutely pain free and surprisingly fast on the new hardware.

A day later and the only thing I’m having problems with is the driver for my Netgear WG311T PCI wifi card. Once the Netgear wireless card is physically installed, I can still boot into Windows Vista without a hitch. As soon as I install the driver for the card, everything is still working – wifi included, until I have to reboot. Upon rebooting, the machine gets into the boot process and hangs for some reason. To get back into Windows, I need to boot into safe mode and disable the device.

Not sure what I’m going to do about the Netgear driver problem but once that is done, I should have a pretty sweet rig.

I’m Beginning To Hate Wasps

Humour, Life

Last weekend while weeding the garden, I found out with crystal clear clarity that paper wasps do not take kindly to being disturbed. Yesterday afternoon I was back in the garden and had another run in with some sort of critter. After the fact, I went back to investigate exactly what I’d been bitten/stung by to find out that it was in fact another wasp. This time however, they were black and orange/yellow instead of black and grey like last weekend. I was only stung once this time, however it really packed a punch and my left hand looks similar to what you’d see on the Hulk or Hellboy.