Trish Safe And Sound In Melbourne

I drove Trish to the Maroochydore Airport (about 30 minutes away) in plenty of time for her to catch her plane down to Melbourne on Wednesday morning. There has been a highway upgrade which now makes entry to and from the airport a breeze. Trish had a baggage weight limit of 15kgs and easily got under that with 14.8kgs!

After dropping her off I popped in to see a Computer Club guy (Peter Gilks) and spent much of the day there sorting out his movie downloads and updating Security on his second laptop computer. Peter has invited me back for a meal while Trish is away. After updating his firewall I had to sort out his Firewalls to allow each computer to see the other on his home network.

Thursday morning Tony and I did a 20k bike ride (we had missed out on a ride Wednesday morning). Then it was bottle washing time which was hampered by cool overcast weather. Later that afternoon I was back to Tony's again. His new laptop came with a free Computer Security package for the first month. The month is almost over so we had to remove that package and reinstall other anti-spyware, anti-virus and good firewall software.

I caught up with Trish, Kate and Arj as well as the grandchildren on Skype Thursday evening.

Another 14 k bike ride today in fresh but sunny weather got the day off to a brisk start.

My computer continues to shutdown without a problem. The rogue startup program was one called D-Weather, a small utility designed to keep you updated with the very latest weather information from the Australian Bureau Of Meteorology. It is a very small program being only 2mb in size. However it had not been designed specifically for Vista and was an XP approved program. Since uninstalling it my shut downs have been much quicker and always perfect.

I still get the occasional startup glitch but a quick restart always gets things running perfectly. I am a relieved guy, a reformat was going to be my next plan of attack!

I have discovered a new website for buying stuff. It is called DealeXtreme and is situated in Hong Kong. The camera battery for our older Fuji camera no longer holds a charge and a genuine Fuji replacement cost is well over $40. I had previously bought a replacement battery (non-genuine) via eBay and it didn't quite fit as snugly into the camera as the original. This created a dubious contact with the camera so it would often fail. I have just ordered another replacement (non-genuine) which will cost me a total of AUD$12-20 from DealeXtream. This website allows people to give a 'review' on items they have purchased and one of the reviews says the product is better than the genuine Fuji battery. I now have to wait three weeks till it arrives by air-mail.