Winding up

It is with a heavy heart I am writing this week to tell you that I have become the latest victim of the financial downturn that has hit this country. As I told you in my last post, Milo our chocolate lab has got a problem with his eye. The vet's bills from that have added up to just short of £1,000. That wouldn't have been a problem if Sainsbury's Pet Insurance had paid out on time as they have in the past. This time they have been messing about asking for Milo's full medical history although they have known him as long as we have had him, sending the claim forms back for more information that they had already been given and acting as though we were making a fraudulent claim. This has caused both us and our vet some serious heartache because we (and our vet) don't see our pets as financial liabilities which is why we have insurance on them. However at a time like this the pet's needs come first and we argue with the insurance company later.

I always try to carry a float so that if something like this goes wrong I can pay the bills as they come in and chase insurance companies later but this time my float has been eroded by one of our other pets having a huge abscess on her jaw at the same time - more vet's bills. Again normally the float covers all these things but recently I have been having cash flow problems with customers being very slow to pay their invoices so I have been borrowing from Peter to pay Paul so to speak.

The crunch came when we had to cancel our holiday because I needed the money to pay the vet. Some of our slowest payers were on holiday having a good time and sending me email requests and instructions for more work together with photos of themselves enjoying their break. This was the straw that broke the camel's back because when I started working with computers my wife had said that she didn't mind what I did as long as my activities didn't effect the bills being paid and our family life wasn't curtailed by them. Having to cancel the holiday we both badly need was seen as my activities doing just that.

Omega Cottage will close for new business on 1st September. I will miss the work and the friends I have made in the years I have been trying to help folk to get the best out of their computers. It is going to be a wrench stripping down and selling off the infrastructure I have enjoyed so much building here in my study but there is no point keeping more than a single computer as I will not need the servers and Macs I have now to do the bit of web surfing and maintenance on my personal web site.

Thanks to all of you who have been customers and friends down through the years, I will miss you.

Milo in trouble - again

Three weeks ago we took Milo to the vet to have a wart taken from his left eye. According to our vet it was a simple procedure that should take about ten days to heal. Milo in a bucket is not a nice animal to have around. He is so clumsy that his bucket looks as if it has been run over by a tank and the walls and doors around our home look as it has been the site of a demolition derby. As you can see Milo is a Chocolate Labrador. They are not the most graceful of dogs at the best of times, add a bucket and you have a lethal moving object. He has knocked us off our feet more than once and we are covered with bruises from the edges of the bucket. Thankfully when we took him to the vet this morning, Aunty Margret (our vet) confirmed that the ulcer is at last beginning to heal.

With everyone away on holiday it is very quiet here with no books or scripts needing work. However I do have a web site request from a firm that has rebuilt our conservatory roof, replaced the windows and generally tidied up and refurbished the whole conservatory. The firm is Calder Windows and I can thoroughly recommend their services and workmanship. You will find their website (draft version) at http://www.calderwindows.co.uk.

While things are quiet I am adding some more templates to my templates page. I have downloaded 20 or so new templates that I think folks may find interesting and give them some ideas of what their web site may look like. Over the next few days I will add them to my site and you can browse through them.

It is the time of year when I go looking at prices for car insurance. I was directed to the SAGA web site and the quote it gave was very attractive, almost £70 less than Direct Line's quote. The way SAGA quote is you give them the registration number of your vehicle and they identify it from a database based on the DVLA one that is used by most if not all of the Insurance companies to guard against fraud. The database identified my vehicle as a Vauxhall Combo Tour 2000 CDTI. There is and never has been such a vehicle as Vauxhall confirmed when I rang them. SAGA couldn't or wouldn't believe that this mistake had been made and insisted on trying to insure my vehicle as a combo panel van. AS that quote came in at over £400 pounds and was again for the wrong vehicle, I gave up, gave Direct line a ring, told them what had happened and got them to reduce my quote for renewal by £40. The lesson from this tale is check carefully any legal documents you are sent as anything based on a computer is not infallible, it is just as likely to be wrong as something produced by a human being.

A New Look

One of my customers suggested that if I was offering to build web sites for people then I should have some way of showing my skills and abilities. This seemed a good idea so I built a new template (called Misty after this little lady).





I have been playing with rounded corners in CSS so the template Misty uses them. This template is a fixed width, three column page with static background. Which lends itself to lists and short paragraphs of text. It is not ideal for tutorials or articles but works just fine for a contact page (see pic on right) or a list. I already have a list of example templates on one of my sites but it had a severely plain and utilitarian background. It is only a three page site just to demonstrate the type of templates that are available for use as free downloads from the web. I don't mind using templates as a lot of hard work has been done for you and the cross platform issues have in many cases been solved. It is then a matter of adapting the template to the customer's needs by adding logos and content. To have a look at the templates go to OmegaCottage.org .

My next task is to change the apperance of the page I use to test new projects. At the moment it looks as sever as the old .org page did but I will select a very different template and adapt it to take the links to the project(s) I am currently working on then add a contact page so that folks can tell me what they think and/or ask for a quote for building a site for them. You will find the page at OmegaCottage.com .

Just a short post today - see you next week.

Setting up the new computer

The computer Jackie won has arrived. It is huge (24" x 24" x 9") and very heavy. We unpacked it and plugged it in and it proved to be as fast as was claimed. However although it was loaded with Vista Ultimate, there was no DVD or licence. Now I know that when you win something you should be grateful for what you are given but when it comes to a computer, then one without an operating system is like a car without an engine. I rang the people who built the computer and was told that it was loaded with Vista and that was that, but as a Microsoft Partner I knew it shouldn't be delivered like that.

The competition was run by PC Format so I rang them to find out just what I should have received. I was told the computer should fully complete and ready to run. I told them what state the operating system was in and that the accessory pack for the computer case was missing too. The Editor Alan Dexter told me he would contact the computer supplier YoYoTech and find out why I had been supplied a computer with an illegal copy of Vista on it.

I am glad to report that yesterday morning a parcel arrived containing all the missing bits. The computer is now up and running with a fully legal operating system and I have been able to add the wheels to the case plus a few other bits like a floppy drive. I am glad PC Format were able to sort this one but if the prize had been won by someone with less computer knowledge than my own would they have been able to argue with the builders or would they have found the computer stopped working when Vista wouldn't activate and had to go and buy a copy at the full retail price?

I have loaded all my usual software on to the computer and it all seems to run just fine. The next test is what it will do in Windows 7. Windows 7 is released on 22nd October. I have signed up at Amazon for the pre-order scheme and hopefully saved my self about £50 on the full price. I am at present using the RC 1 version of Windows 7 on two of my computers and I like it. So far I have had no problems with it as most of the hardware manufacturers are bringing out Windows 7 drivers ready for the launch. The one exception is Matrox who can not or will not say when or even if they will be bringing out Windows 7 drivers so I can't test my multi screen system using my normal P690 graphics cards. In view of this I have abandoned Matrox altogether and switch back to ATI graphic cards. I don't have the massive three screen desktop you get with Matrox but the three desktops I do get with ATI are nearly as good and whats more are reliable and stable which is more than the last set of drivers for Vista 64 bit were from Matrox.

BT Internet seems to be having problems again. Several of the people I am in touch with use this ISP and all have lost their connection over the past few days and several of them also report missing email. BT Claims there is nothing wrong but if not, where are all the missing emails?

That's it for this week - bye for now.