Frankster’s Archive

Well g’day folks,

It has been a seriously busy time at the house of Frankster the last week and a bit, which explains my disappearance from the site.

The last couple of weeks, my two cousins from Italy (Sylvia and Jenny) came for a visit and it was really cool! They had a ball and so did we, we and the rest of the clan took them all over Sydney and surrounds and they absolutely loved it. Last wednesday they flew back out to Italy after their two week sojourn.

The same day they flew out, my dad went into hospital for a cataract operation – I’m happy to say he came through it with flying colours and is now recovering. He’s just rapt, can see everything very clearly and just loves life again. Amazing what something like that can do!

On the social side I visited a mate on friday night and he invited one of his mates over and we sat down and watch some rugby union on Fox Sports 3, then a DVD of Tonight Live Revisited (Steve Vizard) – absolutely hilarious if you’re into that sort of humour!

Dad’s cataract operation meant he had to rest for a few days, so saturday morning I took the groceries helm. Did that, came back early afternoon and went out for a bit of lunch with my sister and a drive, then came back – and this is where the bulk of my “busyness” went for 3 days.

Sis booted up her PC as usual (Acer system running Windows Vista Home Basic [yes, licenced]) and once Windows started, she lost access to both the keyboard and the mouse. Rebooted several times, it didn’t fix it.

More trying followed, continuing on for an hour afterwards when the clock made its way towards 6pm. Sis and I were planning on going to the local club and having a spin of the pokies for a while – so we did that and got back home about 9pm, where the PC work continued. No matter what I did I just could not get it to respond – one final reboot before bed (at that point 2.50 am Sunday morning) then displayed boot error. I reasoned something went wrong and the hard drive was now blank or something else weird was going on.

Sunday morning at 11am I get up and try again, remembering there was a complete backup of the whole drive on a seperate hard drive. This unfortunately didn’t get it going either. Off we went in search of the Acer product recovery discs we made when we got the computer home in late 2008. Could not find recovery discs, we were stuck.

A phone call followed to Geeks To You, a mobile computer repair service. They couldn’t do anything either when Monday came around. I then called Acer hardware support who were very sympathetic to it all and for $163 we could send the PC back to them and they would reload Windows, do the recovery etc etc. Fantastic. They send an Australia Post eParcel label to put on the box and advised to take it down to the post office to send, at no postage cost to us. (presumably included in the $163 quoted above). Computer is now with Acer or maybe tomorrow they’ll receive it where they’ll load things again and ship it back. Good.

Then after that it was time for dinner, and a recording/demo session for a mate from 2RDJ where I used to work. This happened at 7pm with a mutual friend of ours arriving to oversee everything and offer some input as to how it should be sounding. Great catchup too. Finished at 10.30pm, then straight to bed as I had to be up early the next morning.

Today comes and we get word Sis’s new workplace is ready and we move in, unpack, and it’s then up to me to connect the computers, fax, phone etc up. Find that due to the fact the phone lines were dormant it neccessitated a visit from Telstra to make them active again while keeping the same number. Fine. Place has several other business branching off the one block and phone system. Cool. Telstra guy arrives and proceeds to work making our phone connections alive. Connections are finished and all is fine – until he leaves. Voice line and eftpos work, internet and fax doesn’t. Trouble. Voice and internet (ADSL) are connected by means of a filter – voice side of the line works, ADSL part doesn’t. Possible the new connection was only provisioned for voice and not voice/data? Very weird. Try the fax line. Dialling into it makes the fax ring once, then it diverts twice – first to a recording saying “this number is not connected”, then seconds later to a voice in her best chinese accent saying hello. Uh oh. Guy from business just adjacent to Sis’s work comes running in and saying his fax works but his voice line is out. Oh my gosh..what has the telstra guy done??

Get onto Telstra – guy on line says he will send a text to our phone confirming a visit this afternoon. Text never arrives after 70 minutes. Another call made. This time told by them nah, can’t make it, it’ll have to be tomorrow. “What time tomorrow?” “Uh, don’t know”. Great…

The saga continues…’til then, another early start tomorrow, then thursday and friday off along with the weekend. Let’s hope Telstra get their act together and fix up everything properly this time. I’m stumped though.

Voice line has ADSL filter, voice works but ADSL doesn’t – as I said, possible it was provisioned for voice and not voice/data? This line however has a working Eftpos connection as well via the use of a third connection (which is probably an extension point of the fax line, I don’t know – the old place, the fax and eftpos line were together – when the eftpos was in use the fax would be offline). Weird (again).

I know, you’re due an AV update – it’s coming, bear with me, it’s been very busy recently.