Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I’ve got lots of interesting things to share today.

If you like medieval siege equipment then this YouTube video of Mongo the Trebuchet will fascinate you and if you don’t have any particular interest than perhaps just the sight of a flaming fireball being hurled through the air might. Link thanks to Geeks are Sexy.

Another “heads up” from the Sexy Geeks (pun intended) concerns Terry Pratchett and some fancy hi tech science helping him fight Alzheimers.

A Drupal group meetup is on in Brisbane next week – I’m going.

Two new OneNote blogs – from guys in the Microsoft One Note team – John Guin writes on One Note Testing and Jeff Cardon on OneNote Tips & Tricks

Hard Drive Not Found and Data Recovery with Windows Home Server another great story on why to have a Windows Home Server. We are setting up our second one now.

Windows 7. There’s been lots of build up and very little hype. The beta is out and being installed by large numbers of people. I have mine downloaded but haven’t had time to set up a test machine for it yet.

Here are some reviews blogs and other items.

I normally don’t suffer from tech woes – but – this week has been hell!

The good news is that is hasn’t affected machines I set up for clients. I set up 2 new laptops with no issues at all and delivered one – one to be delivered boxing day. Each of them has LiveMesh running successfully. When I delivered one last night I et up live mesh on their existing XP PC and synchronised their data. I then set up an old laptop of mine and a virtual machine (running in bootcamp on a Mac) and attempted to install live mesh. No joy. Tried reinstalling Vista 3 times each machine even using different SKUs. Each time Live Mesh fails to start. I have the Microsoft Live Mesh Tech Team looking at it now.

Then to top it off this morning I awake to find my backup production machine (from which I still haven’t transferred everything over to the new machine) sitting there with a blue screen of death. After restarting it and troubleshooting discovered that the main system OS which is a striped raid running on 10,000RPM drives wouldn't boot. Reason, the raid had a failed hard drive. Being a stripe there is no recovery from this. By the way – never set up your machine using a RAID Stripe for system OS unless you never store any data on that drive. I don’t. I do this to gain speed from my system. So I took both drives out, talked to the shop about the warranty, discovered that they don’t have these drives any more, they have been replaced by the 2.5” form factor drives. I will need to get it sent away and replaced. Being Christmas, that wont happen until early January now. So I whacked a 160GB drive that was sitting on my desk into the machine, booted from the Windows Home Server restore CD, (after disabling the RAID setup in BIOS), connected to the Windows Home Server and starting restoring my system. It is telling me 1 hour and 15 minutes remaining. What a blessing Windows Home Server is!

And I am trying frantically to get work one for clients before going off for my first holiday since February 2007 when I had 2 days holiday with the family and friends down at Kingscliffe in NSW. Christmas Day I fly to New Zealand to spend 3 days with my parents and siblings for a family reunion. I don’t want to think about what I need to do when I get back!

PS that’s not me in the picture – just some random lady I found when searching for tech problems. She sums up how I feel today!

Live Mesh announces an update affecting all platforms

Windows Vista SP2 hits the streets today - Sarah has a full list of the enhancements and fixes in Vista SP2

Tony Morgan posts a though provoking piece with 10 reasons why he doesn’t like most Christians. I would agree with them all.

Rodney Olsen posted this cool video about technological and futuristic trends. I have added it here also.

Time to close some tabs. Here are all the good things found since the last round up.

I completely redesigned the front end of www.rasita.biz using panels and views. What do you think? Judith is now selling reptiles as well as her cooking eCourses.

Sarah Perez posted this on live mesh wallpapers. We got them!

Are you Mesh-obsessed? Well now you can show off your devotion to the new service by displaying the Mesh logo on your computer’s desktop. You can grab the zip file for yourself from here.

Sarah also has a Q&A session on Microsoft Office Web Applications.