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. .

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.