The other day I downloaded and installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate.

Big mistake.

What had been a very reliable, happy computer, turned into a crash-prone bug monster.  Windows Explorer didn’t start properly (no response from the start menu, system tray or task bar); when killed and restarted with Task Manager the system generally had about four or five minutes before locking up completely.  And disk usage was through the roof - it reminded me of the classic “swap of death” that plagued Windows 3…  until it seized completely, of course, with even the mouse pointer frozen to the screen.

After about my seventh or eighth reboot, without being able to actually use my computer, I decided to uninstall the service pack.  Which, without being able to get to control panel very easily, was a bit challenging.  Eventually, I restarted in safe mode and used system restore to get it back off.

This doesn’t bode well, I’m thinking.  Microsoft have already released a “release candidate refresh“, which apparently solves only installation issues. Well, ironically, I didn’t have any issues installing - I just downloaded the offline version and it sat there and did it; it’s only after it was installed that the problems started.

I don’t remember a service pack causing a problem before XP service pack 2, which completely destroyed the installation on my fiancee’s computer, necessitating a nice clean re-install.  I’m hoping that SP 1 doesn’t do the same for Vista.  But I’m by no means convinced that it won’t.

Oh, and before you ask, I have now gone back to non-SP1 Vista.  And everything is running along very nicely again, thank you very for asking.

Years ago, I used to collect 78 rpm records.  And through them, I discovered a singer called Herbert Payne.  He used to sing very odd things - “Amazon, River of Dreams”, “The Lisp of a Baby’s Prayer” - and at the age of about nine or ten, I really enjoyed them.  A few years ago I came across a tape of them I made and guess what…  I still like them.

So, bearing in mind these recordings are almost certainly public domain by now, where to find them?  Well, they’re easier to find than you think…  Turns out he is not only a lot more prolific than I thought, he started recording earlier than I thought - on wax cylinders, no less.

The obvious place to start was The Internet Archive, but from there I got fortuitously distracted by The Cylinder Archive, Norman Bruderhofer’s lovingly put together archive of wax cylinder recordings.  From there I found Glenn Sage’s excellent site tinfoil.com, then UCSB’s archive.  UCSB had several recordings from Herbert Payne and one by Ernest Pike which mentions - in passing - “a.k.a Herbert Payne”.

So there it was.  Turns out Payne was Pike after all.  Turns out Pike was involved in the first recording of
HMS Pinafore, released on eleven cylinders in the early 1900s.

So, after twenty years or so, I now actually know more one of my favourite singers than I did before.  And if you want to hear him in action, I can recommend Roses of Picardy.

I first wrote one of these lists in about 1996.  I thought of a new one tonight…  see if you can guess which one.

You know you’ve been in IT too long when…

• …you double-click the light switch and wonder why the lights went off again.
• …you can not only tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, you usually spit when after saying “the A word”.
• …the staff in McDonald’s ask if you want “the usual”.
• …your light reading matter is by Kernighan and Ritchie.
• …you can still remember the cheat codes for Doom, Quake and Sim City.
• …you have to convert sums into hexadecimal in order to get them right.
• …you think of “the axis of evil” as SCO, Intel and Microsoft.
• …a police officer asks for your licence and you hand over a copy of the GPL.
• …you see a printout of directory from an ftp site and know where it came from.
• …when someone mentions ghosts, you immediately think of imaging software.
• …you tell someone you crashed your car, and you really mean you fouled up the electronics.
• …the last thing you “cooked” was a microprocessor.

I’m sure there’s more great examples.  Please feel to reply with any more you can think of…