Offmessage

The course I was on was the ITIL Managers course. All pretty good stuff really, common sense formalised in a framework you can sell to your boss… Unfortunately apparently you can take it too far (as one of my colleagues discovered this morning…)

Based on the dramatic events of the Apollo 13 lunar mission, this team building day is a unique opportunity for staff to discover the value and relevance of the ITIL “best practice” service management disciplines � particularly as they relate to crisis management and Disaster Recovery. Using the experiences of the crew of Apollo 13 in a highly interactive way, our consultants will demonstrate how ITIL service management principles can be applied to the challenge of returning the crew to earth safely.

To boldly go, etc etc…

There’s a book review brewing (a few days away yet) that mutters about books that were so good and so hard to get hold of that people have at some point felt it necessary to convert them to HTML… Here’s a precursor – Albert Hoffman’s My Problem Child. I’ve been looking for a copy of this for years…

Flickr becomes Flickr!.

(Apparently) the 30 hottest things you can say to a naked woman. And then with the sentences completed.
Found at waxy.org

Apparently George Lucas plans to re-release all 6 Star Wars films in 3D (one a year from 2007 onwards). Exactly how many times can he milk that particular cash cow? More than I thought, apparently.

I’m on a course all next week – one of those residential ones, with homework – so it’s unlikely I’ll be around until Monday 21st…

Our local gym (not somewhere I regularly frequent, it has to be said) has a shop, selling gym kit, called Sweatshop, of all things. Given that it stocks entirely Nike, Adidas, Reebok and the like it kind of stopped me in my tracks. Exactly which marketing executive thought that one up?

Oh yes – all our stuff is made in sweatshops. Pretty though, isn’t it? Want it though, don’t you?

No sense of irony (or moral decency, apparently) these gym types.

So. You’ve decided to uninstall Norton Anti Virus. For whatever reason (and I can’t think of one much better than moving to something free, like AVG Free) you’ve decided it’s time and you click the magic ‘uninstall’ button. Everything appears to go OK, but then when you reboot your PC it can no longer connect to the network. This post will try and get you through it.

What’s happened is that Norton has made your DHCP client (the bit of software that actually gets an IP address for you) rely on a bit of it’s own software, but doesn’t remove that dependency when it uninstalls.

There are a couple of steps to identify this. Firstly you should open a Command Prompt (Start => Run… and then type in cmd) and type ipconfig /renew. If the results are An error occurred while renewing interface Local Area Connection: The RPC service is unavailable (2) (or something similar) this points to the problem. The next step is to open the Services list (Start => Control Panel then select Administrative Tools and then Services) and check to see if the DHCP Client is running. If you’re suffering from the Norton problem it won’t be. Try to start it (by selecting it in the list and then clicking the Start link on the left). You should get the message Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start. If you do you have suffered at the hands of Norton!

To fix it involves running regedit. This is a very powerful tool that deals with the guts of your computer, so only follow instructions unless you’re completely sure what you’re doing…

To run regedit click Start => Run and type regedit. Once regedit is running click Edit => Find… and in the text box type SYMTDI (this is the name of the service that Norton has removed, but your system still thinks it needs). Click the Find next button…

You are looking for a key (in the right hand pane) who’s name is DependOnService. Right click over the key name and select Modify. In the text box delete the whole line that has SYMTDI on it. Do not delete anything else! Click OK to save your changes and then hit F3 to search for the next value. You should find somewhere in the order of 3 to 6 instances of this key with SYMTDI in the value. Edit each one in the same way as just described. Once you are sure that you’ve removed all references to SYMTDI from keys named DependOnService close regedit and restart your computer.

You should now be able to connect to the network via DHCP! Now may be the moment to fire off a mail to Norton, complaining about the fact that a) their product won’t uninstall properly and b) it’s bundled with Windows XP – essentially tying all Windows users in unless they’re prepared to get into the depths of their machine.

Utterly pointless, but way cool
Found at Raw Feed

http://www.serioussites.co.uk/jellyvision/JellyMovies.asp