menu.

I’m graduating on Wednesday and have been looking about town (Belfast) for somewhere to have a meal afterwards to celebrate with the family. I’ve been round a few places (Yum looks like the favourite at the moment) and now Bourbon has been suggested. “Good idea!” I thought. I’ll just check their menu on their web site.

Unfortunately that’s easier said than done. It’s all fine until you hit the back button to go back from the Set Menu to the A la Carte one. You see the site is a wholesale abuse of Flash and it reminded me of an 8 year old article called Flash is Evil. The article may be getting on a bit, but every word’s as true now as it was then.

Flash has it’s uses and designing entire web sites (particularly web site navigation) is not one of them.

I recently noticed that my CPU fan on my Acer Aspire 5002 WLMi notebook was running at full speed much more than it normally should and the system itself was running more slowly than usual. When I opened task manager I was finding a process called Monitor.exe was hogging anything up to 99% of the CPU. I terminated the process and that solved everything - usually until I rebooted.

But what to stop this happening again? It turns out that monitor.exe was related to Acer eRecovery - a tool that helps recover your laptop from a major crash. However after a bit of googling I found out that it needs the D: partition that comes with the laptop (apparently it needs to be in FAT32 as well, but I don’t think this is true because mine had been NTFS for months and I hadn’t noticed any problems).

The problem seemingly arises because I recently reformatted the D partition into a few ext3 and other partitions for installing Linux (Ubuntu to be precise). Since Windows can’t read Linux filesystems, eRecovery can no longer find the D: partition which it, for some reason, seems to need.

Simple solution? Well I disabled Monitor.exe using Start -> Run -> msconfig and disabling Monitor.exe, which was listed at the bottom of the list under the Startup tab.

Don’t you hate those disgustingly easy quiz “questions” on TV? IIRC the reason for the simple questions is that the TV companies can charge people to enter a competition but avoid lottery regulations by claiming there is an element of “skill” in the game.

Anyway, at 2AM this morning while working on a web site I spotted this beauty of a jumbled footballer’s name on Channel Five’s “Five US” channel courtesy of Quiz Call. And at the very least I counted 300 odd suckers who entered this in the space of 5 minutes.

As if the “mystery” footballer wasn’t easy enough, they gave the following clues (among others):

• He plays for Man United
• He transferred to Man Utd. from Everton
• He’s involved with Colleen whatserface

I ask you, with questions like this, who are they trying to kid? I don’t remember exactly what lottery laws they’re trying to avoid, but I thought Ofcom (or someone) were supposed to be clamping down on this abuse. Clearly doing a bang up job there.