Andy Ramblings

I was going to start this, by saying it was a bleak Thursday morning, but it wasn't, it was quite sunny, It was a day for which a number of people had been looking forward to, with trepidation, I guess, as the justice system can be a bit fickle. I went along to the magistrates court, to be with some very good friends, to offer support. Rachel North and Dan who were both victims of FJL.

To quote from Rachel.

' I would like to thank everyone who has supported me - my husband, family, friends, other bloggers, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. It has been a difficult year for me and Lowde's other victims. However, as she has said that she is going to appeal, it is not over yet, so I have no further comment to make''.

What was more interesting was what the judge said about harassing over the internet, was that this is worse than if one was to harrase you via a mobile phone, phone, silent call or via e-mail. A blog is a public place, I would say it would be akin to harrassing someone in the street, with a megaphone where everyone can hear what you are saying. But I guess that's not as bad, as people will only hear it once, but on a blog, that is searchable, some employer is doing a search on you, and finds this kind of post, what is their opinion?  Seriously, I'm glad that the judge said the harassing via the internet is far worse!

I am very happy for everyone who was affected, I do hope that they can get on with their live, business with out worrying about FJL.. She was given a mother of all ASBOs

 

Lowde, described in court as a serial harasser with previous convictions, and numerous victims, was yesterday given a restraining order,which prevents her from contacting me directly or indirectly, or writing or commenting about me in any medium. This restraining order will remain in place until it is ordered to be changed by a Judge, so it can be life-long. The separate post-conviction ASBO prevents Lowde from harassing her previous legal-aid defence team, the prosecuting lawyers, the investigating police, my father, and well over a dozen of her other victims. This will remain in place for 5 years, or until it is changed or revoked following any appeal.

 

Once we left the court, there was much rejoicing, and well, my first experience of Sushi, fab food, maybe not the raw fish, but it was great!

That's the FJL story but to rest, she is down for 6months, if she breaches the ASBO, it will be to the high court, and well, many more years in the slammer.

Warning, this is Geekdom!

I've been pondering on this for the past few weeks, how can I make my backups faster onto my NAS drive (Network Attached Storage), I've had one that runs at a normal office LAN speed of 100Mbps. This is fine if you copying files or opening files from a NAS drive, it's when you want to do a big 150GB backup, that this just takes hours! I, for one, am not a great person for waiting for things to happen, well, OK, only in computers, I like things to, you know, happen.

So, I checked the specs of my PC, and noted that it's able to go at 1000Mbps, ie 10 times faster than the current normal LAN speed. An idea forms in my wee brain, If, I can have a network that runs at 1000Mbps then doing these backups should be a hell of a lot faster. Now I needed to check what I would need, so formed my shopping list.

• 3 x cat6 cable
• 1X Gigabit hub
• 1x NAS drive

The cabling is important, OK, I got CAT6 I could have using CAT5e, but better have top notch cable, and have future speed potential of 10Gbps. Always better to have more than less in this case.

Next, the hub, yes, for your gigabit lan, you can't use your normal ADSL router as that only runs at 100Mbps not matter what you try and do, it just won't run at 1000Mbps. I got the Netgear GS605 (info on hub here and you can buy it here.) pretty cheap and well, very easy to setup, just plug it in, power it up and off you go. OK, you need to get that old cable that was connected to your PC, from the ADSL router and put that into the Netgear GS605, otherwise, you won't have access to the internet!

And finally, you need the NAS drive. There are a lot out there but a few that are good. I checked out the following:

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Well, not really, I personally believe that it's the spawn of the devil, it's the worst thing that has ever ever come out from the Microsoft office stable. There is a fine art in how to do one, the video below, shows you many how not too's. I would say about 99% of the ones that I have seen have left me pretty darn close to comatose.

I will leave you to chuckle away at the video below....

Life After Death by PowerPoint

 

 

 

Well, A loooong time ago when I was a kid, I used to really like the old Muppets, you know, Jim Henson, this tune below, is a darn earworm of a catchy tune.