The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

The Future of Work

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There is a very big company in the outsourcing industry called oDesk.  I learned about them a few years ago when I was looking at outsource projects back then.  I’ve used them a bit and they have a fantastic product. 

They put a video out on Youtube recently called the Future of Work. It’s very good.  Here it is if you haven’t seen it:

The link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Yt4wxSblc

For the past few years, you could definitely see the tide turning.  Maybe there will soon be a world where the majority of people don’t have work which makes them put on a suit and commute for hours every day.  I’m glad that other companies believe that and are working towards it.

Like Zorro

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One of my favourite movie quotes is from the movie Jerry Maguire.  It’s not my favourite movie (that’s Goodfellas, if you’re interested), but it’s up there. 

There’s a scene in the movie where Jerry (Tom Cruise)  and Rod Tidwell  (Cuba Gooding Jr.)  are sitting on an airplane while Jerry is getting drunk.  Jerry is wallowing in his misery and feeling sorry for himself and telling Rod that he can no longer help him because he (Jerry) is “cloaked in failure”.  Rod is frustrated with Jerry’s sudden lack of confidence:

Anybody else would have left you by now, but I’m sticking with you.  I said I would. And if I got to ride your ass like Zorro, you’re gonna show me the money.

I’ve seen the movie a few times, and that line always sticks with me.  There are times when everyone loses their nerve or their confidence drops.  Hopefully when that happens, someone close, usually out of frustration and being tired of hearing your self-loathing B.S., pushes you on.

My Windows 7 problems and the solutions

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I upgraded to Windows 7 a few months ago and have had a handful of issues on my desktop PC because of it.  I love the new OS, and would not want to go back to XP (I left Vista ages ago), so I had to try to figure out why these problems were occurring.  It was a lot of frustration going through forums and trying to find out what was going on. 

So, I’m going to post a few links here about the problems I had and where I found the resolutions.  I’ve installed Windows 7 64bit on a Dell Dimension 9150 with 4gb ram.

Wired Ethernet connection kept dropping and showing up as “Unidentified Network”

This was strange.  I would be sitting and working and then the connection would go down and it would take about an hour of faffing about to get it to come back up.  I found a lot of different possible fixes for this, but none of them worked.  I was having simultaneous trouble with my Orange Livebox at the same time (I was never sure which was the culprit). 

This problem was eventually solved by disabling the Bonjour service used by Apple.  I’m a bit annoyed by this, as I have some applications that use it—but it’s not nearly as annoying as having to chase down a problem with my network adaptor ever couple of days.

PC would not hibernate without rebooting. 

I would try to hibernate and the machine would reboot and switch back on.  I depend on hibernate because I need my machine to turn on at different times of the night to perform backup tasks on my web servers.

The problem had to do with my mouse having the ability to wake up my pc.  The problem is outlined here.

Skype Freetalk Everyman Headset would not always work.

I bought the Skype Freetalk Everyman USB headset to use with Skype.  It works great—when it does work.  I had a problem where the PC would only identify the headset about 40% of the time.  The Freetalk website is absolutely rubbish and there are a lot of people out there (as I’ve seen in forum after forum) who can’t get this to work either.

I fixed this by installed an application called “Universal Link” which I downloaded from the InstoreShop Support pages.  This was incredibly difficult to find.  I don’t know why there is no way to find this from their home page.  I noticed that my product was called TALK-5115 on my invoice and searched on that.  I found a driver on this page.  It seems to work fine now.

 

I hope this helps someone.  I spent hours looking for solutions to these problems.  My laptops haven’t suffered any of them.  Now, my only concern is the fan kicks into high speed far too often for my liking . . .