Hi! Holger,

On Mon, 03 Feb 14, you wrote to me:

 HG> Now all the new snow that came is gone including most of the thin
 HG> layer we had before. It's melting too because the wx forecast expects 
 HG> above zero temperatures for the entire week.

We're getting the same 'melting' here as well.  It's been drizzling (light
rain) for over 24hrs and is uncomfortable.  Not enough to look for
umbrellas or raincoats, and just enough to get a brief soaking if a person
stands in one place for a few minutes.  It's referred to as liquid sunshine
here.  Hence the melting notion.  :)

 HG> OK, if you can say XP is pretty. In my mind it's overworked but maybe
 HG> the best of late Windows versions.

Well, it runs fairly solidly here.  But I don't trust it for most of my
Fidonet stuff.  I do use an XP vBox to do a couple of nodelist-related
jobs.  One is a 'sandpit' for nodelist (segment) generation for a couple of
nets in our region, and to test Region 54's segment based on those.  And
the other is a nodelist comparison job, that compares the current week's
nodelist with the previous week's and generates a report of the differences
(a reverse engineered zone-wide 'diff', if you like).  All of my other
Fidonet stuff will not run in XP, as I rely on a few DOS utilities that
just don't run in XP.

 HG> We just has such a day here yesterday, only drizzle though, that gave
 HG> me the opportunity to fix the TV channel list of one of the TVs at 
 HG> home since we got four new HD channels added to the cable net. I had 
 HG> been fighting with this for three evenings but they were there 
 HG> momentarily only. Next time you turned on the set they were gone 
 HG> again.

:)  Yuck!

 HG> The problem was at the bottom of the second "installation settings"
 HG> where a setting of "Scan while at standby" was set ON.
After setting
 HG> this to OFF the channels stay put.

So simple.  I wish our problem was.

We seem to have a seasonal/environmental glitch here.  We have problems
with signal breakup of some sort.  It seems to happen for a few days
leading up to & around the equinoxes.  It's so bad at present that we
rely on 'closed captions' for programme dialogue for some channels, at
times.  It's either seasonal or could just be that we're in the vicinity of
a couple of heavy engineering plants (diesel long-haul & suburban
electric train manufacuring, and light machine shops supporting the
industry), plus an electric sub-station, and, we're subject to
electromagnetic interference.  We're not sure.[shrug]  However it's a short
duration thing, and is annoying at its worst for a few days in the year.

Cheers,
Paul.

... Help Conserve the Earth - it's the only planet with chocolate.
--- Paul's Win98SE VirtualBox