| Ben's profileBen & BecsPhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
Ben & Becswww.benandbecs.com - our little home on the Web June 07 Second scan...Well, bec is 21 weeks pregnant and we went for our scan this week
and it`s......A BOY!!!!!!! We are SO excited and thankful that he is
healthy and everything seems to be growing and developing as it
should! Lots of people have asked us why we wanted to find out what
the sex of the baby was and we would like to share with you why....
About 5 ish years ago before we were married Bec was really
worried about whether she would be able to have chiildren due to some
complications with her ovulation and period cycle. Obviously she was
really concerned about how this would affect us and how we would feel
knowing we were getting married with the prospect of not having a
family. If any of you know Bec at all you will know that she LOVES
children and having a family is really important to her.......so she
worried for a while and prayed for help with this anxiety and asked God
to help her to trust him more with our future. God did something
amazing and has never before or since spoken to Bec in this way
again....... One night about 2am she had a dream (and she never
dreams!) where God told her that we would have a boy and that we should
call him Isaac. He also spoke about further family....but that is for
another time!!!! She rang me up straight away at 2am in the morning
and we shared this together, wrote it down and then just kept it close
to our hearts until we felt it was right to share it with people. When
we did get pregnant we wanted to tell some people so that we could
testify to how good God is and how much he is involved in our lives!
We really felt it important to step out in faith and trust God in what
he had said to us, so things started to be made and bought in blue!!!
Some people have thought that we were mad or taking a chance on the
50:50 chance, but in our hearts we knew that this dream was from God.
...So this week has been AMAZING to confirm that God`s plan of
our son is true and confirmed! We are so, so, so happy and look
forward to the day that we can share this with Isaac so that he knows
that he was thought of by God even before we had thought about him!!
We hope that this will encourage you to listen for God`s voice - it is not always easy, we don`t always hear him right, and it is often hard to work out whether it is God speaking or just us! However He does speak and wants to speak to us about the ordinary and the amazing details of our lives. Enjoy the pictures of Isaac.... in one he is smiling!! The scan
was such a detailed look at him it was amazing. We saw his teeth buds,
lips, nostrils, fingers, toes, ears, heart chambers, liver etc
etc....all fully formed, now just in growth mode!! June 02 Sony... taking a leaf out of Microsoft's bookSo, after a painstaking few days of trying to get help in order to get help from Sony (sound daft? well it was!) I eventually got through to Sony's help Centre. Their support lived up to all of my expectations - which as you can imagine was very low to start off with!
The thrust of it is that Sonys response is that if the machine still had roblems after restoring the unit back to factory defaults, it would have to go away back to sony for a repair as it was hefinately hardware. That's great (not!) this was their response despite the fact that if you google the error that I was getting (No TV Signal intermittantly) then a number of people can be found discussing their experience of this. Microsoft had released a patch for media centre that "in some cases" solved this issue, and others had reported success by changing their DVB TV receiver card for another manufacturer - not that the card was technically "faulty" but more that the newer or alternative card had a better sensitivity/reception than the first. Others had reported that problems present in MediaCentre 2005 disapeared when they installed Vista Home Premium.
So I started about a plan (not one to end the world you understand, but a plan never the less). Upgrading to Vista Home Premium was already becomming attractive - now it has been out six months or so other vendors are starting to support it (drivers and software etc) and indeed on Sony's site there were drivers for the hardware available for download. but if I was going to upgrade to vista, I needed to ensure that memory was not going to be a problem, and as the machine only came with 1GB and this was really a recommended Vista minimum, an upgrade was in order. In addition, if I every needed to send the unit back to sony, restoring factory defaults was going to be a necessity to prove that it was not software, and I didn't want to lose all our media in the process - so an alternative Hard disk was in order.
Needless to say all this has now been achieved. I have a nice new spanking 400gb hard disk (ought to be enough for the time being - if not There are 2 more slots for hard disks
 ) I have upgraded the memory to 3GB (this is what sony says is the maximum - why they limited the BIOS to only support 3GB and not for 4GB I will never understand!) and Vista Home Premium.So far so good. all works rather nicely so far, quite quick (Vista's performance index rates the system as "4.8" which is determined by the lowest value which in my case is the processor - I have a Core 2 Duo 6300 - which is a pair of 1.83ghz cores) vista has not crashed as of yet and my media is all coppied accross and recognised (automatically added with meta data so the unit thinks it recorded it and has detailed program information).
I have subsequently removed the old hard disk and labeled it so that if the unit ever needs to go back for any reason, I can put the origional hard disk back.
So far the old symptoms have not repeated themselves however on a final note, a collegue of minewas having similar problems on vista but due to poor signal - he has now bought a Hauppauge twin tuner card and this has sorted him out - if it works for the next 2 weeks, I'll invest in one as my only drawback in that we only have one tuner card.
All this done in 24 hours - rather than sonys 2" weeks back to base" after a format and re-install a-la microsoft ! May 22 Sony...just about the worst service...EVER!You know, most people (like me) would have benieved that the reason that there is such a large difference in price between one brand and another might indeed be the service (one might hope!) so that when you pay over the odds for a premium manufacturer, you get the backup and support from them that helps justify the price. Indeed this has been my experience with cars - I have owned 2 BMWs and at any point in time if there was any issue, I could happily call my local dealer who were very helpfull - and indeed servicing was far cheaper than I would have imagined ( most services were £199 and the most expensive service was £299 - for a BMW?!)
In this frame of mind, at a time that we were thinking of buying a Media Centre I decided that we would be in the best possible light buying a TV and Windows MediaCentre all from the same manufacturer and if there was any problem - they could never say " oh well it's the fault of the other bit" or "theyre not designed to work together" etc. So we bought a Sony VAIO.
Now for the past couple of months (well to be honest almost since we received the thing) the media centre has had a fault. It would play recorded TV as if there was a scratched disc in the drive where it would skip a bit or the picture would pause for a second or so while the sound carried on. Now I thought that this could be a problem that the PC was doing something else however after talking to numerous other friends with Media Centre PC's (which are far less powerfull) they say that they can record multiple channels at the same time, and navigate the unit and never have any issues like this. To make matters worse occasionally the unit displays "No TV Signal" on a blue screen for a few seconds - if this happens when the unit is just about to start recording if will not record anything at all. as you can imagine this is VERY annoying. However the TV is ALWAYS fine and never exhibits any of these symptoms.
So I decide to call Sony. Firstly the Sony Centre do a nice job of washing their hands of any issue by saying that all support needs to be done direct with sony, and that they are effectively just a sales centre and cannot help (thanks!). I need to register before I can get help. So I try and Register via the phone number given - they answer the call, puts me on hold with music, and then the system cuts me off. I tried this 7 times and got bored! Then I try and Register via the web - it asks for a serial number in a format of xxxxxxx - xxxxxxxx which is not on the box. Anywhere. there are however 2 other numbers (these are alpha numeric), but the site then tells me that neither of these are in fact the serial number.
And I cannot call the helpline until I have registered - the helpline again expects me to enter the serial number via the keypad before I can speak to anyone.
Would you expect this level of service from a premium manufacturer - from Sony?? - I don't even think that PC World would be this bad!
So now I'm off to go figure out how the heck I am supposed to get support, when I can't even speak to someone for assistance in getting support!! April 10 Video of baby in Womb!We've managed to get video of our little baby in the womb - check it out on the bottom right hand side of the page! ...No I'm not Robbert!I find it more than somewhat disturbing in this modern day and age that something so important (like your medical details) can be lost or confused with someone elses.
Shortly after Bec and Went to book a midwife appointment, the hospital sent us some labels - these are the type that you may see on the outside of a prescription bottle however we were somewhat concerned that they had managed to Bec's date of birth wrong (23rd Jan 1980). So we called up the GP and notified them, and they assured us that this would be rectified. A few days later in the post we now received some new labels with her date of birth correct... but the wrong address on them (yes you are reading this correctly - they printed one wrong address on 40 labels, and then put them in an envelope with a completely different but correct address on it to send to us) - again a short phone call to the GP and they informed us that they would rectify this. A few days (plus 2 phone calls, and 3 sets of labels) we now had the right labels!
Imagine my surprise therefore when Bec and I turned up to the Rosie to have our first scan. Hello Rebecca Rexworthy can I just confirm your date of birth..." <answer> "...erm no I have your date of birth as 23rd Jan 1980..." after we educated the kind receptionist that in fact we were right and Bec's birthday was in fact not 23rd Jan 1980 and that this was not the first time that the hospital got this wrong it was my turn... "... and can I just confirm your next of kin is your 'partner' Robbert..." erm No. I am not Robbert (at this point as you can imagine we were getting slightly concerned) I gladly pointed out that in fact we were married (which as you might have spotted makes me Bec's "husband" and that my name is Benjamin Rexworthy (yes I know it's odd that we have the same surname but let's just play along ok?) It was only as she closed the file and placed it on the desk that I spotted another patient's name on the cover "Rebecca Gardner" - a lady with a very similar name to Bec's Maiden name. When I pointed this out the lady looked up this other woman on the computer, and lo and behold she had the same patient number! We then checked and confirmed that a lot of the contents of the file were in fact nothing whatsoever to do with Bec, and some were! The Hospital had mixed 2 patient records up into one and then provided 3 seperate patient records for 2 people and all were allocated wrongly!
It's not as if it's important or anything after all they're only MEDICAL RECORDS! It's not like Bec might be alergic to anything like... lets say... anesthetic (which she is) - Bottom line, worst case scenareo - life and death decisions are made on the information that is available ...and its wrong!
Anyhow the Hospital have now prommised us that they will resolve this issue and then allow us to verify that Bec's file contains only the right information!
...anyhow take a look at our little bump! Some Breaking News...After a short wait (in approximately 6 months and 8 days time) we will be the proud owner of a little noisy (and somewhat pooey) addition to our family! Yes we've managed to maintain the plants, and cats that we've had so far and now feel like we'll give kids a go! ... Seriously though we are delighted to tell you all that we are pregnant (I say we in a very triumphant sense as it did after all take both of us for this little achievement!) Rexworthy Junior (or version 2 to us techies of the world!) will be arriving on 18th October ..or thereabouts. Bump has been very kind to mummy so far and hasn't caused too much distress - with only 48 hours of morning sickness and 2 weeks of waking up in the middle of the night feeling hungry. The one difficult thing to bear so far (for those of you who know Bec and I well) has been how tired and exhausted Bec has constantly been feeling - however this is now starting to subside (yipee!) as we come to the close of the first 3 months. (scary or what - we are already 1/3 of the way through pregnancy!) We'll try and keep you posted as and when we have news (Ben is making a real renewed effort with the blog!) April already!Well it's been a busy year of highs and lows already - and I think that there's alot more to come this year! It started in January with the news that I had passed my CISSP Exam (no one was more shocked than me!) Hurrah! (Unfortunately this was quickly followed by the news that Bec's Gran had died. Then within a month Bec's other Gran passed away. ...and I've been really bad at keeping this Blog up to date (for all of you out there who check it regularly... who are you?!) so a big appology to you all! December 27 Intensive Training!Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP for short) is the highest vendor independant IT Security qualification attainable, so I had to work hard! The course involved a week long intensive training starting at before 9 in the morning and ending often at later than 10 in the evening for 5 straight days - then a mock exam, a review day followed by exam day - 6 hours straight! The mock exam showed prommise with me getting 87% (pass mark of the exam is 70%) however during the week many questions were asked regarding country specifics like US "orangebook" standards and if we would need to know them in depth - to which we were told that we would not need to know these things for the exam. However come the final exam and the nightmare began - tons of questions of material that we had not covered and specifics that we were told not to waste our time on as we would not be asked on them! - I now fear that I will have achieved 50% at very best and failed the exam!  I won't get my results for 6 weeks so the torment is killing me. My only positive is that the surroundings were really beautiful and I made some good friends - Tarso Calixto you're an amazing guy!Check out the photo's! December 01 Alias - The end of an EraAt long last and after a long wait, we've received Alias Season 5! - being massive Alias fans, i'm sure it won't take long for us to consume this whole series (we already know that there's going to be a list of our friends who will want to borrow this from us - Matt & Hannah, Rachel & James, Nick and Nathan all for starters!) There are only 17 episodes (on 5 disks) rather than the usual 22 so I think we're on for an intense couple of weeks! (erm to be honest, we received it on monday and have watched 9 episodes already!) November 29 Vista's Here (well, not for you just yet!)Tomorrow (November 30th) Microsoft will release the 2 versions of Windows Vista aimed at businesses (Business and Enterprise). Unfortunately consumers will have to wait until 30th Jan 2007 to get hold of Home Premium and Ultimate editions.
Windows Vista will be released in six different Versions (although this sounds like a lot, XP has nearly as many with Home, Professional, Media Centre, Tablet Edition and Embedded) These will be: Starter, Home, Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate
However I now have 'Ultimate' installed and operational and can say that so far it is far more stable than the RC1/2 beta's. The availability of MediaCentre components is also a nice addition. I must say the the boot time is quicker, but the drain on resources (especially for Aero) is quite dramatic - yes it looks nice, but what an overhead!
Next to install is Office 2007... which has also just arrived (also due for release tomorrow!) |
|
|||||||
|
|
