A couple of months back when looking to get a sponge so I could grout some tiles at home I was in the hardware store in the tiling section I found a sponge for £1.78, but I could swear I had seen cheaper elsewhere in the store so went over to the part of the same store that had things for washing cars and windows and found the same sponge for 30p.

The same thing happens with many things in life thanks to marketing… branding… whatever you may call it, don’t pay for hype and product placement pay for genuine value. Think of it as a contradiction to “You get what you pay for”.

Shop around…. even within the same shop..

One fish asks another fish “How’s the water?” The other fish replies, “what the hell is water?”

The point: it’s easy to forget that what surrounds you is only normal because it’s what you know. To others, those surroundings might seem pretty strange, try to look at things from a different perspective to get a more true vision of what something might be.

Also consider the value of “New” and “Old”, in relation to when?, if you don’t simultaneously specify at what point it was considered new then using the word new has very little value as time passes.

#justsayin….

This year we are watching “the business partner”, and it’s as delightfully entertaining as ever. Seems tomorrow is the end of the series and it looks like lots of blood is going to be shed by lord sugars henchmen.

Last week I had 10 BSOD’s crashing the hell out of my windows XP machine at work, I knew what the problem was related to though as I had created a new TrueCrypt container which was larger than the one I had been using without problem for two years now.

As my dropbox storage availability was going up, the container holding the data was staying at 4GB so I had to do something as having to move files each day due to the virtual drive filling up was becoming tedious..

I had benchmarked the fastest algorithm as AES which was not the previous one I had been using (twofish) so decided to switch to that so program file access would drag a little less…

So I have a FAT AES 6GB partition and two times a day the machine BSOD’s after years of stability. If you are having blue screens then the starting point is to download the free utility BlueScreenView to check out what those memory dumps contain which pointed out that fastfat.sys was the problematic driver.

Upgrading TrueCrypt from version 6.3 to 7 and changing the algorithm back to twofish did not help as 10 mins later it happened again.

So two days ago I decided to create a new AES NTFS 6GB partition to remove the FAT driver from the equation and two days on not a single bluescreen… fingers crossed it continues to be stable.

Another freeware program from the makers of BlueScreenView that I used years ago and think is great is ShellExView which you can use to trim the crap out of your right click menus so you can be more efficient with less clutter.

I found this on one of the blogs I subscribe to and thought I’d republish it as it’s just so brilliant, a young girl writes to a supermarket to ask why tiger bread is called so…

Click the images to enlarge