Some more open source disk recovery software, this one seems to be mostly for finding and repairing partitions. TestDisk

How to make MSIE open webdav share urls as file exporer windows. Web Folders

When it comes to preparing a bath for baby the following was divulged:

"Now i know some people get confused by numbers and things so i wont tell you what temperature, just test it with your elbow."

So this is the equivalent of giving directions to a group of people and saying something like "i know not all of you can drive, so i wont give you the address, just catch the number 23 bus, and get off at the 3rd stop" so what if i am not clueless with numbers and have a thermometer to hand, i havent been given the option now have i. And even in the dumbed down instructions no mention was ever made on what i was supposed to feel with my elbow, was it supposed to feel hot, cold, tepid, what?. sigh. I really wish people would be more precise.

It reminds me of that farce that is now the bbc weather news, a while back they decided that "the public" whoever they are, were confused by isobars and little cloud/rain/snow symbols, so they dumbed it down just about as far as they possibly could. you now get a motion sickness inducing virtual ride around a map of the county where bright bits are sunny, dull bits are cloudy and rain is wet.

Why couldnt they have put the isobars or perhaps just the weather fronts on there as well, theres a lot of people out there that DO know what they mean, and it tells you a damn sight more about what the weather is likely to be later, and why, than just a brown and soggy picture does. bah.

But onto the main subject of my rants, babies, or rather the over bearing application of "help" that you get and its utter uselessness. First off is the marketing material, i know this isnt really trying to be helpful just try to sell product, but they do add a thick gloss of pseudo-help, whilst simultaneously trying to muddy the waters even further. Take nappies as an example, you start out thinking that its a straight out choice between disposables, and those ancient fold up & safety pin jobs, but oh no, now theres hybrids [cue groan] semi disposable things, linings, stuffable things, fleecy ones, pre-folded, one piece, the list is seemingly endless, and they all have their little foibles, convenience in application often means inconvenience in washing, and so on. sigh.
Choice is usualy a good thing, but in thise case, evaluating the right choice will take more time, money and effort than will ve available before its too late and baby is past that phase.

Then theres good ole Auntie Mabel (Anti-Natal) Classes, or "parenthood" as they would like you to call it now, these seems to be predominantly targeted at those that have some how miraculously managed to miss or not read any of the mountain of literature that you are bombarded with from the outset. The first class we attended consisting entirely of repeating the content of the booklets we had already been given by the same health service. Further classes have attempted to talk about some of the options available, but mostly with a "we advise this" but without giving you any valid reasons or detail, and when quizzed about other alternatives just giving in with "its personal choice really" well thanks, that helped me make an informed choice, not.

Enough of my rantings for now, i forsee this being a rich vein to plumb, so more in the future.

One suggested issue with the current rota system is that the dates of the meeting are hard to predict for anyone that doesnt have a calendar and/or cant check the list on the site. This being an actual problem for our group is i feel, pure conjecture, but its a laudable aim so lets run with it.

The initial, and obvious answer to making dates easy to remeber is to pick a fixed day of the week, eg First Thursday of the Month. Alas, although this is easy to remeber, it has the very obvious problem of excluding those that already have commitments on that day of the week, and seeing as we have already tried this method with the carmarthen meetings, we have first hand evidence that any day chosen, that may start out as good, will in time inevitably become a problem for people. Since our main goal is to increase the number of regular attendies then this is obviously an undesirable effect.

Now, seeing as this is not the only possible solution to 'easy to remember date', it is just the most obvious one, we can simply move on and try a different suggestion. Unfortunately certain individuals seem unable to let go of this.

But i digress, lets move on to other solutions.

One suggestion was to pick a fixed week and alternate days within it, say 'Second week of the month, alternating Tue and Thu', however this requires prior knowledge of which day was used last time and thus breaks another stated aim, that of being able to determine the day by looking at just that month on a calendar.

My solution to this is to use a predictable rotation, eg '2nd Tuesday or Thursday of the month, whichever comes first' this satisfies the goals of no prior knowledge, and of shifting days, but has been decried as too complicated [shrug].

a third suggestion, which seems to be liked by many is a fixed Date of the Month, such as '23rd of the Month' but there needs to be an auxiliary rule to this to avoid weekends e.g. 'but if it falls on Fri/Sat/Sun move forward to the following Monday' so whilst the basic rule is quite simple, it does appear to come with a lot of added complexity to remember.

Further suggested solutions welcome

So i thought i should be able to keep my calendars on a central server, edit them on the server via some scripts, and also via a local copy of evolution, firefox-calendar, outlook, whatever.

Now just storing the data on a central server and retrieving it seems fairly easy, its just webdav, so thats a quick apache config hack.

There are seemingly boundless quantities of web based calendar applications, sure, many with some kind of import-export ical utility.

But when you look really hard, it seems that you cant combine all of those things. The root cause seems to be that the ical format perhaps just isnt really upto it, that you have to transfer whole calendars around, so that if theres a chance of two people editing the same one then a hideous merging problem is created, so none of the tools seem to allow you to both download AND upload the same calendar automatically.

I think i shall just have to admit defeat on the subject, and go for one of the compromises, of view and edit calendar via the web interface, and have a download only view of it via ical to evolution. shame.

Went to finish that last minute crimble shopping for family, shops are hectic as usual, but it all feels kind of wrong somehow, having had the blow-out dinner and present exchanges, and the number of sales that have started already, it seems like this should be the lull between xmas and new year.

Ah well, means theres more time for me to knuckle down to shifting all the mail and services off my old server to the nice new one, before the old one gets turned off in the new year.