captain support

This morning I was called because my mom’s email wasn’t working. As usual, no clear explanation of the issue was available. This sounds like a job for Captain Support!  The problem turned out to be Microsoft had switched her from the Hotmail interface to the Outlook.com interface. A quick explanation of the new interface and she bravely decided to stick with it, rather than switching back to the original Hotmail interface. I’m sure Captain Support will be needed a few times in the coming days…

I have a feeling Captain Support may be the latest addition to the Avengers lineup. Why?

One of Captain Support’s friends was having some problems trying to sign up to a bonsai mailing list because emails from the list were being rejected before they got to him. He used the special signal and Captain Support jumped into action. A little Googling revealed the Plusnet mail servers can be fussy about emails with too many people in the “To:”, “CC:” and “BCC:” lists. They apparently also get a bit cranky if emails contain lots of hyperlinks. Problem solved, so the bonsai world can sleep safe at night, surrounded by potted trees I guess…

Friends of Captain Support’s nephews were having a problem with their laptop. They were unable to use a browser to access the internet. This was a job for Captain Support…

A quick twiddle on the machine revealed that FireFox just had proxy settings messed up, but IE was totally screwed. Captain Support suspected someone had tried and failed to install IE8 and the failure had left it in a dodgy state. After much messing around Captain Support came to the conclusion that they should either forget about IE, or reinstall the whole thing. They chose the reinstall option…

All went well until the last few Windows updates were being loaded. Captain Support shouted to number 1 nephew, “Is something burning in the Kitchen?” Whilst waiting for the reply he leaned forward and sniffed the laptop, which was giving off a heavy scent of “dusty Scalextric“. Next the screen started to go black from the bottom-right corner and the smell became stronger. With a slight air of panic, the laptop was switched off very quickly. Captain Support suggested the laptop should either be sent to the manufacture for repair, or binned…

Thus ends the tale of Captain Support and the Laptop of Doom…

Cheers

Captain Support…

It’s Saturday night, South Park is on the TV and all is good. Then the phone rings…

• Mom: I was looking up the symptoms of assorted diseases on the internet so I can panic about the possibilities of my friends, family and especially grandchildren getting them, then the laptop beeped and turned itself off. I kept trying to turn it on but the fan starts, then it immediately turns itself off.
• Captain Support: It sounds to me like the power lead is not connected and the battery has run out of juice. Make sure it’s plugged in and turned on at the wall switch and it should be fine. If not, it means either a fuse has gone or the charger is bust. Check it now. Is the power lead connected?
• Mom: Yes, all three leads are connected.
• Captain Support: Describe the leads please. Are they rectangular with a prongy looking symbol on them?
• Mom: Yes.
• Captain Support: Those are USB cables, not power leads. It sounds like it’s disconnected from the power. Plug in the lead and you’ll be good to go.
• Mom: I’ve only ever had these three cables in. There are no other cables.
• Captain Support: Seriously, they are USB cables, not power leads. You must have had another lead plugged in before now.
• Mom: There has never been another lead plugged into this laptop.
• Captain Support: Check the back. Is there a round hole that looks like it could have a power lead plugged into it?
• Mom: Yes. There is a round socket. Oh, I can see a cable down the back of the desk. I pulled the desk out earlier to hoover. It must have come out.
• Captain Support: Plug it back in, then sacrifice a chicken at dawn on the altar of Captain Support and your problem will be solved.

Humans. Will they never learn?

Cheers

Captain Support…

In the morning I got a taxi over to my mate Alan’s house and the pair of us, along with his 16 year old step son Kevin, drove up the nearest hill (Victoria Peak) to have a look down over the city. The Hong Kong approach to tourist attractions seems to be, if you think tourists might come to see something, build a shopping mall next to it. I’ve added some more photos to yesterdays. The pollution in Hong Kong is pretty bad, so you will notice that anything in the distance is concealed by a haze. When you are looking at it you still get a lot of detail, but when you photograph it all you can see is the haze.

From there we drove down to the beach. It seems that if public transport can get you to a beach, it is heaving with people (and there will be a shopping mall there). If you need a car it is much quieter. I’m not a beach person myself, but I do like being near the sea.

From there we went back to Alan’s house, where I bonded with his step sons (Adam 13 and Kevin 16) by helping them speed up their computer so their games could run faster. They were playing MMORPGs like Aeon, Warcraft and some Chinese-specific things. I couldn’t understand a word of anything on the screen, because it was all in Chinese, so Captain Support needed a little translation help from Kevin. I did a little tweaking, but most of the performance improvements came from explaining that having 50 programs on all at once, including streaming video and music kinda interferes with the performance of the game, especially one that has to connect to a server, like MMORPGs do. As soon as I closed down the Justin Bieber video playing in HD on YouTube things got a lot faster and sounded a lot better.

From there we went out to meet a couple of the guys Alan works with. Both were Ausies, but have been living on and off in Hong Kong for a long time. We had a couple of drinks, some food, then early to bed ready for my class today.

Regarding food, being vegetarian in Hong Kong is not a great idea. It’s often difficult to find vegetarian food because even things that look vegetarian have a little something-something thrown in for good measure. During the day Kevin was keeping me on track. In the evening Phil was helping me out. My mate Alan speaks conversational Cantonese, after 5 years in Hong Kong, but can’t help throwing in sentences like, “Did you know Eskimos like peanut butter?”, or, “A big monkey is a gorilla and a big gorilla is King Kong!”, in an attempt to amuse/confuse the waiters, so when he was in charge I was a little worried.

Cheers

Tim…

When I was in Frankfurt airport I got an email from my mom telling me that my sister-in-law was having trouble with here printer. This sounds like a job for Captain Support…

Like any self respecting support super hero Captain Support ignored the email. When he woke up this morning Captain Support had an email from his sister-in-law telling him not to worry about it until he got back to the UK. Captain Support posted a couple of suggestions, just in case it was a simple issue.

When Captain Support gets back to the UK he may decide to switch from wireless printing to a good old-fashioned cable…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: It looks like the default printer was pointing to the wrong printer. Captain Support triumphs again…

I’m starting to think I’ve made a move into the PC support business, without wanting to or being paid for it…

Over the last couple of weeks my brothers laptop (one of my old ones) has been acting a bit strange. Nothing I could put my finder on, but something was not quite right. Yesterday my “Support Senses” started to tingle when I noticed some files and directories had become read-only for no apparent reason. A meer mortal might have considered trying to diagnose the problem, but this looked like a job for Captain Support. Quicker than a flash Captain Support did a fresh backup of all the photos and documents, then wasted that no good son of a… Dell.

Several hours and many Windows updates later there was a fresh copy of Windows Vista installed. Piece and harmony returned to the world. Captain Support even remembered to configure the VPN connection so his brother could connect to work.

Cheers

Tim…

Captain Support is the ongoing tale of a science nerd who was innocently sequencing sex-incompatibility genes in Brassica oleracea (wild cabbage) when he was spiked by the pins of a radioactive “i386 DX2/66″ chip, transforming him into a PC support superhero.

One of my Yoga buddies was given a laptop by is dad and wanted to get it connected over wireless. His dad also gave him a wireless ADSL router, but couldn’t get it set up.  This sounds like a job for Captain Support…

The router wasn’t able to connect to the internet. It turned out that the router was not working properly and needed a firmware update. Next issue was the wireless connection between the router and the laptop was kinda funky. The connection would never work when any form of encryption was turned on. In the end I had to turn off encryption and stopped the router from broadcasting in an attempt to reduce the chances of people piggy-backing on it.

How are normal folk meant to cope with this? The answer is they don’t and they need Captain Support…

Cheers

Tim…