So at what many people would deem to be “tea time” I embarked on what I thought would be a nice simple, and relatively swift job.

Your starter question, how many ‘Windows Updates’ would you expect to be pulled down onto a XP Pro laptop that hasn’t seen an internet connection since mid December 2010?

Your answer – 64!  (This will include MS Office updates as well as Windows) –  that is before the countless other updates in the way of Firefox, Flash Player,  Adobe Reader, Java and other countless sundry bits and pieces – though thankfully these are all automated.

Next uninstall some of the assorted junk that’s found itself onto the machine and I’m two hours down the line before I get to the main task in hand, loading the 500MB download of Quickbooks 2010 software. Quickbooks is a popular accounting software package.

Now my experience in the past is that Quickbooks is notoriously fickle. However on reading up on-line while I was waiting for the myriad of updates to load it seems that Intuit have finally come into the ‘real world’ of corporate computing and made Quickbooks run as a ‘limited user’ (I guess because they’ve got to do this to have vista/7  support were even an Admin user is not running ‘administrator’ rights all the time).

Good news after much loading time (including various .net frameworks, some Office 2003 integration tools and other various bits and bobs as well as Quickbooks itself) all seemed to work, bar the fact that the install was anything but ‘quick’. I’ll stand-by to eat my words about it “all working” once our finance guy has got his mits on the laptop.

 

So onto the other two points of my title for this post.

All this extended evening activity lead me to a couple of listening opportunities, the first was to a radio programme that I’d not normally tune into and found myself fascinated by an Iranian drama piece on the Persian Seda programme. I didn’t understand a word of it, but found myself drawn in by the drama of the different tones of voices. Although it was spoken word there is almost a musical quality to the delivery.

This is a great example of were radio works uniquely. I’d never think of downloading a Persian podcast or search out such content on a streaming audio service, but did discover something I enjoyed via the radio.

Once I’d concluded my software wrangling duties at what some may call “supper time” I could finally jump on the train and got out my Walkman (by such I don’t mean I’m retro and playing cassette tapes, rather it is my Sony ‘iPod clone’) and “discovered” – Burst of the Worst – which gave me some much needed light relief and a few chuckles. Now this was another nice discovery but in a different way. I’d made a deliberate decision to download these podcasts, most of which are somewhat different to this “Christmas tape” edition. An interesting thought for podcasters why not occasionally throw in something a little different. The listener can always just skip past it. Obviously in this case Jonathan Marks is podcasting archive radio programmes, so perhaps decades ago him and his team were doing just this on the radio.