I recently came across this shocking article which made my blood boil.

Mother trailed by policeman and warned by council for telling off son at checkout
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1226056/Mother-trailed-policeman-warned-council-telling-son-checkout.html#ixzz0WvxoDr1b

It beggars belief doesn't it, clearly they are too lazy to investigate all those real crimes and this is exactly the reason why more and more kids are hanging about outside off licenses, swearing and being abusive to the public and generally growing up to be thugs and criminals before they are even teenagers, thus making even more cases for the police and social services to ignore.

Judging by the growing number of incidents like the above one, this is the type of behaviour that the police and social services condone and are encouraging by their actions. Obviously by denying teachers and parents the ability to teach any kind of moral values or boundaries to their children or using any kind of discipline for fear of the repercussions they must have some sick dreams of a future like "escape from new york" rather than the utopian society that most dream of.

It certainly seems that the average social services worker or police officer is completely clueless about children if they think all parents should be calm and collected all the time and that all children will simply do as their told if you just ask them nicely. I think it should be a requirement that anyone who desires to work in this field should have some real world practical experience and I can't believe that isn't the case already. Give them a couple of unruly kids to look after 24\7 for a month and see what happens, or at the very least it should be a requirement that they have had kids of their own. Then perhaps they will realise that most parents lose their temper as a matter of course and make idle threats to their kids just to shut them up. Someone who really does smack the crap out of their kids is hardly likely to shout about it in a public place.

Sure we all see parents losing their rag in the supermarket and initially we may think they are crazy or going way OTT, but then if you are a parent yourself you realise that the kid has probably been winding them up all day and the parent has simply run out of patience, and that is probably exactly what you look like to everyone else when you lose your rag as well.

Sure it is great to think that the police and social services are looking out for the welfare of our kids as we certainly don't like to think of those poor children like baby P out there who are being abused, I know that any stories of that nature in the news always bring a tear to my eye, but I for one do not think that is happening when you take cases like "Baby P" where there was some real and obvious abuse that was totally ignored because they are wasting time victimising innocent people who have clearly done nothing wrong and wont even admit when they have made a mistake and continue to push the matter. One can only presume that it takes up less of their time and requires less paperwork than investigating real crime or abuse cases.

I think these days you need to be more scared of the police or social services than you do of the criminals. At least a burglar is only going to take your stuff and not your kids.

Have you been watching the new series of Knight Rider? It is actually rather cool I have to say. I was sorely disappointed after watching the pilot, as were many others judging by the online chatter, Kitt had none of the cool features from the original series other than being bullet proof, and the only new feature was his ability to morph, which was also rather lame in the pilot, and quite frankly the car just didn't look anywhere near as cool as the old trans-am, and I really wasn't feeling at all excited about the new series based on this.

Thankfully it seems the producers have listened to the complaints and things are vastly better in the new series, Kitt can now turbo boost, shoot lasers and rockets, emit emp's, xray and all manner of other scanning and computer wizardry. He can also generate just about anything it seems from a 3D molecular imaging device, has a super pursuit mode (now called attack mode) and the morphing is truly cool even if totally unbelievable allowing Kit to transmogrify into all manner of different vehicles to match the terrain or simply to blend in.

I still do not think the car looks as cool as the original trans-am, but this is far less of an annoyance now that everything else is cool and you can accept the fact that the car is meant to be able to blend in and not stick out like a sore thumb.

The car aside, the cast are also pretty good, the new Michael Knight (it is explained why he has the same name) is a proper ass kicking ex-marine agent type, so the fight scenes are far more exciting and action film like instead of the lack lustre unrealistic fights from the old 80's series that just made Hasslehoff seem like a smooth talking James Bond wannabe.

Back at HQ there are the genius geeks who keep Kitt up and running and help Mike on his missions with all their gadgetry and ability to remotely hack into just about anything, as well us providing us with eye candy as most of them just happen to be extremely hot babes who of course all lust after Michael Knight, lucky guy.

Everything in this new series is totally unbelievable and technically impossible by any stretch of the imagination, but as long as you are not anal about this and are not one of those people that needs to over analyse everything instead of simply enjoying it, it is great fun to watch whether you were a fan of the original series or not and is I think a great reboot of a classic series for the 21st century and is at least for me a must watch programme each week.

I recently had a total nightmare with Office 2007 Enterprise on windows 2008 server. Some of my office applications stopped working so I tried to repair it, but the setup file would not run off the DVD nor would add/remove programs run, always failing with the error below, as a result I was not able to uninstall office.

"setup has stopped working"

I originally thought it was my DVD player, so I went out and bought a new one, which didn't help.

The solution to get the office installer to work was quite a PITA to say the least

1. First read this Microsoft KB article
   How to manually uninstall the 2007 Office system if you cannot uninstall it by using the "Add or Remove Programs" feature
2. Also run the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility
   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

After doing all this and getting office off my PC I was finally able to run the office setup, but alas this then threw another error during installation.

**************

Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 encountered an error during setup.

Error 1402. Setup cannot open the registry key

UNKNOWN\Components\3D5095D39455BD341908312EDABA9DD8\00002109F10090400000000000F01FEC. Verify that you have sufficient permissions to access the registry or contact Microsoft Product Support Service (PSS) for assistance.

***********

Now this was especially confusing as that registry key does not actually exist. I tried numerous things to resolve this and ultimately failed, so now I was stumped and thought I was going to have to either re-install windows or stump up £250 for Microsoft support. Then I wondered if I could get any free partner support through my Microsoft Action Pack Subscription (MAPS), and discovered these forums. Which surprisingly turned out to be very helpful as I got a reply from a Microsoft Tech who helped me resolve this issue.

As I had already tried everything they suggested, they decided it was in fact a permissions issue, somehow my registry permissions had got screwed, but thankfully they also have a fix for this.

How do I restore security settings to the default settings?

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=313222

After applying this fix I was finally able to re-install Office 2007.

This solutions above should help anyone on XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2003 or 2008 server, it can also be applied to other software you are getting similar errors with.

I recently discovered this site that recycles old mobile phones and printer cartridges and donates the money to a charity of your choice. Certainly a very worthwhile cause and a great way to get rid of your old phones and cartridges and do a good deed instead of throwing them in the bin.

They have also decided how beneficial it would be to offer people their own personal recycling sign up page and have created the intelligent link. This means that any person visiting your site is able, quickly and easily, to sign up to donate their waste to your chosen cause!!

I have just noticed a very annoying bug in Live Writer, thus why you have have received multiple copies of my last posts. After I had posted those last 2 articles, I noticed they both had the same images, even though they clearly didn't when I posted them. It seems that if you paste in an image from the clipboard Live Writer will name it image.png by default and the thumbnail will be image_thumb.png, it will not create a unique filename, thus will simply overwrite any existing images with the same name, thus messing up all your previous blog posts with images not to mention if you have multiple images in your current post, they will all end up as the same image.

I presume this bug must have been added to the latest release (2009) as I have not noticed it previously.

I have however found the following temporary fix on the Windows Live Writer Blog

Open HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer\Weblogs\{blog-id}\UserOptionOverrides\, where {blog-id} is a GUID. You will have several of these, but should be able to tell the right one by looking at the contents of the key.

Add a new String value with name “fileUploadNameFormat� (case matters!!) and the value e
{WindowsLiveWriter}/{PostTitle}/{Randomizer}/{AsciiFileName}

hopefully they will fix this annoying bug very soon.