File Transfer Manager Error

While trying to download from the TechNet site I kept getting this unhelpful message.

There was an error launching File Transfer Manager.

If you are running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, this installation may have been blocked. If the gold IE Information Bar is Present above, please click the bar and select the option to “Install ActiveX”.

This comes up when you are running Windows 7 64-bit and IE8 64-bit.

Suggested solutions;

Re-install File Download Manager – no good

Add or change a Registry setting – the key suggested ({82774781-8F4E-11D1-AB1C-0000F8773BF0}) was in a User location of the Registry of my setup, rather than the expected HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility – no good

Use IE 32-bit (version may not matter, I used IE8) – SUCCESS!

Photography

© Copyright: 2010

I spent a large amount of time and money doing photography 25 years ago, then dropped it when I moved back to the UK because I didn’t have access to a darkroom. I had a Hasselblad for B&W and a Canon for slides.

Now I have a Nikon D60 SLR and I’m really enjoying it again and slowly learning how to use a digital darkroom when necessary. Mostly I just crop right now. It helps that my partner is also an excellent photographer and did a lot of it around the same time as I did – so she understands when I stop and shoot for no apparent reason!

We held out against digital until about four years ago when we got a point and shoot Canon, which does a very good job, but there is nothing like holding an SLR.

You can see images at:

General images

Better images

Gardening Incident – June 10, 2010

My Globe & Mail this morning was curiously bereft of news towards the bottom of the front page.  Four 3” columns of non-news about a ‘gardening incident’.  Is this the Federal government’s justification for the $1 bn security program around the G20 Summit?

Madama Butterfly – Vancouver Opera – June 1, 2010

Let me start by saying: I have been an opera fan for almost 40 years; I am a long-time supporter of Vancouver Opera; I like updated productions.

Tonight’s performance was vocally stunning, with the added delight of Asian actresses playing Cio-Cui-San (Mihoko Kinoshita from Japan) and Suzuki (Zheng Cao from California).  Mihoko Kinoshita is petite but her voice belied this and together the women gave us wonderful duets.  Pinkerton was tall, dark, handsome and stupid (as opposed to Seigfried who is tall, blonde, handsome and stupid – at least according to Anna Russell) – and James Valenti has a very good voice that I am sure we will hear much more of in the future.

Talking to a couple of patrons, and listening in on conversations, it appears that the audience was very taken with the sets and production – as were the newspapers.  Vancouver Opera has done a good job of promoting the positive audience reaction on their site. Visually stunning for sure, but it just didn’t hang together for me.

What worked? The concentric circles were reminiscent of paddy fields, the attire and parasols of Cio-Cio-San’s family were delightful, the coloured streamers were interesting.

What did not work?  Well – what was with the bee-keeper black figures providing props along the way?  Why was the moon, which rose as Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San retire for their first night together, so yellow as to look like the sun?  Why are we presented with sonar dials – surely not in use in those days – during the intermezzo, after the ship comes into harbour?  Why is Pinkerton introduced in a Mondrianesque suit, which screams “Europe” rather than “America”?  If was a reference to the Dutch influence in the New World it was too subtle to be useful.  I found the bleeding red sun at the tragic end of the opera heavy-handed in the extreme.

The Set Design Notes from Jun Kaneko did nothing to elucidate and I actually was left with rather negative feelings about the whole process.  He had no experience in this genre previously, it took several months before he had a good understanding of what was needed, and he mentioned “complexity” a couple of times.  It didn’t look too complex to me, indeed the staging was sparce in the extreme.  Video lighting and colour tiles do not constitute complexity in this day and age.  Mr Kaneko is no Robert LePage.

I have seen Butterfly probably a dozen times, and many of the productions have remained with me, in one way or another.  This one will as well, for the colours and some of the video tiling, but mostly for the vocal experience, which was sensational.

VSO – Motown – May 7, 2010

What can I say?  Fabulous!

McDonald Currie/Coopers & Lybrand Alumni Dinner – May 6, 2010

This dinner at the Vancouver Lawn Tennis & Badminton Club was organized in honour of Noshir Sarkari and Peter Stanley, two venerable partners in the firm between the 1950s and 1990s.  Both men died last year, Noshir at 86 and Peter at 89.

The occasion was a reunion of professional and admin members of the firm, who worked there between 1955 and 1977.  About 50 attended and while several people had remained close friends and kept up with each other over the years, for many it was delightful chance to catch up again after 30 years or more.

Unfortunately John Larsen, our nominal host, had a knee operation scheduled and was unable to attend.  David Sinclair had intended coming over from Victoria but the weekend before this dinner he fell on the wet grass at a grandchild’s soccer game and is now in a full leg cast!

Photos can be seen here.

Vancouver Opera – Marriage of Figaro – Apr 27, 2010

The thing about The Marriage of Figaro is that you have to get the pacing right, and Chris Alexander (Director) and Jonathan Darlington (Conductor) certainly did that.  This longish opera bowled along with verve and seemed to be over before it began.

I thought the Countess had rather too much vibrato to stay on note and rather too little breath to execute the flowing lines assigned to her.  All the other singers were excellent and everyone kept the story going with the appropriate human emotions on show.

Nice to see another almost full house and lots of under-40s!

Vancouver Recital Society – Ramón Ortega Quero/Chu-Fang Huang – Apr 25, 2010

If I had not seen it with my own eyes I would have thought that two oboes were on stage instead of just the one played by 20-year old Ramon Quero tonight.  The Concerto on a Theme from Donizetti’s La Favorita was a stunning piece of virtuosity and a delightful end to the evening at the Playhouse.

The eruption of that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland has had a knock-on effect around the world.  While Ramon Quero had a ticket to arrive from Europe on Thursday night, Kit Armstrong was on standby from an earlier flight which was affected by the ash from Iceland.  He did not make it to his concerts in either New York or Vancouver.  Leila Getz and her team called around on Thursday (just three days before this concert) and the young pianist Chu-Fang Huang agreed to fly directly to Vancouver from New York, with virtually no notice – learning the pieces on the plane!  There is an expression that musicians use: “It’ll be alright on the night”.  But that usually is bandied about during a bad rehearsal when you are supposed to have a passing knowledge of the piece to start with.  Chu-Fang was seeing these pieces for the first time just three days before the concert!  She gave a fantastic performance, providing a solid, colourful and confident balance to the oboe.  Chu-Fang also performed a solo Haydn sonata – the sort of thing I think of as being rather mundane but which received a fresh performance this evening.

The concert opened with Mozart (Sonata No 25 in F, K. 377) and the lovely Schumann Drei Romanzen, Op. 94, with Manuel de Falla’s Siete Canciones Populares Españolas rounding out the evening.

Linksys WRT310N-CA Router Stability

Every few years my Linksys routers give up the ghost and I replace them with a newer one.  Nothing flashy or expensive, just basic wired/wireless routers.  This year Best Buy talked me into buying a snazzy DLink, which went against the grain for me, but offered a port that I could plug my printer into.  Handy for my partner’s laptop and guests who join my network.

I couldn’t get Remote Desktop access to my workstation working so called DLink Support.  They were basically useless, suggested that there was a problem with my workstation and said I should contact my administrator (that would be me).  Obviously nothing had changed since the morning when I turned off the old Linksys.  I did figure out, via Microsoft, that I needed to modify the Registry to change the listening port – something DLink had not thought of.  Nevertheless, I could not get Remote Desktop working.

I took the DLink back to Best Buy and bought a Linksys WRT310N router.  Interestingly, I could not get it to do Remote Desktop unless I was using the default port.  With earlier routers I liked being able to pick my own port, for security reasons.  However, the main problem was that I had to reboot the router every 12 hours or so – it was just not stable at all.  I tracked down one solution which suggested disabling plug-n-play – this worked!

Alan Greenspan

It is beyond belief for Alan Greenspan to suggest that no-one could see the financial mess coming in the United States.  Most people I know were concerned about it, perhaps because we live in financially prudent circumstances, where the outgoings are not greater than the incomings and overall debt is not fuelled by wants rather than needs.

Any competent housewife could have seen these troubles coming a mile (or decade) away.