See the lyrics here

private void FurElise()

{

Console.Beep(420, 200);

Console.Beep(400, 200);

Console.Beep(420, 200);

Console.Beep(400, 200);

Console.Beep(420, 200);

Console.Beep(315, 200);

Console.Beep(370, 200);

Console.Beep(335, 200);

Console.Beep(282, 600);

Console.Beep(180, 200);

Console.Beep(215, 200);

Console.Beep(282, 200);

Console.Beep(315, 600);

Console.Beep(213, 200);

Console.Beep(262, 200);

Console.Beep(315, 200);

Console.Beep(335, 600);

Console.Beep(213, 200);

Console.Beep(420, 200);

Console.Beep(400, 200);

Console.Beep(420, 200);

Console.Beep(400, 200);

Console.Beep(420, 200);

Console.Beep(315, 200);

Console.Beep(370, 200);

Console.Beep(335, 200);

Console.Beep(282, 600);

Console.Beep(180, 200);

Console.Beep(215, 200);

Console.Beep(282, 200);

Console.Beep(315, 600);

Console.Beep(213, 200);

Console.Beep(330, 200);

Console.Beep(315, 200);

Console.Beep(282, 600);

}

Read more in the BoingBoing, BB Gadgets article 101 Classic Computer Ads.

Mr. Cameron: Do you have a break at all?

Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be …

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. … In 15 minute increments and …

Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.

It raises the interesting question of stopping to think and contemplate on things properly before rushing down a path. I know my calendar is full to the point of overflowing.

See more in the BBC article and at 43 folders.

See the original post at Lifehacker and the guys accompanying site - hackingtechnicalinterview.com.

See more in the CNet Crave pictures.

Law suit or not, does Viacom have the right to see my data, or more correctly does a U.S. judge have the right to decide what happens to my data, Google being a US based company or not?

This is a huge data protection failure and does not comply with the terms and conditions I signed up to with YouTube.

The cultures facinate me to some extent. What are they doing that makes them so cool? Well I think they are not much different to a small company looking after the people that work for them in a way that meets eveyone’s needs, just on a much larger scale.

An interesting blog post on leaving Google to rejoin Microsoft gives one view on what works at both Microsoft and Google.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq-QUkE1DGM

How do you get better at doing something? Simply doing is not enough, you have to practice what you do. This has to be a step forward, pushing yourself past the edge of your comfort zone and being prepared to fail.

The iPhone isn't perfect, it has a maximum capacity of 16GB, which is only about half my 30GB classic! There is also no cut and paste or Multimedia Messaging (MMS) both features I would rarely use!

What will the feature set be and when will it be available here, that are my big questions?

Tech Crunch thinks this may the new iPhone!

Read Cnet article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-9956563-52.html.

See more logo mashups from Mario Amaya.

Does anyone not want to take the optional sterring wheel?

See more from today's The Daily WTF - Error'd

I found this Wordpress theme and have added my own image and corrected some of the styling that annoyed me. Let me know what you think…

Firstly why Firefox?! It is my browser of choice, it is more standards compliant at the moment, offers a great tabbed browsing environments and an extremely good view of most of the web sites out there. OK, Firefox 2.0 is not exactly resource friendly, using an amount of memory that it shouldn't. The biggest effect is the open add-on and extension model. None of the other browsers offer the same level of support for third party extensions that Firefox offers. When I am staring at my web browser for much of the day, I need some of these tools to help me get on with things.

Here are my top Firefox extensions:

1. All-In-One Gestures - It is extremely difficult to browse the web these days without the mouse. In fact, try it on something like the BBC site, to see what I mean. Often, no amount of pressing "tab" will get me to the right place and even with Shift+"tab" taking me backwards it doesn't work. Some keyboard commands help but simplest of all is the use of this plug in. Right click and a flick of the mouse opens new windows or tabs, views the source (funny how often this is used just to be nosy!), refresh or close the current tab. Everything could be done but my top commands all use this mouse gesture command line.
2. Google Reader Notifier -I subscribe to maybe fifty RSS feeds and keeping up to date can be a problem. But Google reader notifier highlights how many articles I have to read. I don;t usually take time out to read unless I have 20 which I can comfortably process in less than 30 minutes.
3. IETab - for those sites (named and shamed to be mainly Microsoft sites including Windows update!) that simply refuse to work in Firefox, this opens up and IE 7 tab in my Firefox. A button in the status bar lets you toggle between FF and IE7, great for a quick check of rendering when changing any CSS. It also has a built in store of URL's to always open initially in IE7 - windows update then works when my default browser isn't IE7!!
4. Tab Mix Plus - gives an additional functionality to the tabbed browsing experience!
5. URL Link - Don't you just hate it when you see a web address that isn't a link! By selecting it and right clicking I can open the link as if it were a hyper link!
6. Web Developer tool bar - this is definitely one for the web developers out there - priceless in the various browser check you need to do.
7. Firebug - debugging Javascript is a real pain, this at least takes some of that pain away, as well as giving you DOM based analysis and CSS handling and live editing!
8. Del.icio.us sidebar extension - this is brilliant as I manage all my bookmarks here. I get them all, nicely tagged anywhere.
9. Live PR - displays the current Google Page rank for the page you are on! Nothing but information but something interesting none the less.
10. Fireshot - want to capture the image of a web page and annotate it? This makes it really easy, however doesn't quite support Flash!
11. Colorzilla - an eyedropper for the we, to select color information.
12. Measure IT - a pixel ruler for measuring across web components. Useful in my line of work.

I use others but this I guess is my top 12, those I couldn't do without. Although one not on the list that maybe should be is GMail Notifier, letting me see an outlook style notification when I receive new email (as my Emails are powered by Google Mail) in the Office.

I am sure there are those who will have a different list to this and if any one can suggest others feel free to do so!

Just over eight weeks ago now, I accepted a position at a company called Realise. With a very strong history in web development they are increasing the ASP .Net skillset in the business. The opportunity was one I thought was excellent, I have more responsibilities and a degree of process management to do. I think it will be am exciting challenge and I am ready to take the plunge, stepping outside my comfort zone.

It wasn't an easy decision to leave Ezone. They are a fantastic, if little, company with a strong skill set and some great projects. I feel I have learned a great deal in my time with them and grown both as a person and as a software developer. It is also quite difficult to pass my main project onto someone else. SK Chase have been fantastic clients and I have had the privilege of providing some quality bespoke software for them. I am proud of my achievements over the last 2 and a bit years.

In a shameless plug, as I was asked: Check out the rebranded Consumer site at: www.kisschasegifts.com.

Given that the time is right for me to move on, I am looking forward to the challenges Realise will throw at me and hope I can begin to add value through my own experience and ways of working.

It is simplicity in itself. I hit "Windows key + Q" start typing something that makes sense to me, and hit enter. My file, program or folder launches as if I had gone through the effort of moving my cursor to the stat button, clicking it, selecting all programs, finding the right program in the list and then launching it. I have tens of "magic" key words, and I barely have to type 3 or 4 characters as the little utility auto completes for you.

It is immeasurable how much time this little tool saves me but I can say it will be a couple of seconds for every file, program or explorer location I use on a regular basis so I would expect that it adds up to quite a lot of time.

So I begin, with the first part of an unknown number of posts about the tools that increase my productivity when in front of my computer screens.

You may or may not have noticed that my last paragraph ended with the plural of screen.  This was not a mistake, I have 2 per machine (1 at home and 1 in the office). I cannot equate in time the amount of effort this saves me in a day. I liken it to spreading out over a physically wider work area, allowing me to have more organised and smaller "piles" for my work. 

Take a program like Photoshop.  Not something I use often (not being a big designer or photographer) however it has all these floating palettes and tool bars that while aiding usability, simply take screen real estate away from what I am working on - the photograph. With my 2 monitors I can fill one whole screen with my photograph and have the palettes and toolbars on the other, giving me more room to work on the image itself. This also is reflected in my work as a Software and Web developer.Much of this requires a minimum of 2 windows open - the development environment (in which I write my code) and maybe 2 or 3 browser windows for web work.  On 1 screen I would be constantly flicking between windows and it doesn't help me at all.  On 2 I can have a quick glance at how my work is going without too much effort.

However, as a Windows user multiple monitors although well supported are less easy to manage.   The task bar does not stretch over and you still get the piles of open windows stacked high there. Moving the windows between the 2 monitors is also a pain, they need to be resized smaller than maximum the dragged across the screen.  

Ultramon sorts all of this out. It adds a task bar to the other monitors making it much easier to use. It adds buttons to the window for switching program windows between monitors.  Alternatively there are the keyboard commands to do the same and also to move the mouse cursor form one monitor to the other. 

I cannot stress how these two simple things increase my productivity massively, so together they come top of my list! 

As a Wordpress user, I use Askimet as my main anti spam techinque, however I wanted to augment this with a CAPTCHA for a bit more security. I heard about re-Captcha in an article or blog post somewhere and think it is great. It uses the same principles of a CAPTCHA and puts it to good use helping to digitise books. The digitalisation of books (particularly those from before the digital age) uses Optical Character Recognition to parse a scanned image of a book into its constituent letters and words. However OCR is not perfect particularly when the scanned characters are distorted or not uniform. This is why a CAPTCHA is a good anti spam technique (at least for now!).

The digitalisation has many many unknown words and re-Captcha helps solve this. This special CAPTCHA gives you two distorted words, 1 known word and 1 unknown word. The likelihood of a person entering both words correctly increases dramatically if you enter the known word correctly making this an ideal way to help in the digitalisation of books. Add a comment to see the CAPTCHA in action and visit re-captch for your own plugin at http://recaptcha.net.

Now for those who don't know Carlisle United, Olga (acronym of Goal!), the fox, is the club's mascot.  It used to be the stuffed fox, placed on the centre spot before every home game, usually accompanied by a man in a funny suit. However in more modern times Olga the Fox is a much "cuddlier" mascot
and can be seen parading around Brunton Park before home games.  Carlisle United play in blue and there we have it the origins of the blog name.

As I am based in Edinburgh, and do not make many a game, Olga's Blues is looking for some loyal Blue's fans and volunteers to provide match reports and opinions on the goings on at Brunton Park.  If you know of anyone or want to volunteer your writing skills drop me an email. It is unpaid obviously but if the Google Ads cover more then the cost of the hosting, then I am more than wiling to share it out.

On the technical side, just like this blog, Olga's Blues is powered by Wordpress. I found a good design that matched the blue from N.Design Studio which I was able to edit and make into what you see on the page.

I have been on holiday since finishing up work on Friday evening and Susan's sister was staying with us up until yesterday.  So it has been a bit of a mad weekend and first half of the week. I for the most part let the women go ahead and book what they wanted to see, and tagged along.  This worked really well and I was able to have my input when I wanted to.  It also meant I saw a few shows that I would quite happily have given a miss if I had had the time to look at what they were when asked if I wanted to go.  This turned into a bit of a triumph as I thoroughly enjoyed everything I saw.  Obviously some more than others, but that is the way it is!!

With ticket prices rising though I think gone are the times of running around fitting in 3-4 shows a day. Although it is quite manic just getting along to 2, with places like the spiegelgarden to hang around in between.

Having just been round the supermarket and almost run into at least three times by kids skating around the aisles, I am thinking they are not only annoying but dangerous, there isn't much braking going on.

Listening to internet radio for at least an hour occurs at least 5 days out of 7 for me.  I enjoy an eclectic mix of music, most of it through Pandora or my iTunes catalogue and IPod, as I can easily match my mood and get a full playlist to match what I want.

Pandora,  as an internet radio, has taken part in the "Day of Silence" for internet radio stations, highlighting what it may be like in the near future.  The case seems to be that in the US, where most of these stations are based, the costs of playing a track over the internet will be so great (due to extra royalties and alike) that it will put them out of business.  

I am not against the artists getting a fair amount of royalties but I know for a fact there are more than a few albums I have bought having heard some tracks on Pandora.  A degree of fairness and compromise should be agreed. 

As I am not in the US there is little I can do about supporting the save net radio campaign except spread the word…

I do really enjoy the work despite some frustration at times. It is sometimes a really interesting project to work on particularly when I implementing new features that are innovative and exciting. It is great to see the application moving forward and improving, ensuring good quality on which to base their business.

SK Chase [the clients!] have also been making a bit of a splash in the press recently. You can find articles in The Scotsman here and The Sunday Herald here. They have also managed to get themselves on a business promotion reel on STV (Scottish ITV) running for the next few weeks between the regional and national news programs.

Using Open DNS has been a breeze. I have noticed very little difference in the speed at which web pages loaded but to be honest I didn't really expect to see much difference.  What has been really useful is the on-the-fly spelling correction.  Even though I can pretty much touch type, I still hit a variety of common mistakes, especially when I am in a hurry and not paying attention.  Most of these are caught by Open DNS and redirected to the intended site. The anti-phishing solution is also pretty nifty, although less frequently used as I can generally spot phishing.

I did however run into a little problem with Virgin Media when I last complained about my internet speed.  They were adamant that it would be Open DNS causing the slow down, but in a little over the phone experiment, Open DNS beat their own DNS servers, by a fraction.  Although not really enough to call it a clear winner it was a sign of connection issues not DNS issues.  To be fair with Virgin, other suppliers may have insisted that I not use Open DNS but they didn't (or maybe they would if their technical support team found out what DNS is!). 

Is this lazy or clever? Maybe it is the only reason to buy a Segway!

What happens is that the spammers send out loads of emails having modified the  "FROM" address to appear as if it came from an email on my domain.  They then obfuscate the email headers to hide their actual location making it very difficult to trace them.  Imagine someone handwriting hundred of letters and signing someone else's name and address and sending them out.  It would almost be impossible to prevent that, and domain spoofing is a similar concept but with emails.

A decent spam filter will more than likely prevent the spam getting through.  My apologies if you have received spam from this domain, I am doing what I can to prevent it.  

There will probably be a nagging doubt about it few a little (read Long here) while longer but we will just wait and see.

This time though with Ubuntu linux set up on my old machine - hooray for those 30 minutes spent installing it - I was able to source the problem to… guess what…Windows. Yes, Windows! Windows update to be more precise!! Is it a hardware compatibility issue or something else I do not know, but tonight and I may be speaking far too early I think I  cracked it - with a little help from that font of knowledge called the web!

It would not surprise me if Microsoft in its wisdom, when putting a 435MB service pack for Visual Studio, they wrecked an entire system of machines!  Not exactly a wise choice.  Lets hope this doesn't take all night to install manually! 

For anyone with huge "The instruction at…..The memory could not be read" error message followed by a 'Generic Host Process for Win32 Services had encountered a problem and needs to close.', the details of which point to an issue in the msi.dll, look here and follow the quick steps in the bottom of the post!

It has got me thinking how quickly time has gone by. It seems only last week it was December and Christmas, never mind January, February, March and April! Look at it now. Today, being first Monday in May, is May day, that's us four months into 2007 already and what is to show for it…

Well January as usual was a bit of a slow month, how can it be anything else when it is dark on the way to work and even darker on the way home!  That bit of light seen through the drizzle out of the office window is all you get, unless you venture out at lunchtime. February saw our trip to Budapest and March Mam's 50th.  April was all work and no play except of course for a couple of bouts of Friday night excess.

And now it is May, all in all not a bad month I hope.  It will be busy, punctured by the trip to Carrickfergus. I need to seriously consider how to progress from employee to freelancer and take this forward. Although I doubt very much I will be any less of an employee anytime soon, it is the direction I wish to go in. All I need now a couple of clients or someone who needs a little help to get me on my way.  If anyone therefore has a design that they want made up into hand coded, valid XHTML and CSS and then turned into Wordpress (or other) themes drop me an email, I may even look at a discount to get me started!

While it is old by way of a car, it is great.  To be honest Susan and I don't really need a car.  No we still want it!! However it would be extremely useful, despite sitting in the parking spaces at our flat for the fast majority of the week.  It will give us the freedom to do the things we need to do that would be extremely awkward using public transport.  Have you ever tried to carry a weeks worth of shopping on the bus? It is an extremely painful and stressful event. 

The Polo is going in for an MOT that will finally determine its destination. I don't have all the specs but I don;t think it is more than a 1litre or possibly 1.2.  I will need to get up to speed with that but it is a five minute job.  It is Red, although the roof has faded to a pinkish blur which is a highly classy look, but it has four wheels and an engine as well as the chassis to run on so I am happy!

We are going to be over in a couple of weeks for Susan's Gran's birthday, so we are thinking of driving it across then.  By the end of the month, we could be in business.  No more putting off the trips to supermarket or B&Q, due to the hassle of public transport.  I once went to B&Q to get paint and ordered a taxi back. The taxi driver almost wouldn't take the fare!

Susan told me this morning she was "starting to get excited" about getting her car over! Hmmm, she thinks its her car!

**Readers of the blog feed who cannot see this: You can view this here. Enjoy! 

However I have a huge issue with this period.  Today through the letter box came a total of 24 pieces of electioneering spam, yes 24.  Most of which went straight into the bag for recycling. At least it was all delivered at the same time and by the postman, so there wasn't a steady stream of people wading through the block of flats.

I was trying to figure this out if there are 24 pieces of paper of varying quality at an average weight of 2 grams (a good estimate, I think), there are 16 flats in the block, and it is number 16 and the last one in the street, and they are all the same style, so that leaves me with 12.29 kilograms of electioneering spam in my street alone, imagine that across the thousands of homes in Edinburgh and we are talking an awful lot of Spam, and I hate spam.

Can anyone tell me how many trees this campaign will have cost? So much for politicians running a "Green Campaign".  And the irony is, this is the third time I have had the exact same leaflet through the door from the Green Party candidate!

There are many kinds of blogs that I visit regularly.  I don't know why I find them all interesting, may be it is a snapshot of real life, that gets me intrigued.  For the most part though I think it is because they are just regular people, writing about regular things.  Though it must be said some are just for the pictures!  I don't necessarily know any of them but find them interesting none the less. 

If you find your site appearing in my Blogroll, or the new Photo-Blogroll, it is because I enjoy reading [or viewing] your blog. And if you like mine, do please share the linkage!

There are maybe two streams of what I call Web Entertainment: Audio and Video.  I guess a third is my reading materials which is a collection of articles, blogs and other stuff that kind of fit into this category.

Audio resources are freely available across the web.  Not only are many radio channels streamed across the web but a service I particularly like and use frequently is available at Pandora.com.  This is a custom radio station generator.  Enter a song or artist and Pandora creates a radio station based on songs and artists that are similar in style and characteristics to your original selection.  You can also train Pandora to cut out those that do not quite match what you want, and best of all no ads and no annoying Disc Jockey's.  Podcasts are fun to listen to too, while I am not so keen on them through my Ipod,  I am more likely to listen through my desktop and iTunes still works great for that!

Video resources are available across the web - whether it be You Tube or Google Video or any others.  I tend to use the Democracy Internet video player that downloads videos automatically within channels.  Video Podcasts and general Internet videos are a growing field.  The democracy player list hundreds of channels that are series of videos.  It also allows me to add specific You Tube searches and feeds.  This enables me to get my favourite videos when I want them without having to find them.

For reading material I tend to subscribe to RSS feeds of the sites I visit most recently.  I am a Firefox (web browser) user and use the Sage extension for subscribing to feeds.  This is a lightweight RSS reader - there are many better ones out there, but I like that it plugs directly into Firefox, and I can choose to read it on the site or in the feed.

And well done to the fan who obviously had a few too many before the game against Bournemouth and saw the game sideways on!

These are from my new custom channel in the Democracy Internet Video Player (soon to be renamed MIRO): Carlisle United as featured on "Blue Tube", sorry You Tube!  It is funny how many crowd chants are uploaded.  I particularly enjoyed the "Que sera, sera" rendition from Saturday against Rotherham!

Carlisle are currently 1 point off a playoff place in League 1.  Who knows 6 points form the last 3 games might just see us there and a win will see us off to the new Wembley Stadium. Come on you Blues!

As a blogger, I tend to read a lot of other peoples blogs and have as yet been unable to find one in particular

Carlisle United: the games, the stories, the truth from the terraces.

While I follow a lot of media content including alternative Carlisle United sites, the Blues aren't a big enough club [in the eyes of the media] to warrant huge attention. Blogs like Black & White & Read All Over for Newcastle United don't exist for Carlisle United.

I would in some way like to rectify this. To that end I would like to see what the reaction would be for one or two literate, religious followers (home and away game attendees) to start one of these blogs. I would be willing to begin setting it up and managing the issues around the site, but I simply do not have the resources or the ability to even attend the games, so am not the person to begin writing the content.

If anyone is interested in this please leave a comment with an email address and I will be in touch!

But there are some people who rely on technology for survival, but their technology is not as aesthetically pleasing as my IPod, nor as easy to use.  On her own blog  Amy Tenderich has written an Open Letter to Steve Jobs (of Apple fame) asking him to address this.  I will let her tell you how it is.

I believe in good technology design and, while not afflicted by any such conditions, I support her letter. Good technology and good design should not be restricted to those things that make a pile of money or that are iconic gadgets.  Good design, should be applied to all technology but especially to those things that are essential.  This post may be better entitled 100 million IPods but 100 million design mistakes!

To try and move this forward, I have now implemented a "Blogroll" [see my original post http://www.richardlennox.net/2007/04/09/goodbye-virgin-media-dns-hello-open-dns/ I have said goodbye to Virgin Media and its DNS service and welcomed Open DNS. DNS [Domain Name System] is used every time you browse the Internet.  You enter the human readable (well understandable anyway!) address of a website into your browser and the DNS, translates the into the IP address (4 group numbers) that is the physical location of the websites server.  Take this site for example: you have likely reached it by typing "www.richardlennox.net" into your browser address bar, DNS translates this into the server's IP address, 85.13.219.74, to which you are then directed. This makes the Internet much more usable for you and I, as we can simply type in the human readable name and the DNS does the work of locating its address.

Normally and properly your Internet Service Provider (in my case Virgin Media) does all this for you in the background and the service is generally great but Open DNS offers a much better service (and its still free!).  Open DNS claims "to make your Internet blazing fast, block phishing sites and correct your typos on the fly".  While DNS does add a slight overhead to your Internet connection, the claim of making it faster I cannot prove and am a bit skeptical about, but the other two are the reasons I switched.

Blocking known phishing sites (you know those sites that try and get you to enter things like account details by pretending to be your bank so the site owners can steal all of your money!) is an extremely great feature.  It simply shows you a warning page saying the site you are trying to visit is a known fishing site, or that the site has been blacklisted for whatever reason and you should take care if you are wanting to continue to it. Great, especially for those who are not too savvy about these things.

Correcting typos on the fly is another great feature.  Ever typed .cm instead of .com or .nt instead of .net? Open DNS will try and correct it for you.  Or if you include a complete typo within the address it won;t show you a default browser error but show you what you typed and asks if it was what you were looking for. Pretty neat, hats off to Open DNS! 

This guy seems to do a few when I search YouTube for "beatboxing flute" and therefore I will subscribe to his feed ! Great! 

I have also taken the opportunity to upgrade some of the underlying CSS and HTML of the theme.  This won't mean any visible changes, it simply cleans things up a little in the code.  Let me know if you come across any issues…Thanks!

1. Format the HDD.
2. Clean reinstall of Windows.
3. RE-install all my applications and data.

Luckily I have my Netgear Storage Central (little box connected to my home network that adds hdd storage to the network!) that still has a backup of the majority of my important data.  I didn't have too much to lose just my time.

I was impressed with the support I got over the phone from the supplier of my machine, pcoption.co.uk.  We had a chat and decided that while it may have been the hardware, there was no reason not to try a clean install of Windows (steps 1 + 2 above).  If that goes ok, then maybe it was a corrupt Windows installation.  Luckily this seems to [touch wood or forehead here!] have been the case as over the last couple of days the Windows installation has appeared stable.  I am still a little nervous about it but am assured that any problems will be covered by the warranty!!

Next on my list will be an upgrade of this Wordpress installation, scheduled for Monday! 

It seems it may be either the hard drive or the memory.  It is only 2 months and a little bit old, so I am a little annoyed.  Here is where my choice of supplier will com into its own.  The machine is under a 5 year guarantee (3 yrs parts + 2 extra years free labour!!) so I am confident that it will all be ok, depending on how good they are in their support.   While annoying I have come to learn that these things happen so I am prepared to get on with it.  The only issue is my new web based entertainment has obviously lost out as I had my machine set up nicely! 

For those of who who want instructions on how to do this here is a public service announcement:

1. First you need to find your Windows CD.  This is the installation disc that was originally used to install Windows.
2. Reboot your machine from the Windows CD.
3. On the Windows setup screen: press ENTER (This selects Enter Windows Setup.) Do not select "To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R."  This will take you to a Windows console, which will be of little help to you.
4. Accept the license agreement and Windows setup will find your existing Windows installation.
5. Enter the number of your Windows installations.  (This will generally be 1.)  You may need to enter your administrator password also.
6. Setup will then copy the files to your hard drive and then reboot leaving all your files intact.
7. Once Windows reloads you should update your computer getting the latest drivers etc.

Having decided to install Linux on my old machine, I can happily browse away using this machine, in fact I am typing this here now using it.  It seems my installation isn't going well, I will need to take a look and see what is going on.  I will update soon….