Huge Day!

Today's been flat out.

The morning was taken up with the Selective School Test. In NSW the Education department runs a few elite high schools called selective Schools which enrol on the basis of a competitive exam. In our region the only public boarding school is Farrer Boys High School at Tamworth and lots of farmers like to get their boys in there.

This year we had our lowest number of candidates- just 5. Normally it's twice that number, so I'm guessing the drought has reduced people's capacity to send their children away.

Anyway it was an OK way to earn an extra dollar.

This afternoon I wrote my sermon for Sunday. I had intended to so that yesterday, but I just didn't get there- too many people I think.

Now I've caught up so that's good.

My only downside in the day is dealing with Microsoft. I needed to buy some more licences for our computer refurbishing ministry. To do that you log onto a special Microsoft web-site. Being Microsoft, they write their web pages in such a way that you can only run them on Internet Exploder. Being me, I use linux which doesn't have Internet Exploder. But there is a cheat- somebody has produced a program which emulates IE (it runs it under wine with a few tweaks for those of a more technical bent). Unfortunately, the version of IE being emulated was having trouble either with our network set up or with the MS site, and kept on coming up with "Page Not Found" when I clicked on the next page. So what I had to do was get as far as I could in Opera (identifying as Internet Explorer because it directs you to a page that says their network is temporarily unavailable if you try to use Opera or Firefox). Then at the actual page where you order the licences, copy the address over into fake-IE because the script on that page only runs in IE. After that I entered the credit card details etc only to have it say "Your order cannot be processed at this time. Try again later."

Grrrrr!!!!

Or in my more sanctified bits "Praise the Lord Anyway!"

Now I'm not sure if it really didn't process the order, so I'm waiting for an email confirmation that may never turn up before trying again. The good news is that a corporation that I don't trust has my credit card details to pay for an order it refused to complete.

Praise the Lord Some More!

UPDATE: Finally managed to persuade it that I really do want to buy these things... it still took a bit of manipulation to get through