Gails Completed Jigsaws	Wedding: Frank And Gill	Wedding: Sandra and Matt
Congratulations to Sandra and Matt who finally got married on Valentines Day Friday 14 February 2020. Thank you to my cousin Tracey for sending me some photographs of the wedding of Frank and Gill way back in September 1968.

Website Updates:
This website is driven by various packages which from time to time have to be updated. I have just completed a major update of the Forum software, the Photograph Software and also the Family Tree software. In addition I have made some alterations to the layout of the Photo Albums to hopefully make it easier to locate and particular albums you might be looking for.
This Website contains the "Gail and Steve Jones" Family tree. Access is restricted to family members who have a user account. To obtain a user account please complete the registration form which will be sent to the Web Site Administrators who can then verify and confirm your application to become a member and will reply to you by email.
Non Members have access to the UK Royal Family family tree located on this website It is freely available and included to demonstrate the "Webtrees" family tree software. To continue to the "Gail and Steve Jones" Family tree please click the button below..	In addition there are several other family trees available on the internet that other people have made available to showcase the webtrees software. To view these showcase trees please click the following button The one listed as "Jones Family Genealogy" is NOT our family tree but someone elses and in fact brings up a warning message if you click that one

Further to my earlier entry Sage-Virus-attack-Defeated I have now made several further changes to my website. Most things may appear cosmetic but in fact it took many hours of research, trial and error to get things working. the latest version of PHP is version 7.x but most things were written and created in the era of version 5.x. Due to this the creators of software such as PHPBB3, Coppermine and so on have been upgrading their software accordingly. However not all of the software has been or can be upgraded for one reason or another. I have now managed to work round this problem by creating TWO web sites on the same computer, the main website runs PHP7, anything that doesn't work or does not work correctly is maintained on the second website running PHP5.4 It was quite a feat setting this up and for anyone interested, while it was still fresh in my mind I have written a guide here.

On our way back from London we called into the Coventry Transport Museum. I have been to plenty of similar museums in the past but I consider this one to be the best so far. There are several floors of exhibitions ranging from pedal cycles - penny farthing, cycles with multiple seats - right through to self driving electric cars. From Double decker buses to vehicles that have broken land speed records. Entry is free but there is provision for voluntary donations. In addition there is a very nice cafe.

Early in June 2017 our computer systems were attacked by the "Sage Ransomware Virus" - this virus is almost identical to the widely publicised "Wannacry Virus" that hit the NHS and a month later the "Petya Virus" that hit Mondelez  (Cadbury's) and a large number of Government Departments across Eastern Europe. So severe were these attacks that a South Korean Web Hosting Company actually paid a $1 million ransom. Fortunately I was able to restore my affected computers despite the virus making 3 seperate attempts to attack my network at roughly two week intervals. Following this I have been updating the software used to run this website. This is an ongoing process because it seems that not all of the latest versions of an item are happy with the latest versions of other items. One such example is when using PHP 7.x the right hand column of the front page of my site no longer displays unless I disable the coppermine plug-in. These conflicts have been reported to the appropriate Forums.  (Coppermine) - (Serendipity)

Sage Virus  Please click on a thumbnail for full size picture.

Item  Previous Version  Latest Available Version  Comments  Microsoft Windows 10  Pro 1703 Build 15063.540 1703 Build 15063.540 Updated in March 2017 PHP  5.4.27  7.1.7    PHPBB  3.1 3.2.1   PhpMyAdmin  2.11.9.5  4.7.3    Coppermine 1.5.18 1.6.03 Using 1.5.46 due to Issues with PHP 7 All Databases Migrated MySql 5.5.28 MySqli 5.5.57 MySQL is now considered obsolete Virtual Box 5.1.22  5.1.26    Serendipity  2.0.2 2.1.1 There are issues with PHP 7.x and a plug-in Wordpress  N/A  4.8.1  Experimental only at this time  Resilio Synch 2.4.1.672 2.4.1.672 Disabled as a safety measure due To the Virus Attack

It has been quite while since I have updated the front page of my web site. This has been mainly due to a very large computer project that I have been meaning to do for several months but required some alterations to my computer hardware. In the past I have managed to free up a considerable amount of space in our house by digitising various things such as photographs, my music collection and books. In the past a considerable amount of space was taken up with VHS tapes to keep our video recordings. This was later reduced by moving things onto CD/DVD and then disposing of the taped versions. However there have now been vast improvements in computer technology with larger capacity hard drives plus the increased speeds of wireless networking within a building. It has now become practical to move stuff from those CD/DVD discs onto hard drives and stream the content around the building. To do so however I had to upgrade various items of computer hardware some of which proved to be a challenge - mostly getting things to fit into the motherboard. This has now been completed.

The weather has been so mild this year that I had to give our lawn its first cut on 12 February - Quite surprising when the last cut was only in November.

On Thursday 25 February My Aunt Doreen (Whitehouse) was buried in Walsall Wood. There was a service at St Johns Church followed by a wake at King Street Progressive Club. I met up with several family members I had not seen for several years including my cousins Mark, Christopher and Tracey. It was quite surprising to see how Sandra and also Graham's families have now grown. My former next door neighbour Norma from Herbert Road was also in attendance.

On Monday 29 February having noticed that Millie was now panting much more than usual I took her to the Vets. Millie has now been put on heart medication.

On Friday 4 March the twins had "sleepover". The same day Faustine came over from France on a business trip and so Faustine also slept here from Friday through to Wednesday 9 March.

We celebrated the Christmas Period with Festive pub meals at
1. The Whitehouse
2. The Boathouse.
Christmas Dinner was at the Toby Carvery, Shenstone (Known locally as The Highwayman)

On Tuesday 22 December 2015 we attended an Aladdin Pantomime at the Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre. Neil had arranged the two front rows for members of the PPFC Community Centre, Gail and myself sat at the very front.
New Year was celebrated in our traditional manner of taking a mini holiday with other members of the PPFC Community Centre. This year it was to Scarborough with a Harry Shaw coach arranged by Neil. During this break we also made visits to Harrogate, Whitby, Bridlington and York.

I have made an alteration to the layout of my website. The Video albums have now been merged with the photo albums. This should make items easier to find plus the videos have now been cross-referenced much better than they were previously

Harrogate	Whitby	Scarborough	York

Congratulations to Christopher who has now been promoted to Sergeant and has began working at Coventry.Since my last update we have been on a Warners Holiday at Alvaston Hall, Cheshire. Please click here to see our photo album.
At the end of this mini break we visited a National Trust House - Little Moreton Hall. Please click here to see our photo albumOn Wednesday 25 March we visited another National Trust location - Calke Abbey. Please click here to see the album.I mentioned in my previous post that our fitted Freezer had been replaced with a dishwasher. As luck would have it we then found that our combined fridge/freezer unit also required replacement which has also been done.Keith and Alison now have another King Charles Spaniel. "Lady" is approx. 4 years of age and has already enjoyed a couple of sleep-overs with Otis and Millie! Here are some pictures of them together.My Forum software is driven by PHPBB3. The software was recently updated to PHPBB 3.1.3  bringing with it several new changes. One of which is called a "Pages" function. This has led to me altering various parts of my website to take advantage of this new function. Two examples are 'Gails Page' and 'Family Tree' - you will notice these pages integrate into the website much more smoothly especially the Family Tree. Whilst doing this work I discovered that the Family Tree software was out of date and so this has now been updated to webtrees 1.6.2. Also the software that provides the page you are now reading has also been updated to Serendipity 2.0.1. The version of PHP has also been updated to 5.4.27.  Our Virgin Media Superhub 1 has also been replaced with a superhub 2. Hopefully these changes should improve your viewing experience.

The first 6 weeks or so of the new year have seen a number of items replaced. These include the Back Bedroom Computer "Earth" which was several years old. Originally "Earth" was located downstairs and provided my web server which is what you are now reading. Having managed to get another 3 years use out of the old machine it finally bit the dust, the hardware was becoming very unreliable and this in turn could lead to the loss of a lot of valuable data. The replacement computer is a HP Pavilion 500-319na Desktop PC with 8GB RAM / 2TB Hard Drive / Intel Core i5-4460S Quad Core Processor which in layman's terms means it runs as fast as lightening.

The next item to give up the ghost was our built in freezer. After 11 years of faithful use some of the parts were broken which in turn led to the build up of ice. The decision was taken not to replace the freezer with another but instead we purchased a SmegD4SS-1 slimline Stainless Steel dishwasher. The 15cm Gap was filled by purchasing a Norboard 150mm Pull Out Unit

Yet another item that required replacement was our internal telephone system. Up until now we had been using 2 base units which between them provided 5 handsets. Like the previously mentioned items these were also quite old. We no longer required 5 handsets and so have replaced the existing system with a BT8500 single base unit providing 4 handsets. Should the need arise you can add a further 2 handsets to make 6 in total.

The main highlight of September was our trip to Ireland (Eire) with Shearings Holidays. Its title "Castles and Country Houses" aptly describes this holiday. Please click the photographs below to view each album:

Cashel and Cahir	Portumna and Birr	Roscrea Castle and Damer House	Russborough and Finnstown	To Roscrea

Following this Christopher, Gail and myself took the twins to Leamington Spa for a picnic.
The month ended on a sad note with the passing away of Vera Baldwin (Paul's Mother in law) and also our pet dog Lucy.

Several changes have been made to my Photo Album Pages which hopefully will make it easier to locate individual pictures. The front-page has been redesigned to show Just 5 categories 'Chronological' 'Individuals' 'Locations' 'Other Albums' and 'Weddings'.
I have also increased the number of albums under the category 'Locations' which again should make finding pictures easier.