A childish day

Felt better today other than the coughing and lack of sleep from the night before. I think somehow my body clock has been reset so I'm worried that I won't sleep tonight either. I'm in work tomorrow so I hope that doesn't happen and I don't want to be sleepy at Rob and Em's tomorrow for New Year's Eve.

Spent today tidying up my room a little. It's a lot better now.

Today was a childish day for the following reasons:

1) I watched Short Circuit, which I LOVED as a child.
2) I got my Lego out and made a three wheeled car.
3) I started re-reading Swallows and Amazons.
4) I played with a few of the 24 Psion Series 3as that I own.

Can't sleep revisited

Once again I am unable to sleep. Possibly due to the late night last night and a very pointless day doing nothing other than play with the PowerBook 1400 again. I also discovered that my PowerBook G3 (FireWire) was actually not dead after all, which is a big yay as it is still the best machine I've come across for music programs. The sound system in it is ridiculously better than any PC I've yet encountered and that sad truth was making me start to consider finding an old PowerBook G4 for that purpose. Now that the Intel transition is complete, the old PowerPC machines are dropping in price.

The weather was horrific today so I didn't get a chance to go out. I hate myself right now. I'm a lazy bastard who hasn't taken any exercise in weeks and eaten like shit as well. Before I went to London I was eating reasonably healthily, walking the dog each day and taking other exercise too, and oddly enough I felt really good for it and slept really well. Since I stopped doing that regularly after coming back from London, I feel lethargic and unmotivated. Got to start again come January, which given the apathetic state of mind I'm, is going to be a bundle of joy.

I know it's Christmas time but that really isn't an excuse.

I feel like shite

It's stupid o'clock. I feel like utter shite, full of snot, lightheaded and pounding head of pain. Why is this cold dragging on so? Also the Idiot Hound is on my bed, but I don't really mind. He may be an angular and pointy presence, but he's keeping my feet warm. Life would be easier in many ways if he was a whippet and half the size but he can't help his birth. Wouldn't change him for anything.

Pakistan is about to explode according to the BBC. I have a bad feeling about this.

Fecking colds. And no you silly iPod, I did mean fecking. Yet if I type decking, you prompt for fecking!!!! Should stop now, talking to your devices is probably a bad sign. Right, iPod?

iPod?

Hello?

Electric cars

One thing I saw in London was a G-wiz electric car. I remember being mildly impressed at the way it pulled up in front of me outside the Russell Square tube station on an empty road and then accelerated away with only a quiet whirr.

And then I saw this.

Wow.

That's pretty bad. And Jeremy Clarkson drove one into a table at 40mph and what happened? The same thing, except that time the batteries exploded acid all over the place.

I think there are two reasons why electric cars haven't taken off - first, the big oil companies stifle their development and second, all of the production ones have so far been shit. Except the Tesla Roadster, but that does cost ludicrous amounts of money.

Funking it up

Pakistan's future looks very uncertain now.

Here's a hint, if you are using an iPod touch to write something in one tab of Safari and switch to another tab, don't expect what you wrote in the first tab to be there when you switch back to it. I just lost a fair bit of blog post by doing that. The gist of it is below.

First day back in work. Unsurprisingly the offices were nearly deserted and it was spookily quiet. On the plus side this meant I was able to get quite a lot done today. I left a little early and went round to Will's, bass in hand, where he and Rob were making music.

They had just finished a track when I got there and we quickly started another one. While Rob wrote lyrics in his encoded handwriting, Will set up a beat which I overlaid with a funked up slap bass line which Will accompanied with random guitar noodlings. Sounded quite good and then it was ready for Rob's vocal contribution. Just needs Will to sit down and mix the tracks together properly.

Whether anything will ever live up to the blasphemous success of Mary Poppins Whore Hour remains to be seen. We didn't stay very long after that though, Rob had to go home and cook and both Will and I have been suffering from a cold and felt too crappy. Will seems to have had it worse though.

First time I've used the Squier bass in anger with the various mods and it actually sounded pretty decent, though the fresh strings put on it yesterday undoubtedly helped.

Coughing well today. My throat is killing me.

Retro laptopping

Had a look through the stack of old laptops I seem to have accumulated and had a play with some of them and set aside others for scrapping.

First was a PowerBook 540. Now this was a truly kickass machine in it's time - 68040 processors, stereo speakers, built-in Ethernet, and they were also the first ever laptops with trackpads. They also looked good with a curvy swooping case. Mine has 12mb RAM, a 250mb hard drive, a mono TFT screen and runs Mac OS 8.1. It still works fine, but the screen has a fault where it'll start to fade from the corners inward, which is really weird. After about an hour or so, it's basically unusable. With the built in Ethernet, it can browse the Internet, but it is really very slow. My blog took about a minute to load and looked a bit weird.

After that, I hacked up a Toshiba power supply and used it to fire up an old Tadpole SPARCbook 2. Now this truly is an orphaned machine, I've never seen another one except in a museum. Tadpole built laptop equivalents of high-end Sun Unix workstations in the 90's, and this is one of the very earliest. It has a 40mhz SPARC processor, 32mb RAM, a colour TFT screen and I'm guessing a 250mb SCSI hard drive and probably cost a vast sum when it was new. While it does still power up and drops into the ROM monitor, it won't boot and the display constantly rolls, as though it's lost vertical hold. I did discover after a bit of research that it needs 18v rather than the 15v from the Toshiba PSU, but a brief test with a 19v Fujitsu PSU did the same thing.

There is very little useful information about this machine on the Internet, and the chances of getting it running again are slim. It needs a special version of SunOS to install and boot from and the SCSI connector is non-standard. Theoretically it would be possible to install it via a network boot, but with the display problem, it's not worth trying to hunt down the necessary software. Shame really, it's built like a tank, and it's certainly something different and it would be fun to play with old-school Unix. But it's just too different from a normal SPARC machine - the later SPARCbook 3 was much more like a normal Sun machine and is therefore easier to get running.

Finally I tried my PowerBook 180, an older machine than the 540. I've always had a soft spot for the 1x0 PowerBooks, being big and square. This one has the maximum 14mb RAM and a 33mhz 68030. But this time it wouldn't start for some reason. It showed a cursor which moved, but didn't want to load the OS. Annoying. I'd like to get it running as is pretty clean and has the weirdness of a SCSI-Ethernet adaptor.

I once again admired the sleek beauty of an early titanium PowerBook G4 and lamented the dead motherboard which prevents it being used. It is otherwise intact, although I stole the keytops for my iBook, and the hard drive is long gone. But the motherboard is truly fried and I can't find a cheap enough replacement to justify it, especially as the 512mb RAM in it is fried too.

I nearly started stripping the Proliant today, but I just couldn't be arsed. It's so big and heavy. It needs to go though and so does a lot of other crap. There's a big all-in-one Power Mac 5500/275 which I'd bin, except it's the black model which is apparently rare. There's a LOT of other crap that can go though.

Can't sleep!

Woke up about an hour ago with a blocked nose dripping horrible fluids, and can't get back to sleep. Feel utterly awake and alert. How annoying.

Nose is clearish now but still has that annoying burning sensation. Still dripping though. Various aches.

Feck. I thought I was getting better yesterday but obviously not. Left nostril totally blocked but then it is much smaller than my right one due to a deviated septum, relic of being rescusitated when I was born.

Christmas Day

Updating blog from phone at my Dad's house. So far all has gone well. I didn't sleep well and so am feeling rather tired and crappy. Shame as the weather is beautiful and it would be perfect weather for walking the dog.

Say what you like about the iPhone or iPod touch, using the on screen keyboard is easier than typing on the phone.

Illness and Tron

Felt like crap all day yesterday with a snotty cold, but not too bad today. So didn't do much at all. Just chilled with the occasional DVD. Watched the weirdness that is Tron today. The Master Control Program freaked me out the first time I saw it and it still unsettles me today.

Eaten a shedload of macadamia and cashew nuts so I feel slightly sick. Bah.

Once again it is Christmas tomorrow. Going to have lunch with my Dad and then evening meal with my Mum. Should be fun. Not hugely fussed about it though, I'm looking forward to New Years Eve more.

Ridiculous filenames

People really need to be more careful when naming files. Over the last couple of weeks I encountered these gems:

ASSQUEST.DOC - a questionnaire
SIMSPERM.DOC - documentation about software permissions.

A tiny laptop and a huge Transformer

The thriftiness is being dispelled somewhat by the Christmas influence. I think I mentioned the Masterpiece Optimus Prime recently. Well, I found a cheap second hand one on Ebay. Cheap because it is used and is missing a finger, it's also the US version which has battle damage and the cut-off smokestacks. Despite that, it's undeniably impressive. It stands a foot tall in robot mode and is amazingly detailed, making it a bitch to transform. It kind of makes up for never actually having the original Optimus Prime as a child. I did have Ultra Magnus, which was actually identical except it was white, but it wasn't quite the same. There's even a Masterpiece Ultra Magnus, which is just a repaint of the Optimus Prime one, and is just as cool. There is a fairly similar sized model of the new Movie Optimus Prime, which looks quite cool. But it just lacks the style of the original.

I spent some time today playing with my Toshiba Libretto 50CT. It's a very old laptop, being only a Pentium 75mhz with 32mb RAM. But the appealing thing is that it is very, very small, only just larger than a VHS tape. When it came out in about 1996 (I think), it was very expensive. But being a computer, of course, it depreciated reasonably quickly and I got this rather beat up one a couple of years ago and dig it out every now and again to play with. Originally it ran Windows 95 but now it runs a stripped down Debian Linux install, and runs it quite well. Discovered it can run an RDP session to my XP machine with acceptable performance which was a slightly surreal sight. It's nice to go back to a bare minimum machine - my new phone has a faster processor and more memory than the Libretto, which is quite worrying.

Weird thing you can get in Sainsbury's - dark chocolate with chilli in it. It's a Mexican thing and is actually really nice. It's not spicy as such when you reach the chilli, rather you get a curious sensation of warmth. Very intriguing.

One thing I'm trying to summon up the energy to do is get rid of my Compaq Proliant 5500 server. I bought it a couple of years ago and pimped it out with quad Pentium Pro 200mhz CPUs, 640mb RAM and blue LEDs in the SCSI drive trays. It ran pretty nicely for something so old.

Sadly something in it has died and it won't power up any more. It is enormous and heavy and takes up a LOT of room. I need to strip out all the useful parts (basically the blue LEDs...) and scrap it. It's just one of the many things that I don't need or want any more.

A great night out

Last day of work was meh. However tonight was a great night out with myself, Rob and Em, Andy, Will, Vicky and captain Caroline from badminton and her husband Rob. We started out at the top of St Asaph and worked our way through several pubs. It was pretty good all round.

Would type more but I'm tired.

Meh

Today was a boring day other than building a rather lovely Dell Precision laptop for a CAD user. It had a 15" 1680x1050 screen which was one of the most beautifully clear and sharp screens I've ever seen.

While I was in Woolies picking up some stuff for Christmas, I came across a small Optimus Prime figure for £3, so I thought I'd get it. It's actually quite cool even if it is from the movie. The best one has to be the Masterpiece Optimus Prime. My colleague has one and it looks perfect in both robot and truck mode, and every single joint is articulated, even the fingers. It does cost about £90 though.

Mario Galaxy has crossed the line where it becomes so hard it's not fun any more. I sold Arsearsein's Creed to someone in work because I hate it utterly. Not doing so well with the gaming at the moment.

A fat day and Windows

My department had a meeting today, and we clubbed together to get a buffet, which was really good. I had three piece of a particularly good chocolate cake, and then found that another department in the building had got the same buffet, so had another piece of the cake.

The Shuffle crashed today. It was playing Metallica happily enough in the car, and then died with the disco lights of death (flashing green and orange). Not a good sign. iTunes refused to touch it, saying it was corrupted and then it failed to restore it to default settings. I downloaded the iPod Reset Utility, which worked after a few tries, and some stupidity from the Optiplex. So it's now full of music again and appears to be working fine. A bit of a relief as quite often they don't return from the dead if you get the disco lights.

Watched the Smooth Criminal segment from Moonwalker on YouTube. Actually quite good, but it's funny how much of a bastard he is. He attacks several people and vapourises one, and then forces the hapless people to join in his ankle destroying dancing before going mad with a machine gun. What a great example for kids, eh? Also the song is actually about a woman who has been attacked by a hit man.

Here is a rant about Windows:

The interface is inconsistent and allows applications to grab focus at any time, incredibly annoying if you have stuff running in the background. The layout of the system files is a complete mess and the registry is just a massive, huge ball-ache. Application installation is a total farce, with installers and uninstallers that hardly ever work properly, spreading files all over the place and adding registry keys galore. How many times have I clicked 'Remove...' in Add/Remove Programs to be told 'The uninstall file is corrupted/lost/broken' and then having no way to tidily remove the program.

One of my biggest gripes is drive letters. This is an example: if I plug a card reader with four slots into a Mac, nothing appears until you insert a card, whereupon an icon will appear with the card's name. Insert another card, you get another icon.

On Windows, when you connect the reader, you get FOUR identically named drives with four separate letters. You then have to choose the drives at random to find the one with the card in it. I don't know how enterprise systems running Windows handle it with massive amounts of disks, but it can't be pretty. Drive letters were fine when it was MS-DOS and all you had were floppies and hard drives but in this day and age of network drives and vast storage? Get real.

Windows is a sloppy and kludgy operating system. Don't get me wrong, XP SP2 is a world away from the horrors of Windows 98 and ME, but it's still fundamentally broken in so many ways. Just because it's become the de facto standard does NOT mean it's great. Linux isn't the answer just yet, but it's getting better and my experiences with Gutsy on this machine have been excellent). Mac OS X may have it's own flaws, but it has a much more consistent interface and handles drives and applications much, much better than Windows, something it inherited from the old Mac OS.

Ah...now I feel better.

Christmas

Not sure why, but I'm sick of Christmas this year. Perhaps it's the constant stream of desperate requests for Wiis and DSs on the work noticeboard from people eager not to disappoint their children, and the near total commercialisation of a religious holiday which has lost it's meaning to most people. Not that I ever gave a toss about that side of it. I remember thinking in primary school when we had to do the nativity play that it was a load of nonsense, which is a bit weird really. Lifelong cynic, I guess.

I remember having great Christmases at a friend's house when we were quite young. His mother is German, so there was a strong influence from her on it. They opened their presents on Christmas Eve, had an enormous tree with real chocolates hanging off it, and there was always a massive gingerbread house covered in sweets. Awesome. It always seemed more homely somehow than the traditional Christmas at home. Oh well.

Experimented with Blender today. It's a free 3D program that is very powerful but I find totally incomprehensible. I'm working through the tutorials though and some of it is starting to make sense.

First day of work with the N93. It's big but does fit OK in my pocket with my work phone. The torch function of the flash LED comes in useful.

Worth a listen.

Soup

It was the soup fest round at Will's today. Basically a day each December to celebrate the joys of soup. It was a typical day, everyone sitting around eating soup, cake and chocolate and talking. Also encountered the ridiculous cat which sits there looking cute and just asking to be petted, whereupon it will attack with every claw it has. My favourite soup today was the spicy butternut squash and apple soup.

It's cold today, and annoyingly the ground stayed solid all day long. Also I just encountered a MASSIVE spider in my room, which escaped

I hate Christmas.

A pleasant surprise

I just dug out the mini-SD adaptor that came with the N93 and found a 2gb card in it. The only one mentioned in the listing was the standard 128mb that comes with the phone, so I'm guessing they forgot it was there.

I might be tempted to contact the seller, but they're only worth £10 these days so it's hardly worth it. There wasn't anything on it.

During the dog walk this morning, experimented with the camera. When viewed on a computer, the pics are pretty good, but the colours are a little washed out compared to my 'real' camera and if you zoom in, there's more than normal artefacting. But it's OK for something built into a phone. The video is pretty decent, it can capture at 640x480 at 30fps.

Supernova

This is really cool: Vela Supernova Remnant (& more) Wide-Field One Gigapixel Interactive Image

Memory leak?

Can you guess at what point I killed Firefox?

A work do and a new phone

It was the ICT Christmas do last night. It was held at a nearby hotel and was a 70's/80's themed 'Boogie Night'. It was actually quite good. Fancy dress was the order of the day and I was one of only two scrooges not dressed up. However fortunately I did have my Superman T-shirt on so that was enough to redeem me. The meal was a sort of Chinese buffet thing, but there was salad as well, so people ended up with random plates full of fried rice and sweet and sour pork, along with beetroot, potato salad and BBQ sauce. Odd but interesting. It was a good evening and the secret Santa presents were a big success. Perhaps the oddest was a piece of toffee which contained an apparently edible real scorpion. Two guys bravely ate it but lost their appetite when they actually reached the scorpion.

New phone time. My faithful Nokia 7610 has well and truly earned it's retirement. In the two and a half years I've owned it, it's been dropped quite often, covered in wine, kicked across a concrete floor into a wall, covered in mud and various items of food, and not a single thing has ever gone wrong. It had a new shell earlier this year but other than that, never needed anything. It is the most solid, reliable phone I have ever encountered. If the keypad hadn't finally started to fail, I'd have simply bought a new battery for it.

However instead I got a new phone. As can be seen in the image above, compared to the 7610, it's huge and complex. It's a Nokia N93, the device where Nokia went mad and included absolutely everything in a single device. It has a fast CPU, a 3mp camera with 3x optical zoom, a VGA camera in the lid, a 320x240 display, wi-fi, TV output and a weird folding, twisting shell design. Compared to the 7610 it feels flimsy and plasticky, but we'll see how it holds up. It's amazing how fast these things depreciate - 18 months ago, this was the absolute high-end of Nokia's line-up, but I got it for a fraction of the original off-contract price.

Hurtling through cake and space

Safari just crashed on the Touch. It does this quite frequently. Not really an issue unless you're writing a blog post...

Not much to report. My faithful Nokia 7610 has started to have issues with the keypad, which combined with the rapidly dying battery have led me to hunt for a suitable replacement. Steps have already been taken and I'll update when appropriate. No, it's not a iPhone. The issue I have is how to move the 580 notes that are held in the Notes program to the new device. I did move the notepad.dat file to the 7610 from my N-gage but they ran the same version of the OS.

Work do tomorrow and it's fancy dress. I'm going as someone from the background of the Terminator who coincidentally looks just like me in my normal clothes...
Low battery, better publish this now!

A sad and lonely day

It was a strange day today. I didn't do all that much. The weather was crappy in the morning so I just read books and lounged around. After lunch it looked a little better, so I took the dog for a walk. It was quite eventful, we met three people on horses, yet another uncontrolled dog, and some gimp on a dirt bike who couldn't get the thing moving without stalling. It took him about 20 tries. Quite funny.

After that, listened to some music and tried to play Mario Galaxy. However the toughness to fun ratio has increased dramatically and I got angry and turned it off. I did however play with the Mii Contest Channel, which is fun. I've submitted a Mii for the new competition 'Someone stuck in the 70's'. Also had a look at the top Miis of the day and found there were two with penises on their face and one with breasts. Oh dear.

Also experimented with the free VMWare server and now I have a fully working activated Windows XP virtual machine. It seems to run quite nicely. Perhaps not as quick as it would on the actual hardware, but certainly well enough. To help with speed, I put the machine on a separate hard drive from the real OS, which may help.

So yeah, a geeky and also slightly depressing day, for reasons I can't really fathom.

Work tomorrow. Bah.

Play-doh, poker and chocolate orange cake

Will and I met up with Rob and Em, before taking a trip into town. The goal? To buy some Play-doh and some poker chips. The reasoning for the Play-doh? Being avid and vigorous Pictionary fans, the concept of Rapidough appealed where instead of drawing, you model with clay. However, rather than drop £25 on the actual game, we reasoned that a £5 tub of Play-doh would be more fun. We also got a nice set of poker chips for cheap as well.

Upon return to Rob and Em's house, Rob spent some time teaching myself, Will and later Vicky to play poker. It was actually really good fun, though I can see how it would be difficult to become a true master of it. This was followed by a session of Play-doh madness. Basically we took it in turns to suggest something and the other four would have to model it. Perhaps the most hilarious were an angel, Concorde, a tractor, Stephen Hawking and a lifelike penis. The Play-doh had that typical marzipan-like smell.

This was followed by epic pizza, more poker and a game of Cheat, which was mainly to laugh at Will who is notoriously bad at that game.

Em also made a marbled Chocolate Orange cake, which was absolutely amazing.

Slightly incoherent, but it's late. What a great day though.

Maybe you shouldn’t have accidentally destroyed the entire cosmos then, you giant regal fuck.

6 biggest arseholes in gaming, and I wholeheartedly agree with the first one, having played Me & My Katamari on the PSP. And don't even mention Tom Nook to me.

Jiggle

Work: pointless.
Badminton: shite.
Self-esteem: non-existent.

Remind me why I bother.

Wet? Just a little.

We had a meeting today and our manager made us do one of those annoying team building exercises. But it was interesting, I found that one of my colleagues has a silver grade in ballroom dancing, another can solve a Rubik's Cube in under a minute and yet another wasn't born in Wales (shock, horror!)

I left home this evening to go to badminton, and it rained. It rained a lot. The roads were horrendous, I kept having to go through puddles which made the alternator light come on and the steering heavy as various belts slipped. All fun fun. After all that, badminton was quite entertaining, though I played like complete pants in the last two games, annoyingly.

All men are fools and what makes them so is having beauty like what I have got.

No brakes

Got into the car today to go to work and as soon as I pressed the brake pedal, it did very little to stop the vehicle, which was quite worrying. Subsequent investigation showed that a branch from a gorse bush that blew out in front of me last night had jammed itself between the axle and chassis, severing the brake lines. I was able to use the low ratio gears to get it safely to the bottom of the track, from where it was subsequently retrieved and repaired by the local Land Rover gurus. It wasn't a big repair, but the labour was pricey.

Didn't get much done in work. It was a somewhat strange day.

In the evening, it dawned on me that the 2.5gb RAM in this machine would probably allow VMWare to run another OS nicely. So I downloaded and installed the free VMWare Server, which installed painlessly. It now has a virtual copy of Windows 2000 Advanced Server installed, which actually runs rather well. So that could be fun to play with. Just need more disk space in this machine, 20gb is not enough and I'm running out quickly. This combined with the ever-present RDP connection to my MP3 playing box means I have a rather busy desktop now. Hmm, if I popped another graphics card in, I could have another monitor perhaps...

London broke me

Ever since I got back from London I have been really bad about exercise and eating less crap. I think it coincided with the clock change and a general phase of crappy weather. Now I feel really lethargic and crap and I'm sure it's the lack of exercise. But it's really hard to get back into it when the weather is cold and wet and windy, and the evenings are dark and intimidating. Oh well.

Nothing reported over the last couple days because nothing happened. Had a real fright today as I had to shut down one of the test Unix machines (one of several virtual machines) and as I did so, I lost connection to the web based system manager, making me think I'd somehow shut down four producton systems at the same time. Really worrying moment.

Oh well. That's about it.

Unusual Pringles, Galaxy and family

Went and cleaned the car this morning, which always gets me odd looks. I get 10 minutes on the jetwash and spent about 2 minutes cleaning the top and then the rest of the time cleaning the mud from underneath.

After that, walked the dog and got some more stars in Mario Galaxy. Still enjoying it, though it's getting quite tough now. But you don't get fed up because it keeps you motivated with new things. Also had a couple of packets of Pringles that Steve and Kara brought me from the USA. One was Ranch, which I love but you can't get in this country, and another interesting flavour called Loaded Baked Potato. It was actually quite nice, and did a passable imitation of a jacket potato with butter and cheese.

Then went to meet up with my brother and sister and their families for a meal. It was a great evening all round. One thing that seems to define the genes on my Dad's side is a slightly twisted sense of humour, and whenever we get together, there are always some slightly odd conversations. Also it was good to see my nieces again, one of whom is heavily pregnant. I'm really not very good at keeping in touch with my family but when I have a good time with them like today, it kind of motivates me to try harder. Got some good photos too, so will get them uploaded at some point.