Saints Row 2 > GTA IV again

I'm not the only one who thinks that SR2 is better than GTA IV. I agree with every point on this list bar one - the driving.

The driving was one of the things I really liked about GTA IV. It was a shock at first how much effort it was to control the cars, but I soon grew to love the genuine sense of weight of each car and how they all handled differently. There was real satisfaction in hurling a huge 70's American barge into a bend and watching it lean wildly and the tyres howl in protest as it went sideways with a little tap of the handbrake. You could get into the aforementioned barge, a small hatchback, a people carrier and a van and they'd all handle differently and usually about right for what it was.

But all the other points are spot on. SR2 doesn't even try to take itself at all seriously, and it's all the better for it. Also the sheer amount of side missions is bewildering at first. I've played it for hours and have done hardly any of the main missions.

The hitman missions are quite fun. You usually have to do something to get the target to appear, like picking a fight in the trailer park, or getting drunk in the stadium, or in an extreme case, getting killed to get a doctor to appear in the hospital.

Cough cough

Still coughing away. I hate this part of having a cold.

The author of the iFart application for the iPhone has made $40,000 in two days and it's now the #1 non-free application on the App Store. Two things came to mind when I read about this.

1) People are so damn puerile - what does it say about the future of the human race? *
2) DAMN WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF IT FIRST????

I bet people everywhere are downloading the iPhone SDK and trying to work out what bodily function they can convert into a compelling and popular application. iSneeze? iBurp? iPuke? iLactate?

* I'll admit that I was bitterly disappointed to discover that this application wouldn't install on an iPod touch.

Picking at the corpse

Went to Denbigh to see what was going on in Woolies as it was the last day it would be open. It was quite weird as loads of shelves were empty. In fact the shelves themselves were for sale along with pretty much everything else except the actual cash registers. I ended up with South Park season 8 on DVD for £4 and a new iPod universal dock for the same price because it wasn't registered on the system, and at that point the staff didn't really give a toss. They had some 360 games left but only crappy wrestling ones. I haven't seen any South Park since the movie, but the episodes I've watched so far have been quite funny. The iPod dock works great with the touch once the adapter it came with was fitted, which is nice.

Other than that haven't done much except have a go at some missions on Saint's Row 2. I've not done any more main missions, instead I've been having a go at some of the activities and diversions, some of which are actually pretty good fun. The Hitman missions are OK except I'm sat around on a pirate ship waiting for some tosser in a pirate suit to turn up.

I've resurrected the 1 string bass as a dual course slide bass, so it has two strings tuned to G an octave apart. Sounds quite interesting. However the strings are slicing through the crappy piece of wood I used for a bridge so need to find something different.

Christmas once again

Scary that Christmas has been and gone again. I'm not quite sure where 2008 has gone.

The day itself went OK, spent the morning and lunch with my Mum and then round to my Dad's for the afternoon and evening. Everything went OK and it was quite a nice day.

Today has been a quiet one. The weather was spectactularly nice, but I found that if I went outside the cold made me cough, so I didn't spent much time outside.

Saint's Row 2 > GTA IV

Yes, it's true. I rate Saint's Row 2 above GTA IV. In theory, it should be a worse game by far. The original Saint's Row was a joke compared to San Andreas. It looked and felt like a game for a previous generation machine, and tried so hard to outdo the classic GTA humour and entertainment.

But then GTA IV came out and as I've said before, it took the classic GTA format and stripped it of the ironic sense of humour and parody and the many many things you could do other than the main missions. Instead of the glorious world of San Andreas where you could do almost anything, it went all serious and 'realistic'. Saint's Row 2 is fairly similar to the first one, but it's got more fun to it than GTA IV.



I've just spent a few hours playing Saint's Row 2 in co-op with Will. We found many hilarious things. Charging around naked and streaking was a good start, followed by attempts to land planes and helicopters on the tallest building, before parachuting down off it. Ramming petrol stations at top speed with one player surfing on the car roof caused some interesting results. Then we used the pratfalls cheat in various hilarious ways before triggering wars between gangs and police with inevitable chaotic results.


After dressing my male character up in fishnet tights and a fetching dress, and Will's ambiguous fat character in a suitably bizarre outfit, we found a huge hill to throw cars and ourselves off with various results.



And of course, it wouldn't be Saint's Row without the glitches that pop up every now and again, usually with entertaining results. This guy was stuck in the side of the car for quite some time.

But this is what I miss from GTA IV. All the fun stuff that you can do while not doing the main missions. I have done some of the missions in Saint's Row 2 and they weren't too bad, although the whole gangsta thing the game is built round is quite irritating. The cut scenes are made far more entertaining if your character is naked though.

Aaaargh

The dog is curled up in a ball on my bed, which is very cute, except he just let rip with a huge smelly dog fart.

Bleurgh, the vile plague

Not much to report. Thursday night was the work do which was good fun. It's always interesting to see your work colleagues in an informal situation. Noticed I had a slight cough that day.

Friday was one of those days which was completely uninspired, due to feeling tired after the late evening and having that depressing feeling that I was coming down with something.

Yesterday I woke up feeling awful, achy all over and generally feeling crap. It's sort of like a cold without the runny nose.

Ordinarily this would have been an excuse to stay in bed with a good book but I had to go to Ruthin to drop the car off for it's service. I spent the time while it was being done with Amy and Huw where we went for a nice breakfast in Siop Nain and then took a stroll around the bypass.

The car is definitely running better now and everything is fine except that he couldn't get a gasket for the back end of the exhaust where it connects to the silencer. This means that it is still rather loud, but now it sounds different. In fact it actually sounds like it has a sports exhaust, and I'm ashamed to admit I rather like it. This will be sorted tomorrow.

Yesterday evening was the biannual pub crawl but I had to go after the first pub because I felt so crappy, unfortunately. This also meant that I missed out on the soup fest today as well, bah.

Fun with DOS (!)

I found a spare 64mb CF card knocking about and found that it fitted into the 200LX with a PCMCIA adapter. Tiny by modern standards but respectable for a DOS machine. In a search for something to run on it, I found a copy of Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS. I was able to decompress it on XP and run the setup program, and then copied the final folder to the palmtop. Amazingly enough it works fine, once the colours were set so the mono LCD could display them properly.

The truly scary thing is that the entire program takes up just 2.6mb. It seems unreal somehow that we used to be able to get by on such tiny resources.

The 200LX is one of those machines I find really interesting because it was an attempt to compress a desktop architecture into a palmtop. It's quite unusual because it actually worked, and was a really good machine, made when HP still made interesting things of good quality. The modern equivalent is probably the OQO or the Sony Vaio UX, which are handheld machines that can run full copies of XP or Linux or even Mac OS X.

The most pointless thing of all time

Playstation Home. It's like Second Life but you can't create anything, instead it all has to be bought through microtransactions. You can pay actual money to outfit your avatar in Diesel clothes. Also unlike the Miis in the Wii and the Mii-like Avatars in the 360, the Home avatars are much more realistic.

But the worst thing is that there are many, many reports of anyone with a female avatar being harrassed and stalked by hordes of males. It's that typical thing where some people feel they can do stuff online that they would never do in the real world.

Scales

From one extreme to the other...



Dell Inspiron 9400
Dell Latitude D400
Asus Eee 900
HP 200LX Palmtop PC

The HP is a vintage relic, relatively famous in its day for being a fully PC compatible palmtop, so it can run DOS applications and even early versions of Windows if you feel like being horrible. It's not too bad to use despite the miniscule text on the screen and that calculator style keyboard.

An evil man in blue hotpants

My new evil character in Fable II is coming along nicely. So far he's managed to piss off basically everyone and is completely evil due to performing random acts of violence. There's one village which has no house with doors intact because he's been in and stolen everything from every last one, murdering anyone who tried to stop him. Most of all though, he's evil due to performing 41 human sacrifices to get a powerful sword. But he's not just evil, he's corrupt too. People don't like it when he buys out shops and jacks up the prices, and buys houses and rents them out at extortionate costs. It's somewhat hilarious though to have this guy doing all this, with great red cracks in his skin, covered in battle scars with huge horns protuding from his forehead, with people crying and screaming whenever he comes near, but yet he's wearing bright blue hotpants. Perhaps that just adds to the terror.

Other than that did a bit of tidying today and tried to work out what the hell to do with some of the more useless computer crap that's lying around. Didn't get very far though. It's been one of those weeks and as a result, it's not a weekend where I feel very motivated.

N93 anniversary

Well, it's been a year since I got the N93. It's been a really good phone, nice and powerful and with a good camera. To be honest I expected it to fall apart within months with the crazy hinge and fragile camera, but it's been really good. It's looking well worn from my pocket and I've dropped it at least twice, but it's still going strong. The best thing has to be the camera, as it takes pretty good images for a phone, and the video recording is top notch. It's really handy to have something that can take good pictures at a moments notice.

The only issues are a slightly sticky # key and the battery life. I've tried it with a couple of batteries but it seems to eat them pretty quickly and the latest one has started to swell slightly, which is not a good sign. I think I'm going to bite the bullet and just order a brand new one from Nokia.

Changing it for something else hasn't really ever been a serious consideration. The logical upgrade is the N95 but they are still expensive and I'm not keen on sliders as they leave the screen exposed. I wondered vaguely about making the leap from Nokia to something like the ludicrously named LG Viewty which has a 5mp camera with a 120fps video mode. But nothing really appealed. The iPhone might be a contender if it wasn't so expensive, locked to O2 and disgustingly trendy. The ultimate has to be the Nokia E90 but they are still pricey, and chunky too. I did use a 9210 Communicator for a while but it was too big.

Took a look in the Denbigh Woolworths closing down sale. I wasn't too fussed about anything on sale, especially as all the games were only discounted by 10%. Also all the 360 games had gone. They did have an 80gb PS3 with a nice discount but even if I could afford it, there wouldn't be much point in getting one. LittleBigPlanet looks good though. There was a good selection of DS games but a quick scan made me rethink my plans to get a Phat DS again, it's just shovelware shite like the Wii is suffering from. It's a real shame.

Badminton was OK today. One of those days where I didn't play very well but still had a good time and got lots of exercise. The Woman of Hate had some bad games which is always funny. She swears a lot under her breath.

Vectra fun

Well the Vectra is still going OK other than the loud and embarrassing exhaust. However I met up with a guy I know who is good with cars and he had a look at the various issues.

The ticking at startup is a broken manifold gasket. In itself not a huge problem, but it can have drastic effects on everything else as the leaking of air and exhaust gases affect a sensor nearby. The engine management then gets duff information and the fuel and air ratio goes all to cock. Once sorted the engine will run much better and be more economical, definitely a good thing. Apparently a properly running 2.0 should do 40-45 mpg.

It also needs a full service and a timing belt kit, this I knew anyway. It's not a coincidence that the previous owner traded it in just as it was coming up to120,000 miles, when it would be due for it's third belt. I'm paranoid about timing belts so I definitely want to get that sorted out.

He also popped it up on a ramp to look at the blowing exhaust, and we found a dodgy weld where the centre part connects to the rear silencer and three neat little holes where it had rusted through from the inside, hence the loud and embarrassing noise.

Other than those issues and the central locking, everything is working OK. I might look into getting the air conditioning fixed but that can certainly wait until it's warmer.

Stuff, stuff and yes, more stuff

Friday was a peculiar day. It was proceeding uneventfully when I was suddenly called upon to move a whole load of data connections and phone lines. This took most of the day and a lot of repatching and faffing around under desks (ahem). As a result, when I got home, I fell asleep and woke up too late to go to badminton. Given that I sleep during the day about once a decade, this shows how exhausting a day it was.

Saturday was spent doing some Christmans shopping in Ruthin, which was surprisingly stress-free. I then carried on with Fable II, enjoying the wealth that had built up while the Xbox was away. Today hasn't been much more than Fable II either. I've now completed the main storyline, which was quite rewarding. There's still plenty of side quests left to do though, so that's good. One of the hightlights was getting blackmailed for bigamy, which was quite funny.

It's definitely been one of the best games I've played on the 360, despite having RPG elements. Normally I can't stand RPGs but fortunately it's not a big part of the game. It does have quirks and glitches, such as my wife suddenly disappearing for a while and then unexpectedly reappearing in a new area hundreds of miles away, but on the whole it's a well put together fun game. The combat is reasonably straightforward and you can do plenty of other things than the main quest if you want. I like games that let you do this, GTA San Andreas took it to the extreme and was all the better for it.

A day with ups and downs

Work was a bit much today. However the following good things happened:

1) My 360 came back. The replacement has a manufacture date of 12th October 2008 and both the system fans and the DVD drive are much quieter than the old one. So that's good. Ironically, the day I got mine back, Will's died.

2) Had a good time at badminton. Didn't win any games but had fun hurtling around the court. She Who I Dislike seems to have calmed down a lot recently but she still gets frustrated. There's also a Man Who Annoys Me, and he plays it like tennis which is annoying.

Random

Top Gear is just brilliant for the simple reason that they get do do everything that nobody else can. Watching a bendy bus powerslide round a corner with the rear section flailing wildly followed by a double decker crashing onto it's side was a truly awe inspiring sight.

It's too cold. The Vectra has a great heater but the least efficient rear demister I've ever seen in a car. I can set off from Ruthin and it isn't clear by the time I get to Denbigh. The only car I've had which was worse was my old Series III Land Rover, which didn't actually have a demister. A minor thing though.

Fun.

Feck

Going back to work after a holiday is always a painful experience, even more so today.

Got the car back which is good.

The Monstrosity 2 is no more, I tried to make it into a 6 string which fouled everything up.

Rugby fun

The Thursday post was because one of the lower suspension arms on the Vectra rear suspension collapsed.

Friday can't have been memorable because I can't remember what I did that day except watch some more of the The Wire. Rob lent me the first season and it's quite good.

Saturday consisted of getting up early to go to Cardiff on a coach to watch the Wales vs Australia match. The match itself was great but the journey was a bit trying. The ancient coach had broken heating and so on the way down there was ice on the inside of the windows, and it was a long way without much time in Cardiff outside the match. It was definitely worth going though as it was a good game.

Hordes of people making their way into the stadium.

The fiery entrance, very impressive.

My 360 arrived in Germany yesterday.

Arse

Sometimes life can be really fucking annoying and unfair.

Wow

You'd NEVER get anything like this on TV today. Which is a real shame.

My 360 has safely arrived in Deeside on the way to Frankfurt.

Flaum

It's been another weird unmotivated day of not doing much. I finished Harry Potter book 6 which is quite good and then faffed around on the computer for a bit.

The UPS guy picked up the 360 today. He said in the last two weeks they've picked up masses of them. How weird. The rumour is that the new dashboard is somehow causing them to fail, but I think in my case it must have just been on the point of failure and swapping the SCART lead for the VGA lead was just the last straw.

There's a definite blow in the Vectra exhaust which has got quite loud. Typical. I think it must have caught on the track before I went down there with the spade. Bah.

Virtualisation

Here's my experiments with the VMware ESXi server. There's four machines, one installing Windows 2000, one running Xubuntu, one running Ubuntu Server, the other running a VMware Nostalgia appliance which has a load of old adandonware DOS games on it. These are all running on the Precision with the Inspiron using the Virtual Infrastructure client to connect. Performance seems pretty good but the single hard drive is a bottle neck if all the machines try to access it at the same time.

Tired

The 360 will soon be winging it's way to Frankfurt in Germany. Not quite sure why it has to go all that way. Microsoft has the most irritating robot phone system ever, it has a jaunty American accent and tries to be all reassuring and hip. It's unbelievably annoying. Then the first guy I spoke to yesterday had no idea what he was doing and said he wasn't able to create the repair request, so I had to call back today. This time I got hold of a woman who sorted it out within five minutes. The 360 is packaged up and the label printed, just need to arrange a collection with UPS.

It was a nice morning so I attacked the garden again. Didn't do much else today as I woke up far too early and so now I'm really tired. Not planning on doing much else, probably just going to cabbage in front of a DVD or something.

A good weekend until...

Yeah, my 360 has finally joined the choir invisible. Apparently all those unreadable disk errors might have been a symptom of impending failure.

Other than that it's been a nice weekend. Yesterday morning was spent at my Dad's catching up with him and his wife. We got my Alpine stereo fitted into the Vectra with no hassle at all except we had to swap the red and yellow wires so it didn't reset every time the ignition was turned off.

After that, made my way to Rob and Em's for a nice day of rugby and food, including a particularly nice home-made curry that was only overshadowed by the bread Rob had made that morning. The rugby was interesting but sadly Wales didn't follow up on the promising first half.

Not done much today. I was hoping to go out and do some digging on the track where the Vectra catches slightly but it's been a cold, horrible day of intermittent rain and hail thrown at you by strong winds. So I spent the day experimenting with the free version of ESX server by VMware. The Inspiron 9400 has become my main machine so I installed ESX on the Precision, which runs it quite nicely although you have to hack it a little to support the IDE hard drive.

I'd had enough of that after a while and decided I'd hook up the 360 to one of the Precision's monitors to see what Fable II looked like in HD, which is when I discovered it had finally expired. Bah. I was convinced it was the VGA lead causing issues until I realised that AV cable problems have four red lights, three red lights is when it's failed terminally.

Magic Carpet Ride

It's been a stressful week in work. Today reached breaking point (literally) when a pen shattered in my hands after a particularly infuriating phone call. I didn't think much of it until I looked up and saw the ceiling covered in ink. Naturally I tried to hide the evidence but the ceiling tiles were made up of that light plasterboard type stuff and had absorbed the ink. My attempts to wipe it off just spead it around, making it hideously obvious. There was nothing for it but to go and see the caretaker and admit what I'd done. He didn't believe me until I showed him and then he practically fell on the ground laughing. Fortunately there are spare ceiling tiles, so that's OK.

The car is going well. There is a slight ticking from the engine when accelerating which quietens down when it's warm. From what I read on the net, this could be a noisy fuel injector. I'm going to have a look through the various receipts and things I found stashed in the glovebox and look into getting it serviced.

It's a lovely car after the AX. It feels solid and tank-like and the ride is so much better. Apparently reviews of this car say the handling is poor and the ride indifferent but after the crashing, banging ride of the AX, it feels like a magic carpet. It's definitely not a sporty car but that suits me fine. The roads were wet and slippery today which allowed me to test the ABS and traction control, which both work as epected. I also discovered a button for air conditioning but I don't think it works.

For some reason, this time round I'm finding the Order of the Phoenix much easier going.

Xbox 360 update

Well, just installed the new Dashboard for the 360, and wow. It's completely and utterly different. It's like a whole new machine. I'm currently using the 'Play from Hard Drive' feature to install Fable II. The Avatars are basically a carbon copy of the Miis, and some things are called channels.

Microsoft were always good at using other people's ideas but this really is rather blatant.

Rob, if you read this, get an Elite, that 120gb drive will come in useful with the new dashboard.

Update: Fable II definitely runs better from the hard drive, the menus and things are more responsive and everything just flows better. This is definitely going to help games that are constantly accessing the disk. Shame that with the 20gb drive you can only fit one game on at a time.

The Car

Today in work was hell on toast, and that is all that needs to be said regarding that.

So yes, the car. The big red car I posted the other day is indeed my new ride. Yes, it's a Vauxhall. Yes, it's a Vectra. Yes, it's an SRi.

It's in very nice condition, and drives really well, has a fresh MOT and is nice and comfortable. I don't know what it's going to be like on fuel, obviously worse than the AX, but I've read that the 2.0 can be half-decent on fuel if driven gently. It cost the same as the AX did to fill it up. The insurance was naturally more than the AX but not as much as you might think. I know two people with Vectras who love them so that's why I was looking for one. Unfortunately there are very few diesels about so I ended up with this one.

The weird thing is, unlike the Cavalier and later Vectras, on this model, SRi is just a trim level and there are no changes to the engine or suspension. So other than the alloys and the trim around the windows, it's not more sporty at all. This is a bit aggravating as when I was sorting out the insurance, the guy told that my excess had to go up by £50 just because it says SRi on it.

It does have gadgets, which worries me a little. I've been bitten before by leaking sunroofs, electric windows that stick down when it's raining and central locking which doesn't work right. This has got a manual sunroof, electric windows, electric mirrors, ABS, remote central locking, and I think it even has traction control.

So far everything seems OK except the central locking and alarm, which doesn't seem to disarm when you unlock the doors and some doors seem to randomly stay locked and unlocked. It would probably just be easier to disable the central locking altogether if it's going to be troublesome though.

There's also a third party CD player which was working when I picked it up but died on the way home but that's OK as I'll rip it out and put my faithful Alpine in it. Also there's a screen in the dash that should display the date, time and temperature but it's dead, which is pretty much universal in older Vectras.

The AX? The garage took it off me. They didn't give me anything for it though. I feel guilty that I don't miss the AX but I don't, at all. It should have been a good car, and if it had been any other AX, it probably would have been. But that one was literally damaged goods, and I never should have bought the damn thing.

Goodbye Wii...

I sold my Wii today. It was quite a hard decision to make because I really like the Wii.

Unfortunately I just couldn't justify keeping it when the last game I bought for it was Super Mario Galaxy almost exactly a year ago, not when I had things like car worries and stuff. Also I have decided that the Wii, although promising, is suffering from a lack of decent games. It's a victim of it's own success, much like the PS2 was. The result is that everyone and their dog is making games for it which tend to be some cheaply made crappy game with some shoddy motion controls added to it. The same happened with the DS, which I loved far more than the Wii, but I still sold mine a few months ago. So I'm back down to just two consoles, the Xbox 360 and my old PS2. I might look into picking up one of the old Phat DSs though, they always suited my hands better, and should be cheaper now that the DSi is out.

There's a bunch of retro stuff downstairs but I never really use that any more. There was a time in my St Asaph flat where I had a PS2, GameCube, NES, SNES, N64, MegaDrive, Saturn and Dreamcast all hooked up to complex series of switchboxes that allowed us to switch quickly and easily between each platform.

It was rather upsetting to delete my Wii Shop account and then go into the options and format the Wii memory. It took a little while and then it shut down for the last time, so I could pack it away. But it's gone to a good home, the woman in work who bought it was absolutely chuffed with it.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted and I did have some good times with it. Super Mario Galaxy stands out as the best game, while Wario Ware, Monkey Ball and Red Steel were decent fun too. Tony Hawk Downhill Jam was also surprisingly fun.

The new Star Trek trailer is out. It looks quite interesting but I'm getting a Transformers vibe from it, which is very worrying.

A quiet day

This is being typed on the little laptop that could, the D400. It's still going strong and now I've got a working battery in it. It is second hand but still holds a good charge. All it needs now is some feet so it doesn't slide around and a hard drive caddy as currently it's held in place by a folded piece of paper.

Spent the day not doing much but I did go outside and make some use of the unexpected sunshine we got this afternoon. Hacked down the remains of the stupid apple tree that I left after taking most of it down and brought some logs in from the outside

Found some interesting videos on Youtube of violins being played. After discovering that cellos can be played interestingly, I looked up violins too. They do make some great sounds. Although I like playing bass a lot, I keep trying to find an interesting alternative. So far I've tried and dismissed mandolins and ukuleles. I have briefly looked into violins but they are a remarkably complicated instrument. Oh well.

I really want to get something sorted out with the car this week. Payday on Tuesday so who knows.

My re-read of the Harry Potter books is going OK except I've just got to the Order of the Phoenix. I always find this a bit of a stuggle due to it's sheer lenth. I'm sure it could have been cut down a bit. Also Rob has lent me the new Iain M Banks book, Matter, which I'll have to fit in at some point. I love his Culture stories.

Four strings of doom

Yesterday was a strange day in work, seemed to go on for ever. After that though it was down to Andy's for rugby and pizza, which was good. The game wasn't particularly memorable. After that we headed out to the nearest pub which was nice. It's far enough away from all the other pubs that it doesn't get full of people on crawls which is good as it has a good atmosphere going on. It had a thing going on called 'plug + play' which seemed to be a sort of open mike evening. It basically consisted of a bunch of people murdering well known songs, but the idea was good.

After that everyone retired before getting up in good time for a big fried breakfast at a nearby cafe. It was quite odd, I didn't really feel that hungry but after I took a bite, I scoffed it right down and it was very good indeed.

Spent the morning having a look at a couple of cars. One was a K-reg Peugeot 405 which looked quite tidy and I think it was a diesel. The other was a P-reg Vauxhall Vectra which was actually in pretty good shape and drove really nicely. I'm thinking about that one but I think it may be too uneconomical as it is a petrol. Annoyingly the diesels seem few and far between. I'd never have thought about a Vectra before but someone in work has a diesel one and he says that while it's incredibly boring, it's reliable and parts are cheap.

Another Rant

Following my rant on mobile phone ringtones, I have another rant. This time the subject is PVRs. Yes, those magical devices that let you pause live TV and record every episode of a series and such-like. I can see the point and it's a great technology, but I hate them.

They destroy social evenings. Previously evenings would be spent playing Scrabble or talking, or other activities. These days, nothing like that ever happens because there is always something on TV to watch, stored on the PVR. They made a fuss when the TV was invented, but this is a far more worrying development. When the BBC iPlayer reaches full maturity and all TV is watched on the Internet, on-demand, the grim future of fat humans permanently attached to screens seen in WALL-E will become true.

This is why I hate PVRs. Of course, being in a minority, I'm regarded as somewhat of a freak because I don't watch TV.

Haunted phone line

Spent some time today troubleshooting an apparently dead phone line. I had to go all the way back to where the connections are presented from the switch. When I connected the test phone to the equipment there though, I got no dial tone, just a sinister hissing with vague hints of voices. Deciding it was a short, I ripped out the wiring and redid it, with the same thing. It was really quite disturbing, the sounds were like voices but you couldn't hear what they were saying. At that point I gave up, ripped out the wires again and rewired the phone line to a different socket, labelling the original as 'Faulty, possibly haunted'.

Humorous filenames

One of my colleagues created a laptop image for building services. However he named the image file 'BSLAPS' which cause much hilarity when I came to use it as a test file on the backup system.

Feh

It has been a strange week, no motivation, tired all the time and just not much fun.

Probably not helped by the fact I've been really lazy the last couple of weeks and also eaten shit food at any excuse. People moving offices and leaving in work seemed to be perfect excuses for an orgy of meals and cake. My coke addiction has started creeping back, and since I decided that Diet Coke is just brown water with various chemicals, it's been full fat. And therefore, I too, am full fat.

Nothing else to report.

Rampage

Did some overtime today for work, which was reasonably OK other than various network printer woes including a belligerent and obtuse photocopier which did NOT appreciate having it's network address changed. Also while I was in the office, one of the backup system tape drives died and I then got an e-mail every 15 minutes telling me so. Nothing I could do about it but there's three other drives it can use until we can check it out on Monday. A brief discussion as to what we were going to have for lunch ended in a unanimous decision to have chips.

My empire of buy-to-let housing in Fable 2 is growing to epic proportions. I basically own two entire towns and well on the way to owning a third. The nice thing is that when you fire up the game after break, it works out how much rent you've been paid and so you get a nice chunk of cash. Todays cash was spent on a huge nice shiny axe to replace my old hammer and a rather nice blunderbuss, which is quite lethal.

I was getting a bit bored of the arguing between my various spouses, so I killed one of them off in an alleyway with a single blow from my giant axe. The body lay there for quite some time and people kept saying how horrible it was and how the murderer must be found. But of course, nobody suspected the pure and noble hero. I had another rampage which was good fun and then turned it off.

D400 Frankenstein

The Latitude D400 works with a cheap replacement motherboard. It's not that powerful with a 1.3ghz Pentium M but it's got 1gb RAM so that helps. I was rather miffed to find it uses a weird hard drive connector which requires an adapter but fortunately I found one in one of my scrap ones. I popped in a spare 40gb hard drive with Ubuntu 8.10 installed and it booted right up. Everything works fine.

Dell laptops are built like sandwiches, you dismantle them layer by layer until you get to the juicy goodness of the motherboard.

Stupid

Today was one of those days where I just felt completely lethargic and uninterested for most of it. Lunchtime was interesting with the dentist (scale and polish) at 12:15 then a quick drive to Ruthin to meet up with everyone for a farewell lunch for someone who was leaving. I had preordered some sort of scampi meal but the place didn't have one of the ingredients so they substituted sweet and sour sauce. Perhaps a strange combination, but very nice as it was probably the best scampi I've ever had.

It's been a strange unmotivated evening. I just haven't been arsed to do anything at all except listen to music and think bitter thoughts about my wretched lonely existence.

Ironic that I was complaining to Em about PVRs a couple of weeks ago as they mean that there's always something on TV to watch and so it makes it easier to spend yet more time just vapidly watching the box. I detest TV, it's channel after channel of bullshit, and the few things I do actually want to watch (Top Gear, Stephen Fry) are usually watchable online anyway. But I probably do the same thing but with the Internet. Oh well.

I've got shedloads of holiday time left in work because there just hasn't been much cause to use them as we've not done much this year. To use some of it up I've taken the week of the 24th off work but probably won't be able to afford to do anything. Bah.

Some pictures

Alien dog!

Eee troubleshooting. I quite like the black keyboard in the white Eee, looks nice. My Eee 900 running Ubuntu on the left, Vicky's Eee 700 on the right running the stock Xandros installation.
This was the amazing sight the other day that I saw early in the morning. One of those moments where you instantly scramble for a camera. The new AC/DC album has a track called Skies on Fire, which this reminds me of. Pretty cool.

Laptop geekery

Spent the last couple of hours having geeky fun with laptops. First I examined a Dell Latitude D400 I got off Ebay which I was hoping would replace the MP3 playing Optiplex. Tatty and scratched, it lacked memory, hard drive and battery but I hoped it would still fire up with some RAM in it. Sadly it seems to have a dead motherboard. However, every executive a few years ago was being issued with the slimline D400, so parts are plentiful. Everything else looks OK so a new motherboard should do the trick and I have everything else it needs. I didn't realise the CPU was soldered to the motherboard in this model though, so there went any hope of putting a faster CPU in it.

Some people restore watches, paintings, cars. I restore laptops. I find troubleshooting and repairing laptops very satisfying, especially if they have to be taken right apart and cleaned up.

The next thing was trying to work out why Vicky's Eee PC had a wonky keyboard. Half the keys don't do what they should, almost like the 'fn' key is stuck down. I popped the keyboard out of my Eee 900 and tried it in hers, and it worked fine. So now I'm trying to find a replacement keyboard for it. Surprisingly, given the success of the Eee, parts are quite hard to get hold of.

Bang, oooh, aaah

Andy, Will, Vicky and I went to see the bonfire and fireworks in Rhyl this evening. It was the usual setup, a field with an epic bonfire, a load of burger stands and fairground rides and the population of the town come to watch. It was pretty good and I was ludicrously fat and had two half pounder burgers, which were actually pretty nice. I took some video which came out OK but I'm not in the mood to upload it right now.

Vicky gave me her Eee PC to look at since the keyboard has gone weird on it. Looks like a loose connection to me but I'll check it out properly tomorrow.

Car is falling apart, need new one. I would actually get another AX, it's just this one that seems crap.

A rant

One of my greatest hates is MP3 ringtones. I remember when the first phones came out that could play beepy tunes, and that was bad enough. But when they started to be able to play actual music, that's when the real pain started. I just don't see the appeal of repeatedly listening to the first few bars of a usually crappy tune blasted out of a tinny speaker which is only capable of reproducing the treble frequencies. Today, someone had left their mobile in the office and we were subjected to the first 40 seconds of 'Welcome to the Jungle' by Guns N Roses three times, and once, a Chemical Brothers track. Normally I'd like both, but not when all you can hear is the treble frequencies. I've been known to hunt down an offending phone in the office before now and switch it to silent, that's how much I hate it.

My phone has the normal ring sound (not the Nokia tune) and I thought quite hard and carefully before setting a custom text message sound. This is the Pipe Warp sound from Super Mario, and is short and distinctive enough that I recognise it.

Rant over.

On the plus side, my home e-mail address seems to have stopped receiving spam, which is good, and I had a fun and interesting day with the AIX and backup systems in work. Also the new helpdesk system went live today, which, despite a few hiccups, is already infinitely better than the previous Lotus Notes based system.

Argh!

My trusty Psion Series 5mx just reset to factory settings when I was changing the batteries.

I got it back in 2001 and used it for many things until I moved on and it simply became an overly complex alarm clock. But it still had all the files and documents on it and I took it for granted that it never crashed or had issues and until today, it had never been reset since I put the first set of batteries in it all those years ago.

Luring them into a false sense of security

Everyone loves me in Fable 2. Everyone. My character is so good and pure that nobody can resist his manly charms. This can be very annoying as they crowd around you and get in the way, saying asinine things like how their fingers look so bare without rings and other not-so-subtle hints of marriage. So it was quite satisfying to save the game and let loose with my giant hammer. Because they were so close around me, one swing took out about 10 people, and the spell that spawns swords that hurtle through the air at people quickly got rid of the survivors as they tried to run away.

Bwahaha, it was so much fun that I'm not quite sure why I've played the game as a good guy...

Cambrian Rally

Went to watch the Cambrian Rally with Andy and his Dad, brother and nephew. I've never seen a rally before so I thought I'd have a look. It was a bit cold but really good fun. I took the N93 and got some great videos but all the camera use obliterated the battery after a couple of hours. The videos actually look a lot better than the one below which seems to have been gimped rather by the Blogger conversion.

We got a good spot on the first stage which was next to a little wiggly bit with a long bend, and it was really amazing to see the cars hurtling past. The first lot were loads of smaller cars, and oddly enough there were an awful lot of Nissan Micras, which were really pretty quick. There was a classic Mini which got cheers everywhere it went and loads of old Escorts and things in the historical section. Someone was even running a Lotus Elise, which sadly seemed to be broken when it went past. I particularly liked a 70's Saab 96 which looked in great condition. There was also one AX, which seemed to be doing OK. I wish I'd got a Micra now though after seeing how well they were doing in the rally!

The cars went round the stage again and we found a great vantage point near a long sweeping bend. This was slightly less eventful except for one unfortunate Micra which ended up in a bank after drifting and overcorrecting. Some guy had a rope and a load of people hauled it out, but unfortunately it drove off with the rope still attached, and he ended up flat on his face.

Ubuntu 8.10

The Intrepid Ibex is out, which should be good. It looks like they've replaced the network manager, which has got to be a good thing. The old one was total crap and was such a bitch to use with wireless networks. Unfortunately it's still very brown, although the default wallpaper is rather nice.

I'm installing it on the Inspirons original hard drive, which contained the VIsta Ultimate install that the machine shipped with. I backed up some data on it and blew it away without much regret since the main hard drive contains XP which runs better on the machine.

I don't know what it is with Vista, but I can't get on with it. I like the look of it but when I start to use it, its as if I'm fighting against it to get things done. It's probably because I am so used to XP and Linux. It's a shame Mac OS X had so many broken things on the Inspiron.

Bigamy for Dummies

1) Marry two or more people of either gender.
2) Impregnate those capable of it.
3) Blatantly shag anyone else who is interested.
4) Should both/all your spouses meet and realise the situation, simply resolve the dispute with a drawn out protracted fart.
5) Repeat step 4 as necessary.

Random things

Picked up Fable 2 on Monday. The first one passed me by but I really liked the look of the second one when I saw it at Will's on Saturday. It's good fun, and I really like the open ended nature of the game. I completely ignored the first quest on Monday evening, instead taking a job at the blacksmith, and using the money to buy houses to rent out. I also got married to the blacksmith because you get a discount on the weapons that way. My character is apparently rather attractive as he keeps getting complimented on his looks by pretty much everyone.

Spent yesterday evening at Rob and Em's where we ate stinky cheese gnocchi and watched Stephen Fry trace the Mississippi to it's source. Very cool. I think people often forget that behind the stereotypes, America is a really nice place to visit. Had a go on the X-men game that Rob had picked up, which was good fun.

Today was yet more Fable 2, where I actually went and did a quest. The combat in it is kind of simple but in a way it makes it really satisfying and the controls are really responsive. Also it's very forgiving when you die, and you basically just get up and keep going. This sounds like it could be too easy but it makes it much more relaxed and enjoyable. Fortunately I only got knocked out once so my character didn't pick up too many scars.

The phone battery gave up again and so it was back to the bling phone. I guess I could order a brand new battery from Nokia or perhaps look at a different phone.

Virtualisation, Bass Surgery and violence.

Spent a quiet lazy day not doing anything after the overtime yesterday. Two main things I did were to play with virtualisation and swap the necks on my two main basses.

Perhaps I'm easily pleased, but I still think there's something slightly magical about virtualisation. To be able to run several operating systems at the same time and flip between them with a keystroke is still rather a novelty. Right now I have a laptop running a minimalist Ubuntu install, and on top of that it's running Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Server at the same time (I know, but it's only got 1gb RAM). Both are running full-screen and you can flip between them using the multiple workspaces of the Ubuntu desktop. It's also really good for playing with network applications since you can have the virtual machines on their own private network. I've used it before to experiment with things like DHCP and network booting which could cause chaos on a real network.

In a fit of experimentation today, I swapped the necks on my main two basses, the Squier Precision Bass and the Squier fretless Jazz Bass. Mainly because I was curious to see how the Jazz would sound with a fretted neck. The answer was pretty good, and I prefer the ergonomics of the Jazz body. The Precision sounds rather interesting with the fretless neck, due to the upgraded Quarter-Pounder pickups. Actually swapping the necks was trivial and took less than ten minutes as they are exactly the same other than the fingerboards. The only irritation is a fair bit of hum from the Jazz so it needs some shielding added (cheap) and the pickups raised (also cheap). Ideally I'd like to get some stacked hum-cancelling pickups for it but they are £55 each, so no chance.

Also fired up the 360 and had a look for some game demos. Downloaded the trial version of the first Soul Calibur, which a few years ago was THE game of choice for hardcore gaming sessions in my flat. We spent many happy hours playing it on the Dreamcast, and led to us all getting Soul Calibur II on various platforms. It is probably still the only fighting game that I at all enjoy. Also played Duke Nukem 3D, which is good fun and some stupid racing game called Grid. An interesting feature in Duke Nukem is that it records your progress through the level and when you die, you can rewind it and choose when you want to respawn.

I'm actually tempted to get some Microsoft points for the first time.

Farting is fun!

Yesterday was spent doing overtime in work. What with one thing and another it took far longer than anyone expected, so we basically did a full working day. The first thing I got involved in was repatching an entire cabinet after new switches were installed. It was supposed to have been done but hadn't, and it looked like a vast waterfall of green spaghetti forming a coiled mass on the floor. It took myself and a colleague three hours to repatch it all, but oddly enough it was a very satisfying task. The rest of the day was spent doing much less interesting things like printer and PC configurations, which unfortunately took a long time due to various hiccups.

After that met up with Will and had a Chinese before having a game of co-op Fable 2. It's pretty good fun and we started a new game with the sole intention of becoming pure evil. Surprisingly the fart gesture is apparently fun, not evil, but we were rather suprised when one woman gasped 'How romantic!' after a protracted fart in her general direction.

Is there any particular reason why a simple IM client should want 1.8gb RAM? If so, I'm not aware of it. Pidgin on my machine just decided that it did and caused the machine to grind to a complete halt. I had a lot of other stuff running and the final straw was firing up my Windows XP virtual machine. The memory and swap filled up and the system went into a thrashing state, and it was only when I had a look at the running processes that I realised why. How annoying.

Jupiter

This is downright amazing...

Wretched weather and bling-bling phone

My N93 had a flat battery this morning and I had no way to charge it up at work so I had to leave it at home on charge. I did however have the tasteless gold D&G V3i charged up for some reason so I popped my SIM card into it and took that instead. The size is great, it's so small and slim.

Using the damn thing is a pain though. I don't know if it's because I'm so used to Nokia but finding anything in the icons and menus was near impossible and texting on it was horrendous. I always use predictive text but on this it drove me potty and I had to revert to the old style input. Also the gold paint that covers the exterior and the gold keypad are so tacky that I felt embarassed to bring it out in public.

Not sure what's going on with the N93. It seems to go from a few bars of battery to dead remarkably quickly and without any warning. Rob and I even swapped the battery with his old phone and it seemed better but it's still not great. Annoying because apart from that and the sheer bulk of it, I really like the N93.

The weather is awful tonight. It's blowing a gale and raining like anything, so once again I'm not going to badminton. I'm just not happy driving the AX in these conditions unless I really have to.

WTF?!

This makes my eyes hurt. I admit I once built something fairly similar, but I can't see how you're supposed to play this thing. Also, good luck finding strings for a 12-string guitar which are long enough to reach those machine heads at the far end of that ludicrous headstock.

The Sims

Talking about the Sims with Will, and we remembered the good times you could have with the game.

1) Filling a house with 8 bisexual people in various relationships with each other and watching them cry and shout at each other.
2) Walling people up with food but no toilet.
3) Making people swim and then taking the ladders away.
4) Creating a house that hovered by building it on pillars and then removing them.
5) Using the money cheat and making an enormous house with one slobby guy who would watch TV all day.

Quite how they expect to make a film about the Sims is an interesting question, but since it's going to be produced by the guy who did Norbit and Eragon, it's not really worth worrying about as it'll be shit and disappear without a trace.

Also the first Spore expansion pack has been announced, showing that there'll probably be the same flood of expansions that the Sims series has had.

Brisk

I rather like walking the dog in cold weather. It's fun to be all wrapped up nice and warm and have a cold face and then come home to the nice warm house. Not too keen on the dark though, especially when sheep cough at you from behind hedges.

The AX is grumbling and farting again, the blow from the back end of the exhaust has suddenly grown louder. At least it's not the balls out roar of a completely broken exhaust. It needs a few other things too, mainly oil and coolant changes and the brakes are juddering slightly. Bah.

Crampy claptrap

Saturday was spent hanging out with Andy, Rob, Em and Will. We headed off on a walk around Denbigh, which took in the castle, the old mental hospital and a load of fields. It would have taken in the old railway bridge and a couple of other things except we went the wrong way. After that it was up to the pub for rugby and then back to Andy's with a Chinese. This was followed by the X-factor spoof by Peter Kay which was actually quite good.

Didn't do much on Sunday at all. Today was just basically a typical work day except for clearing out the server room of all the old 14" CRT monitors that had somehow accumulated in there and some other crap.

Got the new AC/DC album today. It's pretty good. You always know what you're getting when you get one of their albums, but in this one they do try a few different things.

Inspiron fan adventures

Downloaded a program called i8kfangui, which is written for Dell laptops. It connects to the power management system and lets you monitor and control the fans, and also shows the temperature of the various components. I found that with the default BIOS settings, even when idle, the GPU temperature crept up to 78 degrees, at which point the fan would cut in and the temperature would drop. I've used the program to override the settings and run the GPU fan at low speeds all the time which keeps the temperature down to 47-50 degrees. Anything more than 50 and the fan runs at maximum. I haven't run Spore yet but Second Life is quite hard on the system and the video never rose above 60 degrees.

This obviously puts more wear on the fans but they are much cheaper to replace than the expensive processor or graphics card. Also if you want to, the program can just set the fans to run at full speed, which is noisy but at least the machine's got some beefy speakers...

It's apparently quite easy to upgrade this machine to a Core 2 Duo which is more efficient and can also run 64-bit operating systems. Not much point in that though because the motherboard has some limitations so that if you put 4gb RAM in, it'll only see 3.25gb regardless of the CPU or operating system.

It lives!

The graphics card from the Inspiron came back from being repaired today and works fine. I've made sure to update the BIOS to the latest version which has modifications to run the fans more so the video card is less likely to overheat.

Apocalyptica

I never realised how cool cellos could be before now. These guys do Metallica and Pantera covers and other things, but this is a particularly nice track. There's also a faster live version which is interesting because sometimes they play a little flat, but it's still good.

Tinfoil keyboard mod

Spent some of the evening applying a modification to the Eee. One of the things that can be a problem is that the keyboard is quite flexible, so it bounces when you type, which inevitably leads to missed characters. Someone modified his Eee with a few layers of tin foil under the keyboard. This improved the responsiveness of the keyboard and as a side effect improved the cooling as more heat was picked up by it. I've just tried it on mine and it's made a huge, huge difference to the keyboard.

Received an e-mail from the laptop place saying my graphics card is fixed and should be on the way back soon, which is good news.

Firefox is pissing me off at the moment on the main PC, it constantly hammers both CPUs and takes up shitloads of memory. Also I've decided that the single process per tab feature in Chrome and IE8 is a great idea.

MacBooks

New MacBooks and once again the UK is completely screwed over with pricing. These look really nice and the glass buttonless trackpad is an interesting quirk, and it's nice that you can get real graphics cards in the ordinary MacBook now.

Gimpy

The most hideous guitar of all time?

Crappy day today, rain, cold and generally miserable. I went to the post office to post the graphics card and on the way back was lured into the chippy for chips. Oh well.

Many screws

Saturday was spent not doing much, until the evening when it was a work colleague's birthday party. All good fun, lots of people from work to talk to, lots of good food and plenty of gossip and things.

Sunday was again a lazy day, although I took the dog for a walk and went on a rampage in the garden, which was tiring and stressful but rewarding. Hacked down a stupid apple tree which has never been healthy and insisted on growing sideways out of the ground for some reason.

Spent this evening sorting out my box of documents, which needed to be done. It was full of old crap which I didn't need and lots of stuff I did need but wasn't sorted out.

Also removed the graphics card from the Inspiron to send it back to the people I bought it off who have offered a discounted repair to the card itself. The Inspiron is constructed in pretty much the same way as the Latitudes in work, just bigger, so it was pretty easy to get it all dismantled and back together, but did involve undoing a lot of screws. It was interesting to see the different circuit traces on the motherboard where the integrated graphics would have gone if it hadn't got a graphics card slot.

Vale of Clwyd Railway

Just done something I've never thought of doing before and looking at Google Maps to follow the old railway from Rhyl to Ruthin. Most of it is clearly visible. Shame there aren't any pictures of it anywhere except these ones of Denbigh railway station. It's a shame it was a casualty of the massive closures in the 60s.

Hand pain

My hand has been twinging all day from last night so I'm not going to badminton in case it makes it worse. It's a good excuse to have a quiet evening in as well.

I've dragged the Inspiron out of the naughty corner where it was banished the other night and it's currently running the onboard diagnostics to make sure everything is still working other than the graphics card. So far it's looking fairly conclusive and I've seen pictures on the Internet of failed machines that show identical display corruption to mine.

Intrigued by the Apple announcement coming up any minute now - could a Mac Eee be on the way?

Badminton joy

Today wasn't shaping up well at all. I was still annoyed at the failure of the Inspiron last night, and work wasn't inspiring. Fortunately Rob suggested going to his for food before badminton this evening as Em had a match on. I hoped that this would prevent an evening of moping over the Inspiron. The day didn't improve though as I somehow trapped my hand in the car door on the way out, causing much pain.

Fortunately a rather nice pasta dish made by Em which was followed by Wispas cured some of the grumps and this was followed by probably one of the best badminton evenings I have ever had. It's not often I come away feeling that I played really well but tonight I was kicking bottom and taking names. One of the things I've always had difficulty with is working out where to be on the court. I had a game with Marge who has knee issues and now foot problems and so she can't get around the court as well as she used to. Somehow this suddenly made it very clear what I had to do and I found myself hurtling around the court returning all sorts of shots that I usually miss. The next game went pretty well and even though I was paired with She Who Is Not Nice, we actually won the game. Hopefully it isn't a fluke. It's evenings like this when I get all inspired and decide that exercise is a good thing, but usually that feeling is gone the next day. I was worried about my hand but it seems OK.

Investigated options for the Inspiron during my lunch break. Apparently it's not Dells fault. Nvidia made a whole load of crappily made graphics chips that overheat and fail after a certain amount of time. The so-called 'fix' was to release a BIOS version that runs the fans more. It's too late for mine though, it's definitely fried. A replacement card is a possibility but it's expensive for a new one. However the place I bought it from actually offers a repair service so that might be worth a look. Either way I can't afford to do anything about it for a while yet, so it'll have to sit in the corner in disgrace. The other option is to either sell it for spares on Ebay or part it out, neither of which really appeals because I really like it as a machine.

And if anyone says I should have bought a Mac, then get this: I bought a brand new iBook back in 2002 and the hard drive failed in it in 2005. So Macs aren't perfect either. And that wasn't Apple's fault either, it had one of those ultra crap IBM Travelstar hard drives in it which were notorious for failing. Luckily I knew it was going so I had a backup, and the dead original 20gb drive was replaced under warranty with a 40gb, so it was all good in the end.

FUCK!

The Inspirons graphics card just failed. I was playing Spore and noticed some strange graphical corruption. Before I could do anything, the machine locked up. Now, the display is corrupted, even in the BIOS. Windows won't boot up in normal mode.

At least the graphics card is separate from the motherboard and should be easily replaced but that's something I can't afford right now.

Again, FUCK.

Fun with Linux

Spent some time in work today building a new Linux server for imaging PCs and things as the old one has hard drives on the way out. The original machine was an ancient scrap Compaq fitted with a 120gb hard drive and unexpectedly became a very useful machine. The replacement is a decommissioned IBM Xseries server with actual SCSI hard drives, although the built-in SCSI controller only supports RAID 1 in hardware, which is a bit shit really.

Unfortunately this required setting up Samba, which I detest with a passion. It seems to have the most illogical configuration file ever and it never, ever works the way I think it does. Eventually I got it working and reverse engineering the DHCP and PXE boot system that one of my colleagues set up three years ago was trivial by comparison.

Fired up the Wii this evening for the first time in quite a while. Had a go on Wario Ware but that got boring quickly. I need something new to play as I'm bored of everything I've got on the Wii and 360. Lego Batman is getting OK reviews and I really had fun with Lego Star Wars so that might be worth a look. Also loaded up GTA IV but all the reasons why I hate it came flooding back pretty much immediately. I don't think I've ever been let down by a game so much.

AC/DC is one of those bands that somehow manage to get away without changing much about their music even over 15 albums, but somehow it works. Back in Black was the first album I properly listened to that wasn't Michael Jackson and though my innocent 9 year old self completely missed the less salubrious aspects of some tracks, the music completely blew my mind. The track that plays on their website from the new album sounds basically the same, but it's really good. Might treat myself to it when it comes out, conveniently near payday.

The Monstrosity 2 definitely has a use - to learn to play an unlined fretless. It's all well and good having lines but it would be nice to be able to play a completely blank fingerboard.

New Look Monstrosity

Here's the Monstrosity 2 having been reassembled after the paint job. It looks better in real life than the picture as there's more black than it looks like in the picture. There's a few lumps and things but it's not too bad considering the paint is Hammerite and meant for cars. Amazingly it plays and sounds just like it did before. It has a really nice sound to it, I think partly because the action is so high. I'm not really happy with the shoddy electrics though and might rewire it with a better pickup, preferably a black one to match the nice black knobs that didn't fit the Telecaster.

A fun day

Spent the morning with Will going to a market/car boot thing and taking photographs. The car boot was a bit crap and the only thing interesting was watching a load of people being brainwashed by one of those peculiar auction type things. We watched for at least 15 minutes but had no idea what was going on. 

After that we went to Talacre beach to take photographs. Will had a spare tripod which I tried out as I'd never used one before. It was really handy but as it and the camera were quite light, it kept getting blown over by the rather high winds. It did however let me do a decent HDR picture of the beach, composed of several images at different exposure values and then combined in Qtpfsgui. 

This is another one. The shots for this one were a bit all over the place but the program has an auto-align feature which actually works. After that we went and looked at Prestatyn from up high before finishing the trip with pizza.

I spent the afternoon watching yet more Red Dwarf while dismantling the Monstrosity 2 and starting to give it a black and silver paint job. It's been a long time since I've painted a bass or anything. I'm not expecting the body to look any good because of all the crap left on it from my attempt at stripping the old finish. I decided to paint the headstock to match but I took the slightly unusual step of painting the fretless fingerboard as well. The whole thing is a bit of an experiment. If it works, great, if not, no real loss as the body and neck were fairly cheap and crappy anyway. It would be easy enough to build another, all it takes is a Strat body and a fretless bass neck, both available cheaply on Ebay.

Something that struck me about Red Dwarf VIII is that they put absolute tons of references in to older series, so much that it's really noticable. To be honest, series VII and VIII weren't great but they do have their moments that make them watchable.

Genpets

This is weird and disturbing.

Stupid weather

The weather has been truly stupid today. Rain one minute, blazing sunshine the next. All day. It's been really annoying.

Not slept well the last two nights, feeling tired and crappy. I was going to go to badminton tonight but I didn't really feel like going, and then there was ridiculous rain and I know the roads round here can become quite nasty in rain like that so I gave that idea up.


On the way home I saw the Vale of Clwyd lit up in bright sunshine, with the distant hills hidden in the shadow of huge clouds. The contrast between them was stunning and to top it off there was a huge vivid rainbow. Unfortunately the phone didn't capture any of it at all really.

Nintendo has announced the DSi with larger screens and a camera.

A whole lot of noise

I was driving happily to work this morning, but the trip was rudely interrupted by a gentle clunk followed by the engine roaring through a completely unsilenced exhaust. It wasn't touching the ground so I carried on to work, feeling sorry for any of the poor sods who might have been trying to get a lie in. I had a look underneath and it had snapped off right by the middle silencer.

Some investigation found a place close to the office that would sort it out for £41, including a run back to the office while they sorted out. The journey from the office to the place was loud and hugely embarassing, and the exhaust place knew I was on the way not long after I left as they could hear me coming from three quarters of a mile away. It's amazing how much noise a little 1.5 diesel can kick out when it's running without silencers.

Annoyingly there is still a blow from the rear silencer but at least that doesn't seem to be on the point of falling off.

They're coming

Big update

It's been a series of days with late finishes, so I'm quite tired right now.

Thursday evening was spent at Rob's sorting out the old iMac I gave him a few years ago. It's been fine until recently it booted up but didn't load the Finder. I couldn't get it to work so we dumped his data onto my iBook and reinstalled the operating system. Since then it's been fine.

Friday evening was spent at a wedding evening do for one of my work colleagues. She'd got married in Switzerland earlier in the week and this do was for everyone else. It was a really good evening and there were a lot of people from work. On the way we agreed not to talk about work but inevitably we did at some point.

Yesterday was spent getting my Spore bastard civilisation up to the space stage. The tribal stage wasn't quite as violent as I allied with two tribes as when I'd set out to attack one tribe, one of the others would go after mine. But the civilisation stage was all out war. 

The evening was spent at Amy and Huw's for another Wii/Chinese night. It was the usual setup, but this time we actually managed to not get too much food. It was a time to play Guitar Hero, Wario Ware, Mario Kart, eat Chinese food and Amy's awesome chocolate cake and try to make friends with Squish, who has grown hugely and is turning into a beautiful little cat. Also we ended up with two lightsabres after a trip to Tesco for some supplies which cued some entertaining battles.

Today was spent at Will's with him and Rob making music again. I took the Monstrosity 2 and we found it sounded really good through Will's setup. We laid down some drums and bass and then Will added Rob's lyrics.

Monstrosity 2

This is the completed Monstrosity 2. It now features a single humbucker with simple volume and tone controls. It took a bit of fiddling to get it to work but work it does, despite the pickup and wiring being very cheap and nasty. It actually sounds quite decent though and it isn't too hard to play despite the strings being so close together at the bridge end. The only thing it really needs now is an arm for the tremolo as it's supposed to be a bass with a tremolo after all. Also at some point I should strip it down and continued stripping off what's left of the old finish but that can wait.

Work was particularly frustrating today with office moves still going on. At one point I got three phone lines mixed up and for the life of me couldn't work out why until I realised two people were telling me different things.

Finally, there is an RS/6000 nearby which could run AIX 5.3. It's got dual processors and 2gb RAM. It's in Llanberis and should be quite cheap. Unfortunately it's a H70 Enterprise, which from the pictures, it's even larger than the old Proliant I used to have. So that's probably not quite what I'm after, annoyingly.

Continued with my bastard creature on Spore. Just about to start the tribal stage, having eaten my way through most of the planet's population.

Memories of Bath

The BBC news article on the explosion in Bath city centre and the accompanying photos reminded me quite forcefully of the six months or so I spent living there from about July 1999 to January 2000. I went there to start a job which for various reasons didn't work out.

The office was within walking distance to the flat and the route was through the city centre (which I've already traced on Google Maps). It's weird to look back now but for some reason while I was there, I never gave a toss about the architecture, the history of the place, or made any effort to explore and see what was there. For example, I only just found out that the apparently famous and beautiful terrace of Walcot Parade, where I lived, featured the highest frontage vaults in the city, which is why the whole thing was so high up above the road. It never occurred to me to wonder why that was. The flat wasn't actually too bad and the building was so solid that I never heard a peep out of any of the neighbours except for when they started hammering things in the upstairs one once. I only ever met one of them and that was about twice.

I think it was because Bath is an expensive place, the rent was extortionate, and I was on a very low salary. Also I was far more introverted back then, so the idea of going out and exploring the city never really appealed. Seems like a missed opportunity really but I just don't think it was in my nature back then.

It would be interesting to go back there and have a wander round, take a fresh look at the place. Makes me wonder how things might have turned out if the job had gone OK.

Raging carnivore

Work wasn't great. Office moves are troublesome enough but when all the people being moved are bitter and resentful about being moved it's even worse.

Started a new game in Spore, this time setting out to be the biggest bastard ever. This made the cell stage much more entertaining. By the end of it, my cell was covered in spikes and could take down pretty much anything. 

I made an awesome creature in the creator with eight weird mouths on arms surrounding a giant eye, with two huge fists. Surprisingly it worked really well so I tried it out on the tribal stage, which was fun. Also made a huge fat creature which wonders round looking sad.

Otherwise nothing much to report except I had another go at the body with the Nitro-mors. More crap came off but still more to go. Wish I'd just left it as sunburst now.

An expensive weekend

Spent yesterday playing Spore until it was time to go down to Andy's for the Denbigh Beer festival, along with Rob, Em, Will, Vicky and Rob and Caroline. They had about 40 varieties of beer for everyone to try out. It was good fun although the entire point of the day was wasted on me as I can't stand beer. I did try some which to everyone else smelled and tasted of strawberry but not to me. At one point the hunger pangs became too much and we all got loads of pizza, cake and chocolate, which seemed to get us a lot of attention from the other drinkers who hadn't thought that far ahead. That evening after everyone dispersed I got a Chinese from a new place called the Happy House. It was pretty decent too.

Today was spent playing more Spore before heading down to Andy's house to finally book the flights to America next year to see Steve and Kara. We got a reasonable deal from Manchester to Boston via Heathrow, but it was still rather a daunting experience to write out a cheque. For some reason Em said it was like giving birth. But it's great to have it finally booked after talking about it for at least a year and it's nice to have something to look forward to. We went to Boston last time in 2005  for a day and it was pretty cool, so it'll be nice to get to know it a bit better and it'll be great to see Steve and Kara again.

Spent the afternoon messing with guitars, playing yet Spore and watching Red Dwarf in roughly equal quantities. I found a spare set of bass strings and put them on the Monstrosity 2. It took a bit of fiddling but I did get it tuned to normal EADG, and it was quite fun to play. However I decided that I was going to strip the sunburst finish off the body with Nitro-mors. I regretted this almost immediately as it's horrible stuff and it ran out before I got rid of the many layers of gunk on the body. So that's going to take another couple of goes. I'd like to leave it natural but since there's great chunks of wood missing around the neck, the plan is to repair those with wood filler and paint it a loud orange colour or something.

Finished the Civilisation stage in Spore with a combination of religious conversion and military might, meaning my history graph at that point wanders erratically back and forth. The Space stage is very interesting and has trading elements that reminds me strongly of Elite. Also the way you can seamlessly zoom from looking at the entire galaxy to someone standing in a city is extremely impressive. So far I'm really quite impressed with it.

Found this video of the Corinth Tower in Liverpool being demolished, which was where some of Infestation was filmed on the abandoned top floor. It was a bit of a dump but I remember we found a load of pictures of some of the people who had lived there and they called themselves the Corinthians. Also there was a hell of a view from the top floor.

Sunshine?

What's going on? Sunshine...on BOTH days of the weekend? I don't understand!

More Spore

Played some more Spore this morning. Got up to the civilisation stage which is proving interesting. I've obviously played it from the pacifist point of view as my civilisation is religious and it's best way of uniting with other cities is to convert them to the same religion. It worked OK so far but I've got an awkward military city which doesn't appreciate the attempts to convert them. Stupidly one of my cities was military but I converted it to a religious one so I don't have much military might.

The replacement keyboard arrived for the Inspiron. Dell seem to have used various keyboard revisions on their laptops, each of which has a totally different feel. The German layout of the older one didn't bother me, but it was the one with flatter keys which felt horrible and I hated it. The one I was after was the same as my work laptop, as I've always got on well with it. Fortunately the new one is the right one and it's made a huge difference to how well I can type on it.

Spore

Spore turned up today. It seems good fun.  I've made it to the tribal stage so far and trying to work out what I need to do. The cell stage was a bit meh, but the creature stage was good fun. I managed to make my creature sociable, which is nice. It's interesting to see  how it evolves as you add more parts in each generation.

Another monstrosity

Work was OK and the weather was great today. Felt pretty crappy all day for some reason so didn't do the full walk. Did however take the dog into the field and walked around a bit so he could chase rabbits. I used to hate him doing this but it's clear now that the urge to chase them is thoroughly part of his make up and isn't going to go away.


Was bored so I made this thing. It's the body from a Squier Strat combined with the defretted neck off an old Encore bass. I had to get rid of some wood to make room for the neck to fit but I was slightly over enthusiastic with the chisel so there's an epic gap around the neck.

It started out as an experiment to see if I could make a bass using the Strat tremolo but I didn't have any decent spare strings that fitted. So it has three old ones, all tuned to G, although they all sound different as they are different types.

I did put a bass string one tuned an octave lower but that was too much for the tremolo. It can just about cope with the three on it so I doubt it would cope with four bass strings tuned to pitch. It might be possible to add two extra springs to it though. Also the scale length is shorter so the lines on the neck are completely wrong although they're quite faint.