GTAIV (again)

Well, played quite a bit (OK, a LOT) more today and got to about 22% complete. It's still really good but now I've got more used to it, it doesn't feel quite the enormous upgrade it did at first. It's still GTA when all said and done.

Ironically my favourite car so far is the GTA version of the BMW X5, a car in real life that I despise utterly. But the game version handles OK, is tough, and reasonably quick. I still HATE the motorbikes though, they are twitchy and uncontrollable, like the earlier GTAs. A bike based mission nearly drove me to tears of frustration as I lost control and fell off yet again.

Multiplayer is quite fun especially when everyone has helicopters. At one point I was standing on the top of a bus shelter and Will smacked me with his rotor blades, hurling me for miles. It was very funny.

Oddly enough there's been reports of both PS3 and 360 versions freezing during cutscenes. Not had any issues like that. It froze once yesterday when I tried to pause it and once this morning due to gunk on the disk, but otherwise it's been trouble-free. Weird.

GTAIV

Thanks to Rob braving a queue of chavs outside GameStation at midnight, we were able to commence GTAIV at about 7:45am this morning. We played it single player until about midday when Will's copy arrived in the post and we tried out the mutiplayer with my Xbox setup, before carrying on with various missions and things. Other than a brief trip to pick up snacks and drop Vicky off at work, we played until about 6:00pm.

And how is it? In a word, stunning. It looks great, the cars handle and drive far more realistically (which was initially VERY weird), the characters look good and act well, and the whole thing is just insanely polished. The much lauded animation system which uses no predesigned animation routines seems to work quite well although it glitches every now and again. The city is amazing too, it's huge and insanely detailed. Will and I played multiplayer this evening and attempted to land a helicopter on the top of the Empire State Building. We failed, but the view was great as we plummeted to our deaths.

Nico as a character has more depth and personality than any of the others, Claude in GTAIII was a mute nobody, Tommy Vercetti from Vice City was an arsehole and CJ from San Andreas was pretty much everybody's bitch despite his big mouth.

So far, I'm really impressed. And I'm not the only one.

Kittens are great.

Wild and crazy

Well, not really.

Yesterday was good, an Indiana Jones marathon at Ed and Kat's with Rob, Em, Will and Vicky, complete with vast quantities of pizza. It was really good fun even though I didn't watch them that long ago. But then again watching films in Ed's cinema is a bit different from watching them at home.

Today was rather tired due to the late finish yesterday. Also GTA IV is out tomorrow so cue spasms of anticipation all day long. We've deliberately not read any reviews but basically everyone has given it perfect scores. Spent much of the evening taking my mind off it by watching some more of Doctor Who season 2.

Steve Ballmer going mad. I'd forgotten how funny this was but wow. This kind of sums up Microsoft in an odd way.

Death

In the kind of mood where I like this.

Hurgle

Glad it's Friday.

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is out on DVD. Hurrah.

It's a shame that I'm learning AIX in work instead of Solaris. There's plenty of Sun machines on Ebay including several Enterprise E4500s with 12 processors and 12gb RAM. But there is only one RS/6000 and it's ancient and crap. Bah.

Just been a fat fuck and eaten a load of chocolate. I suck.

0

Flipped Defender

Not much today. Took the dog for a walk as it was a really nice evening and noticed a sorry looking M-reg Defender in a field. From the looks of it, it had flipped over and skidded along the road upside down, causing severe damage to the wings and roof.

I've seen it around before. It's got big wheels, snorkel, chrome accessories and a big roll bar and was driven by someone who seemed to be under the impression that a Defender has the cornering ability of something like an MX-5. As he presumably found out, they don't.

Google Maps has finally updated the satellite images for North Wales. Our house is in shadow but you can see the cars outside and the Audi parked in the space it sat in for three years before being scrapped.

Updates

Friday evening: Badminton meal at the Brookhouse Mill. Much gossip, food, music and people dancing in odd ways. All good.

Saturday: Ruthin in the morning for speedo cable installation. Just £10 labour but the cable was £40. Still, saved £50 by not taking it to the garage. Went to the delicatessen I sometimes go to for lunch but it was quite different being there when things are still warm. In the evening it was round to Vicky's with Rob, Em and Andy for lots of Mexican food, including chilli, fajitas, wraps, crisps and all sorts, accompanied by many cocktails. It was an excellent evening and everyone retired to bed quite late.

Sunday: Rob,Will and I went to the car boot sale in the morning and took a wander round some shops. The car boot wasn't very big and the only thing of interest was an old Toughbook. It was a PII of some description and was missing some parts. It had the BT logo on it. I didn't get it although I was slightly tempted. The rest of the day was spent relaxing with yet more Doctor Who.

Monday: Up at the crack of dawn to drive to Birmingham for disaster recovery testing. I was a bit anxious about this due to having never driven the AX that far before. But fortunately it proved to be surprisingly competent on the motorway. Once up to speed it was quite comfortable and when necessary I mingled quite happily with the usual outside lane BMWs and Mercedes. The traffic was OK although it slowed down a bit once near Birmingham itself. Took about three hours door to door.

Once at the DR place I parked up in the visitors section of the car park next to two X5s, a Lexus and a Honda Civic Type-R. Yeah, the AX was slightly outclassed. Once inside it was the usual story of chucking all the tapes into a library and getting it all up and running and ready to restore servers. After that we went to the same ghastly French hotel as last time. To be fair though the beds are comfy and the food OK except you seemed to get cabbage with EVERYTHING. My colleague got salmon with rice...and cabbage.

Today: More DR. This morning I assisted with the recovery of an AS/400 which was interesting even though it was only the second time I've ever touched one. It's good though because when our one was backed up, it generated instructions on exactly what you need to do to restore it, right down to the tapes you need, and the actual commands you need to enter. It was a bit of a beast, coming up to face height on me. Still ran really well for something approaching ten years old though. Then left and came home. Again the journey was fine, taking about three hours again, including a couple of stops to find out why my stereo kept only playing out of one speaker and to pick up chips in Denbigh.

Tired now.

Metal valve caps suck

When I got the AX I noticed it was missing a couple of tyre valve caps. Rather than get the usual little black ones I put a set of metal 8-ball ones on, for no real reason. Nobody noticed either.

Today I went to check the tyre pressures and two of the damn things wouldn't come off, having presumably rusted on. I eventually got one off with pliers and hot water, but the other is seized so solid that any attempt to turn it now turns the entire valve. So I guess I'm going to have to go and be embarrassed at a garage and ask them to put a new valve on that wheel. Bah. Apparently it helps if you put vaseline in them beforehand. Oh well, I didn't know that.

Payday today, hurrah. Let's see if I can get back on track with this thriftiness lark. Well, OK, I've ordered a new 160gb hard drive for this computer but it's only £30 and that's covered by the London stuff I got paid back.

I'm so glad it's Friday. It's been a shitty week of poor sleep, annoying work and general crapness only relieved by many many episodes of Doctor Who.

Exhaustion

Woke up to dense snowfall this morning and sweeping acres of white fields. Sadly it was that crap big snow that never lasts and while the Clwydian hills looked particularly impressive, it was all gone by lunchtime. By this evening I was able to sit in the field.

Not been sleeping well this week and last night was particularly bad with an attack of the squits early in the morning. That combined with a particularly shitty day at work just left me with no motivation to do anything this evening. I had been planning to go to badminton but didn't bother, instead watching the first couple of episodes of Doctor Who season 2 and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

It's weird watching David Tennant be the Doctor. But I suppose you must get used to him after three seasons. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was interesting, since I haven't seen it since the first time round in the cinema. It's still pretty good and has more depth than you'd expect.

Mobile laptop weirdness and a curious pony

Work was meh. Tried out a laptop with inbuilt mobile network connectivity. It would probably work better if Denbighshire had more 3G coverage. In places you only have GPRS which works but is quite slow. Also a 6-month old machine suffered hard drive failure, which was annoying in itself but it was running an AutoCAD license manager. Bah.

Took the dog for a walk which was quite eventful. First we met our neighbour walking his little Jack Russell. I don't normally like them but this one is lovely. She's small and friendly and doesn't yap at all. Strangely, she and the Hound adore each other and are best friends, which is very funny considering the huge difference in size. After that we came across a rather cute little pony who came galloping up to the fence when we walked past. It seemed very interested in Sandy and followed us along the hedge to watch him, which he found quite disturbing. Then we encountered a small bird which was unable to fly. It seemed to have a broken wing. It was sad but what can you do? Even if I could have got near it, you can't really do anything for them.

The weather was great with the sun out and the sky bright and clear but it looks like it's going to be another cold evening.

Picked up the replacement speedo cable for the AX today. The garage that serviced it wanted £60 for the labour to install it on top of the £30 for the cable from Citroen. Fortunately I know someone who used to work there who will do it for £10.

Why I like the AX

So far today I've watched an awful lot of the 2005 Doctor Who series. It's quite decent and so far I've really enjoyed it. Only a couple of episodes left though.

I was bored around lunchtime so I put the dog in the car and went for a drive. Had a look at the nearby wind farm, which is always nice. The turbines are surprisingly large when you're close to them. After that got lost and ended up in Cerrigydrudion before heading homewards and taking a look at the Alwen reservoir on the way. I went there before I went to London but it was raining then so didn't get to look around. This time I took the dog for a short walk along the dam and round the first corner and back. One day I'll go all the way round.

Not entirely sure how much diesel I used due to the ridiculous fuel gauge. It could have been anything from none at all to half a tank, but I know that I wouldn't have been able to make a random trip like that in the Discovery for fear of wasting fuel. So yay.

Rugby, snacks, Futurama and root access

Went to Andy's with Rob, Em and Will to watch the Ospreys vs Leicester. It wasn't bad and the Ospreys won. But I spent much of the time gaining root access to the N800. This is good as it lets you run things you otherwise wouldn't be able to. Will and I also tried out some games in ScummVM on it and found it runs pretty well.

We also watched the new Futurama DVD, Bender's Big Score. A good return to form. Can't wait for the next three to come out.

Pic is a mildly HDRified photo of a big fat Cadillac I took a photo of in the US in 2005, which I think was parked in the New England Air Museum car park. I know cars like this drink fuel, don't go round corners and are probably unsafe in accidents but it would be fun to go on a road trip across the country in something like this. I (badly) GIMPed a modern car out of the corner.

Books, badminton and wanton violence

Work wasn't too bad today. Went to my new site, the Ruthin Gaol and got a lot done there. Then spent the afternoon working on a pair of semi-rugged Dell ATG laptops. The ATG somewhat hilariously stands for All-Terrain Grade. They are nice machines though, being based on the Latitude D530. Dells latest laptops are pretty nice.

Badminton end of season tournament this evening. It wasn't great for me, I got paired with a nice guy but he had a totally weird way of playing which I just couldn't adapt to. So I played like shit and we didn't do very well. Afterwards everyone went to the pub which was slightly awkward as loads of people from my old company were there.

Rob lent me a comic book collection called Wanted. It was a bit weird really, the idea was quite interesting but the main character basically became a complete fucktard so you had no reason to relate to him. Not that great to be honest. He also lent me a book which I haven't read because I'm still working my way through Excession by Iain M Banks, which is certainly not the kind of book you can stop reading and pick up again half way through.

Not much else to report.

Vlah

Single Status = pain. Work not a happy place right now.

Sold the mandolin within an hour of putting it on the work noticeboard.

No badminton. Not a great week in terms of health and fitness, eaten a bit better but not much exercise. I think I've put on nearly a stone since November.

Tired. Feeling really bloody miserable for various reasons. Weather was shit so didn't walk the dog but took him for a run and dig in the field between rain showers.

I think I'm going to write a couple of books entitled 'Little Timmy's Guide to Software Licensing' and 'Little Timmy says Saving to the Network is a Good Thing'. They'll be dedicated to all the people I've tried to explain these very simple concepts to, who obviously need it explained in big clear writing and friendly illustrations.

Was mocked today in work by people who said the Discovery had shrunk in the wash, because the AX is basically the same colour. But they fed me Lindt chocolate until I cheered up again.

Just realised I'd better get the speedometer fixed soon as I've got to drive to Birmingham soon for work and I'll need to odometer readings to claim back the mileage. Last year I got a lift with someone down there and the train back, but that wasn't ideal as the train was from New Street station, which the most ugliest complicated swine of a station I've ever been in.

The thought that the M-reg AX that I bought as a £500 banger was brand new when I was in college is a scary one.

Fecktardical

Work is doom and gloom all over the place. Really depressing at the moment. Also I left my lights on all day which killed the battery so nothing happened when I turned the key. The switch which would turn on the interior light when the door is opened, and also beep if the lights are on, isn't working.

Fortunately it wasn't too late to find help in the building and there was a nice guy with jump leads who was happy to help me get it started with his 206. That was lucky. I need a new set of jump leads as the old ones I had in the Discovery were too short and melted when I tried to start the Audi from it.

List of things to fix on the car:

Door switch
Driver's window goes up at an angle
Speedometer doesn't work
Sagging right front spring, car sits at an angle
Heater fan knob keeps falling off (glue)

Spring is awkward, need someone to do that. I'm sure it wasn't like that when I bought it but if the spring was weak, the track would reveal that pretty quickly. The window and door switch can hopefully be got from the scrappy, while the speedo cable is £30 from Citroen and may require someone to do that too as it's not easy apparently. I need to consult the Fabled Tome to look into that.

It also has the most ridiculous fuel gauge of any car I've ever had. Most of them have had some sort of fluctuation when you go round corners and things, but this is stupid. You can be going along a perfectly straight road and it'll be dipping up and down. When it gets low, it can be below red one minute and then up to quarter of a tank the next. It also doesn't seem to have any warning light when it gets low. Bizarre and annoying.

This may sound like I've simply swapped one problematic car for another. But the AX is old enough for many to be in scrapyards, and the parts are much, much cheaper than Land Rover parts. Also I can forgive it's little foibles by the fact it costs so little in fuel to run.

Definitely selling the mandolin. Going to advertise it in work. I like the sound but it's too small and fiddly after the bass. I might look into an octave mandolin or a bouzouki which have a similar sound but aren't so small. Or a cittern, as this electric one sounds awesome.

Discovered the old AIM account I had many years ago actually still works, which is pretty cool. I can't remember the last time I used it but I'm sure it was back in something like 2003 or 2004.

This machine is doing some odd things. It hasn't been right after it was shut down while I was in London. I'm not sure if the old crappy 20gb and 40gb hard drives might be failing. I've backed up my documents. What I'll probably do is wait for the next Ubuntu release and then get a new hard drive and rebuild it with that.

I can't get my head round Flickr. Every time I look at it, there's been something like 4000-5000 photos uploaded every minute. Insane.

Someone lent me season 1 of the new Doctor Who series. Before someone shoots me and says it's actually season xxx when taking into account all of them, I've never seen any previous Doctor Who before and know next to nothing about it. I've seen some of the first series round at Steve's house last year though.

Many things

Work has been OK. Not much happened in my absence. Still no update on Single Status, but I gather I should be OK.

Didn't do much this evening except see how cheap satnavs are. I'm going to have to drive to Birmingham at the end of this month for work. Or I could just use a map. Also had a look for IBM RS/6000 machines. Also need something to run AIX on so I can play with it. We have a test machine in work but it's just a logical partition of a system running several other live systems so it isn't really a toy I can break. Annoyingly RS/6000s or P series seem quite hard to get hold of in the UK, and expensive. There's a single 43P Model 170 on Ebay UK which is £140. In the USA, it would basically be free scrap as it's only something like 233mhz with 256mb RAM and a couple of 4.5gb hard drives.

Tired all day today for some reason. Annoying.

Guitarrón

Just remembered I saw a Mexican guitarrón in London. Like an acoustic bass guitar, but huge. Looked like fun.

Null thriftiness exception

Oh well, I guess four or five months of being reasonably careful and good with money wasn't too bad. This past month's been a bit bad really with the car, the fretless and London. Oh well. I'm going to treat it as a blip as much as possible and try and get back on track after next pay day. Also by then the Single Status thing will have kicked off in work - we find out about how it will affect our pay on Monday. Also need to do my expenses for the London trip, which I hate doing. I think you have to have a certain type of mind, possibly inhuman, to come up with expenses policies.

I really like the fretless bass. It sounds really good and has a really different feel to a fretted. I can't really explain it.

Watched the Simpsons movie today. It was better than I thought but it was still too much like the generally crappier later seasons than when it was at it's best.

Pictures - first one is of the crowds of people watching the RAF flypast, taken from the roof of the IBM building. If you click on it and look closely you can see them on the bridges and roofs across the river. The second is of the Vale of Clwyd from a road not too far from home. Quite a contrast. Going from here to London and back is always a bit of a culture shock.

Why?

Short Circuit is being remade.

Back

Back in Wales. Course is all done. It was actually really good and a lot of things about AIX make a lot more sense. It's enough not like 'real' Unix or Linux to be annoying though. It would be a real help if I could get hold of an RS/6000 or Pseries to play with but they don't seem to be very easy to get hold of. Sun machines for example are readily available on Ebay.

Yesterday was a bit annoying. I took the DLR to Canary Wharf, intending to get the Jubilee line back to the centre. Partly to see Canary Wharf and partly because I'd never been on the DLR (a bit of me is still a train geek). But by the time I got there and had a look around, the Jubilee had shut down following a power failure. So I had to cram myself back onto the DLR with the thousands of others trying to escape Canary Wharf and get back to where I started. After all that it was quite late and so I ended up back near King's Cross and got a burger and chips in a fish and chip shop that had a restaurant in the back. Pretty decent too.

Today I wandered round a bit more and had a look at the music shops in Denmark Street. I played a Dean Rhapsody 12-string bass which was awesome, shook my head at a ridiculous 6-necked guitar/bass which took up an entire window and watched someone who looked very familiar for some reason play a genuine 60's Fender Bass IV which sounded absolutely amazing. After that had a look at Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden before heading up to Euston and getting the train back. It left on time and actually arrived ten minutes early. Amazing. Both journeys were completely trouble free and both times I was in the shop carriage, which was handy.

The replacement stove was installed while I was away although we can't light it until Sunday so things can dry out. It's a lot smaller than the old one and a lot more complicated. We'll see. Also the people left a pile of bricks in front of the doorstep from when they were trying to get the old Rayburn out, and when I went out in the dark I fell right over them. My hand is killing me.

I could attach a photo to this because I took a few in London but I can't be bothered to get the memory card out of my phone which is downstairs on charge.

Speedtyping, rumbling sounds and a bouzouki

The bloke who was sat next to me for a while has to be the fastest one finger typist I have ever seen. I can't decide if his skill with the his right index finger is to be admired, or whether he should be ridiculed for not learning to type properly.

An Underground line must go under here, it's very loud indeed, and it still smells of dog. Still, £1 for an hour of Internet access on a reasonably decent computer isn't bad, especially as the hotel charges £3.50 for half an hour of access to their wi-fi.

One thing I saw today was one of the Hobgoblin music shops which specialises in mainly acoustic folky instruments. There were the usual acoustic guitars, mandolins, ukuleles, etc, but they had bouzoukis, several of those bandurria things from Spain and those weird giant guitar like things. They even a couple of one-string objects that looked almost like a Whamola but with a giant trumpet thing sticking out. No idea what on earth they were but they looked interesting.

I had a quick go on a Blue Moon Diamond Bouzouki which proved the point that I should have got a bouzouki instead of a mandolin. The scale length was just right and it was nice to play but still had that interesting dual-string sound. If I'd had the £100 it cost and had some way of getting it home which didn't involve underground trains and things, I might have bought it. I think I'll sell the mandolin, I never really play it as it's too small and fiddly after the bass.

Crazy London

Decided that I'm not going to do much this evening. The Underground and traffic seem to be madly busy for some reason. I've even had a burger from McDonald's because it was nearby.

Typing this in an Internet cafe thing near the hotel, that for some reason smells of dog. A lot. Rather like the Fiat Uno I had a long time ago which always smelled of dog.

Chinatown

After wandering around a bit last night I ended up in Chinatown to be confronted with a bewildering array of restaurants and places to eat. In fact there was so much choice that I nearly ended up throwing it all in and getting a McDonalds. But I found a place which did a buffet so I gave that a go. It wasn't all you can eat as you could only go up twice, but it had a decent selection and you could put as much as you wanted on a plate. The food was pretty good too and also got a pot of tea. They had the biggest onion rings I've ever seen.

Also found the Nokia store which was interesting. It is obviously a copy of the Apple store but I was the only one in there, making it a little creepy. But it was nice to finally see a working E90 which is a stunning device. But for £600 it better had be. I also liked the N810 which isn't a phone but more a portable tablet device. Quite interesting and it runs Linux. That's £340 though and the older N800, which is fairly similar, is much cheaper and in some ways more versatile.

I've noticed I'm sneezing rather a lot since I came to London. Not sure why but the black snot has returned. Cities are fun but they can't be good for you. Also trying to resist the urge to shop and buy things that I can't afford. I'd like to get a Badass bridge for the fretless but they're £55. I've got one on my other bass but I bought that in the US so it was only £30.

We support your socks life

Ok I have been here for half an hour and not seen anyone else keep their iPod in a sock. Also wondered why a guy next to me was waving at his MacBook and it turned out he had a video chat open to his kids. Technology keeps catching me out.

Hungry. Going to find some food.

Can't keep away

Back in the Apple Store once again. Sounds like I'm addicted to the place but the truth is that you can sit down and it has free wifi. It's actually quite quiet at the moment. Not sure what to do for lunch but saw a greasy Chinese just now that looked half decent so might the that a go. Typing this on the touch. Can you tell?

not in the mood to do anything this evening but the hotel room is too depressing to just sit in.

Feh.

Dyslexic?

Just saw the RAF flyby from the roof - very cool as we were nearly directly underneath.

I think I must be dyslexic or something, just had to type a horrible volume identifer which looked something like this 0057h57538ecdcbe000000000000000 and got it wrong twice, l for a 1 and 6 for a b. I know I have problems with numbers though, put a group of more than 4 or 5 and my head starts to swim.

Things

Misread the box in the Apple store, the charger did include the docking cable. Still a bit expensive at £20 but it can also be used to charge the Shuffle and also anything else that uses USB to charge, so it could be quite handy to have.

Spent yesterday evening wandering around. Visited a shop in Camden called the Bass Gallery where I saw some incredibly nice basses, many Fenders and things, a simply stunning Fodera and some other customs, an original Steinberger and something that I didn't know what it was but was apparently sculpted out of a single piece of wood. Later on I happened to come out of the Underground right next to Big Ben just as it chimed 8 o'clock - very impressive. It's always much bigger than I think it is. Went across the bridge and past the London Eye and got some caramelised peanuts on the way, very tasty.

Staying near King's Cross has some benefits, it seems to have a ludicrous number of places to eat nearby. I went to an Italian and got Gnocchi with gorgonzola sauce. Pretty good but the sauce wasn't as tasty as when Rob made it.