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.

Yay

Got my payslip today which indicated that for whatever reason my tax bracket or whatever has changed which equals £60 less tax per month - yay! So I can now get Spore and a replacement UK keyboard for the Inspiron guilt-free as they are both about £30.

Other than that the only things to report were a successful set up of a test backup server in work, which was really good as it clarified an awful lot about how the live one was originally configured, and a nice dog walk in the evening in lovely sunshine for a change.

Finished Ringworld at last. It's a really good book and fun all the way through with some really interesting ideas. Rob says the sequels are worth reading so I'll look into picking them up too.

51st State

Yet another sign that Britain is becoming more like the USA by the day. This is supposed to the be the 21st century for crying out loud! At this rate we'll end up back in the Dark Ages.

I've got nothing against religion or those who practice it, but I can't for the life of me see why anyone does. What I do have a problem with is when law and government policy is directly affected by religious views, especially when it is down to one person. That is inexcusable. It's also much too easy to use religion for illegal and devious purposes.

I found one comment on that article quite interesting, where the guy basically said he'd rather be the product of a God than an evolutionary accident, and so he embraced Christianity, making him much happier. This basically (in my opinion) goes to show that religion is a safety blanket that makes people feel better about themselves and their place in the universe.

Weekend shenanigans

Saturday was mostly spent washing the car and t-cutting the bonnet to get rid of the penis Will drew on it a couple of weeks ago. He must have acidic spit or something because I'd tried various things but it took stripping the top layer of paint of to get rid of it completely. Then went round to Andy's with Rob and Em where we watched Futurama, random TV, ate some good pizza and created GIMP photofits. The one below is me with Andy's hair, Rob's chin and Em's eyes. Not as impressive as Em with a goatee though.

Today was spent wielding the Electric Hedgetrimmer of Death and the Saw of Blood as I attacked the overgrown plants outside the house. Two weird ones and a pair of small trees came crashing down and it's made a great difference. There's still a lot to do though. Really tired and achy now though after that as the trees were quite big and shifting them was a pain.

Death Magnetic isn't perfect but it's the first decent thing that Metallica's done in years. I've listened to it a couple of times and enjoyed it a lot. There's a couple of tracks I'm not too keen on but the rest is really good. I wish they didn't bury the bass in the mix the way they've done since Cliff Burton died though. 

Badminton pain

It's been a hard week in work so I wasn't sure about going to badminton. But I'm glad I did as I had a good time. It took a while to get back into it and my first couple of games were shockingly bad. But it was good fun. Afterwards, went to the pub for the traditional drink, so that was good.

I think my body is resenting the exercise, and I'll probably feel it tomorrow.

Heh

This made me laugh.

Thingsynum

Had to go back to my old school today to investigate an SDSL connection problem. I hate going back there. I went there for a job interview in 2004 (which I didn't get, thank fuck) and a couple of times for work since. The disturbing thing is that it hasn't changed much. Yes, the reception area changed and there's a big new block at the back, but the rest of it is so much the same it's scary. 

The problem turned out to be that some genius installed a kill switch in the Business Studies room which cut the power to the whole room as some sort of disciplinary tool. Unfortunately this included the cabinet which included the network switches for the whole site and yes, the SDSL hardware, which didn't survive the trauma.

Took the dog for a walk although I wasn't sure about the weather. First it was uncomfortably hot, and then very cold, and finally we were bathed in bright sunshine while simultaneously being hammered by horizontal rain. It was annoying.

Did very little otherwise except for watch the Top Gear's team second attempt to build amphibious vehicles. It is absolute unbridled genius.

I'm having difficulties keeping track of where I am in the week.

Forced apathy

Ah fuck it, I had something to type but then I ate and I forgot it and can't be arsed.

Rereading Ringworld.

Crappy day

Did nothing all day except grumble at the weather, watch Futurama (surprise!) and wonder at quite how I've managed to get myself into a fairly useless financial position. Bah.

Decided that the tapewound strings on the acoustic bass were crap and cut them off with scissors, causing an interesting effect as the tape unwound from the strings. I put some old normal strings on it and it sounds much better. I even played some Rage Against the Machine on it with a reasonable sound from the built in preamp.

Blissful silence

Decided I'd finally had enough of the old second 40gb hard drive in the Precision. It's been making a whining noise for a while now and so I dumped the VMware machines onto the primary 160gb drive and disconnected it. Ubuntu had a bit of a tantrum when it rebooted and the drive wasn't there but I hadn't realised until it was gone just how much noise that thing was making. Not loud as such but with a real piercing edge to it.

Does anyone care?

Eee vs Aspire

Went to my Dad's this morning.

One thing we did was put my Asus Eee PC 900 up against his Acer Aspire One. I found that the Aspire is much nicer looking, has a much better keyboard and the processor is a 1.6ghz Atom. However it has less RAM and storage, and the RAM is not easy to upgrade like it is in the Eee. One thing in it's favour is the 8gb storage is one block rather than the slightly bizarre 4gb+16gb setup that the Eee uses. The screens are the same except the Aspire has a glossy panel, which I can't stand. So it's a bit of a tough call really. If I was to be buying one now I might just pick the Acer.

Also had a play with retro Psion stuff which was good and then spent the rest of the day trying out various things on the netbooks and watching bad TV.

Was supposed to be going round Rob and Em's for board game action but sadly Em isn't well so it had to be called off.

Electronical thingies

Work is about to go...crazy. I'm trying not to think about it and just have a fun weekend.

I proved myself right by creating a dice emulator on one of the old Organisers in about 10 minutes. You can have any number of sides and enter how many times you want to roll it. I just found out that they have ported the OPL language to modern Nokia phones, which are descendants of the later Psion handhelds.

Reactable

This is insanely cool, but it would probably be very easy to end up with just a hideous mess of noise.



Had a play with an application for the Touch today which simulates various dice rolls. It made me think that I could have written a program on my old Psion Organiser II to do the same thing. It wouldn't have looked as pretty though. Those Organisers were great little things. Yes, the screen and keyboard were bloody awful but the internal OPL programming language meant they were very versatile. I wrote loads of programs on mine including a program which ran a graphics animation (hard) and a text-based snail simulator game for some bizarre reason. Unsurprisingly I have quite a few of these, including two rare point-of-sale models. I very nearly ended up with 75 of the things for £40 once.

Cars cars cars

The AX had the suspension repaired today. It seemed to handle better on the way home but I was restricted on how fast I could drive home due to ludicrous rain and flash floods.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not good with cars. Since I passed my driving test in 1995 I've had far too many of them. Partly because I'm hard on them, partly because I seem to end up with ones that break and partly because we live up 1/3 of rocky farm track.

While rootling through my hard drive I found some pictures of various vehicles I have owned. Here they are in no particular order:

1986 D-reg VW Passat. This was a bit of an impulse buy after the Pimpmobile got written off. I needed a car, and this was there at the right price. The engine was an early turbo-diesel 1.6, which made it quite quick, even with the turbo lag. Possibly one of the most boring cars I've ever seen, it bizarrely received the attention of vandals on a regular basis who stole the VW badges and left it covered in trainer prints, dents and scratches. This combined with various mechanical issues led to it being sold for a pittance a year or so later. Shame as I really liked the styling and you don't see them around any more.

The Pimpmobile. This was a 1982 Y-reg Mercedes 200. I paid just £400 for it in about April 2003 just after moving into a flat, possibly one of the stupidest things I have ever done. It immediately needed some work on the engine due to zero oil pressure and a rattly timing chain. Amazingly the engine was completely fine despite it being obvious the oil hadn't been changed in years. The brake pads also needed urgent attention too.

But once those issues were sorted, it was a fantastic car to drive. Being yellow and covered in chrome, it had huge presence on the road. Despite worn seat springs and a tatty brown interior, it was very comfortable and the suspension masked even the most serious potholes. It was also very easy to maneuver due to astonishing power steering and a surprisingly tight turning circle.

Downsides included fairly poor fuel economy from the 2.0 litre petrol engine, rust, and a dislike of long hills. I only owned it seven months before it was written off by a lorry. I was strongly tempted to replace it with another Mercedes when I got the insurance money but I went for the VW Passat instead.

This is the rare 6x6 Land Rover Discovery van I owned for a brief period last year. It had been converted to a 4.6 litre automatic V8 and so I didn't really use it much as it used so much fuel.

I got this 1994 M-reg Fiat Cinquecento in late 1999. It still holds the record for the longest I have owned a car at 3.5 years. It was fitted with a CD player and some big speakers in early 2001or so and it was fun to drive. I absolutely hammered this little car for 50,000 miles and it took it really well with only a few issues. It's tiny size made transitioning to the Pimpmobile a rather daunting experience.

1982 X-reg Land Rover. I got this in about 1997 and while a fun old beast, it was a bit of a disaster. It had many issues, culminating in the 2.25 litre diesel engine expiring loudly and expensively in a cloud of white smoke and a loud knocking sound. The only engine available to economically replace it was a 2.25 litre petrol engine, which drank fuel like there was no tomorrow. This picture was taken just before I got rid of it with the new door top and shiny white wheels.

This was my very first car, a 1986 C-reg Fiat Panda 45CL. Powered by a 900cc engine with four gears, it was noisy and not particularly quick. The front seats resembled deckchairs, while the back 'seat' was basically a padded hammock slung between two poles. It had quite a few problems which were made worse as it was troublesome to get parts for, being a 'rare' Mk1 Panda - a rear light that got broken had to be shipped all the way from Italy and a cracked heater valve which couldn't be replaced led to the heating being permanently on.

Games of war

Spent most of the day struggling with AutoCAD licensing, and finally emerged victorious and triumphant. This was followed by a dog walk in slightly uncertain weather.

In the evening played Defcon with Will. Found that it runs full screen across both monitors on the Precision, which makes it look like the actual Wargames setup, which was fun. It took a few goes as a surprising number of people joined Will's game, entitled Bumchins.