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.