A long day

Rugby last night was OK. The first place we went to was heaving and smelled of wee so we went to another place which was quite empty. Will and I left early as I was tired and his car was in the way of mine. On the way back we saw the beginnings of a fight at the bottom of town and when I went back that way a few minutes later, two police cars were in attendance and there were at least two people flat out on the ground.

The overtime went OK today as much as reconfiguring dozens of PCs can be. Lunch was good, chips and a battered sausage, slathered in curry sauce. After that, it was over to Andy's to watch some uninspiring rugby and sort out the final gap in the USA holiday in April. The Ireland/England match was stupid, the England players were being cocks and the only entertainment was at the end when Martin Johnson was being interviewed and clearly trying to contain his fury and not punch the interviewer out. We also ate some rather tasty burgers from a local butcher and spent about an hour and a half thinking of alternate things to do in the holiday gap, only to go back the original plan in the end and book that.

All good fun.

It's been a bad week for food and exercise. Need to crack down on it tomorrow and next week. I'm off Monday and Tuesday, which is nice.

Argh

A very busy day. Didn't sleep at all well last night either, so knackered now. I would be looking forward to a nice weekend of relaxation but there's overtime tomorrow. Oh well, hopefully it won't take too long and we always get chips for lunch so that should be fun.

Rugby tonight, should be fun. I don't think I'll be out too late though, so tired and need to be up for the overtime.

Holy crap

Work was OK today but I have a bad feeling about tomorrow.

Picked up the new Prodigy album when I went out for lunch and put it on in the car on the way home. I'd already heard a few of the tracks, but through laptop speakers, and I think 'Omen' is the best thing I'd heard by them in a long time. It's just amazing when it all kicks in at the beginning. There's some other great tracks too.

Badminton was OK this evening, played reasonably well I thought, especially as I've felt really tired all day, well, all week really, and I wasn't sure how well I'd play.

A Saints Row movie will suck, because it'll focus on the whole hip-hop gangsta thing. The second game only really worked for me because having the character played by a sarcastic cockney bastard made the gangsta thing rather more tolerable for some reason.

One of those weeks

It's shaping up to be one of those weeks. Today was particularly annoying with hassle coming from all quarters. It was made worse by not having the car so I had to traipse half a mile across town with a laptop in tow to deliver to an ungrateful user.

I got the car back this evening. It was definitely the crankshaft sensor so they put in a new one and it's running perfectly now. I hadn't realised how rough it was running while the light was on but I suppose that's understandable if it was in limp mode. As to the cost, I don't know as the garage guy didn't have the bill handy so is posting it.

Played around a bit with the RS/6000. I successfully mirrored the hard drives, which is something I remembered doing on the course. This is really why I wanted one because the AIX implementation of LVM is really powerful and flexible, but it's not easy to practice without a machine that doesn't matter if I break it. I'd like to get a couple of tapes for the drive in it so I can back it up before trying stuff that might break the OS, as it took quite some time to install. It's an ancient DDS3 drive and the tapes are about £1 each these days.

Anyway, I'm going to shut it down now and try and relax.

RS/6000

So that RS/6000 I mentioned had a significant price drop, so I ended up with it. It's old, but it does support AIX 5.3, which is what we use in work. Also, unlike most of the other machines I've seen for sale, it isn't a hulking great beast of a server and is about the size of a large tower PC. It has the following specs:

400mhz Power3-II processor
256mb RAM
2x 36gb SCSI hard drives
DDS3 tape drive (12gb per tape)

As you can see it's not the most powerful machine, but it should run AIX nicely enough and certainly will be good enough to play around with LVM and disk management. It has two free RAM slots so allows room for expansion and a third hard drive could be installed. Also it's capable of running AIX in 64-bit mode, which is nice. There is no graphics card though so it has to be accessed via a serial console. Annoyingly RS/232 ports are rapidly disappearing from modern machines so I had to use the Latitude D400 as a console.

The installation of AIX 5.3 went as expected, but when the machine tried to boot from the new install, it hung when it tried to start the kernel. Investigation showed it had a very old firmware version that didn't support AIX 5.3. I found the latest firmware for it, but it required installation from floppy disks. I had to go and dig out a USB floppy drive, and then find a disk, not that easy. Then I found that it wasn't able to update the firmware from the system management so I had to download a diagnostic CD from IBMs website, write that to a CD, boot from that, install the firmware, and then reboot and see if the OS would load. It finally booted and I was able to set the initial system settings, and then finally reboot again. I was slightly worried that I didn't get a login prompt on the serial console but I was able to telnet in over a network connection.

So hurrah, I tamed the beast. I found a quote that probabaly describes this quite well. "Unix IS user friendly. It's just selective who it's friends are."

Stuff

In preparation for the Watchmen movie that is out next month, I thought I'd get a copy of the graphic novel and reread it. The last time I read it was in about 2004. I've read a few chapters so far.

Completed one of the gangs in the first Saints Row yesterday. It was quite decent but seemingly harder than I expected. Also I didn't realise just how much of a bonus unlimited rifle ammo was until now. Unofrtunately there doesn't seem to be any way of getting it in the first game without cheating.

New Prodigy album is out and Will sent me links to some of the new tracks, and from what I've heard so far, it's pretty good.

Chinese Democracy

Well, everyone's heard all the stories, hype and rumours about this Duke Nukem Forever of music. Axle Rose might be a cock of the highest order but after all this time, it would be rude not to listen to it at least once.

If it had been entitled 'Axl Rose and the Amazing Musical Variety Show' it would be more appropriate. It's definitely not Guns N Roses, or at least not if you have fond memories of Appetite for Destruction. It has some interesting tracks and a couple I quite like.

But I'll stick with Velvet Revolver, thanks anyway Axl.

A nice lazy day

The weather today was absolutely fantastic, so I took the dog for a good long walk in the sunshine. Really nice. One of those days where I stopped on the road and marvelled at the scenery. When you live somewhere like this, it's very easy to become used to it and just take it for granted. Due to the car woes, I stayed at home otherwise.

Other than being V shaped, the drunken rugby bass doesn't do anything in particular that my other basses can't do. So I took one of the sets of octave strings from a 12 string bass set (which I got a long time ago when I wanted a 12 string) and put them on it, making it into a piccolo bass, which is tuned exactly the same as the bottom four strings of a guitar. This is quite often regarded as a pointless thing to do but it lets you play it like a bass and get guitar like sounds.

I fired up the first Saints Row and have played it a bit. Probably because I'm so used to the second one, it's far better than I remember. I think it's because I was so used to GTA San Andreas that I never gave it a chance originally. It has more rough edges than the sequel but it's not as bad as expected. The city is also a lot smaller, but I keep driving through areas that I recognise from the second game, and it's interesting to see the original Saints Row area which has been completely redeveloped in the second game, much to your character's dismay. Quite a lt of other things are the same, mainly a number of the cars and some of the character animation. The character creation is much more limited but I managed to make him look a bit like he does in SR2. Not really necessary though as the story dictates that the character has extensive plastic surgery while in a five year coma between the two games. One thing that is difficult to get used to is that your character never speaks in the first game, while he never shuts up in the sequel.

Finally got to listen to the second Velvet Revolver album, which is really good. Also listened to Chinese Democracy, which is...well, it sure as hell isn't Guns N Roses, despite what it says on the cover and whatever Axl might say.

Yay badminton

It was a fairly busy day in work and it was one of those annoying days where I felt tired for most of it. As a result I nearly didn't go to badminton this evening. To be honest, what with one thing and another and bouts of laziness, it's been ages since I went on a Friday so I wasn't sure if there was any point. I'm glad I did go though as it was a really good evening. I played reasonably well but there was one game where I had a complete blast and both myself and my partner played really well, so that was good. After that, it was time to go to the pub which was good fun as always.

Nothing's going on this weekend, which is probably a good thing. It's nice to have two days of nothing to look forward to.

I took the car to a garage at lunchtime where they hooked it up to a PC and read the fault code. Apprently it is the crankshaft sensor. They cleared the fault and said to drive it back to the office and see how it went. For half a mile or so it was fine, just like normal and then it went back into safe mode and the light came back on, so that'll have to be looked at next week. Boo. Oh well.

The drunken rugby bass turned up. It's a cheapo Wesley which was ordered during the first boring match last Saturday. Alcohol and Internet access should not be combined - this is why I own a unicycle. Anyway, it's a white Flying V which is very 80's metal, and given how little it cost, it's actually rather nice. I think my reasoning was that it would be a nice platform to modify but all it really needs is some extra shielding in the cavities. I've always liked the Flying V guitar and you don't see bass versions very often. It's rather strange after a normal bass though, mainly because it's so long.

Dwi'n hoffi Cymraeg

Work was OK today, being my Unix day which is always entertaining and a nice break from the usual stuff that goes on.

The Vectra tried to start this morning but the battery was too low. I had to take my Mum's car to work and then come home at lunch time with jump leads. Once the Vectra was started it ran OK but clearly is stuck in safe mode In theory it's possible to cross two pins in the ECU connector to make it flash an error code but I'll see ifI can get someone to actually use the proper tool. Apparently the most common cause of this is the crankshaft sensor, but who knows. The top end of the engine has always been a little noisy, hope it's not anything to do with that.

It was badminton in the evening, which was good fun and very energetic. There was also the now usual impromptu Welsh lesson, which is surprisingly entertaining and it's quite surprising how much of it I remember from high school lessons. I wish I was more fluent in it.

Orange Light of Death

I was merrily driving home when the engine management light on the dash lit up. It still drove OK and there weren't any other signs of issues, so I carried on. However when I got home I switched the engine off and tried starting it again, and it was very reluctant to restart. Eventually it did and it seemed OK once it was actually running. I suppose I'll have to find someone who can plug it into a computer to find out what the fault is that it has picked up and hope it's not serious. Apparently it's far more common for the various sensors to fail rather than the actual thing they are monitoring, which is a bit silly.

One of those evenings where I wanted to put some music on but couldn't decide what to listen to, so I put iTunes on shuffle. And then The Great Southern Trendkill by Pantera came up - perfect.

Life is fundamentally unfair - there's an RS/6000 on Ebay right now with enough power to run AIX 5.3. It's reasonably affordable, has hard drives (most are removed before sale) and the only thing wrong is a lack of RAM (256mb). And what with holidays coming up, car failures and things, I can't really think about getting it. Annoying.

Cuba has banned Windows and is creating a custom Linux based OS for everyone to use instead. Seems a bit OTT.

Long time no post

The last two work days of last week were much the same as the beginning of the week, unnecessarily stressful, due to various reasons. I went to Rob and Em's for badminton on Thursday but Em wasn't well, and Rob and I decided we couldn't be arsed. So we ended up looking at laptop options to replace the venerable iMac they've had on loan from me since about 2005 and drinking hot chocolate with Twirls to dip into them.

It was the rugby on Saturday which worked out quite nicely. We ended up on the top floor of a club in Denbigh with the matches on a projector. Somehow we ended up with that top floor all to ourselves for the whole thing, which was nice. After that it was out around more pubs, stopping off to get chips on the way.

Sunday was spent doing nothing much due to tiredness, other than doing some more crap in SR2 and watching a couple of DVDs.

The Lost and Damned came out today, the DLC for GTAIV. I've heard encouraging things from Will about it so I might just pick it up, especially as I've got SR2 up to 97% complete and little motivation to get the last 3% as it's mainly the last levels of some activities which are annoyingly hard.

I did put GTAIV on today anyway to see how it felt and it was a distinct shock after the craziness of SR2, primarily the more realistic handling of the cars. The first car I got into was a typical 70's American land yacht, which was almost impossible to control at any kind of speed. Fun though, especially as it drifted sideways yet again onto a pavement, sending hapless crowds of people flying. It just feels so dull after SR2 though, you miss the bizarre little touches like when I left my character standing around in a nightclub and he strolled over to the dancefloor and started dancing. You'd never catch Nico doing something random like that. Also I found Nico infuriatingly slow in his movements, even running.

Found a great invention in Morrisons. USB AA batteries. You pop the end off and put them into USB sockets to charge. Once full, you put the end back on and use them as a normal AA battery. What a great idea.

Not much else to report really. Payday tomorrow, woo.

Touchy feely

Work was better today. A couple of meetings in the morning and Unix in the afternoon. This just reminded me of why I need an AIX machine to play with. There's a load of things which I haven't had a chance to practice and an actual physical machine is really the best way of doing it.

Saw a 3G iPhone in person which was nice. They are very nice devices, it must be said. If they were available on other networks than O2 I'd probably own one. The iFart application is just as puerile and hilarious as I expected. There is also a BlackBerry Storm in for evaluation, not impressed. The way the screen responds with an actual click is quite interesting but the software is pants. Sluggish, unresponsive and clunky.

Took the dog for a walk and went the full circuit for the first time this year. The light has got better so while it was pretty dark towards the end, it wasn't too bad. The roads are annoyingly wet from melting snow though.

Downloaded a few things onto the 360, a Watchmen trailer, and a couple of game demos. Nothing particularly interesting. The Lego Batman demo was fun for about two minutes until I realised it was more of the same. I replayed the first level of Rez HD, which looks absolutely awesome on the new screen. It's not really the kind of game you'd expect HD to make a difference but somehow seeing all the lines rendered so sharply makes it much easier to see what's going on. I've never yet bought any Microsoft points but I might just do it to get the full version.

Argh, work

It's bad enough going back to work after a week's holiday anyway, but when there's office moves going on, it's a recipe for a whole load of stress. Things could have gone better, but today was very annoying. I was finishing off the phones and merrily ripped out one of the lines and rewired it, only to find it was the wrong line. Oh well. It didn't take long to sort but was frustrating.

Other than that it's been a fairly ordinary couple of days.

They won!

Well, after the retro madness of the morning, it was off to Rob and Em's, picking up Andy and Will on the way to watch the Wales/Scotland rugby game. It was a good match with Wales playing really well until it all suddenly went to pot in the last 20 minutes. They still won though. After that it was a good few hours of conversation, YouTube videos and some rather nice chilli made by Rob.

Before that I downloaded the ST version of Captain Blood as it's supposed to be the best one. It's a really good game, and the visual style in it is absolutely amazing. It also has the best sounds apparently, which are important when you are communicating with the aliens. I remember seeing screenshots of the CPC version and that itself looked pretty decent, other than the resolution being rather low. A friend of mine actually had it on the Spectrum, but that didn't look quite as good.

For some reason I'm feeling astonishingly tired, and depressingly today feels like Saturday.

Amstrad CPC

In a fit of retro madness I downloaded an Amstrad CPC emulator and some games. Playing them on the keyboard was a bit crap though so I hooked up the 360 controller. It actually works pretty well and the analogue stick works quite well when mapped to the joystick input.

Currently playing Captain Blood, which was an amazing game that I never actually got hold of at the time, so I thought I'd try it out.

Video game addiction

Video game addiction is an interesting thing. I've had it a few times where I've played a game far too much. Most of the GTA series (but not IV) did this, BioShock, Fable II and most recently Saint's Row 2. It's quite weird when you realise just how much time you are spending on it. But at least these games come to an end. As much as I've enjoyed Saints Row 2 there isn't much more I can do in it except finish off the activies and finding the tags and CDs dotted about. I thought about replaying it with a new character, but I found that all the cutscenes and missions seem faintly ridiculous if I change the character at all. The other voices in particular just don't seem right.

Hilariously when I was experimenting with alcohol in the game, I found the character drunkenly says things like 'I really hate this fucking town'. 'I only hurt people because I'm crying inside' and 'Oh Christ I want to give up', bringing to mind a gang leader who secretly wants to dump the whole thing and move to the countryside.

Anyway, online games such as WoW don't come to an end, they keep changing and updating, keeping you coming back for more. I can't really speak from experience with this but this might be why they can be more addictive. The closest I've come to this is playing Second Life. I was worried that I might get too involved in it. Fortunately, it's such total shit that it didn't happen.

Shopping, rugby and steam engines

Supplies were low so I had to go and get the car from the bottom of the track and get some supplies. Morrisons was annoyingly busy but it didn't take too long. After that I hung out at Andy's with the krew for some rugby. While watching it we tried out the new flavours that Walkers crisps are trialing. The results were as follows:

Chocolate and Chilli: Nice but flavour too weak.
Builder's breakfast: Quite tasty with bacon and egg easily distinguishable.
Cajun Squirrel: Interesting but eew after a couple.
Crispy Duck and Hoi Sin sauce: Pretty nice, but not great.
Fish and Chips: Not too bad but a bit fishy for my taste.
Onion Bhaji: Easily the nicest, agreed by all.

I got home OK but the last bit of the track needed about five goes to get the car up to the top. After that, spent some time recovering the data from Sian's laptop hard drive after deciding the motherboard is toast, and then resuming my experiments with USB RAID under FreeNAS.

The new Tornado steam engine has made it's first long distance trip with actual passengers. The shot at the end where it pulls up next to a modern train is awesome.

The curious case of hailbound

Didn't do too much today. Faffed around a bit in Saints Row 2, doing some of the activies that I hadn't done and replayed a couple of missions.

After that, met up with a couple of people from work to go and see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The journey didn't start out well. As I approached Denbigh, I noticed some hail falling, and by the time I got to the town, the roads were thick with it. I had to go to a cash machine and the road was blocked by idiots so I had to go to another one. After that though, the journey was uneventful. After going to Pizza Hut (a large cheesy bites BBQ deluxe is to die for), we watched the film.

It was long. Very long, but unusually, while you noticed it was long, you didn't really mind. It was a very odd film though. Also, with all the stupid hype about Brangelina, it's easy to forget that Brad Pitt can actually act when he puts his mind to it.

When I came home, the hail hadn't melted, and the roads gradually became more and more treacherous. I had a go at the track but couldn't get anywhere so I had to abandon the car right at the bottom and walk up. Oddly enough, it was a very pleasant experience in the cool air and bright moonlight. Having just typed that, it's started hailing again, so that was lucky.

Snowbound

It was snowing all the time at my Dads' and when I drove home, the roads were pretty slushy. The track was pretty bad at the bottom, then it was OK and then the top bit was too much. The Vectra battled valiantly up the track with the traction control light blinking all the way, but finally the snow got the better of it. Still, it was only a short walk from where I had to leave it.

That was the 1000th photo I've taken with the N93.

The Fart Machine is complete

The string tree and the pickup cover on the Fart Machine are now in place, effectively making it complete, assuming that the wiring hasn't come undone during the work. Just need to sort the finish out on the back, but that isn't too urgent.

The Fart Machine strikes

Went out to Will's today. The track was still quite snowy so the car basically tobogganed all the way down. After that, the roads were OK.

The modified bass proved to sound quite nice when hooked up to Will's system, which was definitely good. The new pickup is only really good for big fat low frequencies by itself, which is why they're generally called mudbuckers. We ended up making a track which is hard to describe but starts off with a bass duet, a weird bit in the middle and a death metal rampage at the end. Good fun.

I wasn't expecting to make it up the track on the way home, but much to my surprise, I got up fine. There was a nasty bit at the bottom, which I got past by flooring it around the corner, startling some people with dogs who thought I was revving at them. Once again the traction control proved it's worth.

Going to my Dad's tomorrow, we're going to attach the new pickup cover to the bass, and it could also do with a string tree on the headstock if I can find a spare one. I'm trying to think of a way of removing the damaged finish on the back of the body. It's this nasty thick lacquer stuff. Ideally, if I could be at all arsed, I'd pull it to bits and strip all the finish off, but I'm not quite in the mood to do that yet. It would be easier to just strip the back, make it smooth again and chuck some lacquer on it.

Installed FreeNAS on a VM and set up some iSCSI targets. These work quite well as remote storage, appearing on the client machine as an actual connected disk. I'm sure it would come in insanely useful for something but I can't think what.

Argh, why did I start

I was slightly at a loss as to what to do this morning, so I decided to have a go at installing another pickup in my main bass. It's a giant chrome humbucker. To make room, a big hole would have to be created in the body. As I don't have a router, or the knowledge to use one, I spent ages making a hole with a drill and chisel. This actually worked, and I was quite pleased until I turned the body over and realised that my energetic pounding (ahem) had created a slight crack between the bits of wood the body was made of and wrecked the finish on the back. Undeterred, I hacked up the pickguard to make room on the front, which also went a bit pear-shaped, and then attempted to wire up the pickup using a spare volume control.

The soldering didn't go too well and it took a while to work out just how to add another volume control and wire it in to the existing controls. After a tantrum, I had to rewire the whole thing, so I did. The new pickup actually worked, and the two originals and the tone control did too, so that was good. Then as I put the pickguard back on, it started buzzing, and I haven't been able to work out why other than it being some sort of grounding issue. So I threw it aside (gently) and decided I'd had enough. Tomorrow I'll have another go at the wiring. It looks like a bit of a clusterfuck at the moment with the finish and the gimped pickguard, but before it started buzzing, it sounded quite good.

Update: I put the strings back on, plugged it in and no buzzing. WHY?! It sounds pretty good. The new pickup is a bit much by itself, basically making it into a fart machine but combined with either of the other pickups, it sounds really good. The last thing left to do is to screw down the pickup cover, but I don't have the right screws at the moment.

It just keeps on giving

Did a few activities and things in Saints Row 2 and managed to complete a perfect base jump, allowing my character to survive any fall. This can be very funny if you lead a team of homies to the top of a building, and jump off. Their loyalty will make them follow your example. Also bought a long macintosh which allows you to flash people, which is really funny. The best part is doing it in your territory so if someone gets offended and attacks you, they are instantly beaten to a pulp by your fellow gang members.

I was driving along and saw this billboard, unexpectedly showing my character as the new owner of the Leather and Lace store. I've since found more showing adverts for the other stores I've bought.


This happened when I was trying out the falling thing. My character got stuck arse first in the ground, but the game seemed to think he was falling; it played the whooshing wind sound, and the character's voice screaming. He stayed in that position for about thirty seconds, until the game finally realised something was wrong and respawned him. It was very funny. To be fair though, I've not seen many glitches like this. A lot of the reports of major glitches and crashes in both games seem to be blamed on the older 360s which can't stream the data off the drive fast enough. I installed it on the hard drive anyway, so maybe that helps.

Also watched the end of the fourth series of Doctor Who. Not quite sure if the series as a whole grabbed me quite as much as the previous ones, but the final three episodes were madness, a complete clusterfuck of insanity.