Bank holiday

It's been a fairly dull bank holiday, the main events being a visit to various Denbigh pubs on Friday evening to celebrate Andy's release from voluntary college work exile and a car boot on Sunday. The pubs were quiet, which was nice, and the car boot was the usual shedloads of tat, only more of it due to the bank holiday.

Haven't done much else, watched a few DVDs. Started the 2nd series of Torchwood which someone has lent me and once again discovered that Cardiff seems to be populated by promiscuous bisexuals and aliens. Fun fun.

Feeling really unmotivated at the moment, I can't get myself to do anything at all. Not sure why but it's pissing me off.

Blades

Work has been busy busy busy. Today was my Unix day. The morning was spent examining the possibility of hooking up an old tape libary to the server to use on the test sytem, but it proved not to work. The afternoon was spent putting a loaned JS21 Power6 blade and suitable management module into a spare Bladecenter (just like the one above) and see if it would work. It did, but the blade had been configured in a different Bladecenter with internal disks and kept hanging trying to see devices that weren't there. Still, it was a start. It was interesting as I've never had much to do with the blade servers before as normally they are populated with normal Intel machines. They are incredibly loud things, due to the vast amounts of airflow needed to keep 14 servers packed into a relatively tiny space running at a tolerable temperature.

The evening was spent round at Rob and Em's before going to badminton. It was OK but that ghastly woman was there again making things miserable again. It's just no fun to play with her at all, whether you're on her side or not.

Feh

Friday: Saw Star Trek in the evening, woohoo! Actually really quite impressed. It had a few things that weren't quite right (the Kelvin had a single warp nacelle!) but the whole thing really worked. The guy who played Spock did an awesome job and everyone else was pretty good. The only one who irked me was the guy playing Chekov as his accent was really far too exaggerated.

The weekend was spent feeling crappy with an agonising throat, so I didn't do much. I did however discover the joys of DS homebrew with the assistance of the apparently very naughty R4 card. The best thing is a clone of Lemmings, which is absolutely brilliant. I've always said Lemmings would be awesome on the DS, and I was right.

Today was payday, unfortunately my expenses form from London went missing, so I didn't get any of it. After a number of calls to Payroll, I think I should have the money by Thursday, so that's OK. I did however book the flights for a trip to Berlin in July to see my brother. My cousin is coming with me, which will be good as she's never been. So that's something to look forward to.

Minton of the bad

Work was meh, enlivened only by the visiting of a new office, which is part of a new development. It's actually really nice and has cool windows that take the entire wall and have a nice view over the town.

After that it was off to Rob and Em's for food and badminton. She Who Irks Me was there but I'm used to her ways now. There was one hilarious moment where I cocked up a serve and I heard her do a big fake laugh and then when I turned around and she was rolling her eyes in despair. Not sure why as she wasn't playing well after a few weeks away on holiday.

Fun.

Seeing Star Trek tomorrow evening, can't wait!

Fun week

It's been a busy week so far with work so not much in the evenings. Took the dog for a walk which was good and showed that I need to get back into the routine of doing so after the various weeks of travelling and things.

Went round to see the near completed house that I helped shift the timber for a while back. It's really nice. One thing I didn't realise is that the frame is visible in the walls which is really cool.

I put the fretless neck back on the Fart Machine which I thought went OK until I realised there was a gap between the neck and body and the neck keeps shifting in the pocket slightly. I suppose I'll have to take it off again and have another look. With the big humbucker on by itself, it sounds really quite double bass like which is interesting.

The car has a couple of issues which need to be dealt with. The handbrake has basically stopped working, one of the rear brake disks is looking interesting and the manifold gasket is ticking again. Oh well.

Tomorrow is badminton and Friday is Star Trek, good stuff.

Frustrating dream

I just had a weird dream where I was a train driver on the London Underground. There was a day where I was driving the train happily enough, but then the next day I was trying to get to work to drive the train but couldn't get there because things were either getting in my way or I kept getting distracted. It was really frustrating as I kept looking at my watch and seeing the time tick past and getting really worried.

Weird.

Glasgow and uber geekery

So it was up to Glasgow last weekend. The drive up was pretty much clear traffic all the way and we had no problems finding where we were meant to be going. Rob drove until about half way and then I took over. We did get slightly lost in Glasgow after I accelerated past a junction a little too enthusiastically and we had to take the scenic route over the river. After that we took a nice tour around Buchanan Street and the surrounding area before heading back to the hotel for a nap and to get changed.

The bash was pretty good, almost everyone doing the whole 30's themed thing. There was live music including a woman singing and playing a ukulele while being backed by a double bass, and the band that Laura's new husband plays in, which was pretty cool. It was interesting to see all the people there and there was quite a mix.

The next day was spent hanging out with Ed, Kat and Will at Loch Lomond. There is a touristy place there with shops and things, and we took a cruise out onto the loch which was interesting, although cold, and then went around the new acquarium. That was good but the cost was pretty high and we saw a lot of people going in and then leaving when they saw the price of admission. The evening was spent having a rather nice Indian meal and then finding an interesting underground bar where Rob endeared himself to the owner and got us all a free round of schnapps. Win.

After all this the drive back was reasonably OK. It wasn't quite as clear as the drive up but there were only a couple of minor delays on the M6 and the M56. We had the Hitch-hikers's Guide to the Galaxy playing all the way there and back and the 12th episode ended just as we were approaching Rhuallt Hill, so that worked out pretty well.

The week has been very busy and tiring in work, so I've not really done much in the evenings. Yesterday evening and today have been spent in an orgy of geekness. First I played around with the old Freescape games (Driller, Total Eclipse, Castle Master). I first played these on an Amstrad CPC where the frame rate is less than 1 per second. This really got on my nerves for a while so I got hold of the PC versions. These didn't run under XP but did run under Dosbox, and are much more playable. I also got the 3D Construction Kit. Again I had this on the Amstrad and it kept me occupied, creating all sorts of interesting worlds.

Today was spent with Rob and Em, and Jane and Wes who were visiting. We went to see the Wolverine movie, which was OK, and then pizza and desert in Pizza Hut. The pizza was OK but they cocked up the order so we got a free large one, so can't complain. After that it was back to Rob's for a game fest.

After I came home, I embarked upon a quest to update the BIOS of a Dell Mini 9. If it was running XP this is dead easy, if it's running Ubuntu, not so much. There were various ways of making a pendrive bootable and using the DOS update utility, but they were all too crappy and annoying so I tried to find an alternate solution. Eventually I found an ancient 300mb laptop hard drive that had a copy of Windows 95 installed on it. This was hooked up to a USB to IDE adapter, which allowed the update to be copied to it. The Mini 9 was then able to boot to a DOS prompt from the old disk and then run the update. Quite a palaver but worth doing as it fixes a lot of quirks with the original BIOS version.

I'm 31 tomorrow. 30 is an age I can cope with...31 I'm not sure about...

Argh, hotels

Just spent a week in London another course at IBM, this time it was 'Korn and Bash Shell Programming'. It was a pretty decent course and I stayed in the same place as last time, the Comfort Inn in Kings Cross. It's fairly similar to the Travelodge but has two important advantages - it's not on a main road, and it doesn't have any Underground lines going under it.

Off to Glasgow tomorrow for a wedding bash, should be good but I'm a bit anxious about the drive.