Violence and lust

Yesterday went to my Dad's to see him and had Christmas lunch with him and Jean. It was really nice, and good to finally have a Christmas lunch at last. Also finally picked up a tripod for the D50 which came in useful as Will and I went out taking photographs in the afternoon. We went to the beach and took a few shots of a curious robotic lighthouse keeper, before trying to do some steel wool shots. Sadly while I now have the right wool, the battery had gone flat so it wouldn't light most of the time.

In the evening we played a bit of Fable III on Xbox Live. It seems much like the previous one but with quite a few changes and an interesting plot. Not sure all the changes are for the better though, as the interaction with people doesn't seem as flexible, and I think the hand-holding thing is a bit stupid. As I did in the last game I've started building up a property empire.

Feeling a bit rough today, like I'm coming down with something.

Went to town first thing today to go to the bank. Shortly after I got home my phone reminded me that I was supposed to go to the gym to sort out the new programmes and things. By that time though I was sat in the armchair playing Resident Evil 5 over Xbox Live with Rob, surrounded by Monster Munch, Mini Rolls and Coke. We played it for a considerable amount of time, and got a few chapters out of the way. Not sure if I'd have enjoyed it much at all by myself, but as a co-op experience, it's pretty good fun, although frustrating in places.

Didn't really do much else today. I finally got a Mini ITX case for the Atom based VMware server, which is great because it takes up much less room, and it was silly to have a tiny motherboard in a full size case. One thing I hadn't considered was the network card that the machine needed as ESXi doesn't support the onboard network card. My solution was to get a flexible PCI extender lead that extends the PCI slot and relocate the network card. It's a bit kludgy but it works. That combined with a nice little 8-port gigabit switch means my desk has far more room on it which is useful.

House in a state, the dog puked on his bed last night and it smells and due to ongoing problems with the water, it can't be washed, and also I'm running out of clothes. The water seems to be a problem with the pipe, which might take some considerable time to resolve. Oh well.

Another lazy day

Another lazy day but I'm on holiday.

Spent much of the day playing on the DS, which I had left in a corner since about April. I had a play on Super Scribblenauts,which is pretty good fun. Then had a go on WarioWare DIY. Pretty much the same as the previous Wario games with the twist that it has a whole load of tools that allow you to make your own minigames. The tools are fairly basic, but you can do quite a lot with them, and other than the limited sound effects, you're pretty much free to make whatever graphics and behaviour you want. Cue loads of rude/violent games. Hah. Good fun though.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHc9Q8G1EyM&

If I used my DS more I'd love to get DSi XL as I'm sure I'd find the bigger screens easier to use but they're still quite pricey. The 3DS is due out in March - definitely reserving judgement on that until I've seen one running in person.

I've been trying to find a particular German film on DVD for ages but had no success. It never occurred to me that I could use my Amazon UK credentials on the German site and just order it directly from there. Tried it today and it worked.

Snow now basically gone but the water still didn't pump up today, although it did push some ice through the pipe.

If you ever played Animal Crossing, read this:

http://lparchive.org/Animal-Crossing/Update%201/

A good day

There was a bit of a thaw today so I was able to go out and get some shopping and get the car up the track. It was still a little bad at the bottom but did eventually get up. The water didn't pump up though, annoyingly. I really need a shower.

Something really unexpected this morning. My HTC Magic told me there was a system update, which actually turned out to be Android 2.2.1. When I got the phone it had Android 1.6 on it, and when I looked into it, the general consensus was that it would never be updated to anything higher. But kudos to Vodafone for finally getting it sorted. A lot of people said that the Magic wouldn't run 2.2 very well because it has a relatively slow processor and a low amount of RAM. But it seems fine to me once it had sorted itself out after the first boot. There's quite a lot of stuff updated, but the main thing that is noticable is a new and very swish Gallery app, and the fact that it now supports multi-touch. It's pretty much made it feel like a new phone.

This evening it was Caroline's 40th birthday bash, which was fancy dress and you had to be something that started with C A or Z. I did have a look around the house but couldn't find anything to go as, so I just went in a festive red top. It was a great evening, lots of good food and gossip and so-on. Perhaps the most worrying was Rob P and Rob T swapping clothes and appearance, which was really uncanny in Rob P's case.

Weird

Just had a dream about discovering a railway from Ruthin to somewhere and then getting it restored and then someone driving one of those little shunting steam engines with a Porsche 911 body on the track. How strange.

Fun fun

So Christmas was a bit of a bust really, due to the weather barely any presents had arrived in time, and we didn't have any special food. Spent the day doing sod all really, although I did have a clearout and a bonfire, which was fun.

Today pretty much the same. Didn't feel like going out anywhere, so spazzed out. Had a look at some of the trailers for Portal 2, which looks like it should be pretty good. The teaser trailer surprised me with the idea of it, but it looks like it'll be a lot of fun. Can't wait for it to be released, but that's April now.

Caroline's birthday party coming up, supposed to dress up as something starting with c, a or z. No idea what though. Will have to have a think tomorrow.

Singular Notable Ovular Whales

Sunny today, no real melting though. Went to town this morning to post an Ebay sale and pick up some bits and pieces. Roads are a bit better but things like car parks were a nightmare. Also shop floors all covered in water and shit. I thought it would be busier than it was though, which was a bit of a relief.

Not really done much else today. Tried to start the bike up and it ran briefly but then stopped and the battery was too flat to get it going again. I'm sure it'll get going with a bump start when the weather is better. Took the dog out for a play in the snow which was fun.

Finally got the latest Iron Maiden album as it was just £3 on Amazon.

Looking forward to going to Andy and Maz's tonight, should be fun.

Stupid Necrophiliac Orwellian Wenches

More snow overnight although it didn't freeze. The roads were bloody awful though. When going to work I found myself going downhill through 8" snow that hadn't been touched. Fortunately, the Focus coped pretty well, and I made it to work fine. Not everyone did but it was another fairly productive day and I was able to have a shower, which was great.

Just finished reading Selling Hitler by Robert Harris, about the Hitler diaries. What an utterly crazy story, so many flukes and errors. It's the first time I'd actually really read about them, previously it was only when they were mentioned in Adrian Mole's diary where of course he passionately believes they are real and then loses a bet to Pandora over it.

Watched Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the latest Kevin Smith film I've got. It's a great film if you've seen and like his other stuff. The ending always gets me with all the old characters coming back, and the last shot of Kevin Smith and Jason Miewes is great when they're pretty much just being themselves, and Smith is gobsmacked about it all.

Other than that just played around the basses for bit and fooled around on the C810 writing some stuff.

The Clansman by Iron Maiden is one of the few good songs from the Blaze Bayley era, and it sounds much better when Bruce Dickinson sings it.

Flimbles

Still snow. More came today. Track and water unchanged. Fairly productive day in work.

Fairly pointless evening, finished rebuilding the C810 and got it back to the state it was in before the last drive failed. Also put Artic Silver 5 on the heatsink, dropping the CPU temperature by over 20 degrees. The heatsink isn't big but has two fans, which reach over 11,000rpm when forced to run at full speed, which is bonkers compared to the most which seem to run at about 4-5000rpm maximum.

Might seem weird to put all this effort into an 8 year old laptop but like I've said before, it has a fantastic keyboard. I discovered that while it has the same mechanism as most laptop keyboards, the actual scissor bits under each key are substantial metal rather than plastic, which is presumably why the keys have such a great feel. It feels fairly similar to the Alphasmart keyboards, and even beats the old IBM Thinkpads for feel in my opinion.

This is worth watching just for the surreal sight of a full-size train going down the middle of a street: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-E67fiYLXQ&feature=related

Desperate for a shower, going to take towel and shampoo into work tomorrow so I can take one there. Also had pizza for supper three days in a row, getting slightly tired of it now.

On a Kevin Smith marathon although my copy of Clerks wouldn't play, seemed to have been one of those cases where the DVD had deteriorated. Watching Dogma at the moment after finishing Chasing Amy.

Rargh

Still snow. No water. Work was OK, except for discovering there'd been office moves in one of my sites that nobody had bothered telling me about so people are without phones and expect me to drop everything to sort it out. Never mind that this is my last week before holidays and I had tried to plan it out properly. Nearly had a rage moment but didn't feel up to it.

Fairly average day at work. Got some more steel wool but this stuff isn't as good, doesn't burn as well. Did get some OK shots though, but nothing spectacular.

Rebuilding the C810 with another hard drive, but sometimes I get the feeling a machine is fighting. It kept doing strange things like fail to format the drive during the setup process, or failing to detect any drives at all. After pulling the damn thing completely to bits I took out the optical drive and replaced that with a generic spare, and it was fine ever since.

Still snow

Snow not melted at all today. Still no water.

Didn't really do very much today. Played with the dog outdoors and did some reading on the Internet and some writing.

Dug out an ancient Dell Latitude C810. It's a hefty beast from around 2002 with an 866mhz PIII and 512mb RAM. Not the most poweful machine, but it has a lovely 1400x1050 screen and the best keyboard I have ever used on a laptop. I installed XP on it and set it up as a writing machine with a program called Q10. All was well and I used it for a few hours and then it started to BSOD. Cause uncertain, either the original 10gb hard drive is failing (most likely) or it could be a memory or motherboard issue. Currently running Memtest86+ to rule out the RAM or board. Not really an issue if it's those as I have a spares machine. If it turns out the hard drive I've got plenty of spares that can go in it but a pain. Might be an idea to strip out the heatsink too and regunk it as it seems to be running a little hot.

Back to work if I can get the car moving tomorrow. Bleh.

This site is somehow even more of a time-sink than Youtube:

http://www.tvtropes.org

Thwarted by snow

Not a bad week on the whole. Work wasn't too bad. Thursday wasn't all great as Em's car was bumped while it was parked, so we had to take the car to the bodyshop and then I ran her home. Then we didn't go to badminton, instead having a Chinese.

It snowed on Friday, and so back the normal situation of not being able to get up to the house. It hasn't frozen hard yet, but the water isn't coming up. The worst thing bout the snow was that I couldn't go to the work Christmas party on Friday night.

Due to the snow I've basically stayed in today and watched a couple of DVDs. Also tried out a light painting technique I discovered on Flickr. Put the camera on a looong exposure, run a 9v battery over some steel wool and whirl it around so it burns and throws sparks everywhere. Looks great although it's a little scary.

Beep...click.......click...shit!

Yesterday Will wanted to go out and take photographs so we headed up to the Brenig in the afternoon and spent some time taking pictures. It was pretty nice up there and the lake was almost completely smooth so we got some good shots. Had a few issues where the wrong camera got triggered by the wrong remote as it's the same on both. When it got dark though, it got cold very quickly and when we went to get our cases and things where we'd left them, they already had a thick layer of frost. I got some nice pictures and because I was able to borrow a tripod off Will, was able to use the bracketing thing to make some HDRs, which came out quite nicely. I need to get a registered copy of Photomatix though.

Not much else to report. Work today was OK. Picked up Forza Motorsport 3 for the 360 as I quite enjoyed the original one on the old Xbox. It's fairly fun, my main chariot at the moment in it is a bright orange Citroen C4 with a stupidly powerful engine and green mismatched wheels, 20" on the front and 15" on the back, for no real reason except it looks silly and makes the handling more fun.

Long time no update

Hmm, not sure why I didn't update. Last week was better as the track remained clear enough for me to get the car up. Work was OK, a few things going on but nothing as drastic as last week. Also as everyone is hotdesking we've had to standardise on new laptops so I got mine built this week. Nice as my old one had a duff battery which was a real pain. On thesse new machines, we're using Windows 7 as XP isn't going to be an option for much longer. I stuck with the default 32-bit install which was a good idea as a couple of other guys tried the 64-bit version and ran into trouble getting some of the normal corporate stuff to work. Weird as I've used the 64-bit version at home on a few machines with no problems at all.

Thursday night was a casino night with Rob and Caroline and Rob and Em and a few others. It was a pretty good evening although I hadn't made quite the effort that everyone else had, just going in my work clothes. It was fun though. That night there was also an epic thaw so the track and everything was totally clear.

I took the bike out today for a spin as it hadn't moved in over a month, but it started fine (with the usual choke faffing) and went really well. It felt really strange at first and I kept trying to go for another gear above 5th. Also went out to Rhyl and got the headlight bulbs for the Focus. Got some nice ultra white ones which are better. They've redone the Comet store there and it's loads better now so I had a look. I once again looked at an iPad and once again found myself admiring how slick it feels and how it has by far the best implementation of Google Maps, but again trying to work out what it's actually for. Oh well.

Not done much else today, watched Shaun of the Dead because it's always a laugh, and played through Portal on the 360. I can't describe how much I love that game. It's fairly short, but it's just so well made, and GlaDOS is fucking brilliant, especially her more deranged ramblings at the end. I can't wait for Portal 2, due in April.

Sorting out my finances is going fairly OK but is also causing some annoyance. Can't wait for it to be done but that's a few months off yet.

A guy in work told me that I'd put on weight, which is worrying as he's a fairly sizable chap himself. I know I have though.

Bleh week

It wasn't a particularly good week. It snowed most nights and it was bloody cold meaning I wasn't able to get the car up the track until yesterday. The water froze up and I had to keep carrying supplies up the track again, but hey. Live in a place like this and you have to put up with this sort of thing. We did get a tank of water pumped up so was able to shower, which was a relief.

Work was pretty shit too, politics flying about everywhere causing tension. I spend Wednesday in a rage like I have never experienced in work yet.

Last night was good fun, went to Rob and Em's as they hadn't been able to make it up down to Kent for the weekend sadly due to the weather. We tried to make it up with DVDs and a takeaway which was pretty decent. By the end of the evening though it had got really cold again, and the roads were absolutely lethal all the way home.

Rob and I were talking about N64s recently and I thought it would be nice to have a play on my old one, but then realised it would mean digging out the machine, the power supply, controllers, etc. So I looked into emulators and found the best one was apparently Project64. It works really well. You can hook up an Xbox 360 controller and remap the buttons, and it displays the graphics in a higher resolution, so the games look pretty good.

Today took my Mum out to go shopping. Perhaps unwisely we took her car out. The bottom corner of the track is still covered in snow and while my car was able to get past it with a bit of speed, her car failed dismally until we got some grit down. Might be the tyres that mine has on it.

The dog has a broken dew claw which is taking a while to come off and is causing him a bit of pain as he keeps catching it on things.

Brrrrrrr

The roads are largely OK at the moment so getting to work was fine. Not too bad a day but had a frustrating moment where an issue affecting several of my users was revealed to be something that I had been assured repeatedly could not be the cause.

Went to Andy and Maz's after work and doing some shopping. They reckoned that if I ate fish prepared by Maz, I would like it. They were correct. I was pleasantly surprised by it, and it was really good. I had to scoff and scarper though as I had stuff that Mum needed at home. The track was considerably frozen when I got home though so I didn't get all the way up although if I'd made it 10 more feet I'd have got to the top. I've got my work laptop with me now, and a remote access token, guaranteeing it will not snow tonight so I won't have to work from home tomorrow.

Need a shower. If I can get to the office tomorrow I'm going to take a towel and stuff, so I can have a shower there.

Leslie Nielson has died of pneumonia. Surely you can't be serious.

Warning: Stomach capacity exceeded

Yesterday was a fairly quiet day, and the sun shone for a bit and melted the snow a little bit. I went into town and did some shopping and was able to get the car back up when I came home.

In the evening it was Andy and Maz's engagement party which was great. We met up at theirs first for a couple of drinks and a chat and then headed up to the top of town to the Guildhall Tavern. The food was really very good, and the portions were enormous. This wasn't necessarily a good thing - my starter was a good portion of linguini which was easily enough to be a main course, and then the main course (risotto) was even larger. I'd also ordered a portion of onion rings which were similarly gargantuan, and then after all that there was a sizable chunk of chocolate brownie and ice cream. Really good though, and it was a great evening overall. Got home at about midnight and it was hideously cold.

Been lazy today, didn't get out of bed until midday and then had a giant bowl of Coco Pops. It's sunny but very cold outside. Not in the mood to do much except watch old Top Gear on Youtube and possibly do some more of Half-Life 2 later on.

Let it snow?

Well, it was snowing like a bastard when I left for work and the roads were pretty poor. Once again though, the Focus pleasantly surprised me at how well it copes in the snow. I got to work, not many people were in and there was some confusion over what was going on. After an hour or so, I decided to head home. As expected I didn't get all the way home but the trip was fairly uneventful except for a stuck BT van in the village, which was soon shifted with a load of salt. Fairly similar stories all round I heard, so it was definitely one of those days. Bah. At least the dog likes the snow, he loves to play in it.

It snowed off and on for the rest of the day so I stayed in the warm house, not doing much. Rob got home in the afternoon and we had a bash on Saints Row 2 as it was the only multiplayer game we had in common, oddly. It was good fun, although a couple of times it booted Rob out, and once my 360 froze completely. After Rob had to go, I spent a bit more time heading around the city, and quite by chance found the last CD that I'd been missing. I thought I'd hit a bug where you pick up a CD in the middle of an activity and it doesn't count, but happily there was one sat blatantly in the middle of a park next to one of the cribs that I hadn't seen. The quick play just reaffirmed my opinion that SR2 shits all over GTA IV and it's derivatives, because it is just more fun.

Hope the snow doesn't stay around for long.

Bluuuuurrrrgh

A somewhat difficult day back in work today. First had a very busy helpdesk session this morning and then my own jobs and helpdesk calls had rocketed up in the time I was off. On top of that I was just feeling really rough, worse than I had the previous few days. But it was still a fairly productive day.

Didn't do much this evening really, just listened to music mainly and relaxed. Feel better now, hopefully back to normal in the next couple of days.

Berlin is now on Street View, which is nice. Spent some of my lunch break having a look at some of my favourite places there.

It's cold. They say there might be snow. Oh I hope not.

Was mocked much today for the incident with the car, annoying.

Fun day

Felt quite rough this morning so curled up on the sofa with the dog and read some more of Harry Potter 5 in a kind of doze.

Rob and Em came up at lunchtime bringing bread, cheese, pate and soup, which was good and then we went for a walk with the dog, which was great.

After that I settled down and started a new game of Half-Life 2, which I shamefully never got very far in when I first tried to play it a while back. Got quite far in and it's pretty good so far. I did try the demo on my games laptop (Acer 5535) but while it did run OK, I didn't see the point in buying it when I already have the Orange Box on the Xbox 360. I guess the controls on the PC are better but to be honest I'm so used to playing FPS games on the 360 it doesn't matter too much.

Had a catastrophe with the Ferrari laptop - it fell down behind the bookcase it was on, which meant the lovely red lid is scratched to fuck. No actual damage but it definitely looks cosmetically challenged. Oh well, it still works fine, so it doesn't really matter.

Taking things apart

Yesterday was a silly day. First I had to go to Ruthin for an eye test. I've got an updated prescription but also a referral to the hospital to have a more indepth test of my eye dominance issue and a possible cataract forming in my right eye.

On the way home had to reverse for someone on a country lane, but when I braked, there was mud on the road and the car slewed into the hedge. Unfortunately there was a fairly substantial tree hidden in it, and it buckled the tailgate in enough to smash the window. I got home and phoned the scrappy in Llandudno and they had one in. Then in the evening took my Mum to a writing event in Hawarden.

Woke up this morning feeling quite rough, not quite a cold but something similar. Typically this would happen when I've got a couple of days off work.

Today went and picked up the tailgate. It's from an S-reg Focus and is the light shade of blue rather than the dark blue mine is but not fussed. My Dad and I got it on OK, but some of the interior trim had to be taken out to get the electrics hooked up, and it was such a pain getting it back. The tailgate opens and closes but isn't lined up quite right and there's a bit of a gap at one side. We tried several time to line it up properly but with no success, might see if I can get some advice from a friendly bodyshop as there's probably some art to it.

Got home and decided to try the lefty neck on the doubleneck. Much to my astonishment it fitted absolutely perfectly without any problems at all. It needs some new strings on that neck as they were cut for the righty neck, and the nut still needs to be replaced, but so far it looks good. It's rather frustrating actually as it showed that if I'd got a lefty neck before the bodies were joined, the necks could have been at least three inches closer together, making the body smaller overall. As it's already painted it's not really possible to chop it about again. The headstocks aren't identical, but it looks loads better than it did with the old neck on it. I've ordered a suitable nut and will put some new strings on it and then set it up, but so far the lefty neck feels quite good. I listed the left handed body on Ebay and it went for£46, so the lefty neck will have cost me about £34 or so, which is pretty good really.

I know I'm not feeling 100% because when I was driving home, I had a tremendous urge to pick up a couple of Pot Noodles, curry flavour.

New horrible way to wake up

Previous winner: A 5-stone greyhound leaps onto the bed, his paws aimed firmly at your bollocks.

Current winner: Having a nosebleeed in your sleep and waking up coughing and spluttering and hawking up a huge blood clot.

Argh

Today was meh, spent quite some time sorting out a ludicrouus amount of CDs that had accumulated in the Ruthin office. Mostly it was Microsoft Volume Licensing CDs, which they used to send out on a regular basis with copies of basically everything the company made, so there was a hell of a lot of them, and then there were even more of random software and crap. They all went into a box to go and be shredded.

While waiting for things to copy and stuff this evening, found a random CD-R and shoved it into the Xbox to see what it was. It was an old compilation I had made about 10 years ago that had various things on it, but it had a Limp Bizkit track on it which reminded me that for a short period I was obsessed with the Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water album, and also the Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park. I seem to remember I lost my taste for the CDs and trashed them. but thanks to the miracle of YouTube I was able to have a listen to them again. Really didn't like the Linkin Park one, but thought the Limp Bizkit one was OK. I still Fred Durst is a total cunt though and his stupid whiney voice is so annoying.

Not much else going on. The lefty bass has been separated from its neck and put on Ebay, with one bid alread and loads of watchers, and the Alphasmart Neo that got no bids at all with a £45 starting bid is now up to £50 with 5 bids from a £40 start.. I really don't understand Ebay sometimes.

Trying to clone my music playing Dell Latitude D400 onto a new 160gb drive to replace the shit and noisy 40gb drive in it, but it's proving hard to do as the first program I tried was a piece of crap. I used the machine as a regular laptop up until about a year ago and now it seems so sluggish. It was another frankenstein from a couple of dead D400s, and it's always been reliable. If it didn't have a soldered CPU I might look into a faster one for it but that would involve a motherboard swap.

Virtualisation is the best thing ever, it makes it so easy to play with operating systems and software without having to have loads of machines., and is good for trying out software that might be unsuitable to be installed on a main machine. Performance on the Acer 7741g is really good, nearly as fast as running natively. Ubuntu 10.10 in particular is very good on it.

Somehow left one of the car windows open last night so it got rather damp inside. Seems to have dried out OK. The driver's side window is still playing up and the door card is broken again. That door needs some serious attention now, but I just can't summon up the energy to pull it to bits again. Got a long weekend coming up though as my Mum is on a course so I might have a look then. I think the door needs rewiring but not sure what's involved in doing that.

The second program I used to clone the D400 has worked, hurrah. Its a much faster drive and seems to have helped speed it up.

But it's backwards...

It was a good weekend, the rugby on Saturday was good fun, as always. The Wales match was frustrating as it could have been so close. As per usual, snack overload, followed by really tasty lamb burgers and Maz's epic home made cheesecake. It's that good, that as Andy said, any other cheesecake is a slight disappointment.

Yesterday was spent in a bit of a fugue state not doing much. I did however pick up Iron Man 2 on DVD and watched that, which was good fun. I really like the Iron Man movies. Also watched a couple of other movies, Cloverfield and Swordfish, which is pants but in a nice to have on in the background kind of way.

Today was a good day in work, got quite a few jobs and things out of the way, and one job which I hadn't been looking forward to turned out to be nice and simple after all, which was great.

In a peculiar move, I bought a left handed Squier Precision Bass. The reason is that they are fairly uncommon, this one was cheap, and I've always thought the double neck would be better with a left handed neck on the bottom. The idea is to keep the neck and sell the rest of it on Ebay. It's a Korean made model and is a peculiar cream colour. Unusually it has flatwound strings and actually sounds fairly decent except I can't play left handed.. The other option is that I could put the neck from my Jazz on there and put the lefty neck on the Jazz instead. Either way the neck will need to be modified to accept strings the other way up but that just involves a new nut for a couple of quid.

Feel fat now, had chips for supper as is traditional after my Mum has an eye appointment. Didn't sleep too well last night, so don't really feel up to doing much this evening.

The XT now has 3gb RAM in it, seems to have helped performance a bit. The main bottleneck now is the 1.8" PATA hard drive, best thing would be an SSD but they are rare and not too cheap either.

Great clouds of steam

Took the bike out for a spin in the sunshine. Slight problem in that the track has become quite waterlogged. Going up the middle is a bad idea because it's a bog and the bike has no traction and will quickly embed itself in a pit if pushed. Going up the ruts works but means the engine gets splashed considerably with water, and so you end up traveling up in a huge cloud of steam, quite funny really.

How the hell have I missed Zero Punctuation video game reviews for so long? They are ace, and I particularly enjoyed the Saints Row 2 one.

Flam

End of a somewhat turbulent week in work, but it was fairly productive. Certain things going on though that are really pissing me off. Found what I thought was a suitable machine to build my second test TSM server but it really didn't want to cooperate so gave up on it for now. SCSI controllers can b really bloody irritating sometimes.

Feeling very tired tonight for some reason. Looking forward to tomorrow, rugby, etc at Andy's in the afternoon. Not sure about the morning, might take the bike out if the weather is reasonable as it has been a little while since I last did.

The Neo didn't sell, despite 8 people watching it, much to my surprise. Not too critical though. Going to relist it with a slightly lower start price.

Not much else going on. Finished the Alien films. Still making my way through Harry Potter 5 which is the most difficult book I think. Read some articles about the latest film, which seems to have divided critics. I've only really seen the first two films but while I've heard the later ones are better I just don't feel like making the effort to watch them.

The XT is still running OK. The battery lasts well on it. It doesn't appear to have had much use, looks pretty much new. The only real bottleneck is the slow 1.8" PATA hard drive, but it's not too bad. I've stuck a 2gb SD card in the slot and set Windows 7 to use it for ReadyBoost, which is something I haven't tried before.

Cat poo FTW

A fairly decent day in work, did quite a bit with Unix and also with the AS/400s. It's quite scary, huge boxes which take up loads of space in the server room have been replaced by blades server which take up a fraction of the space but are much more powerful. The AS/400 is weird though, nothing like a 'normal' computer.

This evening headed out to Rob and Em's for food and badminton. We got Chinese for two reasons, one to celebrate the offer on their house, and also to celebrate the Woman of Hate not being at badminton. It was a good session too, had some amusing if not skilful games.

Windy this evening, on the way home had to avoid plenty of bits of trees that had come down. Hate it when it's like this.

Bleh

Feel better this evening now after settling down and having something to eat.

Experimented with Windows 7 multitouch courtesy of a cheap Dell Latitude XT off Ebay (bought using proceeds from Ebay sales) and it's quite interesting. Not as smooth as an iPad but quite usable. The XT came out in 2008 and was very expensive, but is probably one of the fastest depreciating computers made. Mine is 18 months old and I paid probably 10% of the original sale price and it still has 18 months warranty left. It has a dual-mode N-trig touch screen which responds to both finger touch and the included stylus. It's not perfect, definitely a little quirky, but works surprisingly well. Also, unlike most modern touchscreens, it has a matt finish. It's actually quite nice how the touch screen can be used while it's in the laptop configuration too, just for quickly scrolling or selecting something.

Strange to think that the machines I now use all the time, including the XT, are all running a 64-bit operating system with gigs of RAM and multiple core processors. This level of computing power seems unreal, but at the same time, you'd expect such power to give incredible performance, but because software is bulkier, it doesn't seem that way. Back in the days of the Pentium II, I remember reading about a guy who ran Windows 3.11 and Office 6 when Windows 98 and Office 97 were current, because it was so much faster. Oh well.

Urgh

If there's any more proof that I needed that Coke is evil, here it is. Woke up, had left over Chow Mein for breakfast (I know) and headed to work feeling quite happy and normal. Round about 10:30 thought I'd treat myself to a bottle of Coke. Vending machine broken so I went to the shop next door and got two bottles of Cherry Coke. Helpdesk was busy and as I dealt with calls I kept swigging them. By lunchtime I felt a headache coming on and generally crappy and that pretty much defined the rest of the day. So there we go, Coke is shite and I hate it utterly.

Still got a headache, going to curl up in bed with paracetomol and try to relax.

Rob and Em have offer on their house, fantastic news.

Long, long day

A fairly good day in work today, got quite a lot done and a colleague and I spent an interesting hour or so finding out why a laptop hadn't joined the domain properly. We did it remotely using tools within Windows, with no outside evidence to the user except the laptop would reboot every now and again. Fortunately she was doing other stuff.

I have a bad habit of reading books and then just leaving them in a pile by my bed until the pile becomes too unstable. Right now the pile consists of the following from the bottom up:

Burning Chrome by William Gibson
The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
Spook Country by William Gibson
The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Ringworld by Larry Niven
The Homward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones
Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years by Sue Townsend
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling
Runner's World Complete Guide to Running (heh, whatever)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling

Also in the To Read pile are The Algebraist by Ian M Banks and The Junior Officer's Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey.

Just finished Aliens on DVD too, been quite a while since I watched it. Started Alien3 but got a bit bored and it's always annoying to start it when they kill off everyone but Ripley.

Bloody cold tonight, it's even been suggested that there might be snow on the hills. Bah. The fact it's winter and cold and dark now is one reason why I'm reluctant to try running at the moment, and the other is I don't have any good trainers. Oh well. My brother suggested signing up for the Berlin half-marathon in March but no way. Not yet.

Listed the Alphasmart Neo on Ebay as while it's great, I find the Palm based Dana nicer to use as it has a bigger screen and a similar but nicer keyboard. I've stripped out the rechargable battery pack from the Neo for the Dana though as that will be useful.

Really tired now, didn't sleep very well last night and have been awake since about 2 this morning. Went into work very early too just for something to do and left quite late due to the demented way that our installation of Visual Studio Pro 2005 works, so it's been a long day. Think I'm going to curl up in bed early with a book and relax now.

Faecal Spray for Massive Damage

Today was really good. Nice quiet morning and then off to D&D at Rob and Em's with Steve and Kara over Skype. We had a really good time playing it, although more room for Rob to do his DM thing would have been handy due to his large amount of paperwork. It was good though, we did loads of stuff even though sometimes we broke into a chant of 'The DM is a wanker'. The plot is progressing nicely and my flatulent wizard is still good fun. I've started writing his backstory too.

We played for some time, and it's always surprising how the time flies when playing. Once we had reached a natural stopping point, we bade farewell to Steve and Kara and settled down to watch Ice Age with pizza.

Back to work tomorrow, boo.

Rugby times are here again

So today was spent at Rob and Em's for the first rugby games of the month. First Wales vs Australia which wasn't particulalry inspiring. Then It was Ireland vs South Africa which was so interesting we all got on the Internet and started looking at bad tattoos, which actually turned out to be quite disturbing. Can't imagine why some people would do some of them to themselves as they are truly awful. Somehow we started quoting Anchorman to each other so after the rugby finished, we put it on. One of those movies which even when you've seen it a few times, is still entertaining, and it's so quotable. As always we went mad with food, Rob made delicious chilli and nachos and we had a whole load of snacks.

Not much else going on. Experimented with a tyre writing pen that lets you highlight the writing on tyres. The pen I had was really crappy so I only did one wheel but it looked quite cool but I don't think it dried properly before I had to move the car so some of it came off. I don't know why but tyres with white writing on make me happy. Probably because when I had my original Series III Land Rover, I wanted a set of BF Goodrich All-Terrain tyres for it but could never afford them. Also they feature on those big American cars in old films

Financial crackdown was OK until the other day. Bit of an epic fail but I tihnk I'll be OK. The big payment that I needed to make did go out though which is the main thing. Just need to keep it up for another few months. Looked into flights briefly to see Steve and Kara, but they are still about £470 for the route through Philadelphia that seems to work OK. It's been a while since I've/we've seen them though so once I've got my finances sorted out I really should make the effort.

Friday again, at last

It's been a funny old week, glad it's Friday. The plan was to go to the bonfire night in Rhyl but Andy and I have agreed that it wouldn't be much fun with the weather being what it is. It's grotty and rainy tonight and it's rained so much in the last few days the showfield must be a quagmire.

Action packed weekend coming up, rugby and chilli tomorrow, and then D&D on Sunday, should be good.

Apple is discontinuing the Xserve, proving that it is moving solely into the consumer world. Shame really, I have an old G5 Xserve stashed under my desk in work that was redundant and it's a beautifully designed machine and still fast even though it's at least five years old. I wonder how long the Mac has left now.

Plimpy plimps

The week has been unspectacular so far. The only notable things were meeting up with a guy that Amy and I used to work with at Proact for lunch, which was good as we hadn't seen him for a while. He's just been promoted in work, which is great news.

I had a weird dream that Wales went to war with England. I don't know why, but the border was closed and the whole country was set up to go to war. In work we were required to carry out cyber-espionage as well as our normal stuff and the dream ended just as English battleships (with sails) reached the coast of Anglesey. Very odd.

The weather yesterday was horrendous, all windy and horizontal rain, definitely one for staying in the warm.

Gave up on installing Windows NT 3.51 on the old Compaq as the floppy drive went on it and then it had a tantrum. So, not expecting it to work, I installed it on a virtual machine on the 7741g. The setup process was amusingly fast, it was buit for the 486 era and it's running on a 2.1ghz Core i3. It's so weird seeing it looking like Windows 3.1 but with NT features so familiar in modern Windows. Installed the latest service pack and some video drivers so it can display at a decent resolution in Virtualbox.

Cut myself somehow while trying to fix the Compaq floppy and got blood everywhere. Bah.

Fuck me I'm a geek. Also fat as someone said the new Indian in Denbigh did takeaway and I've heard nothing but good things about it so I tried it. It's pretty nice in there, much better than the skanky nightclub it used to be and the food was really good.

Good weekend

The weekend was great. After the radio rally I had lunch with my Dad and then headed home to get ready to head over for Vicky's house for the Mexican food fest. This was great with loads of excellent food and snacks, and loads of banter and hilarity. Highlight of the evening was Andy's announcement that he had proposed to Maz, which is wonderful news.

Sunday was spent having a retro fest with some missions in GTA III using the PS2 and the VGA converter. Did I just say the PS2 was retro? Fuck. Mind you I did buy it in 2002, eight years ago.

In the evening it was off to Ed and Kats for their Halloween get together. It was pretty good and they had really put loads of effort into decorating the house and garden. Also met their new puppy who i the cutest softest dog ever, and he knows it. Also experience Kat's really nice cakes and pumpkin soup.

Day off today, had a bit of a clearout and a bonfire, taken the bike into work to top it up with fuel and then probably the rest of today is going to be generally lazing around and relaxing.

The little Compaq I got from the radio rally is a P133 with 32mb RAM and a 2gb hard drive. I sorted the keyboard issue by reseating the connector which is a bit of a strange arrangment where the connection is made by a ribbon pressing against a series of pins and which are held together by the case. If the screws aren't tightened in the right order, the keyboard doesn't work properly.

Somewhat amazingly drivers are still available for it from the HP website for everything back to Windows 3.1, so I rebuilt it with a fresh install of Windows 95, which was a real retro blast. It might be a good platform to play with Windows NT 3.51 which was back when it still had the 3.1 interface.

Just finished rebuilding the HP 2133 with Ubuntu as it sold on Ebay. It's a tragic machine I think, it's beautifully built, looks great, has a superb screen and keyboard, but is let down by the sluggish VIA processor and chipset HP decided to use. The succeeding 2140 is very similar but has an Atom processor and a much lower resolution screen.

Retro goodness

Well, the radio rally wasn't as good as it has been but there were some interesting things. I picked up two things, an old Compaq Armada laptop for £5, which turned out to be a Pentium with 32mb RAM and 2gb hard drive. Needs a keyboard as half the keys don't work but is otherwise fine.

The other item was a box that converts old video signals into VGA, which is something I thought I could use. Since I put the monitor on the 360 instead of using a TV, I've had no way of using the old PS2 or any other consoles. This box lets the PS2 display through the monitor, and has a bypass so the 360 can display perfectly well too. I've hooked it all up and it works fine although the quality isn't great. But it never was anyway, just been spoilt by the HD signal from the 360. Played a bit of San Andreas which proved it is the pinnacle of GTA, and going back to the original GTA III.

Week of meh

Well, it's not been too bad a week really. Work has been about average.

Badminton yesterday wasn't too bad, although The Hagg was up to her usual tricks. If I serve it too high, she smashes it at my face every time, and her aim is good enough to make it a real issue as the first instinct is to duck. I don't really care, I find it amusing she's so predictable more than anything else. It really pisses Em off though and for once The Hagg realised we weren't happy about it. Her justification was that it was my fault for serving like that. Hah. The numbers meant that we had one game where it was the three of us and someone else, while The Hagg sat out. I didn't do it intentionally but I found myself making it rather obvious how much more enjoyable the game was, and I find it fun to do silly or pointless things as it clearly winds her up such as discussing German or Welsh swearwords between serves, or blatantly insulting her in front of her face in sign language.

Played some retro games this evening. Fiddled about with Sim City 3000 although couldn't get it into it again, and then the original Theme Park. It runs well in DosBox although just a little too fast. Good fun though. Badminton was tempting but I got home and couldn't extricate myself again to get out to it. I feel bad for not going.

Not mentioned it on here but about a month ago I had some chequer tape spare so I put it on the right wing of the Focus for no real reason except I was bored. However, I had a dream last night where I took the tape off again and the car was all rotten underneath, like it had gangrene. It was really disgusting.

Sold my Neo Geo Pocket collection for £41, not too bad. The buyer is in Portugal, having ignored my statement that I'd only post it to the UK. Oh well.

Radio rally tomorrow, should be fun. Then off to Vicky's tomorrow evening for Mexican fest, and then Ed and Kat's on Sunday for Halloween shenanigans. I've taken Monday as flexi now too, hurrah.

Bike on fire

Today was spent doing some of the Diversity Awareness online training course which everyone has to do. It's not the most riveting thing but does have some interesting bits.

Took the bike out for a ride after work to see how it was after the oil change. I don't know if it was psychological on my part but it seemed to go really well. Stopped off in Denbigh briefly to see Andy and Maz who are off to London tomorrow, and then headed back home. By that time it was getting dark and was probably the darkest I've actually ridden the bike in. It was pretty cold as well, definitely need to get some sort of clothing for my legs.

I am a fat slob

Went out this morning and got oil for the bike, but it was a stupid day of unpredictable weather, one minute sunshine, next heavy rain. Gave up on the oil change and slobbed out in front of the third series of Torchwood, which was good. Morrisons was a heaving mass of people so I went to Lidl instead which can be relied upon to be quite empty even at peak times. It's a weird atmosphere in there, it always seems hushed compared to other supermarkets. I like the German stuff you can get in there though as well as all the usual stuff, and you can always get a parking space.

Other than that, it's been a quiet day. Listed my Neo Geo Pocket collection on Ebay, three consoles and some games. Great little machines to be fair, just haven't used them for ages. Also checked the status of my other auctions for a Sinclair ZX81 and a vintage PacMan 2 game. The ZX81 has bids, but not the other one, yet.

It's the radio rally next weekend. I haven't been since it was cancelled in 2005 when they couldn't afford to hold it in the theatre any more. It's a great place for finding computer equipment and retro stuff, and I've got many nice and interesting things from there, including the above mentioned ZX81.

In the last two years it's been held in the new school in Llandudno, but I haven't been. The first year I just didn't know it was happening, and last year I was in Berlin. Despite my financial crackdown, I am going to allow myself a bit of cash to go and see what's there, but this time, with the intent of seeing if there is anything I could possibly resell on Ebay. The problem I've had before is that I would buy something just to really have a play with it, but then never get rid of it and it would just sit around. When the stuff was PDAs and stuff it's not too bad, when you're talking huge Unix workstations and the like, it can get a bit silly.

Supposedly the weather tomorrow is going to be better, and hopefully will get the bike oil change done.

The gearbox plot thickens, when I was driving hom from town today, I had a lot on my mind, and forgot to avoid third gear, and it worked perfectly all the way home without me realising. Perhaps it's not as damaged as previously thought.

My brother has once again encouraged me to sign up for the Berlin half marathon next year. It is something I think it would be great to do, but I'm so unfit at the moment I'd never be ready to do it in time, and I'm still quite dubious about my running ability.

Rereading Harry Potter, just started book 4.

When I went into town, found that I'd forgotten to charge the HTC and it was completely flat, so I had to go out without a mobile phone. It was a somewhat strange sensation, probably the first time I've been out without one for years. Still like the HTC, found a C64 emulator for it, and there's even an Amiga emulator for Android, which seems totally unreal.

Goodbye Mac

Apple has started the process of locking down the Mac, just like the iPhone and iPod. OS X 10.7 will allow third party stuff to be installed without the Mac App store, but what about 10.8 or 10.9? When will the Launchpad interface which makes it look like an even bigger iPad become mandatory?

Ubuntu has its centralised Software Centre and Android has it's Market which install apps and automatically update them for you, but you are still able to install applications yourself from whereever you want. Windows is the other extreme, all apps are installed manually and handle updates themselves, which leads to chaos in the taskbar as they all jostle for your attention when updates are there. I think Ubuntu has it about right.

I saw this coming when they invented the iPhone, and I lost interest in the Mac platform some time ago. But the worrying thing is that what Apple does, everyone else tries to copy, with varying degress of success.

Badminot

End of a stressful but quite productive week in work, even though several things didn't really quite go as planned. Had details today of the restructure of the department, shouldn't think it'll affect me. Also been told that we have to do a Diversity Awareness course which is online and will take several hours to complete. Great, like we have the time to spare.

Didn't go to badminton tonight. Again. I just can't myself motivated to go for some reason. I don't think I'm going to join this year, mainly because with my financial crackdown I don't want to drop £70 on it.

Downloaded an Atari Lynx emulator and some games. It works quite well but the sound isn't quite right. I've got a Lynx somewhere with my old games, if I can find a power supply that'll work with it I'll dig it out. Not putting batteries in it.

No real plans this weekend except to change the oil on the bike, although it depends on the weather really.

Finished Big Bang season 2. It was pretty good. The bloopers on the DVD are so weird, seeing the guy who plays Sheldon not being Sheldon is just wrong.

Haven't done anything about the gearbox yet, going to keep an eye on Ebay and scrappies though. Someone told me that this coming winter is likely to be like the last one and I pondered briefly on getting a 4x4 for the winter but that would probably be a really bad idea. Finding it OK without 3rd gear but it can be really annoying on hills where 2nd or 4th just aren't right.

Really tired now.

Funny fun fun

A reconditioned gearbox for the car would cost £500+VAT so that's not really an option. A couple of guys in work said if I got a box, they would help me install it, as one of them has an engine crane. An intriguing idea but so much could go wrong. The idea of a second hand box is still doable, just need to sort out someone to put it in. Someone in work suggested the Focus RS8 conversion kit you can get in the States. It converts a Focus to rear wheel drive with a 5.0 litre V8. Could be fun, but it's £15,000, so not really an option. It would be ace to have a sleeper one though, a ratty old 4-door Focus with 250bhp would be hilarious in the traffic light grand prix.

Badminton this evening. First it was a meal at Rob's with a laptop shuffle, swapping out the HP 2133 I sold him for the Precision M65. The meal was haggis, first time I've had it I think. It was interesting, but probably not something I'll actively seek out. It did however have an unfortunate effect on digestion causing several involuntary eruptions during badminton from both Rob and I. Also someone got struck in the eye by a shuttle, which made her eye go all red and painful so she left to get it checked.

Boo cars.

Car broken again. Fumbled a gearchange on the way from one site to another and trashed 3rd gear. Now it just screeches and jumps out again when you try to select it. Probably the high mileage more than what I did but it's fucked. A mechanic drove it and says it'll go on for many miles yet if you ignore 3rd. Possibilies:

1) Get box repaired, not too sure about this as 4th and 5th have crunched in the past.
2) Get second hand box for as cheap as £45 off Ebay or breakers and get someone to install it.
3) Get reconditioned box for more, possibly up to £600
4) Get new car.
5) Ignore it.

4 and 3 are not happening. Leaning towards 2 at the moment, going to make some calls tomorrow. Absolutely typical this would happen right after I have it services and swear a vow of frugality for the next six months. Bahburgers.

Sart

A good weekend all round. My cousin Pauline came down for the first time since January to stay with my Dad, now that her breast cancer treatment has finally ended and she's back in work. So we spent yesterday hanging out and catching up. She had her laptop with her which was unfortunately inflicted with Vista and was running like a complete dog, so we went out and got a copy of Windows 7 for it, but then realised her optical drive doesn't work. That evening we went to the Prosperity in Rhuddlan. It's a Chinese which has a whole page of vegetarian stuff, which was ideal for Pauline. It was a really good meal.

Today went back over with my external DVD drive and we spent a few hours rebuilding her laptop. It's relatively old Compaq but it made a huge difference to the machine, like it always does if Vista is involved.

Didn't do much else today when I got home. Took the bike out for a short run, watched some more Big Bang Theory. Sold another old laptop on Ebay, good news.

The tacky Ferrari laptop is running well with the SSD and the 250gb drive from it is now a backup drive which is nice.

Hadn't seen this Dave Allen clip in years, damn he was funny.

Friday yay

At last the end of the week. Workload still frustrating. One nice success which I've done in spare time is build up a test version of the backup system using a spare PC. I had a couple of spare SCSI controllers and a pair of SCSI hard drives from scrapped machines, and added an LTO1 tape drive from a scrap server. Then followed the original configuration documents for the real thing to build it up. It's now at the point where it is successfully backing up data from a test client machine, although I haven't yet tried migrating the data to tape. It's definitely been worth doing as a lot of things about the real system make much more sense.

One last thing I bought before the frugal crackdown next week is an SSD for the tasteless Ferrari laptop. It gets moved around a lot and I didn't want the drive to get damaged. It's a Crucial RealSSD with a capacity of 64gb, considerably less than the original 250gb hard drive, but lighter, quieter and more power efficient. It also has extremely fast read speeds, so it should perform well too for what the machine is used for. It also came with a useful SATA to USB adapter to allow the original hard drive to be cloned onto the SSD to save having to rebuild the whole machine and hopefully to allow the original hard drive to be used externally.

Chocolate Weetabix was a bit of a let down, but still nicer than standard Weetabix. I can only eat Weetabix with sugar on, which defeats the point really.

The car is running much better since the service but I think one of the rear tyres has a slow puncture, will get that checked on Sunday.

One nice thing about the Android phone is that it synchronises everything with your Google account, which is something I had never really looked at before although I've had one for a while to do this blog. Found a cool geeky Tricorder app that actually does things, using the accelerometer, compass, GPS and microphone to give various readings. Fun. Also got the Amazon Kindle app for it, which is quite interesting although only put free books on it so far. Reading the original Dracula at the moment on it.

Girly my arse

The bike passed it's MOT with only a couple of bulbs needed. Quite amazed really, and it only cost £45 overall. People in work said that I could have got the MOT done cheaper elsewhere but this place was convenient for work. It was a VERY cold ride into town this morning though, but I was pleased that the bike wasn't any harder to start than normal. Work was meh, got some things done but not others. Constantly feeling tired this week, and had an on and off headache today. Bah.

Still really happy with the HTC phone. The only issues I have are the on screen keyboard, which is a bit fiddly, and the battery life. I've always preferred phones with good battery life, and previously the various Nokias I've used had at least a good couple of days. I think the HTC would manage a couple of days, depending on use, but it is capable of being charged from a normal mini-USB connector so it's quite easy to top it up. Also the camera is fairly dire. It's apparently a 3.2 megapixel one but it takes pretty poor photos in anything but bright daylight. Got an ace geocaching app for it. You can download the cache data onto the phone and then use the built in GPS to find it. If you have data access it can even tell you about nearby caches and log visits while out and about but I've disabled data access as it's prohibitively expensive on PAYG. Oh yes, apparently the HTC is 'girly' because it's white. I've decided I don't care, I like it.

Not much else going on really. Carried on with Big Bang Theory season 2, which is pretty good.

Still relatively Coke-free. Had some diet cherry while on overtime on Saturday and had some at Andy's meal, but otherwise still on the squash at work. I think my skin has improved quite a lot and it's probably due to that. Anyway, not consuming shitloads of sugar and caffeine every day has got to be a good thing. The squash I'm drinking now probably has various sweeteners and stuff but it's a lot better than full-fat Coke.

Once and for all going to work on my finances, so the next few months are going to be frugal (heard that before) although I will have to budget for a trip to Berlin as my cousin wants to go now that her treatments are all but finished with. Not sure when but we're going to discuss it on Saturday when she is down for a visit.

Bah

Better day today. Work wasn't too bad, although workload increased again, annoying.

The bike is going for an MOT tomorrow, hope it will be OK. They already know it has an issue with the headlight although that's hopefully a bulb.

Fuck everything

Yesterday was a good day, took the dog out geocaching, took the bike out geocaching and then went to the Semaphore for Andy's birthday meal, which was great. Also saw his mate Steve's menagerie which was fun. Turkeys, chickens and tortoises were all admired. Achieved my objective of getting my 100th geocache on 10/10/10, bit pathetic really.

Today was shit. Plenty of fallout from the office moves, took all day to get it sorted out completely combined with the usual shit caused by an unmanageable workload and general despair. Tired of it.

Aglets

Overtime went OK. We got there about 12:00pm and left shortly before 5pm, but the time seemed to fly past. Came home and didn't really feel like doing much so watched some more of the Big Bang Theory season 2, which Rob lent me on Thursday. It seems much funnier than season 1 for some reason.

Installed a new 160gb hard drive in the D800 and currently installing Windows 7 on it. I was going to put XP on it, but if it runs OK with 7 then I'll put the spare license I have on there.

The HTC is going OK. It's nice to use although still finding that the keyboard is a little awkward in portrait mode. The screen is the same resolution as the iPod touch but slightly smaller. It's fine in landscape mode though. The way it handles text messaging is quite different though, much prefer the BlackBerry for that.

Quite impressed with Android as a platform though, even though the Magic is on the older 1.6 version. It's not quite as slick as iOS but it is close, and it's more open - you can get apps from the Android Market, but you also have the option of installing them manually from websites or from the SD card. So there's more choice and less control than the iTunes app store, like when Apple rejected a Commodore 64 emulator because you could program it in BASIC.

It's the weekend!

But I'm working tomorrow...boo. Fecking office moves.

Car serviced yesterday, went OK. The handbrake was sorted quite easily - the cable hadn't snapped, it had just come off the handle, so it didn't cost much to sort. However, the front tyres were utterly screwed so had new ones fitted today by Etyres.

After the N97 incident, been looking for suitable replacement. Android has been intriguing for a while but took a while to find an affordable device. Found one eventually in the form of a HTC Magic, a slightly older device. So far it seems pretty decent although finding the onscreen keyboard a little difficult. Tried out a few apps and things, seems quite good. Can't believe there's actually an Amiga emulator for Android, that just seems wrong.

Fling

Didn't sleep well last night, but felt suprisingly good most of the day, and had a productive day in work, got a lot of jobs out of the way and it's all looking a little better than it was. Also made peace with the person who sent the e-mail that caused the bin kicking incident on Friday. Still wish I wasn't doing overtime on Saturday though. Set myself a little project to do when I have quiet moments, which is to set up a little copy of the backup system on a Linux machine by following the original documentation for the live one. It works to a degree but there is a time limit as without a valid license file, it only runs for 30 days.

The Focus goes in for it's service tomorrow, but I had to phone them up and add the handbrake as the cable snapped while I was parking it today. Also it looks a complete shed because I was tired of the paint flaking off the non original front bumper so I put Nitromors on it to strip off the old paint. It worked to a degree but it currently looks dreadful. Oh well.

Not a good week for cars, both Rob and Steve had bumps, and a guy in work has issues with his car cutting out and he's going to Devon with his family next week.

Think it's catching up with me now, urgently need sleep.

Computer hot-rod

It's fun to hack around with older computers and make them run better.

Just worked out at last how to replace the BIOS on the Latitude D800 with the one from the Precision M60. The two machines are pretty much the same but the D800 for some gimpy reason only runs the RAM at 266mhz, while the M60 runs it at 333mhz. The RAM I've installed in the D800 is capable of that speed so I have been meaning to swap the BIOS for ages, but 0nly just now worked out how it's actually done.

The D800 now thinks it's a Precision M60 and is noticeably quicker. I don't know why Dell did that, the Inspiron 8600, Latitude D800 and Precision M60 all use the same basic chassis and motherboard, but only the D800 has the slower RAM.

There was a HOLE here. It's gone now.

Not much went on the rest of the week on Friday when I had a disctinctly upsetting e-mail in work, that caused me to scream obscenities at the top of my voice and savagely kick a bin across the office. Not sure if it was because I used my left foot or what but it really damaged my foot to the point where it still hurts now. Oh well.

Picked up BioShock 2 from Morrisons for £14 so have been playing it off and on. It is pretty much more of the same except that this time you play as a Big Daddy. The plot is interesting and the environment as great as ever.

Didn't play badminton on Thursday due to Rob being ill and then Friday I didn't go because I wasn't in the mood and my foot was still hurting.

Yesterday was a fairly idle day with mostly BioShock and a couple of movies. I dug out some old movies that I hadn't seen for ages on VHS, The Living Daylights and The Craft. Then went to Llandudno with Andy and Maz to go to Pizza Hut and watch Back to the Future in the cinema. Both were OK although there were a group of tattooed bodybuilding gorillas who thought they were really funny and loud in Pizza Hut and then to our dismay went into the same screen as us. Fortunately we were far away from them and the sound was turned up so their constant talking was a faint murmer in the background. BTTF was a blast on the big screen, looked great on digital projection and it's just such a fun film to watch.

Today it was supposed to be rugby in Wrexham but it was cancelled due to heavy rain, but by the time it was announced, I had just arrived at Andy's. So we went to the Denbigh Chocolate Shop, which is really cool. It has a little cafe area, but then if you go upstairs there's a sweet shop, a gallery and a meeting room. Very nice.

Trying to rationalise the computers I use, so after the failed Acer behemoth experiment, I ended up buying a brand new Acer 17" 7741g with a Core i3, 4gb RAM, 500gb hard drive and ATI 5470 graphics. To fund it I'm selling off the older machines. Sold the MacBook on Ebay and made a small profit on it, even with the replacement keyboard. I also listed the Latitude D800 but that didn't sell, which came as a bit of a relief as I have a soft spot for it. Decided to keep it and treat it to some more RAM and a new hard drive to speed it up, but there's still a few others to list.

The car really needs attention now, it's definitely down on power and using more fuel than it should. The exhaust is getting steadily worse. Tired of exhausts now, wish I could just get one that stuck up out of the bonnet like a tractor.

Title of this entry is one of the stranger messages encountered written on a wall in Silent Hill 2.

So tired...

It's been a long, strange week. Work has just been impossible to keep up with. Get one job out of the way and in the meantime two more come in and just constantly being hassled to get things done.

Not many people were able to make it to the drumming workshop tonight so we went back to Darren's for a bit. Nice to sit down and catch up with him. We ended up playing drums for a while as his housemate played piano which was fun and interesting. Tired now though.

A fun packed weekend

Yesterday was OK. Amy and Huw came up to pick apples again, which was fairly entertaining and there were plenty of them on the tree. Also we had a look at the damson tree which I've ignored for some time, and found that it was covered in them. After that I took a trip into Denbigh to get a new tax disk holder for the bike as the original was all rusty and knackered. In the evening went for an Indian with Andy, Maz, Rob, Em and Vicky. A bit fat after going out on Friday night too, but wasn't going to turn that down. Had a chicken tikka masala which was slightly embarrassing to order, but was really really nice.

Today did some digging in the garden to clear out blocked water channels and fitted the tax disk to the bike. It was a bit of a pain as the old one really didn't want to come off, but got there in the end. Then took it out for a nice ride, although it was a bit cold. Had an interesting moment where I stopped on the side of the road near Cerrigydrudion to have a look at the view and some bikers slowed down to ask if I was OK. Dug out Fable II again after ages and progressed my evil character a bit more. Got to a new town with the normal routine of a rampant massacre of half the people there before buying out the place. Hehe.

Mmmm

Mum's birthday today so went to the Prosperity in Rhuddlan, a really good Chinese restaurant. Very good food there. Only been there once before with work, and it was good then.

Friday at last

Hurrah, finally, at last, it's Friday.

Mum's birthday today so going out for a meal this evening, woohoo.

Stupid Acer behemoth graphics card died, stripped it for parts and scrapped it, arse.

Bleh

Watched Hackers, a film which is shit in many ways but still has a bizarre appeal for some reason, even though anyone who knows anything about computers will go 'What?!' several times. It's good stupid fun though. Every time I watch it I still want to paint a computer in camo.

Also watched Total Recall while doing some hardware tweaking on an Acer 7520 17" laptop with serious overheating issues, CPU running at 70-80 degrees and graphics chip hitting nearly 100 degrees. Put some Actic Silver 5 on the heatsinks and removed a thick pad of dust from the fan and it's down to 40-50 degrees for the CPU and 60-65 degrees for the graphics chip, much improved although I think the graphics chip should be cooler still. It's away from the danger zone at least. Think it's because of the shit thermal pad between the chip and the heatsink, might see if I can get a copper shim for it like the Dell I had similar issues with as the heat transfer would be a lot better. Nice feature of this laptop is two hard drive slots, ideal for dual-booting or virtualisation. Just needs some more RAM now and perhaps a faster CPU if I can find a compatible one (AMD Socket S1).

The skin on the back of my neck is killing me, got a massive outbreak of painful pustules on it and it's really hurting because of the pressure my shirt collar puts on it. Probably caused by stress, I usually break out in spots if I'm worried about something or under pressure.

Unremarkable day

Not much going on today.

Had payment for another Ebay item, a HP 71B palmtop that is off to France. It's going to a place not far from Lyon, and just recently my lost lovespoon geocoin got moved to France to a cache in the same general area. How odd.

Stupid weather

This morning went to the biker cafe in Denbigh for breakfast with Andy, Maz and Vicky. It's actually called Sam's Cafe but I call it the biker cafe as it's right outside the motorbike dealer (in fact it used to be the dealer) and usually has plenty motorbikes parked outside. They do a pretty good all day breakfast to be fair and the lunchtime specials are usually good too.

This afternoon, Will and I were going to go up to the moors and take photos but the weather today has been grey and pissing it down with no let up so we gave up on that. Instead we had a go on Fable II multiplayer, which was quite good although I had to download the expansion packs as Will had them already. While they were downloading I played a few levels of Duke Nukem 3D, which was good fun.

Not done much else today really. Tidied up a bit and packaged up a couple of the Ebay sales for postage tomorrow after having the payment for them.

Having one of those weird introspective moments where I'm questioning quite a lot of things.

Beer, beer, beer, I hate beer

Today was the annual beer festival in Denbigh. I detest beer and cider in all forms, so I don't really get much from it really, but it's nice to meet up with everyone and hang out. I didn't go last year, but I did this year and had a good time. I tasted quite a few beers, all horrible, and some ciders which weren't great either. Fortunately this year they had a cafe which did food and drinks. I had two bowls of a really nice chilli and then Caroline bought cakes and chocolates. Also, I only just realised that I had two cans of Coke, breaking my no-Coke rule. I hadn't had any since Sunday. Oh well, it won't matter so long as I don't lapse into the old habits.

All four of the last things I put on Ebay sold, including a batch of Speak & Spells that went for £51, yay.

As it was payday yesterday, I did the tax for the car and bike. £205 for the Focus and £15 for the bike. Also the Focus is having a service next Saturday.

Came home from the beer festival at about 6pm as the noisy and annoying folk band had started up.

Felt tired today for some reason and at a bit of a loss what to do with myself. Oh well.

Need to have a tidy up tomorrow, living in a pigsty at the moment. Also can look at what else I can put on Ebay at the same time.

Flim

900th post.

A fairly ordinary week. Not much really to report. Found there are more caches gone live near home and a colleague and I went for one that had gone live yesterday, hoping to get first to find. Somehow we managed to time it so we arrived at the cache just as it poured down with rain, and got wet, and then found someone had got it an hour before - ARGH!

No drumming this week as the hall was booked out previously, boo.

Other than that not really done much. the inverter for the MacBook arrived today and I got it installed and the screen still flickers, although not as badly. Getting at the inverter was, surprise, a royal pain in the arse. Removing the screen bezel is easy but the cover over the hinges and the inverter is a rotten design. Officially you're supposed to remove the whole display assembly before taking it apart but that involves removing the fucking keyboard section and I'm not doing that again after last time. Wretched bloody thing. At least the screen should be swappable without too much hassle if I do buy a new one for it.

I haven't had a single drop of Coke since Sunday and I think I feel a lot better for it. I have been drinking Robinson's squash in work, which to be fair has it's own share of crap in it, but it's nowhere near as bad as Coke. I actually have a spare bottle of Diet Cherry Coke in my work laptop bag left over from last Friday, which I've been treating as a sort of test as I haven't opened it yet. The food hasn't been good this week mind you but the lack of Coke must help. Also been walking the dog a lot this week, which was fairly OK except the weather sucks rather a lot. Met a pair of friendly horses today poking their heads over a gate and demanding attention. Horses are alarming things really.

Great weekend

Saturday consisted of the gang going into Denbigh for a heritage festival. It was hyped up a bit and had things going on but after going around the underwhelming thing in the town hall which consisted of a fairly crappy market we sort of gave up on it. We did partake in the rather delicious hog roast though and then spent the rest of the day in a pub and having ice cream. So while the heritage thing wasn't great, we did have a good time.

Sunday was spent walking the dog and taking the bike out. Had a really good run on the bike, went further than usual and ended up seeing quite a lot of other bikes. At one point got stuck in the middle of a convoy of huge leather guys on big Harley Davidson type bikes, all loud farty things and then on the moors ended up in front of some sports bikes. Wasn't too bad though, quite good fun really. The evening consisted of a meal at the Brookhouse Mill, which was really good, lots of good food and conversation with friends.

Today wasn't too bad in work. After a protracted scream, managed to make my job list a bit more likable, and left a little early as it was quite a productive day. Got home to find the tasteless Ferrari laptop had arrived back from repair, which is good. It's back to normal now, so hopefully it'll behave now. It's a nice little machine. Debating now whether to take the dog out - it's rather windy but that I don't mind, but it's trying to rain as well. Hmm.

Update: Did take the dog out and it didn't do more than drizzle. It's actually better in poor weather though because you put more effort in rather than just pootling along enjoying the scenery.

Further update: Just listed a few more retro computing things on Ebay. One nice thing is that now I can put good quality images on there as the D50 works very well for that.

A shit day with highlights

Some days, I really hate my job. Again, not the work itself, just the way it suddenly piles up from people with no consideration that you might actually have other work for other people that, shock horror, might be more important, and then get all stroppy about it. And BlackBerrys are NOT important, I don't care how much you want your shiny toy but it doesn't take precedence over someone who can't work because their machine has died.

It was someone's 21st birthday today and so there was a vast, beautiful chocolate cake, and we all had chips for lunch. This was mildly cheering until I felt sick all evening, so much so that I didn't go to badminton. Throwing up on the court might not have been liked. Did take the bike out for a little jaunt and it went really well. Oh, except the headlight seems to have stopped working. Bah!

Really tired and dispirited this evening. Can't be arsed doing anything. Tried to play bass, failed, tried to play Xbox, failed, so just listening to music.

Bike sorted

Yesterday was fairly dull until the evening, another African drumming workshop. Slightly less people this time but it was still really good fun with more complex stuff going on and different people doing different parts of the rhythm. Really enjoying it.

Today I had a flexi day to take the bike in for the work. They did the faulty lights, the chain, spark plug, handlebar bearings and the exhaust. It's amazing, it rides and sounds like new, which is great and it only cost £51. The only thing they couldn't do was fit a long mudflap to the front mudguard as they didn't have one but will let me know when they've got one in.

The tasteless Ferrari laptop has been repaired and is on it's way back, which is good news.

Fraaark

Work has been frustrating. My Latitude D520 laptop had been pretty reliable until three weeks ago. First it had an intermittent line appear across the screen, then started to have issues with the hard drive clicking, and then three times yesterday it crashed hard. Unfortunately I was told I couldn't have a new one, instead have someone else's old one. It's a D620 which isn't much younger than mine, which had just suffered a graphics chip failure. Fortunately Dell extended the warranty on that part as it was a known fault (Nvidia made a few million shit chips) so it had a new motherboard two weeks ago. Finally got hold of it today and started building it so that was a relief. It's got a nice screen, a 14" 1440x900 panel which is so much nicer than the 15" 1024x768 panel in the D520. It seems to be in good nick and the new motherboard should hopefully mean it will be reliable. Would have been nice to put Windows 7 on it but we're not quite at that stage yet.

Just washed the motorbike in preparation for taking it in on Thursday as I won't get a chance to do it tomorrow night. Doesn't take long but is fiddly. It could really do with a longer mudguard on the front wheel to stop more of the mud being flung back.

Bought a Nikon D50 which is a slightly elderly DSLR after decided I'd relied on phone cameras long enough. Kind of overkill I guess but it does take lovely photos despite being five years old and 6.3mp. All the settings are rather bewildering though - taking some time to get used to it.

Haven't been using the MacBook much since I repaired the keyboard because the screen flicker pisses me off. I've just read though that this is more commonly caused by an inverter problem rather than the screen itself, so I've ordered one as they are pretty cheap compared to a new LCD. If it works, great, if not then I'll get a screen when I can afford one. I really like the keyboard on the MacBook but not the sharp edges on the front. When it makes typing on the machine actively painful, it makes you wonder what they were thinking when they designed the thing.

Hah, that's ironic, just yanked the screen bezel off the MacBook to see how hard it is to get to the inverter and I think I did something to the cables. Now the screen looks brighter and it doesn't seem to be flickering. Shit, wish I'd tried that before I ordered the inverter. Mind you, compared to the Dell laptop to it, the screen does have a yellow tinge, but that might just be the gimpy colour calibration in OS X. Oh well. We'll see.

Update: Nope, it's flickering again.

Tired and unmotivated this evening. Again. Not sure why.

New work shoes I bought on Saturday are working out well. My feet feel much better.

Unproductive

Well, that was probably the least productive Sunday ever. I literally did nothing but sit and watch the Top Gear challenges on Youtube all day, except to package up the Acorn A4 laptops (Went for £127) and the tasteless Ferrari laptop so they can go to the purchaser and warranty repair centre respectively.

Up to the 3rd James Herriot book. I've read them so often before that I nearly know them off by heart but they are great books.

Back to work tomorrow. Bleh. I am going to have a lie in though because I need to call DHL to arrange collection of the broken laptop and they don't open their call centre until 8am.

Windows 7 aplenty

Spent much of the day at my Dad's. Went and got some packing stuff and things and a new pair of work shoes. Hopefully this will help my feet get back to normal.

After that went to the new PC World and Currys shop in Llandudno, which is pretty cool. We picked up a couple of copies of Windows 7 for my Dad and Jean's laptops, which were unfortunately inflicted with Vista. Spent the rest of the afternoon backing up the machines and rebuilding them.

Exercise fail

It took four days, loads of parts, and a whole load of aggro, but finally the tape library works. It's not been a good week because of that, having to neglect my normal work and concentrate solely on the backup system was a real pain. On the plus side, I'm much more confident with the system and the various processes, due to having to shift tapes around manually and keep on top what the system usually does automatically. When the main guy is in, it's all to easy to let him do the hard stuff when it breaks. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end. I'm not saying it's perfect, there are still issues, but the backups themselves ran each night and the offsite tapes are where they should be.

Booked the bike in to the garage on this coming Thursday. I'm taking it as a flexi day - because of coming in early for the last five days I've got loads of time to take. Basically I've given them a list of what it needs and asked them to check it over to see if it will be OK on the upcoming MOT.

Now on South Park season 2. This seems much more familiar than season 1 as I think I had it on tape. Enjoying it though.

Started reading the James Herriot books. I've always really liked them and it's been a while. I've always liked the way they are written, especially the vivid characters.

Need to have a tidy up, the house is a disgrace at the moment.

Went to Friday night badminton today for the first time this season. However, my feet haven't been right since Monday after the walk, and so I only lasted two games. Also made it rather clear how unfit I am right now. My trainers are OK but it's my work shoes that are the problem. Going to try and pick some up tomorrow. Also need to get a box and bubblewrap to send the Ferrari laptop back to Acer as they have agreed the fan is faulty and it needs to be repaired. They say to send it with at least 5cm of bubblewrap around it, which is mad because the original box doesn't give it anything like as much protection. Oh well. It needs doing and otherwise it's a damn fine machine.

Tax forms came through for both the bike and the car, in the same envelope which seems unusually efficient of the DVLA. Bike tax is £15 for a year, car tax is £205 for a year. Ouch.

Not much else going on. Going to my Dad's tomorrow as I haven't been for a while.

Today is the first day I didn't go mad for Coke. Feel better for it I think.

Grah

Yet more parts needed for the library. Argh. Given up hope now, but only one more day and I can hand the whole blessed system back to the guy who normally looks after it.

Didn't go to badminton tonight as my feet have been complaining all week - I think the walk on Monday followed by a day in my shit work shoes ruined them. I've been wearing my trainers all week and they do feel better. Should be OK for badminton tomorrow however.

Went out on the bike for a little spin and it went OK. Slightly alarming moment when I went round a bend on a relatively narrow road to encounter a green 08 reg left hand drive Aston Martin. The bike does need attention, the occasional hesitation it had before is getting worse and it generally just needs some bits doing. Hoping to take a day of work next week to have a garage look at it and evaluate its condition and what needs doing, bearing in mind the MOT in October. If it comes to a lot, it might be more sensible to sell it for parts and put the money towards another 125 which is easier to get parts for - either that or put it towards the DAS scheme to get a full license.

Other than that it's been a quiet evening.

I like hitting things

Tape library still broken, needs more parts and that's all that needs to be said about that.

An old friend of mine from school announced drumming workshops nearby and I thought I've give it a go. There were about 10 people there of various ages and it was really good. It's been a while since I've seen him but it was probably 9 years ago that he was starting out. He's really good on the drums now. Found it very relaxing after the nightmare day in work. It's a weekly thing for a little while now so will probably go again.

Apple has redesigned the iPod shuffle yet again. Someone must have realised the buttonless design was incredibly stupid.

Flibble

Went into work to general chaos with the backup system. Again took all day to sort it out and I found that removing tapes manually from the library is a very tedious operation indeed since there doesn't seem to be any logical order in which it stores them. And it still isn't fixed, awaiting engineer from IBM to come in and repair the actual hardware.

Other than that, quiet day. Listed the two Acorn A4 laptops on Ebay. After years in storage, one of them powered up after a bit of fiddling but the other didn't, so I've put them on as a job lot. Both hard drives appear to have failed however. Quite gutted to be getting rid of them as I remember them coming out in the early 90s and being outrageously expensive and then being thrilled to get them cheap a few years later. Oh well.

Not much else going on, tired now after going into work very early. I woke up and I couldn't think of anything but the backup system so I got up and went straight in to see what had happened.

Awesome walk

Went for a walk around the Abergele area with Rob, Will and Sarah. It was really good as the weather was superb and we went around the Gwylch Castle area which I had never seen before. It's pretty impressive, even if it's not that old, and we saw some amazing views down the coast. I looked up some geocaches beforehand and we found five in the end, which was good. Also picked up two travelbugs, which is always nice. One of the caches had already been found twice today by the time we got to it, but it was on the sea front next to the cycle track so it would be in a prime location to be picked up.

So overall it's been a fairly decent weekend other than the strange mood I was in yesterday. I've successfully managed to avoid thinking about work too, which is good. It's kind of getting a bit a close now, I'm really hoping the backup system hasn't died over the weekend though, it was bad enough on Friday.

Need to get stuff on Ebay due to financial issues mentioned previously. I watched an old Acorn A4 go for £132 recently - the rare RISC OS laptop. I've got two of them, which both worked several years ago although I think one had a dodgy hard drive. Not so much of an issue with Acorn machines though as the operating system is in ROM. Once I've tested them I'm going to put them on as a job lot because I've lost the power supply for one of them. Still loads more crap I can list though.

Tired now after the walk, need to get to bed.

Superhero name generator. This has been around for ages, I remember playing with it in college in what must be around 1997 or so.

Examples:

The puerile Ice Woman
Power(s): Telekinesis, Image projection
Source of powers: Mutant mutagen
Weapon: Ice Pistol
Transportation: Woman Pig

The naughty Tomorrow Thing
Power(s): Shrinking, Clairvoyance, Telescopic vision
Source of powers: Mutant spinach
Weapon: Thing Pistol
Transportation: Tomorrow Sleigh

The brazen Wolf Hitmen
Power(s): Gadget creation, Speed reading, Deus ex machina
Source of powers: Magic mutant
Weapon(s): Hitmen Amplifier(s)
Transportation: Astrosubmarine(s)

A less than productive day

Didn't really do much today, didn't feel quite right. I thought at first I was coming down with something but then it just seemed to be tiredness with a bit of a headache.

Watched some South Park season 1, which I haven't seen since it originally aired in the UK which I guess would be about 1997. Funny stuff. Discovered it had a German audio track, that was slightly weird to say the least.

Not been a good month for finances or health, real willpower issues at the moment, but today was not a day to worry about it as I really didn't feel up to doing much at all.

Acer fan is getting louder but tech support lines only open Monday to Friday, 9-5 which is less than helpful.

A bad day with a happy ending

Typically, it being a Bank Holiday Friday, the backup system broke. It always does this without fail when I am left in charge of it. This time it was a hardware failure in the tape library. The door where you insert tapes had a sensor problem and if the system tried to do anything with tapes in the door the whole thing would lock up. So spent much of the day trying to sort it out and worrying about the backups over the weekend. I think it's going to be OK though, but the engineer is coming back first thing on Tuesday to repair it so we can get the tapes out again. This also caused a debate amongst the helpdesk team who were thrilled by the robot in the tape library and decided to try and name it. So far the candidates are 'Bertie', 'Jeffrey' and 'Bender'.

After all that was in a very tired and stressed mood, but went for an Indian in the Village Masala with Andy, Maz and Vicky, which was great as usual. The food was excellent although rather filling and they have puddings where you keep the container. Andy had a Punky Penguin which was a plastic penguin filled with ice cream and I had a pistachio kulfi that came in a nice little pot which you could keep too. That was nice.

Looking forward to the weekend now. The replacement speedo for the bike has turned up and hopefully should fit OK, but it reads up to 160mph which is perhaps a little excessive. Mind you my old Vectra had a speedo that did the same.

Strange day

An confusing and unproductive day in work. I did have my interim PA in the morning though, which went OK.

Evening consisted of a meetup with a few people from work to bid farewell to a Canadian woman who is returning to Canada with her husband. I've known her in work for a couple of years now and she lived down the road from me. It was a good evening and a good turnout, which was nice.

In a weird mood this evening.

The fan in the new Acer laptop has developed a slight buzz. It's not very loud but is noticable. Think I'll give them a call about it as it didn't do it to start with. Bah. Otherwise it's really good, very happy with the performance and usability of it. It runs Windows 7 very well.

Bank holiday weekend coming up and already I think it's going to be a fat one. Oh well.

Random

A fairly hectic day in work after the day off yesterday. One of the test Unix partitions had gone down and only I could get it up and running, although it didn't really take much. But there were loads of e-mails waiting for me about it.

Took the bike out when I got home, went. Definitely needs attention to the exhaust now though, and the rear light has gone, although the brake light is still OK. The list is getting longer. I have however ordered a universal speedo for £30 after discovering the original item is about £130 and is notoriously unreliable, presumably why it was replaced by the cycle computer in the first place.

Gave the poor dog a bath this evening as he needed one. He doesn't like it, but at least he doesn't struggle or fight. The worst part is when he shakes himself afterwards, although I did accidentally get water in his ears which caused a shake in the tub which wasn't good.

Attempt to make lunch to take into work failed, as I forgot it. Oh well, I had it this evening and it was nice, and fairly filling as it was pasta. Will try again tomorrow.

Fairly quiet otherwise.

Clean-cut or mate

A fairly decent day. Played around with the Acer a bit more, getting it how I like it. It definitely runs better than the average netbook. The Atom server seems stable, which is good.

Got another key for the bike, so I've got two again now. Hopefully the other one will turn up at some point. Dropped into a place in Kinmel Bay where I've been a few times to ask their advice. This time it was about the speedo and chain tension. They were really helpful and said to just bring it in whenever, which is good. It's good when they are really approachable like that. Also I think the exhaust will need looking at.

I dug out an old plywood bass body that has been the basis for several previous experiments and attacked it with a hole cutter. It's now got about 20 holes in it, removing a large amount of wood and making the body much lighter. I've got a neck that will fit on it and the rest of the hardware, so just need to put it together. I don't know if the holes will affect the strength of the body but we'll see.

Chips for supper, from the really good one in Denbigh, and once again it was really good. A battered sausage is a pretty vulgar item of food really, but from there it's a work of art, and the curry sauce from there is sublime.

Back to work tomorrow. I always worry about going back after a holiday, even if it's just a day off.

Iron Maiden got to number 1 with their latest album. Who would have thought it!

It lives!

Got a replacement power supply for the Atom machine and it powered right up, which is very good news. Also the new power supply is quieter, so that's nice too.

Wedding trip

It was my nephew's wedding on Saturday, which was taking place in a Llanegryn on the west coast of Wales near Barmouth. I travelled down on Friday evening right after work and met up with the family for an Indian.

The B&B my sister had booked us into was in a place called Llwyngwril. It is on top of a hill and has incredible views over the village and the sea. You can see right across the bay to the peninsula and it's amazing how it reaches right across the skyline. Simply stunning. The B&B was great too, very quiet and peaceful and the hosts were very nice and friendly.

The wedding went OK with a good turnout. The church was very nice, clearly very old and nicely decorated. The vicar is Dutch, oddly, and can speak fluent Welsh, which leads to quite a peculiar accent. After that it was back to Llwyngwril for the reception, which was held in a pub. It was a really good day overall. At one point Amogharatna and I took a break and had a look at the beach, and it was a pretty amazing view. The whole area had a really nice atmosphere, and was very beautiful. Living in Wales can make it easy to forget how lovely the countryside can be.

Amogharatna wanted to run a half marathon while in the UK so we headed off early on Sunday to go to Leek where one was being held. It was a three hour drive but traffic was fine and we made it in good time. While he was running, I went over Blackshaw Moor to Buxton, and was treated to some amazing views over the countryside. Buxton seemed very nice and was very pretty. After that we headed off to the East Midlands Airport so Amogharatna could catch his flight home to Berlin, after which I drove home. It wasn't too bad, the M6 was a little busy but otherwise it was fairly painless. I did feel quite zoned out when I got home because of all the driving. I used a whole tank of petrol in three days.

Decided I needed a more portable machine and due to some fairly mediocre experiences with Atom based netbooks, picked up an Acer Ferrari One. The reason being that it is only a bit bigger than a netbook but has a much better spec, with a dual-core AMD CPU, full-size hard drive, discrete graphics, decent 11" screen and a decently sized keyboard. The downside is the Ferrari styling with a bright red lid and red highlights around the machine. I've seen much worse however. The default OS install was as I expected, loaded with crapware and an embarrassing F1 engine startup sound. Blew that away immediately with a fresh install of Windows 7 and I'm happy with the performance so far.

There was a thunderstorm on Friday morning so I shut everything down and left it all unplugged. When I got back last night I powered up the Atom based server. It came on OK but after about thirty seconds, the power supply expired with several loud flashes and bangs, which was a little startling to say the least. I just hope it hasn't taken out any of the other components with it.