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.