Whooosh

Yesterday it was off to Liverpool with Andy, Maz and Rob. Em was supposed to come too but sadly wasn't well. We drove to Hooton and got the train, which turns out to be a very quick and cheap way to get into the city.

We did some shopping, visited numerous pubs, encountered several accordion playing twats, and ended the day in an all you can eat Chines buffet just outside Lime Street station. I was quite good and only bought a set of bass strings from Dawsons, after drooling over an £1800 Rickenbacker bass and being somewhat astonished that a rather ordinary Fender Jazz Bass should be up for £3995. We also saw the nice Asus S200E in PC World, which is a nice affordable laptop with a touch screen. The Chinese buffet was pretty good but lacked any form of duck pancakes, a curious omission. Despite applying my usual strategy of many plates with small portions, I didn't gobble as much as I normally do at them. I think I've come to realise that my attitude to food is really unhealthy.

On the way home the Astra started to make a curious loud whooshing noise when the turbo came in, and at the same time the temperature gauge started to creep up. I checked it out today and the coolant level had dropped quite low, so I think the two things aren't related. From what Google tells me, it's probably just a split pipe somewhere, although it doesn't seem to affect the actual power of the engine at all.

The M17x is pretty much now fully set up on Windows 8 without any issues. It's running pretty nicely with most things I need. The only thing that was lost in the transition was my saved game for Minecraft which had been coming along quite well. Oh well, probably a good thing anyway.

Today has been OK. Rob P came over and hunted rabbits for a bit. As soon as he turned up there was a huge cheeky one that had been hiding under one of the cars, that got taken out at pretty much point blank range.

Can't believe it's New Year's Eve tomorrow. 2012 has been a curious year, good in some ways, utter shit in others.

Whoa...speeeeeeeeeed

Work today was even more quiet than yesterday. A long slow day. I was led astray and had chips for lunch with a couple of the others.

The SSD turned up today, so I backed up the M17x and popped it in. It's now running a nice fresh install of Windows 8, which is turning out to be rather interesting. So far, running on the SSD, it is ridiculously quick, although the 16gb RAM probably helps. Nearly all the hardware worked straight away with only little things like the freefall sensor that needed updating. I think it does need better graphics drivers though - while it recognises that there are two cards in there, it doesn't seem to understand the Crossfire link.

Annoyingly our broadband is being crap at the moment and slows to a crawl in the evenings, so getting hold of certain things has been tedious since it struggles even to download a 22mb file. In particular I need to enable the .net framework v3.5 for a couple of things, but it won't download. Same goes for the graphics drivers since they are about 134mb. Someone in work has had fibre installed and has something mad like a 33mb connection, galling when ours can't even manage 1mb in the evenings. I've left it copying the data back on which will take a while and then set it downloading stuff in the morning when the broadband should work again.

But so far things look quite promising. I find it interesting that they've introduced the new Metro interface which is somewhat dumbed down and easy to use, but have made a lot of changes that are nice for the more techy users, like the new file copy dialogue and task manager, and massively optimised it under the bonnet too. Also because it's Windows 8 Pro it has things that the old Windows 7 didn't have on this machine. Intrigued by Hyper-V, that sounds like it could be worth a play.

While the machine was backing up and things, had a go on Need for Speed: Most Wanted on the Vita. Only got it because it was cheap and had reasonable reviews. It's OK, but a bit annoying since there doesn't seem to be an option to have analogue acceleration, so you're driving balls-out all the time. Oh well. Apparently the old PS2 finally went out of production today, which seems quite bonkers really. I really enjoyed my old PS2. If the PS3 had had proper backwards compatibility I might have got one. The 360 is OK but I really don't like the way they've gone with it now, especially the new advert laden dashboard. The Wii U seems to have passed my radar completely, I know it's out and I've even watched the Ashens review of it, but it doesn't interest me in the slightest.

Also watched the Rammstein Live in Berlin DVD in the background, which is always awesome. I got it years ago before I really knew anything about the band and it was a bit of an eye opener. Due to my dislike of crowds I don't generally enjoy seeing bands live, but there are two that I would make an exception for - Iron Maiden and Rammstein.

Worth the wait (hopefully)

Work was very quiet today. ICT seemed quite busy but it turned out there were more people in our office than the entire rest of the building. I spent much of the day trying to set up a backup client that was being exceptionally awkward.

Came home and watched Short Circuit because we ended up talking about it in work somehow. What a great movie. I still love the introduction, makes me think of the 80s and all the potential that computers and robotics seemed to have at the time. Then I grew up and discovered that robotics is hard and computers aren't as exciting. Same with sci-fi, it's disappointing to read science fiction from the likes of Arthur C Clarke who assumed we'd be exploring space like anything by now. I read a quote once recently that said something along the lines of we're the generation where there isn't much left to explore on Earth, but haven't yet started exploring space properly.

Made the irritating discovery that mice attacked my water bottles for the bike, which I had brought in but forgotten to wash. Annoying. Have set up traps. The dog is still slightly traumatised from the fly incident and won't stay downstairs so I let him sleep on my bed for a bit. Serves the dual purpose of calming him down and warming my bed up.

I've had my eye on a Crucial SSD for my main laptop, the M17x, but kept off buying it in the hope of a price drop. My patience was rewarded as I checked today and it's come down by £50, so I've ordered one. The idea is to break the RAID0 setup it is using now and have the SSD as the primary drive and reformat the secondary drive for backups and things. It's going to have a fresh build as well since it's probably due for one, although I don't have any complaints about the performance. I'm dithering between just putting Windows 7 back on or making the jump to Windows 8. The Modern UI interface and other changes are rather offputting, especially without a touch screen, but I really like the sound of the way Windows 8 has been optimised under the hood.

I dithered about ordering one for the M11x too, but I'm not sure about that one yet.

Bit shocked about the Lostprophets singer being arrested. If the charges against him are true, then he's one sick bastard.

Feeling exceptionally tired at the moment, not really sure why.

Christmas

Well, Christmas is over and done with. The weekend was good, it was round to Andy and Maz's for the Christmas Eve Eve bash, which took place a day earlier this year. It was really good, lots of food, party games and random gossip, and a curiously hard quiz.

Yesterday was a good day. Went to my Dad's as usual for Christmas lunch and hung out for a bit before I came home again. I had got the stuff to make a Christmas pizza but I ended up having that today as I was too full. Basically a turkey and stuffing pizza. It turned out I'd accidentally picked up tikka flavoured turkey, which made it more interesting.

Spent today starting to clear out the room downstairs which is full of crap going back years. I found all sorts of things, such as my membership card and badges for the Dennis the Menace fan club and lots of invoices for repairs to my old Fiat Cinquecento which seems to have broken a lot more than I remember it doing. Also some random stuff from college and a couple of letters from my brother from when he'd just moved to Berlin.

There was also loads of tapes for the old Amstrad CPC, which I really didn't want to keep so I made a list of them. There's also a fair bit of old hardware that can go on Ebay, for examples a couple of Atari STs that I'd forgotten about, a couple of old Macs and things like that.

So basically at the moment there's a big pile of stuff to be burnt, a pile to be chucked, and so-on.

The dog hasn't had a good Christmas. He's scared of flies for some reason, which is ridiculous for a large greyhound. Somehow there's been an outbreak of big bluebottles, and so he's spent much of the last 48 hours as a shivering drooling wreck and trying to hide in the most peculiar places. I managed to squish at least six of the damn things this evening but there are still a couple more. I don't know where they're coming from.

In the time before Christmas, spent some time fooling around with the CPC emulator, playing some old games. I always seem to do this around this time of year, not really sure why. Some games are still fun, but some are truly terrible. I think the best game I ever played on the CPC was Stunt Car Racer, which was a 3D racing game that despite the track being barely there, still managed to have actual physics and was really good fun. Unlike Hard Drivin, which also had 3D graphics but had impossible steering and was monumentally unfair as other cars could just drive through you and cause a crash.

Work tomorrow. Hopefully it'll be nice and quiet.

Events

The rest of last week was OK. Thursday night was the Rhuddlan badminton club Christmas meal. Since the place it was going to be in St Asaph was flooded, we had it at one of the member's house, and since she is an epic cook, it was amazing. Really good fun.

On Friday it was off down to Kent to see Rob's sister and family, and then go to Belgos on the Saturday with that big group. The trip down wasn't fun since there was terrible weather until the M6 and we got there at about 11pm. The next day was spent hanging out and trying to get used to how gigantic the baby had grown, and then getting ready to get the train into Victoria from Whitstable. Totally random coincidence, while we were getting the Tube from Green Park to Covent Garden, the train pulled in and we saw some of the people we were meeting right outside the doors. Not only the same train and carriage, but the same set of doors!

The meal at Belgos was great as usual. The place is amazing, despite it being generally huge, chaotic and noisy, there's such a good atmosphere. I had the meat platter to start, followed by a giant steak and a chocolate orange cake. Last year I was brave and had lobster, but I decided it's a lot of work. It didn't stop Vicky who utterly demolished her lobster, leaving only fragments behind, which was quite impressive.

The Sunday was spent watching movies and generally being slobby. We had a snack/drinks run to Tesco and then we studiously ignored the welcoming sunshine outside and watched several movies mingled with Red Dwarf VI and then late night pizza. It was awesome. Movies:

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol: I wasn't expecting much from this, but it was surprisingly enjoyable, and despite his scientology weirdness, Tom Cruise has still got it. Jeremy Renner was pretty good too.

The Cabin in the Woods: Heard good things about this and I really liked it. The concept was nicely different and it didn't chicken out.

Brave: It looked amazing but I wasn't quite sure about this one. generally rather strange, but at least it didn't end with the princess marrying a handsome prince as that would be predictable.

The Escapist: Odd and random one, and dark in places, but very good.

On Monday I had to dial in to work and run a script on a Linux server that nobody else could remember their password to, and then it was time to drive back, which was fine until we got back to Wales when it started to rain again, in an annoyingly stereotypical way.

Yesterday and today have been OK in work. Today I managed to overdose on liquorice allsorts and sweets and make myself ill so I came home early, and then scoffed half a giant Toblerone, which didn't really help things. Oh well.

Geeky time

Work was OK except for another slightly perturbing meeting in the afternoon.

Yesterday evening was bored and flung a machine together out of spare parts. It used the old Atom motherboard, 1gb RAM, a 160gb laptop SATA drive and a 120gb IDE drive. Onto this mixture of parts I installed Windows Server 2012, because I could. It took forever to install and set itself up but once done it runs OK. Not sure what it'll do, if anything, but it was fun.

Really cold this morning. The car was frozen up and it was saying it was -4 on the way to work.

Another geeky evening. Someone in work said they had a laptop with a busted power connector, and they asked if I could install the new board that has the connector on it. It was a Dell Inspiron 1545, and it wasn't until I got home and looked at the service manual that I realised the charger board, as it's called, is literally underneath every other part. So it had to come completely apart, which also meant the CPU had to be regunked and everything. Fortunately the part went in OK and it fired up again without any issues. The Inspirons are definitely not in the same class as the Latitudes, not as easy to work on at all. Still, at least it wan't a Mac.

After that I looked at the Series 3mx I picked up recently. It was the pinnacle of the Psion Series 3 range, the last model with the faster CPU. Unfortunately both hinges were smashed. I did have a spare Series 3c that had good hinges, so I took them apart and put the mainboard from the 3mx into the 3c. So now it's a true frankenstein. The outside of it is branded as an Xemplar PocketBook III (for education), the screen half says it's a Series 3c and the keyboard is labeled as a 3mx. To confuse things even more the underside now has the shiny grey SSD doors and battery cover from the 3mx casing.

Watched a couple more episodes of The Walking Dead season 3, which is already massively better than the dull whinge-fest that was season 2, which felt like it could have been done in a couple of episodes.

I'm a hapless geek and I don't care.

Shopping

Yesterday was a curious day. Rob had to go to Manchester to do a tedious payroll module for his course, and came up with a cunning plan that Em and I would go with him and do some Christmas shopping. So we got up at stupid o'clock and got the train. The journey was uneventful and after we left Rob to go and find the hotel, Em and I went to a Costa Coffee and contemplated the relatively empty pavements outside and thought that perhaps the day would be productive and perhaps even fun.

First we went to some small and interesting places in the back streets by Picadilly Gardens. Em was particularly taken with Pop Boutique and if the logistics had allowed, would have transformed their house into a 70's paradise.

After this we went to the Arndale Centre. By now the city was predictably busier and the giant monument to consumerism was crammed with people. After a couple of hours it was getting somewhat wearying and we needed food. The food court was packed, but we got lucky because the only place without a queue was Taco Bell. I went up and ordered a burrito, quesadilla and two portions of churros without queueing at all, while KFC next door had a queue about 20 people deep. I think I started a new trend since as I was waiting for our food, the queue for Taco Bell suddenly grew hugely. The food from there isn't great, it's basically semi-Mexican fast food, but it's a nice change from McDonalds or KFC.

We saw a nice laptop in Currys, an Asus Vivobook with a touch screen and Windows 8. It worked surprisingly well, with the touch screen being a complimentary input device to the mouse and keyboard. The only thing it needed was a more substantial hinge to stop the screen wobbling when you touched it. I think that's the way it needs to go - instead of touch screens becoming the only input device, an additional one to the usual mouse and keyboard, at least for desktops and laptops. Dockable tablets are probably the way to go.

Finally we met up with Rob, went to Forbidden Planet and got the train back. We got a sack of takeaway food from Sainsbury's and ate it in front of Michael Portillo riding astonishing railways in Switzerland and making a prat of himself trying to talk to locals.

Today has been a fairly unproductive day, but I did spend an hour or so sorting out some Christmas shopping online when I wasn't sitting around watching DVDs. I also had a go at making macaroni cheese, which came out rather nice and there was enough for tomorrow lunchtime too.

Patrick Moore has died. Shame as he was a real character.

Meh

Badminton tonight was OK. More than the usual amount of people there so only had two games. We're rapidly developing a dislike for someone who comes with the Hateful One. She is rather large and other than being able to hit the shuttle quite well, seems to never understand how badminton is played. She'll serve to people on the same side as her all the time, never know whether she is serving, or even if people are just passing the shuttle to her. She'll be told several times a game but it doesn't stick. My theory is that she does it to appear ditzy, but it's just annoying.

Not much else to report. Tried to get some Christmas shopping out of the way since it's worryingly close now, but not all that easy.

Found the entirety of 'Live After Death' by Iron Maiden on Youtube in work today, that kept me isolated from the usual office gibbering that is so distracting for some time. Absolutely amazing live album. Also found a track by them I'd never heard before, a cover of 'Doctor Doctor' by UFO. Really good, even though it's when they had Blaze Bayley singing.

NCC-1701

Busy days in work. A lot going on with the backup system. Was tasked today with documenting how the backup system handles data retention in a 'See Spot Run' fashion, because every time I try to explain it, it gets out of hand and nobody understands it. I thought this would be quite easy but when I actually came to put it down, it ran away with me and I was left with a page of incomprehensible gibberish.

Made pasta this evening with a cheese sauce, sweetcorn and peas. Bit of an odd combination and I used caramelised onion cheese for the sauce and put some jalfrezi curry powder in it too, so while it was nice, it was something of a unique taste. Also made far too much so I think I've got lunch for two days now too.

I watched the 2009 Star Trek movie tonight, almost by accident. I didn't actually plan to watch the whole thing, but it sucked me in. Once again I really enjoyed it. It's a pretty radical development over the old series, but with it being an alternate reality, it doesn't invalidate any of the old stuff either. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with for the next one. Zachary Quinto is amazing as Spock too, absolutely spot on performance.

Radiator

Went into work in much the same mood as yesterday, but it gradually improved. I dropped the car off at the garage and they found it had a punctured radiator, which cost £150 to sort out.

The buyer of the M15x received it and left me the most glowing feedback I've ever had on Ebay, so I'm guessing he's happy with it. Good news.

Had another evening of fail. But never mind. It's early but I think I'm going to go to bed with the Kindle or the PS Vita. Tired and unable to process basic information at the moment.

Crudity

Yesterday was a busy day. Went to my Dad's in the morning as I hadn't been for a while. We didn't do all that much, just chilled and looked at my Berlin pictures and had the traditional Saturday fish and chips.

After that it was Steve's random Christmas bash, which was really fun. Ridiculous amounts of food, lots of conversation and general abuse. I met up with Rob and Andy beforehand to watch the dreadful rugby game between Wales and Australia, which was lost in the last seconds, and then we headed off. We were a bit tired which I think helped the conversation reache previously untold levels of crudity. I think the zenith was reached when Maz said she had a swirly chocolate brioche and I said it was because she didn't wipe front to back. This was followed by probably an hour or so of telling each other to fuck off and me farting loudly. It was all in fun but I look back and think it's one of those moments when you realise that it's you that's the arsehole if all you can bring to the conversation is stupid genital humour, farts and burps.

Spent today in a grumpy and bitter mood, consuming snacks in front of DVDs and loathing myself for it at the same time. I ran into someone from college in Morrisons, who I haven't seen in some time and I wish I hadn't while I was stood there with a basket full of crisps and several days worth of stubble because there's a pimple on my jaw that I didn't want to shave over. It didn't really help my mood.

And of course now it's December, which is a month I generally loathe because all the Christmas shit starts happening. It came as something of a shock to realise that I think I hate Christmas so much because everyone else has people to properly enjoy it with. That sounds terrible.

Work tomorrow and taking the car in to have the cooling checked out. Hope it's nothing serious but at least if it is, I've got the cash from the Alienware sale, so I'll keep that on standby.

The next thing I want to get rid of is the PowerEdge 1950. It comes to something when you want to get rid of a machine with 8 CPU cores and 16gb of RAM because you just can't think of anything to do with it. The problem is shipping the damn thing because it's such an awkward shape.

Achieving the impossible

It's been a curious week in work. Today we had a meeting with external people about the state and future of our backup system, which always means talking to people who have a lot more knowledge and experience, leaving me feeling somewhat inadequate. Today though, the guy asked if we we having issues. Are your backups finishing on time? Yep. Are you having migration problems? Nope. Reclamation problems? Nope. His response - 'Bliss!' He had been dealing with a system that backs up 27,000 nodes and holds several petabytes of data and has many, many issues, so our fairly issue of our server retaining too much data was child's play to him.

Badminton was good this evening. Many varied games and it was quite an active evening since there were a few less people, so plenty of games. It was good fun, but very tiring, in a good way.

The M15x ended while I was out, for £20 more than I paid for it a year ago. Somehow I've achieved the impossible - made a profit on a computer, assuming the buyer pays for it. I've got vague plans to get SSDs for the M17x and M11x. A guy in work was saying how nice Windows 8 is, not so much the new Modern UI stuff, but the improvements that make it much faster. Since it's quite cheap for an upgrade license, especially if you download it, I'm quite tempted to try it on the M17x, but at the same time, I'm not sure if it's just too early and should wait for a service pack. It does seem very Marmite though, people seem to either love or hate it. I've played with it in a VM.

Busy tomorrow, off to my Dad's in the morning and then it's Steve's Chrismassy bring-your-own bottle thing, which will be fun.

Car woes

Well, it's been a long time since I had to write about car woes on here. I got antifreeze and topped up the coolant in the Astra last night and it seemed fine after a test drive and when I went to work today, but when we went to badminton this evening it suddenly did the same thing - rising temperature and no heat from the vents. After the game we topped it up again, and it took a lot of water to fill up the expansion tank. Then it was OK all the way home, except that while heat was coming out of the vents again, there was no reading on the temperature gauge. So something is clearly amiss.

I think it's only losing water when the engine is running, but the oil looks OK so hopefully it's just a leak somewhere and nothing serious. To be fair I've had the car since May and this is the first issue I've had with it after 6,000 miles, and it's quite possible that something was damaged when I was driving it down the track on Tuesday or perhaps one of the floods I had to drive through.

Now that I've managed to clear all my debt and actually build up some savings, it's a nice feeling to not have to panic about getting the car fixed. Right now I know I could even go out and buy another car if I absolutely had to, which is comforting. I've said before that if the Astra did die I'd get another one, ideally a diesel estate with ABS - that's the only feature that I wish this one had. Otherwise I'm very fond of it.

The M15x continues to make good progress on Ebay. I might even manage the impossible - to make a profit on a computer!

Badminton was fantastic. I haven't played in quite some time, and the exercise felt great. I've really missed it to be honest.

Water water everywhere

I slept through much of the rain in the night, had no idea it had rained so badly. I went out in the car and the track was pretty bad, but in the darkness I couldn't tell how bad it was.

Throughout the day there was constant news on the floods in St Asaph, and I'd already passed the flooded new estate in Ruthin, which was built a couple of years ago on an area well known to be a flood plain, so it flooding was not really a surprise. The pictures of St Asaph at the height of the floods are horrendous. It must be awful for the people who had their homes flooded out. The latest looks like Rhuddlan is going to flood now.

I left work early to come home and look at the track in the daylight, and it's bad. I've seen water wash the top away before, but nothing like this. The ruts are down to the rocks the whole way, and in three place there are foot deep chasms. My car won't make it up again but the Berlingo can just about do it. I'm not sure what the hell we're going to do about it but the water is still flowing fast so can't anything at the moment. The field next to our land has recently been sold to a new guy after the previous farmer owner died and the only way to get it to is on our track and they are required as part of the deeds to help maintain the track so they have said they will help too.

Also on the way home the Astra started to overheat, but didn't quite make it into the red. With the stress of the day I was convinced it had completely died, but I realised I hadn't checked the coolant in ages and when it had cooled down I found the expansion tank was empty. I put some water and antifreeze in but I didn't have enough so I'll have to take my Mum's car to work tomorrow and get more.

Spent the evening sorting out my photos from back when I was still using iTunes on the Mac. It worked fine until it came to exporting them,when it made right fucking mess of it all. I've made quite a bit of progress on sorting out big events like holidays and things but there's an awful lot of just random things. Found plenty of things I'd forgotten about.

Data movements

Yesterday was a fairly quiet day, but headed down to see Rob and Em in the evening to watch the rugby and drop my old phone off to Rob. I did put it on Ebay but two people failed to pay for it. My theory is that because most of the stuff I sell on there is fairly specialist (vintage computers, etc), generally the people bidding for it aren't twats. We also watched a fascinating programme about travelling by train from Berlin to the Rhein area of Germany, the only downside was it being presented by Michael Portillo, who is downright embarrassing at times.

Today was a weird day. Despite the reports of torrential rain and flooding elsewhere in the country, it was nice here for most of the day, only raining in the evening. I almost took advantage of the weather but ended up spending quite some time sorting out stuff on the computers. I've been thinking for a while that three Alienware machines is probably a bit much so today I transferred all the stuff on the M15x to the M17x, wiped it, and listed it on Ebay. It had two bids before it had even been on there an hour, so that's a good sign. The M15x has been replaced by the newer M14x for over a year now but they seem to hold their value pretty well. Perhaps because they are more modular, with the graphics card being a separate board, while the M14x has it built into the motherboard. Well, we'll see how it does.

Also treated the M11x to some new feet since the ones on it are pretty useless. The new ones are much grippier and lift it up more so that there is better airflow.

I did make a start on sorting out some of the crap that is lying around on the two remaining machines, but got distracted by watching movies. There is a lot of stuff that's just been transferred from machine to machine to machine and never been sorted out. Not least some of the stuff that dates back when I was still using a Mac.

Not much else to report really. Still seemingly unable to start exercising, which is proving more and more frustrating.

Geisterjäger

Not a particularly fun day in work. It was a declutter day so there was an awful lot of shredding and scrapping of things. I've been moved to a desk which has still got stuff that belongs to someone who isn't in but technically is still an employee so wasn't able to declutter it. Anyway, I didn't have time due to having to faff about with a Unix machine at ridiculous speed for annoying reasons, and then spent much of the afternoon feeling like my head was falling apart after trying to go through the new settings for some of the backups and struggling to get software from the IBM website, which is bloody awful.

Came home tired and grumpy and not in the mood to do anything at all. So I watched Ghostbusters in German with English subtitles. It's odd watching a film that I'm very familiar with in another language. In retrospect however I should have gone to badminton but I completely forgot about it.

Tired but can't sleep, annoying.

Wibbly wobbly

The week has continued much as expected. Work today was particularly successful in the morning, since I managed to solve two issues with the Unix boxes which have been bothering me for a while, so that was good.

Not been doing much in the evenings at all, mainly just lazing about, which is not really very good.

Was ultra fat tonight, had a big stuffed crust BBQ feast pizza all to myself, which was very nice indeed. Ironic since it was supposed to be badminton but Rob, Em and Steve had other plans.

But this is the problem, this is what I keep doing and I'm tired of being fat and lazy. Just can't seem to get my arse in gear to do anything about it. Especially now it's dark and cold in the evenings, and the weather was truly horrific today. I'm not even sure how much I weigh at the moment since my scales died.

Was a bit naughty after payday and picked up a new project laptop, something I've not done in a while. It's a Dell Latitude 2100, the chunky netbook type thing meant for educational use. It was missing a hard drive, battery and some screws but was otherwise complete and was only £30. It turned out to be a curious amalgamation of parts from both a Latitude 2100 and 2120, but the motherboard is definitely a 2100 as it has the original Atom CPU.

I've put a spare drive in it and it runs nicely. Given it only has a single core 1.6ghz Atom and 2gb RAM, I'm surprised at how snappy Windows 7 is on it. It still needs a caddy for the hard drive as it's held in place by tissue paper at the moment, and there are still a few missing screws. All good fun.

Work trauma

Friday and the weekend were good. It was off to Rob and Em's to watch the rugby and consume snacks. The rugby wasn't much fun since Wales lost to Somalia but we did get through a lot of pizza.

I was all set to have a lazy fat weekend but Andy and Maz suggested a bike ride on Saturday, so at least that helped mitigate things a little. Sunday wasn't particularly good though as I developed something of a fascination with cheesy nachos. On Saturday I watched the Inbetweeners movie, which was OK and a nice ending to it all, but made me never want to go to Malia, ever, and completely randomly, Cocoon, becuase I remember it being out way back when. That was OK, somewhat strange though.

The Inbetweeners is funny but does hit slightly close to home, since high school was a rather shitty experience for me all round. The Inbeweeners is set in 6th form, which I never did, but it felt scarily similar. Hated it completely, and I think I still have issues with things because of it. Also I think I should have done a lot better than I did in my GCSEs because of that ridiculous attitude that if you were good at things you were a swot and to be tormented. Grr, just thinking about it pisses me off. I wonder how life would have turned out if I had done psychology instead of IT at college as I briefly considered.

Work has been OK since I went back in yesterday. Not much happened while I was off, so that was good, but things are piling up thick and fast that need to be looked at. In a way it's good because they are new and challenging, but at the same time trying to coordinate the time to get them done is proving a bit of a nightmare, especially when you have a slightly hysterical manager trying to do many things at once. Things are coming together though and I think I'm getting a much better grip of the backup system now, which is a nice feeling.

Randomly tried to make my own Spezi today by getting a can of Coke and a can of Fanta out of the vending machine. I wasn't sure what ratios to try so first I tried half and half which wasn't particularly good, and then found one part Fanta to four parts Coke seems to work nicely. Not as good as a proper bottle of Mezzo Mix though, damn I love that stuff.

Have now watched all of Red Dwarf X on DVD, which I really enjoyed. It's good to see them going back to the old rickety sets and concentrating more on the story and characters with a nice dash of decent effects to round it off. With me being such a hapless geek, I keep spotting things though, like the way the door mechanism on their quarters is made up of two Dell D-series Latitude docking stations stuck to the doors with barely any attempt to hide what they are. That did make me giggle.

While unable to sleep in the middle of the night, I finally discovered my copy of Robots and Empire, but it's not very useful right now as I'm rereading Game of Thrones, and then I've got A Clash of Kings to read, and also the first Hunger Games book, but I might read that between them to take a break from the brilliant but hard to read Ice and Fire books.

Burn, baby, burn.

Not the most productive day, but I did take my Mum's car into town and give it a wash, since I can't remember the last time it had one - probably not this year. It actually had moss growing on it. It took some doing to get it clean. Looks a lot better now though.

After that, had a nice bonfire with some crap that has been lying around for ages.

Other than that I've not really done all that much today except listen to German DVDs while playing Minecraft. So far I've failed to meet any of the objectives I'd set this week, which included such things as replaying Dead Space and BioShock, and things like that. Oh well. The one thing I haven't done which I really wanted to was head to the gym and get my programme sorted out so I can start going again.

Normally it would be badminton this evening but I didn't have anywhere to put the dog and didn't want to leave him in the car for too long. I headed over to Steve's and had food with him and Rob, which was nice. Steve tried a new collar on Binx the cat, but she managed to tighten it and start choking which led to the three of us chasing her all over the house to get it off her, poor thing.

The long walk

I got up today and was about to embark on another lazy day of not doing much in front of DVDs, when I decided enough was enough and felt like going for a walk with the dog. I wasn't sure what to do so I ended up going to the Brenig and going all the way round. It takes a LOT longer than on a bike and not far from the end, my body gave up and my hip started really hurting. Sadly at that point there was at least a couple of miles to go so I complained bitterly the rest of the way, mainly to the dog who ignored me, but also to the occasional signpost and clumps of heather. The dog also now has a fear of cattle grids because he tried to walk across one before I could stop him and fell into it and had to be rescued.

Fortunately the hip seems to have settled down again after a nice long shower so I feel OK again. Glad I actually managed to do some exercise though. Kind of ruined it though by going to town and picking up a takeaway.

Listening to Rob on the radio, quite strange to hear his voice.

I think the walk has taken it right out of me, feeling very very tired at the moment.

Spare time

Sunday was uneventful, pretty much spent the day being lazy and watching DVDs. I watched all three series of the Inbetweeners, which was funny but did get somewhat repetitive after a while.

Yesterday went into work, despite it being a day off, just to check up on the systems and say hi to people, then took my Mum to her writing group thing which is why I'm off this week so I can look after the dog.

Not sure what to do with myself now. I don't want to just slob about but at the same time I can't think of anything to do. Annoying. I have however discovered how dreadful daytime TV is, the only acceptable things so far seem to have been a rocky music channel and the original series of Star Trek that's being rerun.

Trying to rationalise my computers a bit more. I'm considering selling the M15x while it's still worth a bit and then using the funds to apply some upgrades to the M17x and the M11x. Also I've found myself not really using the PowerEdge 1950 as much as I thought so that can go as well. The only problem with that is that it's awkward to ship, and the box it arrived in was accidentally burnt in a bonfire.

The main upgrades I'd like for the M17x and M11x is SSDs. The M11x would benefit from this since it does get moved around a lot. The M17x is currently running two drives striped as a RAID1 array, but what I'd do is use the SSD for the main system and then keep a hard drive in the second bay for backups and to keep VirtualBox machines separate.

Windows 8 is a difficult one at the moment. On the one hand it has a lot of nice tweaks over Windows 7, such as much faster booting, a really nice task manager upgrade, that sort of thing, but on the other it has the new gimpy Start screen and the Metro stuff optimised for touch screens. I suppose there's no reason why you can't just use it like 7 but with a different start menu. I've found that with 7 I just pin my most popular programs to the taskbar and hardly ever use the Start menu anyway. I did see some Windows RT tablets in Berlin, which seemed rather strange. To have Windows running on ARM is interesting but I'm not really sure that having two incompatible processor architectures running what looks like the same thing is a good idea, too much potential for confusion.

Probably the best thing to do right now is to stick with Windows 7 and see what happens over the next few years. I'm not really happy with the way that Apple has made the walled garden approach trendy and acceptable and how everyone is now going in that direction, but at least Android and Windows 8 allow sideloading of applications. It's going to be an interesting time I think.

It's difficult for a long-term enthusiast to accept that computers are becoming dumbed down appliances for everyone to use. I suppose the same thing happened to cars, and probably other technologies too. What will probably happen is the market for self built and enthusiast computers will become much smaller and specialist, like the kit car market today. That might not be a bad thing I suppose. And if computers become tablet like appliances with the data being held on the Internet rather than on the device itself, then there will still have to be servers and people to administer them.

It does seem ironic that they are pushing cloud storage so much when storage is now finally cheap and plentiful. I still find it ridiculous that I can put a 32gb MicroSD card into my phone for under £20, and 4tb hard drives are just becoming available.

Trying not to have a bit of a rant about Apple, but I'm really quite pissed off at what the company has become.

Back home

Well, it's been a really good week. I spent two nights staying with my brother which is always interesting since he lives in a little Buddhist community. It works out nicely since they always meditate at 7am so I know I can get the in the bathroom to have a shower, haha.

Unlike previous occasions, this trip was pretty much freestyle, with no great plans to do anything really. Highlights included the Funkturm, which was a nightmare to get to and turned out to be closed, the video game museum, which was completely empty apart from me but still good, and going to see Skyfall in Potsdamer Platz with an intermission that made it even longer. It wasn't all leisure either, I helped my brother shift some stuff for the Buddhist centre and took a look at his girlfriend's computer after the hard drive failed.

I was a bit worried about the weather with it being November, but while it was a bit cold and windy at the beginning of the week, it lightened up a bit and was pretty tolerable for most of it. It does get a bit annoying when it's very cold though since you get all layered up and then have to get on a train where you get all hot and sweaty.

The two nights in the hotel were good. It was a hotel I'd tried to stay in before but last time they fucked it up and I got shuttled off to another hotel, back when it was part of the AGON group. Now the AGON hotels are owned by Ibis but this one is owned by someone else. I had a room right up above the elevated tracks of the U2 line, but since I'm weird like that, I saw it as a bonus. It was fun to watch trains go past and the regular rumble of trains in the night was reassuring, meaning that there hadn't been some dreadful apocalypse that I hadn't heard about.

The journey  back today was fine, although it was a much earlier flight than I'm used to so it was a bit of a tired bewildered journey to the airport while it was still dark. On the plus side I got to see the new Ostkreuz station which is a big improvement, and I got there just as the sun started to rise and since the whole side of the station is glass, the view was amazing. I tried to get a photo but they never quite capture it.

On the way home I felt like watching something new and I found Transformers 3 and The Inbetweeners cheap in Morrisons. Transformers in Michael Bay form is terrible, it really is. It's just a showcase for ludricrous CGI. It was a tolerable enough brain disengagement flick though. The Inbetweeners is strange but bloody funny. I've finished the first season.

Strange to think that after tomorrow I have another week off. Except I think I will pop into work on Monday just to make sure everything is running OK and to say hi to people. Then it's time to look after the dog for a few days - hope he's forgiven me by then since he's ignoring me at the moment. Silly old thing.

Berlin again

Yesterday I was in work from 7am to 6pm getting the backup system up and running again. It did get a bit panicky in the late afternoon when it didn't look like I'd manage it, but fortunately things suddenly came together and it came back up and was ready for that evening's backups.

That meant that I was able to go and see the Denbigh fireworks display with Rob and Em and Caroline and Rob. We walked up to the top of town, which is always a bit of a slog, but it was OK. They don't have a bonfire but the display went on for about half an hour and the castle is a really nice atmospheric setting. Somewhat randomly they had 80s music playing, and then some woman sang a song while my old friend Darren played drums with fiery sticks. It was quite cool until one of the fiery bits fell off and nearly set his feet on fire. Also had a hog roast bap which was pretty awesome to be fair. Unfortunately while I was getting my change a really loud firework went off and startled me, making me say 'FUCK' to the poor guy, it was somewhat embarrassing.

Today it was off to the airport to come to Berlin again. Because of the stress and hassle of the weekend it really sneaked up on me and I had to have a last minute panicked check of what was in my bag to make sure I had packed sensibly. I'm still not sure even now that I have everything I need. The only thing I did forget was a plug adapter but fortunately I remembered in enough time to pick one up at the airport. Also I'd forgotten to top up my phone but fortunately Rob the gentleman was able to respond to my frantic text and did it for me.

The flight was rather uneventful and quite dull for most of it due to clouds, until the end when the sun was behind the plane and you could see the shadow on nearby clouds, that was cool. I also had a Polish family behind me, and unfortunately the kid would occasionally kick my seat and gabble away in Polish and English. It was pretty funny when the plane was taxiing in Berlin though since he gave a great sigh and said 'This is so fucking boring!', bearing in mind he was only about 6. Fortunately I had Game of Thrones on my phone so I read that which kept me occupied.

It was certainly nice to see the sun in Berlin after the grim cold fog and rain in Liverpool. It was a pretty grim drive to the airport as well. I met up with my brother OK and we headed back to his place via a bus and the U-bahn, stopping off at Moritzplatz for a falafel. It was from a random Imbiss that neither of us had tried before, and it turned out to be pretty delicious. While eating we had the amusing event of a policeman parking his car in the bike lane so he could get a burger. It's nice hearing German around me again. I always like listening to the language and seeing how much I can understand.

I've spent much of the evening just sitting around with the laptop and listening to music while my brother was busy with Buddhist things. A bit dull but after the weekend of hell and a day travelling I didn't feel like going out. Also I remoted into work and checked to make sure things were running OK, which happily they were. Somewhat annoyingly the remote access actually works better from Berlin than home.

I realised on the way over that I haven't actually got any plans at all - normally I try in advance to think of things to do when I come over here but this time I just *needed* to get away for a while so I have no idea what I'm actually going to do. Something will turn up though, I'm sure. It's going to be fun.

Catastrophe

After my fairly miserable post the other day, Friday didn't seem to be getting any better. And then it got hugely worse. Disk failure took out both a fileserver and the backup system. It took me until about 1am to get the backup system to the point where it could run a restore on the disk that coudln't be recovered for the fileserver. It also involved shifting lots of tapes around and a lot of faffing.

Yesterday I had to remote in and do some more work, and then today go into the office to put more tapes in and supervise it. I was there three hours and it was creepy having the whole building to myself apart from the caretaker, and also bloody cold as the heating was off.

So the weekend didn't really go as planned - I missed out on Skyfall with the guys from work on Friday night and a meetup with my old work colleagues last night. In between bouts of work, I ended up reading old Transformers comics on my laptop and eating various pizzas.

It wouldn't be so bad but I'm leaving the country on Tuesday so I'll have a shitload of work to do tomorrow to get the backup system back to something like normal again. As it is I'm planning on taking my work laptop with me in case something happens.

One thing I did which was quite random was listen to some songs by the Presidents of the USA, which are really good fun. I remembered that they used weird instruments, a guitar with two bass strings and a bass with two bass strings and a guitar string. Inspired by this, I remembered the crappy old Strat copy I was given by my niece and a short while later it had two bass strings on it. Not quite the right gauges and they are flatwounds, but it kind of works and is a proper hoot to play.

Fuck it all

Today in work was not much better. Got moaned at for bringing a cup of hot water to my desk and putting a teabag in it since I've been drinking the occasional cup of Earl Grey or Chai instead of my usual squash. I've never wanted to be involved in a tea rota since my last job because it's never right, too hot, too cold, too strong, too weak, too milky, too much sugar, in the wrong cup, etc. Also the guy I've been covering for came in to visit and while it was nice to see him, he managed to leave me feeling that a lot of the stuff I've been doing is wrong, so that didn't help. I don't know why I fucking bother, should have just left the fucking things to crash and burn.

Badminton should have improved my mood after a nice meal and chat round at Steve's but then we found that the horrible hag had brought her moron friend again who seems to be completely unable to grasp even the most basic rules of badminton even after being told several times. And complains about various aches and pains which are of course in no way related to her being morbidly obese. That's probably cruel but right now I don't give a fuck.

So the week gets shitter and shitter really. I'm just counting down the days until I go to Berlin next Tuesday and get away from the work clusterfuck for nearly two weeks.

Generally fucked off with the world. Sometimes living in a rural area like this can be monumentally shit and hateful and catastrophically lonely.

Bad day helped by ludicrous burger

Not a great day in work. Forced to move desks pointlessly. All I'm going to say is there's lies, damn lies and statistics. Fuck's sake it's hard sometimes. Also root access to Unix servers tends to be restricted to a limited group of people for a fucking reason.

Went to Wetherspoons for lunch with a colleague. I'd intended to get a waffle, but we both ended up getting large burgers. Mine consisted of lower bun, cheese, bacon, burger, burger, fried egg, onion rings, upper bun. Plus a few more onion rings and chips. It was good but not really good for afternoon productivity due to being bloated and sleepy. Got to stop doing things like that, I've been eating far too much recently.

Came home in a fairly crappy mood, but sat down and watched the DVD of Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, which I haven't seen in years. It cheered me right up, absolute classic comedy. I'd forgotten about how much John Cleese swears in the Albatross bit - 'Course you don't get fucking wafers with it you cunt!' Also reminded me of that thing that is coming out round about now, the animated version of Graham Chapman's autobiography, which should be quite interesting as the book is completely bonkers. Graham Chapman is definitely my favourite Python, for a variety of reasons.

Unfortunately I missed the radio show that Rob was on tonight, since I completely forgot about it. Balls. Looks like it'll be put on the website at some point though, so that's good.

Tired but edgy now, like I might not sleep when I go to bed. Hate that feeling because it usually ends up true. Argh.

Fat (again)

Thursday badminton was OK, had some good games, including a late one with just Rob, Em and Steve. This was unexpectedly fun as we could swear to our hearts content.

Friday was Andrea in work's Halloween party. I'd been persuaded to go as Mario with Robert, who was going as Luigi. The costumes were actually pretty good and it was a great evening. Really good fun.

Saturday was a bike ride with Rob from St Asaph to Prestatyn. It was a bright day but cold and windy. Still, it was fun and we weren't the only nutters out on bikes. We met an old couple on a tandem and several guys on expensive carbon bikes and lycra. There was also a short but very steep hill towards the end of the ride which I managed to get up without stopping to my own and Rob's astonishment. The only thing that went wrong was me wrecking the Presta valve on Rob's back wheel with an incorrectly set up pump so we had to change the inner tube.

In the evening it was time to meet up for an Indian for Rob P's birthday, which was really good. There was a curious delay before the main course, but the food was spectacular. I was boring and went for a butter chicken, but it was absolutely delicious.

Sunday was a quiet day except for a trip to set up the laptop I'd got for Vicky. It took a little while since her music and photos were on an iMac which was a right faff since Mac OS X would't write to my NTFS formatted external hard drive and copying over wireless would have taken forever. In the end I had to reformat the drive and do it that way.

Sometimes I hate my fucking life, today is not a good day and I don't see the week getting any better. to be honest and it becomes quite difficult to maintain the facade of cheerfulness and professionalism. Fortunately though I have booked a trip to Berlin next week to see my brother, so that will hopefully lift my spirits.

Absolute total cobblers

Not much to report today except spending much of the day in a bleh mood.

The Galaxy Note has been treated to a silicone case and a 32gb memory card, because both were startlingly cheap. I don't normally like cases but since the Note is big and a bit slippery I thought one would be an idea. It does make the thing a little bigger but grippier, and also means the camera lense isn't flush with the case.

The Astra went in today for an oil change and to get the creaking suspension and handbrake checked out. They said the suspension bushes seem to be rubbing but there isn't anything actually amiss. The handbrake has been adjusted and cleaned so it hopefully won't stick on when it gets cold like my old Focus used to, which was infuriating. I realised on the way home that I miscalculated so it had the oil change 500 miles early but it can't hurt. 10w40 semi-synthetic.

Against everything I've ever been told, I watched Red Dwarf Back to Earth. What a total load of cobblers. I honestly went into it thinking that after all the anti-hype it might have at least some OK moments but no. The whole concept was utterly ridiculous and it just wasn't funny in the slightest. The only redeeming thing was the nice CGI shots that showed the scale of Red Dwarf itself, but even that isn't really in keeping with the show.

Fortunately the two episodes I've seen of Red Dwarf X are infinitely better. Looking forward to when the DVD is available.

I think I like Skrillex's music, which bothers me. I somehow feel at a fundamental level that it's too young for me.

Headspace not quite right at the moment.

Diagrams

A fairly meh day in work. I was working on updating some documentation and had to use Office to create some new diagrams and things. For the first time I appreciated what the new interface that 2007 introduced is trying to do, and it does kind of make sense.

After work it was the final D&D session with James before he moves home to Boston in the USA and then eventually to his new job in Malaysia. We didn't actually play D&D though since his house was upside down so we played Super Munchkin. For such a simple concept it is surprisingly complex and can be almost Mario Kart like in the ability to completely fuck over other players. James also asked us if we wanted anything from the stuff he had left over, so we all took a couple of trophies, in my case a Star Trek mug and a rather beautiful crystal candle holder.

After using the Galaxy Note for a few days, I am getting used to it. The size is fine when it's in my pocket but it can be a bit of a problem when using it in one hand. I've ordered a silicone case for it so hopefully that will make it grippier, which will help.

Not much else to report really. I've booked the Astra in on Wednesday to have the oil changed and the handbrake adjusted and greased up for the winter so it doesn't seize on. Also the suspension creaks loudly when going over speedbumps. Another issue is that when first started from cold it won't rev above 2000rpm without misfires, which a quick Google indicates might be the injectors. But that goes away as soon as it starts to warm up and isn't a major problem at the moment, so I'm going to leave that.

Splash bars

Ridiculously nice weather today and I was invited on a bike ride by Andy and Maz, unfortunately I'd already arranged to head over to my Dad's to do some work on the road bike.

We put some new tape on the handlebars since the original black tape was worn out. It went on OK and fortunately the yellow and black splash pattern quite suits the bike although the yellow isn't quite the same as the paint on on the bike. The problematic rear dearailleur was sorted out so it now selects all gear and the rear tyre was replaced with a spare one that my Dad had lying around. I hadn't realised how worn the rear tyre was. The new one is slightly larger but not enough to matter. We managed to clean up the chain too, but it looks like the sprockets on the front and rear are pretty worn so they'll need replacing at some point. But that can be a winter project since it's not that bad yet.

Otherwise it's been a fairly dull day. I got a Chinese on the way home and unexpectedly encountered the CEO from work who surprised me by saying hello and then sitting opposite me in an awkward silence until he got his food. I didn't think he had any idea who I was.

Expensive coaster

Yesterday was OK but fat. We had a bacon breakfast with the somewhat strange revelation that you could have the bacon butties in a box without the bread. So I had bacon, egg and mushrooms in a box with BBQ sauce, and it was delicious. Then we went to the same place for lunch.

Badminton in the evening was OK. I had a couple of good games but was still not quite up to running around properly although I did get some decent shots in. Still getting used to the raquet with the new strings. It even sounds different. It was absolutely heaving with people - probably the busiest I've ever seen it, which is good as it meant lots of variety and will keep the club going.

Today it was off to see the Indiana Jones trilogy on the recently released bluray edition. It was really good,we watched the first three films quite happily but the Crystal Skull disk was relegated to use as a coaster. There was a crazy amount of food as per usual and it was a fantastic day.

Off to my Dad's tomorrow with the road bike to put new handlebar tape on it and hopefully replace the chain too.

Kies = poo

It was a day off today, not really as a holiday but because my Mum had a hospital appointment. I took the morning to go and see my sister, which was nice but also because the trackpad on her laptop had stopped working. I couldn't figure out why and despite me telling her to use Firefox with Adblock, it had spyware on it and toolbars and crap, so I brought it home with me to sort it out.

I finally got a new phone. I had intended to get a Galaxy S2 as the natural progression from the Galaxy S, but discovered that the Galaxy Note was about the same price. It's rather big with a 5.3" screen but it is a much higher resolution. So I've ended up with one of those. It arrived today but was on the old Gingerbread version so there was no point setting it up until it was on Ice Cream Sandwich. Unfortunately it didn't want to update over the air so I had to use the Samsung Kies application to do it. It did NOT want to cooperate on my Windows 7 machine and was reluctant to do it even on the old Precision M90 with XP. Eventually I just left it to do it's thing while I was out at badminton and when I came home it had finally worked. They are supposed to be releasing Jelly Bean for it at some point so I'll have to go through it all again at some point, arse.

It remains to be seen if the Note will be as good as the Galaxy S was. The size is...well, yes, a concern. It's big. I have a feeling that I'll be mocked when I use it, much like I was when I had the old Nokia N-gage. Despite the size, it feels OK to use and the screen is downright beautiful. The Galaxy S has been running various ROMs with normal Android since I had it so it's odd to see the Samsung Touchwiz interface again. The Note doesn't seem to have quite the same level of support in custom ROMs so I'll probably just stick with that for the time being.

My badminton racquet has returned with a new handle and strings. The handle is rather weird as the new tape is almost sticky and it feels different. The new strings are amazingly tight which meant it was difficult to control my shots and also since I've not exercised in a while after I was ill it wasn't a particularly good evening for me. Also the new strings stink, which is odd.

Friday tomorrow, thank goodness.

Slow week then noise

It's been a fairly uneventful week. Work has been OK. Today I helped deal with a hapless Latitude E5410 that had been subjected to an entire mug of tea emptied into it. It was thoroughly soaked inside, right through to the underside cover. We took it apart, cleaned it out as best we could and pointed a heater at it for an hour or so and somewhat amazingly it booted up quite happily except the trackpad doesn't work and the keyboard is a little sticky.

Tonight went with the gang to see the Mugenkyo Taiko drummers in Wrexham, which was a performance of Japanese drumming. It was really good, and very loud, and it was interesting how they combined martial arts and drumming. The first half was kind of serious but they really lightened up in the second half. Very good fun to watch. It made me think of the Djembe drumming workshops that an old friend of mine started up briefly and how much fun they were.

Really tired now, it's been a long day and I was woken up at 4am by monsoon rain and then found it really hard to get back to sleep again.

The Aztecs built Notre Dame in Birmingham

It's been a good weekend. Yesterday was Andy's birthday meal which was at Romeo's in Llandudno. I think I'd been there a long time ago but it's a very good Italian restaurant. There quite quite a few of us there and we all had an awesome time and the food was great.

I gave Civilisation V a go when I wasn't well the other week and it was too much for my ill brain to cope with, especially since it has the least helpful tutorials I've seen. Today was good though, had a nice long game with some random elements introduced. I ended up playing as the Aztecs and named all their cities after English ones, and then it came to the time when you could add wonders to the cities, so I ended up with the curious situation of the Aztecs building Notre Dame in Birmingham. Having never played Civilisation before it took some time to adapt to it but I think it's really good fun.

Also carried on with Halo ODST with Rob on Live this morning. It's a bit repetitive and I'm not very clear on what's actually going on half the time but it's good fun. Same old Halo really, just in a city.

The Galaxy S has been reflashed again. I decided I wasn't hugely keen on the version of Darky's ROM on it so I've switched it to the stable release of Cyanogenmod 9, which Darky is based on. So far it seems pretty good - it feels smoother and faster anyway. I'm at the point where I'm tempted to pick up a Galaxy S2 since they have come down a lot in price and I coild probably still get a decent amount for the Galaxy S, despite it's rather worn appearance. An interesting option is the Galaxy Note but it woudl just be too big I think, although I do like the idea of the stylus. I'd still love one with a physical QWERTY but there aren't that many options, and the Android phones that do have them tend to be low-end and a bit cheesy.

WARRRGH

Last night was badminton. It wasn't too bad but I really started to cough and suffer towards the end. Still, it was great to hang out at Steve's and play with Binx who is becoming very brave and sociable. She's such a dainty little cat though.

Today in work was bad this morning - I just felt awful, my ears ached and I felt tired and unable to focus. It was really bad. I think something nutritional was out of kilter becuase I was drawn to the vending machine and had something like six packets of crisps after which I started to feel more normal. I really wasn't up to badminton this evening.

I experimented with pizza making earlier in the week. First was a fairly ordinary cheese and pepperoni one that came out nicely, but then I tried something a bit different. I made another one with tomato puree, sweetcorn, crumbled blue cheese, mozarrella and pepperoni. It was bloody delicious, and instead of dominating the flavour the blue cheese was a subtle background taste. Really nice.

The road bike is going to be treated to some new black and yellow handlebar tape to match the paint and I think it needs a new chain as the one on it seems rather floppy. I think the previous owner did rather a a lot of miles on it though. I think the cogs might be worn too, not sure really.

Lance Armstrong is pretty much confirmed to be a doping cheat. I read the report about it all that was released and it's hard to deny it any more. I was kind of hoping it wasn't true despite reports that he was a bit of a twat anyway but oh well. Let's hope this year marks the start of a clean TDF so they can restore the image of cycling.

I just watched Prometheus. It was beautifully made but I think pretty much all of the crew needed a damn good slap for being complete and utter morons. Michael Fassbender was good as usual though.

Filthy dirty

Yesterday and today were unremarkable. Had to go into work really early today to reconfigure and test some services on one of the Unix boxes, since I'd have to restart them and kick everyone off. Fortunately it worked fine after a bit of fiddling about.

Still coughing well, had a gigantic coughing fit just before I went to work, not good.

Watched a movie that Dave in work lent me, called The Raid. It's set in Jarkarta and is subtitled, and is pretty much unceasingly and loudly violent. But oddly watchable in a disengaged brain kind of way.

Also cleaned up the bikes, which I've been meaning to do for a while. The road bike wasn't too bad but the salt on the coastal trip has made the chain go rusty. I cleaned it up a bit and oiled it. Closer examination showed there's quite a lot of wear to the chain and front and rear cogs, so it might be time to replace them. I've also ordered some new handlebar tape for it, since the stuff on it is very worn. The mountain bike was absolutely filthy and horrible, covered in grainy nasty mud that was a complete sod to clean off. It took some time.

Been eating too much, feel really crappy about it now. I thought I was doing OK but not this week. Bah.

Cough

The weekend was OK. The badminton club meal was on Saturday and was decent enough, although the Indian didn't seem to be able to cope with a group of 20 or so, unusually. Food was OK though.

Went for a bike ride around the Brenig on Sunday with a guy I work with and someone that used to work with us. It went OK but two of us took the off-road route that I didn't know existed and ended up getting very tired and muddy. I felt quite crappy for the rest of the day.

Tired today and still coughing rather. Work was frustrating due to issues with Samba on one of the AIX boxes, and I despise Samba utterly.

Not much to report otherwise. I sometimes think I miss the old days of computing. I look back at something like the Psion Organiser II and think it was amazing what people managed to do with an 8-bit 0.3mhz CPU, 64k of RAM and a 4x20 character display. It seems odd that such a humble machine could be perceived as more powerful than a modern smartphone because you can pick it up and program it directly.

About to re-read the Hobbit since people were talking about it in work today and I haven't read it in years.

Better

Spent much of last night coughing instead of sleeping, and it didn't stop in the morning so I decided to err on the side of caution and stay away from work again, as I was also completely shattered. The coughing has got less over the day though and I finally feel more human, so I'm sure I'll be in work tomorrow.

Not much to report due to being ill. I did finally however manage to identify a remix of a Fluke song called Bullet. I'd heard it on a compilation CD decades ago and loved it but couldn't find out which one of the many remixes it is. The original song is good but I love the remix. Anyway it's this one, although the version on the CD was much shorter.

Still not well

Not been well today at all. Spent pretty much the whole day shivering and sweating in my bed, watching vintage Top Gear on my laptop and random YouTube videos.

Also randomly used the free car check websites to see if there were any details on my old cars. The Prelude has been taxed for a whole year so hopefully is in the hands of someone who can give it the attention it needed. The Focus, somewhat astonishingly, is also taxed but now listed as white. Perhaps someone removed my dreadful black paintjob and did it right, who knows? Sadly the old Vectra hasn't been taxed in over two years. My old Cinquecento that I sold in 2003 hasn't been taxed for four years, shame. That was a fun little thing.

The guilt-free computer parts were installed on Saturday. The M17x is quite happily running with 16gb RAM and has a test virtual machine with 8gb assigned memory running quite nicely. The M15x CPU upgrade was a bit more involved since some of the casing had to come off to get the heatsink out, but otherwise that one's working fine too. The i7 I put into it is actually slower than the i3 in terms of clock speed but I think the extra physical cores and turbo-boost will help. Not sure really.

Ill

Friday was a long dull day in work. Not sure why.

Went on bike ride with Andy and Maz yesterday. We went from St Asaph to Prestatyn and back, which was a good long ride. There was a coastal wind which made things rather hard in some places and easier in others. We also took great delight in cycling past the epic tailbacks caused by the roadworks by Rhuddlan.

Not well today at all. I felt something wasn't right yesterday but today I feel properly bunged up and achy, more like flu than a cold. Spent the day in bed with laptop watching the rest of Firefly, which I really liked. Just need to watch Serenity now. Also caught up with Doctor Who. Quite liked the last couple of episodes with a fair few twists and turns in there.

Functional

It was a curious day in work, slow, dull and it made me want to listen to Limp Bizkit. I have no idea why since I've not listened to them since that curious period about ten years ago when I was obsessed with them, Korn and Linkin Park. The frustrating thing about Limp Bizkit is that behind the horrible vocals and childish lyrics is some half decent music. I keep meaning to check out the stuff that Wes Borland did when he left. I have to admit a guilty liking of the song 'Hot Dog' because I like the guitar in it and the line 'If I say fuck two more times that's 46 fucks in this fucked up rhyme.' because it's true.

Badminton tonight was OK, managed a couple of reasonable games though I had to spare my right leg a bit. Also before we got to meet Steve's new cat Binx, who is a lovely little cat, all different colours and with the most amazing bluey-green eyes.

The bits for the computers have arrived, funded by the sale of the 3DS and Virtual Boy. The M17x is having an upgrade to 16gb RAM, and the M15x is going to get the 8gb RAM from the M17x and a quad-core CPU. The reason being is that I want to run virtual machines on them. The only other thing I'd like is an SSD for the M11x since it's getting moved around a lot more recently.

Still not much to report

Not much to report except had a minor strop when someone complained about the filesystems on a new AIX box not being the right size, but I think that was understandable when the instructions I received basically consisted of 'Double the size of a couple of them.' Rah.

Also feeling full since it was my Mum's birthday meal at the Prosperity, so full of Chinese food. I had the honey and lemon chicken on crispy noodles, which I've always been tempted to try. It was great, battered chicken in a sauce that almost but not quite tastes like you should be washing the dishes with it. It didn't quite go with the crispy noodles though as they work better with lots of sauce but it was still pretty tasty.

Leg still painful on occasion, but it is getting better. The bruise is nice and purple at the moment. Not sure about badminton. The generally quite sedate badminton tomorrow will probably be OK but not sure about Friday which can be very energetic.

Slow wet week

Not much to report. No D&D last night due to the horrendous weather, stupid amounts of rain and stuff. Bruise on leg progressing nicely with a huge patch of bruise but only a small area of actual pain now.

That's about it really.

Comic Con

Yesterday was the North Wales Comic Con, which I'd never been to before. It was actually really good, and amazingly busy. I think a lot more people turned up than they had anticipated. I didn't really bother with autographs or anything but it was interesting to see who was there. The Q&As by Ed were good, at least the two I saw, the Torchwood and Red Dwarf ones. I actually feel a bit more optimistic about Red Dwarf X after hearing what Chris Barrie and Robert Llewelyn had to say about it. I did end up buying a Cyberdyne Systems t-shirt though.

Today was a really miserable rainy day, very depressing all round with what I described a bit strangely as proper wet rain. Not helped by my leg still hurting. I didn't think the bruise was that big at first but it has grown. Bah. Posted off the 3DS and the Virtual Boy, both of which sold on Ebay, which was nice.

Little Big Planet on the Vita is really good, a whole lot of fun. I wasn't too sure at first but I think it's a great game. I've done the tutorial levels so now the level creator mode is unlocked, but I haven't tried it yet - looking forward to that. It makes interesting use of the touch screen and the rear touch panel, with blocks that can be knocked back and forth.

A day of ups and downs

Down: Being chased by a lunatic farmer in a pickup truck after I mouthed to myself 'Wanker' after he nearly pulled out in front of me. When I realised he was chasing me with intent, I headed across town to the police station, oddly enough he stopped following shortly before I reached it. The sad bit was a young kid in the passenger seat who was clearly asking what the hell was going on.

Up: A bike ride from Kinmel Bay to Rhos-on-Sea with Andy, Maz, Rob and Em. The weather was good, and it was a great opportunity to try out the road bike on a decent surface. The bike worked really well and is really comfortable.

Down: Somehow managing to lose sight of a metal post in the middle of the cycle path while turning to check on the bikes behind and slamming into it at top speed. My right leg impacted on the post, flinging me off in a kind of spiral motion. I was convinced the bike would be totally fucked but fortunately rather than the front wheel taking the impact, the quick release lever did. After realigning the handlebars, we carried on and made it there and back fine. Other than a few extra scrapes and a bent front axle, the bike appears to be fine, astonishingly. This evening though I have the beginnings of a tremendous bruise on my thigh and stomach and walking is somewhat painful.

Up: Heading out to watch Avengers Assemble on DVD with Rob, Em, cats and snacks. What a brilliant movie it is. It really stood up to another viewing, especially since it wasn't in gimpy 3D this time. Superb all round.

Down: Was driving home through town and some drunken idiot thought it would be fun to run out in front of me while I was doing 30mph. God knows what he thought he was doing but I had to slam on and skid to a halt while his female companions screamed at the top of their voices. Didn't hit him (un) fortunately.

Other stuff was badminton on Thursday and Friday, which were both fun. Friday badminton is proving to be really good fun because there's a big and varied crowd this time, which will hopefully continue. It's the Comic Con in Wrexham tomorrow, which should be interesting. I've never been before so I'm quite interested to see what it's like.

It was payday the other day and I treated myself to a pre-order of Little Big Planet for the Vita. I've heard lots of good things about it on the PS3 so I thought I'd give it a go, but frustratingly haven't had a chance to try it yet. Looking forward to it.

Weird days

Sunday was good - did a circuit of the Brenig in 1h 9m, which wasn't too bad. It was windy again and a bit wet too. My time would have been better if I hadn't had to keep stopping and dry my glasses.

The rest of the week has been mainly work, which is being interesting due to the massive reconfiguration of the backup system. I had to have an unsociable morning today, I loaded up my iPod with the entire Offspring back catalogue and sat listening to that on headphones while doing a gigantic spreadsheet of how it will all work.

Otherwise it's been quiet. I dug out the Nintendo Virtual Boy that's been sat around for a while and got the 6 AA batteries it needs to run. It still works but the right screen is dodgy, sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Apparently it's a common issue with a few fixes, but due to it's rarity I don't want to take it apart so I've listed it on Ebay as-is. They were never imported to the UK so there aren't many around, so hopefully it will sell.

My skin is playing up for the first time in ages, my face has gone a bit flaky and I've got a massive spot on my back which is really, really annoying. Bah.

One functioning limb

It was the proper badminton club last night, the first time I've been in a couple of years. It was quite a shock after the rather sedate Thursday badminton. It was really good fun though and a good variety of people. I'm really feeling it today though, my left arm is the only limb which isn't aching at some place or another.

Today was the annual beer festival. Not much point in me going really since I just generally take a sip of the beers and cringe because it all tastes the same to me - horrible. I only go to be sociable and eat chilli. It was good though.

The rest of the day was spent fooling around on the computer and bass, which was nice.

Babbled

It's been a curious few days in work. I had to connect an AIX blade to a different SAN but it didn't quite work - instead of the six drives it should have seen, it saw 25. This led to a monumentally complicated problem with devices drivers, not helped by the incomprehensible IBM documentation. Fortunately today a consultant was in and he had a look and saw what was up and got it working.

The backup system has also had a lot done to it. Another consultant was in yesterday and today and it's going to be completely reconfigured. The basic stuff has been done, but I will now have to go through the 200 or so servers it backs up and reconfigure them all. Fortunately, it's now going to be able to backup VMs by going directly via the hypervisor, which is much more efficient.It's been a very educational couple of days but I hit a point today when I just couldn't absorb any more information.

Not much else to report really. The car hit 250,000 miles the other day and I was able to get a picture of the odometer. However I've booked it into the garage tomorrow to get the brakes checked out as I'm sure they've got a bit crappy recently, and when it was very cold the other day one of them seemed to be rubbing. Hope it's not expensive as the tax is due this month and the insurance next month - argh.

Long time no post

It's been a while since I last posted, rather busy with stuff.

Thursday badminton last week was good, but I felt crappy on Friday so had to miss the first night of Denbigh badminton club, which I've decided to give another go. My raquet is also really starting to show it's age - the frame is battered and the strings are fraying, but I do like it so I might get it restrung as it would be a lot cheaper than buying a new one.

Saturday was the first movie night at Steve's, which was great. We watched The Guard, a very funny movie but wow it had some questionable dialogue. I only think they got away with it by being Irish somehow. Good though. After that we watched two episodes of Father Ted as Em has never seen it, which were great.

Yesterday went for a bike ride round the Brenig with Andy and Maz, which was really good. The weather was overcast and VERY windy, which made things challenging. I surprised and impressed myself by managing to cycle up the steep rutted gravelly path bit towards the end, only stopping once when the back wheel slid into a rut, nearly pitching me off. I made it OK but my legs really felt it afterwards, and today.

Work has been interesting, the backup system is running nicely now, but there's been a lot of work with the Unix boxes. One of them was just decommisioned and shut down after 755 days of uptime. It's fate was uncertain and due to the nature of the data that it had held, I hooked it up to a serial console and spent some time working out how to fully wipe the disks. Unfortunately it has sixteen of them (four internal, twelve external) and it takes quite a while to wipe each one.

Today though, it was decided not to scrap or sell it but to use it at least temporarily as a testbed for DR so now I have to rebuild it again, argh! It's also not exactly in an ideal spot either as the machine and disk drawer are taking up quite a bit of space on the hotdesk area. Still, it's nice to have actual honest to goodness POWER hardware that I can mess with without worrying about breaking it. I even took the processor card out to see what RAM it took. Unfortunately, while the specs say it's fairly ordinary DDR2 server RAM, the DIMMs have a notch in a different place, meaning it's IBM proprietary, damn them. And all the slots were full. Oh well.

Last Monday we played Settlers of Catan instead of DnD, which took some time to get the hang of. But the way it invites discussion and bartering is pretty good. Today we played Cthulu Gloom, a somewhat morbid game where the aim is to make your family very miserable and then kill them, while at the same time making everyone else's families happier. It uses a clever system of clear cards that stack to show what is happening to each hapless member of your family and has a lot of random stuff that can happen. Good fun. Wasn't a good drive back home though, it absolutely pisssed it down the whole way making the roads rather treacherous.

Waterslide of Peril

Been a bit of a lazy day today.

The morning was spent watching the first disk of Firefly which Steve lent me on Bluray. Now, I watched the pilot a few years ago and didn't like it, and have spent the last few years feeling like an outcast from pretty much the entire universe.

This time however, I did like it, even the pilot. I think what happened last time was that someone told me it was a western in space, and since I don't like westerns I went in expecting to hate it, so I did. I like it this time though, very good fun.

Spent most of the afternoon listening to music, and then playing some multiplayer Minecraft, or Tekkit. After seeing someone else's extremely tall tower, I tried to build my own but decided it was hideous and pointless so knocked it down and started again. This time it's basically a buildng supported on an unlikely single column of blocks about half a mile high with transparent viewing platforms, which is slightly alarming. At several points I actually felt vertigo while working on it.

While building it I fell off several times to my death, causing one of the other plays to remark 'It has now been TEN MINUTES since the last fatal accident' each time it happened. Fortunately I was building it near my default spawn point.

My final project was something called the Waterslide of Peril which starts at the top of the tower. You throw yourself into a stream of water and the current takes you down a couple of rooms before dumping you out the bottom, sending you plummeting half a mile into a safe pool of water. This took a LOT of time to perfect and was the cause of quite a few of my deaths. For some reason it greatly amused me once it was finished and I spent probably half an hour playing with it while cackling madly to myself.

Back to work tomorrow, boo. It's been a good week off though, I've barely even thought of work, which I suppose is the idea.

D&D tomorrow, although I think we're going to play another kind of game that Rob found.

This will probably mark me as a hapless geek but I love watching these videos of S-bahn trains going along, especially this one of a complete Ringbahn circuit. The sound of the trains starting off and slowing down is a big factor, always reminds me of travelling round the city.

Bah wind

Went out for a bike ride today on the road bike, which is the first time I've ridden it properly. There's a road nearby that's been recently resurfaced so I thought it would be idea. It was nearly a good ride, but the road is not that flat, and is uphill the way I was going. Despite the road gearing I could probably have coped except it was ridiculously windy against me so it made it very hard. I did a couple of miles and then turned around and came back down the hill, which was great fun. The road bike feels great, very different from the mountain bike and I like the drop bars and brake lever shifters.

I think I may have lost a bit of weight, which is a nice feeling. I've been 15 stone for a long time, which I suppose in a way isn't bad since it stayed consistent.

Watched the pilot of Firefly again - I've been pestered by so many people to give it another go, and Steve lent me the Bluray version. I watched the pilot years ago and hated it, but I think I must have been in a funny mood or something since I liked it this time, and apparently the pilot is crap and it gets a lot better. So looking forward to the rest of it now.

I also watched In Bruges which Steve had also lent me. I didn't know what to expect, but really enjoyed it. A really good black comedy. Kind of makes me want to visit Belgium too, would be somewhere new to see. Also waffles.

The payments on the credit cards have definitely gone out. It's a curious feeling to be finally debt-free for the first time in years, although I should have managed it ages ago if I hadn't been so crap.

Not much else to report. Gangnam Style by PSY is going completely mental, which is quite odd. My Mum has finally trashed my original launch week DS by breaking the hinge, but since she's already worn most of the paint off and ruined the touch screen by using a knitting needle as a stylus, it was already due for replacement. I'll put it to one side though, I'm sure with a bit of TLC and some parts it can be repaired.

Lazy/busy week

It's been the first week off I've had in a while so it's been fun. Alternated between lazy messing about with computers and games and doing exercise.

Did a bike ride on Tuesday on a route I'd been thinking about that goes on a circuit from the village. It went quite well until it got to a stupidly steep 1in 4 hill that I knew about but had forgotten it was so long. It took a while even to push the bike up it after I discovered I could actually cycle up it in the lowest gear, but it made it almost impossible to steer.

Badminton was good today, we had some really good games. I think the recent biking has helped my legs as I seemed to be able to get around the court a bit more and we also had a relatively sensible supper.

Nearly finished Professor Layton and the Lost Future on the DS, so should probably hunt down the next one. Not sure quite why I enjoy the games so much, but they are fun. Also picked up Wipeout 2048 for the Vita, which is fun but hard.

Rob and I have got rid of the rest of the video game stuff for £170, so in total we've made £473 once the Ebay fees were taken off. Not bad for stuff we thought most people would consider junk. One of the rare cases where we bought it when it was junk but now it's retro.

Not much else to report. One more day of freedom and then it's back to work after the weekend, boo.

Finally made the last payment on the evil credit card, which was considerably less than I thought it was going to be, so I'm 100% debt free. Now to start some serious saving!

Fun days

Wednesday was indeed interesting, as was Friday and yesterday.

Thursday badminton was good, and we had some decent games. Steve is better now so we went to his for dinner, sadly we ate a bit much again.

Saturday was a BBQ organised by Robert in work. It was really good, the rain held off just enough, and after consuming large amounts of food, including his astonishing cheesecake, we all sat down and watched Taken because a couple of us hadn't seen it.

Yesterday went for a bike ride from Rhyl to Llandudno with Andrea in work and some of her friends and husband. We intended to get to Llandudno but we got to Rhos-on-Sea and stopped for lunch and turned back. I was the only one who managed to ride over the small but steep hills on the coastal path by using the lowest gears, so I was pleased with that. The bike went fine and Nigel had advised me to pump the tyres up to 50psi for the hard surface. The path was busy but not too bad.

Today went to my Dad's and hung out, before heading over to see Rob and Em to discuss the rest of the video game Ebay stuff. We ate a large amount of unhealthy food and then watched a documentary about the Iron Maiden tour where they converted a 757 to hold the band and crew and the equipment. I'm always slightly bemused at just how massive Iron Maiden are. They were the first real band I got into, which kind of makes them automatically uncool. It's just crazy. After that we watched random bits of the Olympics closing ceremony.

And tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of my week off. Happy days.

People want things

It's been a fairly weird week. Been playing a bit of Minecraft on a multiplayer server, and watching the Ebay video game stuff.

Somewhat astonishingly the Megadrive lot went for £142! This was gobsmacking but I think the MegaCD stuff probably helped bump that one up.

Tomorrow is going to be an interesting day.

Seeing a load of Americans doing the Gangnam Style dance is surreal.

Wet wet and yes, more wet

Yesterday was good. Played a bit of Minecraft in the morning, and then it was off to the BBQ. It was a good long day of plenty of food and chatter. The weather was a bit grey at first but then it went really nice, so that was great.

This morning I decided on the spur of the moment to take the bike to the Alwen and try it out. All went well except for rolling it through a hidden dogshit meaning the tyre was horrible, until it started raining half way there. It rained most of the way round, and I got completely drenched. It wouldn't have been so bad except my glasses got wet and for some stupid reason kept steaming up too.

Still, on the plus side, the bike worked perfectly, even better than it did before, so that was ace. I also rode reasonably well and only had a couple of breaks, although probably motivated to get back to the car and out of the rain more than anything else.

The rest of the day was spent not doing much until I had a go on a multiplayer version of Minecraft with some updates known as Tekkit, which adds new textures and things like railways and other technology. I found a cool cave and spent quite some time turning it into a mountaintop fort with an observation room, several lower rooms and a deep mine underneath. Surprisingly really good fun. It's surprising how fun it can be to make things out of giant blocks. It reminds me very much of the 3D Construction Kit, a program I had way back on the Amstrad CPC which allowed you to create your own blocky 3D worlds, but was quite fiddly so making those worlds was quite a chore.

I don't think I could have cycled that far, but the Ride with Brad thing sounded pretty cool.

LOUD NOISES

Got yelled at for playing my bass too loud for the first time in years today. My colleague and I were testing a bass effects pedal he'd built, using my bass and amp. We didn't think it was that loud but the cardboard walls of County Hall meant that after a minute or so someone hurtled into the room and bellowed at us to shut up. Oops.

Tried Minecraft this evening after I was sent a download code by someone. I'd never quite understood the appeal of it with the big blocky landscapes, but it's surprisingly good fun. The creative mode where you can't die is great fun. I made an underground cave system, before I found a lava pit, then spent some time blowing pigs up with TNT and leaving giant craters. The survival mode is great, but scary. Not done too well at that so far.

Not much else to report. BBQ tomorrow at Em's parents. Need to get on the bike and do some exercise and have a bit of a clearout.

Payday today thank goodness.

Traumatic day

Today didn't start well. I was going through a village with a 40mph limit and there was a junction coming up on my left. A car coming towards me indicated and sneaked across, a bit cheekily, but then the car behind it followed blindly. I slammed on the brakes and fortunately missed it by inches, after leaving two giant skidmarks. The other car did stop and after I managed to stop my hands shaking enough to get the car moving again I parked in a bus stop and hurtled out of the car in a towering rage, which kind of dissipated when I saw it was a terrified girl who must have only been 20 or so, stammering that she was really sorry and didn't know what she had been thinking. It could have been worse, if I'd been going a little quicker it could have been a head on collision. The Astra hit 249,000 miles the other night - if it had been written off before hitting 250,000 that would have been a shame, quite apart from the hassle of finding another car again.

In a similar note, yesterday one of the Unix servers hit two years uptime since the last reboot. It has just been replaced by a newer one, and is due to be shut down and scrapped. I didn't expect anyone to care except me but when the news got about I suddenly found people surrounding me, watching my console session to the machine as it hit the magic number. It's been a good box that one, running under pretty much constant load since 2005 with barely any problems.

Today a couple of people from the external support for our backup system came in to find out why we were trying to ditch them. I wasn't involved at all but it didn't go well. In the end they came all the way from Oxfordshire for half an hour of stroppiness. Oh well. It was mildly awkward however when I went to the sandwich shop and realised halfway across the road they were sitting outside. However I didn't let that stop me and strode inside with my head held high. It was worth it though as I got a pork and stilton pie, absolutely delicious.

Then it was badminton, which was good fun. I ended up with Rob and Em and someone else in each game, which was great. We had some really good games, even one with The Ghastly One, who Em and I managed to defeat by clawing it back from 14-11 to them, awesome. She was so cross. Her, not Em.

I listed the first batch of video game stuff on Ebay last night, the Megadrive stuff. It's got loads of watchers and three bids already, which is a good sign.

Payday tomorrow, thank goodness. If my calculations are correct, I may be able to make the final payments on my various cards, and finally be 100% debt-free. A scary concept. 

Family

Sunday was uneventful and the last two days have been family stuff. My uncle on my Mum's side and his wife came to visit, so last night we took them out for a meal, and then today it was taking them around to places and things. I don't enjoy it when they come round, they are very religious and he's extremely eccentric, and not in a good way. Also annoying when my Mum took it upon herself to take my various faults and proclaim them out loud as hilarious anecdotes. Nothing like being made to feel like a waste of space to brighten up your day.

To make the day even better, Steve has been diagnosed with chicken pox - unfortunately I knew exactly where that came from. When I was round at Nigel's last Sunday messing with the bike, his son had chicken pox and the next day I saw Steve at D&D. Oh dear.

Back to work tomorrow. Hope the backup system hasn't died in my absence.