Bad vibes

Yesterday was going OK, the phones were quiet, the backup system was behaving, kind of, and my knee felt absolutely fine exept for a slight tender spot. I was able to take a nice long walk to get a new cache though, so that was good.

However, at lunchtime some e-mails were sent out for meetings next Thursday about a restructure. What was worrying was that there were also meetings with the union present. This instantly caused much dismay in work and despite an e-mail from the department head, it persisted today.

The backup system had a tantrum in the morning so I spent much of the day sorting that out and getting some other stuff done in preparation for my two days leave tomorrow and Friday. I had been volunteered to do stuff for an external guy on one of the Unix machines that I wasn't all that familiar with, but I was able to help him out and use my l33t skilz to get what he needed done.

Two colleagues tried to set something up on my laptop and failed. It was decided that with all the stuff I need to run on it, 3gb of RAM is simply not enough, so I've been allowed to order an 8gb RAM kit for it. Unfortunately this will also necessitate a rebuild with 64-bit Windows since when I got it, there were a few things that didn't run on 64-bit so I stuck with 32-bit. Also it had it's first reboot in about three weeks.

Watched a couple of early South Park episodes this evening before kicking off Mass Effect 2 with my latest save. Somewhat annoyingly it crashed after the intro sequence so I had to go through it again, and you can't skip it. After a full game of Mass Effect, the sequel takes a little while to get used to. I did get loads of bonuses though since this Shepard was at a really high level, had done loads of stuff and had lots and lots of money. I need to get cracking on it if I'm going to finish it before ME3 comes out though...

On Monday I saw a free bike on the noticeboard and was the first to claim it. It's a Specialized Hardrock mountain bike from about 6 years ago. It would be a pretty good bike if it hadn't been left out in the rain. It's all there but the brakes, gears and chain are rusted and the suspension fork is siezed. I think it's got potential though. It's a much better candidate for restoration than anything else I have since it's modern, so much easier to get parts for.

Really tired this evening, not sure why. I had an awesome dream the other night where it was like a downhill bike event but on office chairs, and sometimes you had to pick up the chair and run with it over obstacles. It was really good fun and I was quite disappointed to wake up from it.

Meh

A curious day. Work was OK, and nothing had gone horribly wrong in my absence. I was taken to the Welsh shop in town which is a curious place, it looks small from outside but then has a curious passage to a large room at the back, and then an awesome labyrinthine cellar with loads of cool stuff.

At lunchtime saw an advert on the work noticeboard for a free mountain bike, a 6-year old Specialized Hardrock. Somewhat amazingly I was the first to inquire so I got to go and pick it up after work. If it hadn't been left out in the rain for goodness knows how long, it would be in well used but good shape, but the brakes, gears and chain are rusty and the suspension fork looks to be siezed. But the frame is sound and the main bearings seem OK, so with a few bits and pieces it should hopefully be easy enough to get it going again.

I'm far too unfit to ride a bike at the moment especially with my knee, so a nice long-term project will do nicely, hopefully ready by the summer, depending what it needs.

Tired now. It's been a long but satisying day.

Mood improved

Well, after the angst ridden post of yesterday I feel better today. I found that while the indicator in the Prelude is now a bit loose, the impact had shattered the bulb. One new one, and the indicator is now working again. Also I've washed the floormat that got curry but the carpet may be permanently stained in the car. I can't believe we eat that stuff after seeing how it goes when it's dry. Now I'm feeing I should learn to make my own curry, would probably be healthier and cheaper.

After our Linksys router got killed by a power surge last December, it was replaced by a supposedly high-end Belkin. Unfortunately it was a new model and from what I can tell hadn't been tested at all. It would reboot randomly at least twice an hour, and I could consistently make it crash by attempting to copy data over the wireless connection. Enough was enough so I went out and bought a Netgear that cost half what the Belkin did, but so far has been rock solid. The Belkin can go back.

While out getting the indicator bulb and router, I actually saw someone in a Hummer H2, apparently oblivious to how ridiculous they looked. Somewhat surprisingly though, the driver actually used the indicators, and managed to park it in a space without touching any of the lines.

I had a quick look at the new Sun on Sunday paper, but gave up when I could feel my intelligence decreasing by the page, total garbage.

Watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Not too bad actually, but probably could have been shorter.

The only downer today is that I've busted my knee again when I was putting the indicator bulb in. I knelt down and put too much weight on it and now it's really painful again.

Watched a programme on iPlayer called The Tube after Andy recommended it. It's quite interesting but I don't envy the people who have to work in the stations at night on the weekends.

I hate my life

Shit day. Worse because it should have been good.

It started out well with Xbox this morning with Rob and Steve. We played L4D2 which was really good until we got to the end of the mall which was insanely frustrating but then we realised we had it on Normal instead of Easy. Once that was set, it worked out fine.

Then it was down to the pub. The first match was fine but then it began to really fill up because of the Wales/England match. I don't like crowds much anyway but something about it got to me and I began to feel really uneasy and then suddenly I had to get out of there. I still can't explain it but it took me a good few minutes of sitting in the car taking deep breaths before I began to feel normal again. It wasn't a panic attack exactly but...well, I don't know. I've never felt like that before in that kind of situation.

There had been idle talk of getting a takeaway after the pub and after I was sat at home for a while I thought fuck it, I'd get one anyway. I ordered an Indian and went to pick it up. On the way home, pheasants ran out and I had to brake but one of them didn't make it and slammed into the bumper. And the food bag fell on the floor and it went all over the place. Mostly on the floormat but some on the actual carpet. Then I got home and found the front right indicator was cracked and didn't work any more. And since it's a relatively rare car, it's going to be a fucking pain to find another one if it's properly broken.

Sometimes you wonder what the fuck is going on, why nothing ever goes right. It's the kind of thing that'll be funny in six months time but right now, life just seems really shitty and unfair and miserably lonely.

How much?!

Well well well, something has gone awry with the Prelude. Not anything serious, but because the idiot who put the drainpipe exhaust cut the original exhaust to fit it, it needs two new sections of exhaust to go back to standard. My local garage quoted about £250 but now I know exactly what it needs I can at least shop around for quotes. Also the odd noise from the engine is the timing belt tensioner so it needs a new one, and belt. Again, they quoted £250 because it's £100 for the kit and a big job.

I can live with the exhaust for now I guess, but I'm going to get the timing belt done. I'm always paranoid about them and if it's done then if I decide to get rid of it, it adds some value to it. But I don't want to get rid of it. Despite the disasterous insurance increase, I really like it. It's comfortable, really nice to drive and despite being a 2.0 litre, not as bad on fuel as I expected. Admittedly I drive it like an old man, but that's the nice thing, it can be driven like that and still keep up with traffic easily. Not being able to get a bike in the back is a downer though, not sure what I can do about that unless I get a folding one.

Decided I can't do without the Atom server, so I went to Rhyl today to pick up a hard drive for it. Currently rebuilding it with the new version of ESXi, 5.0.0, so I can get FreeNAS up and running again. I was just reading a web page about some guy who tried and failed to get ESXi running on an Atom board, which seems weird as my cheapo ASRock motherboard has always run it like a champ. Yes, the Atom is bloody slow, but it's got plenty of power for simple stuff. What's nice is the new release of ESXi supports the onboard network card, so that's a bonus.

The 500gb hard drive was not cheap after the floods last year but at least it'll get it running again. Rhyl is such a frantically depressing place though. Walking about the town centre drains you. Spotted a PS Vita in a shop, looks nice. Had McDonalds for lunch, which was about as satisfying as it always is and I felt unclean and hungry not long afterwards.

Effect of Mass

It was great to not have to go to work today. It was a really nice day, but other than taking the dog out for some runs in the field, I didn't do much as I wanted to let my knee have a good proper rest.

Other than that I completed Mass Effect again. This time it took me 22 hours and I got up to level 51, which is good going. I think it's because I realised you get loads more XP if you get out of the tank on planets and kill things on foot rather than using the cannon or running them over. Also I found a side mission that I'd never seen before, and a couple of other things. It might be a little glitchy in places like the texture popup and stuff, but it's such a good game. Now to start ME2...

The PS Vita is out. I think from a hardware point of view it looks pretty good, 5" OLED touch screen, quad-core CPU, dual analogue sticks, etc. Shame that Sony went full-retard again and made it use a non-standard connector for power and a proprietary expensive memory card - a 16gb one is £40 compared to a 16gb SD card which is £10. Oh well. I think in the days of cheap £1 games for smartphones both the Vita and the 3DS will probably struggle to have anything like the success of the older systems.

Other than that, not much to report. The Prelude is still going OK.

Random

A shit day.

Got a text off my Dad to say his sister-in-law was found dead by her husband slumped in the kitchen. Only 59 with no obvious health problems so a devastating blow to her family. I didn't know her all that well but still a shock.

The rest of the day was spent trying to coax the backup system into some semblance of normality after it ran out of tapes and crashed. Typically it would do this when I've got leave coming up. Sick of it. Also going up the stairs in the morning made my knees hurt for the rest of the day. Tired of it now, going to see what the doctor says.

Tried out Brink and Star Trek Legacy tonight. Brink seems complicated, but hopefully will be OK as multiplayer. Legacy looks like it should be fun but it has a complicated control system and I found combat nearly impossible. We'll see on that one.

Tired and hacked off, hope tomorrow is better then it's two days off. I'm planning on going to the doctor about my knees and seeing if I can get a garage to check out the Prelude's engine and see if I can get an idea how much a standard exhaust will cost as I'm sick and tired of the fart can.

Full of Chinese food

Today was fairly quiet day. Apparently there was snow this morning but I missed it as I had a bit of a lie in. I was woken up in the night by weird noises which I realised were the death throes of a mouse in the mouse trap. Only one though.

After that I gave the dog a bath which wasn't much fun since he doesn't like them at all. I let him have a bit of a run outside to try and get him dried off a bit, and he promptly went and dug a hole. Oh well. After that I tidied up a bit and got some more stuff done in Mass Effect.

This evening it was off to the Semaphore for Steve's birthday, with the all you can eat buffet. It was pretty good as usual, and we all left feeling comfortably satisfied. We also saw Maz's nice new Audi convertible, which to me seemed eerily quiet until Andy pointed out the Prelude isn't exactly a good point of reference.

After that I got home and fired up Left 4 Dead 2 with Steve and we had quick blast. I like the L4D games, basically it's just killing zombies but I find it really easy to play and it's just good fun.

D&D tomorrow, should be good fun after missing it last week while Steve was in the USA.

Rah

This morning headed into town to take my 360 hard drive transfer kit to Rob so he could move the data from his old Xbox with the knackreed drive to the shiny new slim model he'd got. Except it's the 250gb version so it's not shiny. Not sure why they only have 4gb and 250gb model with nothing in between.

After that spent some time pissing about with Samba on Linux on the spare laptop in an attempt to make it share an external hard drive to the other machines before getting pissed off and just hooking up to one of the Windows machines instead. I HATE Samba with a passion, once it's configured, sure, it's fine, but getting it to a state where it works is such a pain in the arse. The configuration file and options are a bastard and getting permission conflicts between Samba and the filesystem are a pain. FreeNAS worked fine.

After that, did some stuff on Mass Effect, mainly some of the side missions and finally had a tantrum at the new Belkin router which is shit. I've found out that any sustained data transfer over the wireless interface makes it reboot. Not an issue with Internet access, but when I'm trying to back up the M11x over the wireless, the router will crash and reboot. There is a firmware update on the Belkin website, but it won't install saying it's not the correct version for the router, even though the page and filename match the model number.

At least my knee is at last back to normal except a little tender spot. I'm hoping I'll be able to start going to the gym again soon and I want to get a new programme set up. Also I should see if there is any way of strengthening my knees and hips.

I knew Dave Mustaine had become a born-again Christian but I never realised until today just what a bigoted prick he actually is.

NOS!!!

Went in today to find that while the upgraded machine had rebooted to a login prompt, nothing actually worked. I think the remote management software timed out, causing the server to lose connection to my laptop's CD drive. Oh well. I tried it again today and hopefully this time it'll work. My supervisor on helpdesk has started sending out little quizes about the Discworld. I aced the first one but then it suddenly got hard. Oh well.

Got home and had fat food. Guilty now. Then I watched The Fast and the Furious for no reason except it's entertaining in a completely stupid way. I'm sure that to car enthusiasts it's the equivalent of me watching Hackers. I remember someone told me when it first came out that I looked like Vin Diesel, which at the time I thought rather unlikely. Perhaps when I was a little thinner, but definitely not now.

I thought my knee was getting better but today it's still painful. I'm a bit bothered about it now, but I think it just needs a day of rest. Or I need a walking stick or something. Bah. My left knee is hurting too now, probably because of the extra stress from hobbling around.

Got the weekend to look forward to with Steve's birthday meal on Sunday evening and then two three day weeks, yay.

Adventures in AIX

The last couple of days have been OK. Work has been pretty much as expected. My knee has been gradually getting better and was nearly better for most of today, but is now painful again in the evening. Hopefully it will be better by the weekend.

Work today was interesting as I finally took a mksysb of the AIX server I've been building, and then initiated an upgrade to AIX 6.1, which I've never done before. Due to issues with the CD drive in the BladeCenter chassis, I had to install it from the CD drive in my laptop over the network, although I don't know how much impact that would have on the speed of the install. I had to leave it going though since it was only at 64% at 5:50pm and I was due to have dinner with Rob, Em and Steve. I really hope it installs OK. It won't be an issue if it fails because I took a backup of it, but I could do without the hassle of putting the backup back on and starting all over again.

The Prelude is still going OK and I'm adapting to the fuel consumption. It's not as bad as all that, but it's certainly not the fill and forget approach that the old 306 was. I've got used to the feel of the car now, and it's certainly the fastest and best handling car I've had. It's like the Pimpmobile II in that it's a lot more planted on the road than most cars I've had which now I've got used to it is nice, but also means I sometimes end up going a little faster than I thought. Now I'm aware of that though I'm careful to keep track of it.

Also since I'm a little paranoid about using fuel, I tend to pootle around in town and accelerate gently, which also helps make the obnoxious exhaust less obvious. And it's fun to surprise people by being polite in what is unfortunately rather a chavvy car at the moment.

Finally booked some leave. I had four days I had to take before the end of March, so I've booked Thursday and Friday off work next week and the week after, which is then followed by a full week in work, then a week off with Mass Effect 3.

Not much else to report. I think I have mice again which is really annoying and I keep forgetting to get mousetraps. I don't like using lethal ones, but unfortunately I think they're necessary.

Hobbled

Sunday was mainly spent watching the rugby down at Andy's. I'd tried to replicate these sweets that James had made at D&D a couple of weeks ago called turtles. Basically just mini pretzels with chocolate melted on them and a pecan on top. They were really nice. It didn't go quite right since I could only find nomal sized pretzels. I used cashew nuts and Mars Planets for those who didn't like nuts, and they came out pretty well. The rugby was good too and it was a great afternoon.

However I woke up on Sunday with a painful knee, which I suspect might be from when I nearly fell down the stairs on Saturday. It didn't hurt then but i've spent much of the time since Sunday hobbling around. Yesterday lunchtime was embarrassing as I went to the post office with a colleague and we were being overtaken by old men with walking sticks.

I thought it was feeling better this morning but it got worse throughout the day, and is being a real hindrance. The Prelude isn't helping because it's so low down, but at least I can drive. I scared myself in it this morning, I gave it some welly to overtake someone (which I rarely do) and because I was intent on watching the road, didn't realise it had got to 90mph without even trying and had hurtled past the hapless Rover 25. This was embarrassing since there was a tractor a couple of miles ahead and the Rover then followed me all the way to work at 45mph.

The hard drive failed in the Atom server last Thursday. It just clicks now, which is annoying. Fortunately it didn't have anything on it except backups of the three Alienwares so nothing was lost except some large video files that I left on there but they weren't important. At the time of failure it was only running two VMs, one for FreeNAS and one for Ubuntu. I hate not having backups (something I'm paranoid about in work that follows me home) so in the short term I bought a 320gb external USB drive which is plenty of space to hold the data off the laptops. Not as convenient as having the storage online on the network but I think I can come up with something.

No D&D last night due to Steve being in the USA so I had a reasonably chilled night in, trying not to move much so as not to disturb my knee.

I sold the two Spectrum computers that I dug out from downstairs. They both worked, but the +3 didn't want to load from disks. I got about £50 for them, less than I had hoped, especially the +3, but hey, it all helps.

Watched X-Men: First Class that someone lent me. This caused problems as it was a new Bluray and the software I use to play them didn't want to. I had to get a new version of the software, but that used a different registration system. But it did play it. Bluray is a bit shit I think, it takes forever to the disks to load, they all have their own gimpy custom interfaces and new ones need software updates.

After I finally got the movie to play, I quite enjoyed it. I knew absolutely nothing about it having barely been aware that it had even been released. So I approached it with a clean slate, although certain things were obviously going to happen. It was a bit long, but it was an interesting look at it all and I thought the background to the characters was pretty interesting. Michael Fassbender seems to be the big thing at the moment, so it was interesting to see him in a different role, previously I'd only seen him in Inglourious Basterds.

This article on the BBC provoked quite a lot of comments, which were interesting since most people seem to think religion is outdated and irrelevant. I personally don't care what people believe, but if they then start using their beliefs to restrict how other people live their lives, then that's going too far. I also find her implication that a society can only be good if people are religious rather alarming. If I'm a good person, which I hope I am, it's because it's the right way to behave, not because when I die I'll be rewarded in heaven.

Noise vs noise

Thursday and Friday weren't good days in work. Thursday was marred by one of the most horrible phone calls I have ever had to deal with in work. The person wasn't rude or shouty, just ignorant, patronising and utterly incapable of understanding anything I was trying to tell her. I was really angry after that. Then on Friday we had IBM guys in to look at the situation with the backup system and I felt like a right tit because they kept asking me questions and I wasn't sure what the answers were. If I had the time, and the training, I could do it properly, but I haven't. And it's not the kind of system I can just set up at home and learn about myself. Fortunately I had a really nice relaxing Friday evening and was able to chill out.

Today has been mainly sorting out some bits and pieces on the car. It needed new sidelight bulbs since one was blown and the other was some gimpy LED thing, and I managed to get the stereo wired up. I got some colour code information from the Internet which was mostly right except the power. After making some wires spark I got it all in place. I don't know if the speakers are the original factory ones but they are pretty good, sadly the exhaust means this isn't really much use at the moment.

Motivation

Well, the last couple of days have been interesting. I had a kind of awakening, and finally realised that I've been spending a LOT of time on the Xbox, and not really achieving anything. I guess this could be because I've spent quite a lot of time being ill since December but now I feel better, I should be doing things.

Well, this evening I did something about it. I stripped down the Atom machine, rebuilt it into a spare tower case since the fan in the Mini ITX case PSU was dead. So it's back up and running. After that I dug out the Precision M90 with the custom paint job and started to build it up into the ultimate retro gaming machine as I had thought about doing a month or so ago. So far it can run Megadrive, SNES, N64, GBA, Amstrad and Archimedes games. It's actually a good machine for it since the built in sound system is decent and it has a good screen. Also, remembering my experience with the Inspiron 9400, I set up a program to keep the fans going. Need a spare wired Xbox pad since Windows works with it automatically and it works well with emulators.

Whether this actually counts as achieving anything or not, I don't know, but at least it wasn't just sitting there in the armchair not moving except for my hands on the Xbox controller. I'm not going to stop playing on it entirely, but I need to spend more time doing things.

Need to start exercising again. I feel really crap in that regard at the moment. I need to get back to the gym and perhaps look into doing some more exercise at home too with weights. I did some way back in 2007 and it really helped I think.

1998 Honda Prelude 2.0i

Well, the car update was a Honda Prelude, which I picked up on Saturday. It was reasonably priced and had a full year's MOT with no advisaries. The issue Direct Line had with it was the 17" alloys and loud exhaust. Unfortunately my luck with cars kicked in and I got a puncture on the way home, which due to the lack of a wheelbrace for the 17" alloy wheel nuts and any nuts for the space saver steel wheel, meant I was stuck. After a series of unfortunate events including being given the coastguard number by a particularly unhelpful RAC, the car was recovered to a tyre place where I was informed that it needed a front tyre as well.

After that trauma I went to Andy and Maz's where we booked the hotel for the April Berlin trip and had some food from the good chippy.

Sunday was a fun day with a good 6 Nations game of Wales vs Ireland, which featured the unhappy prospect of a dismal loss until a penalty at the end got Wales the game, which was bonkers and so tense.

Yesterday I took the afternoon off work to go and get the car, and took it back round to my Dad's and we had a good look at it. Basically it's in reasonably good nick inside and out, but had some issues like a misfire when it's warming up and a crazy mass of wires where the stereo should go, the legacy of some previous crazy sound system install. It does go really well though and is comfortable and all the electrics other than the mangled stereo connection work fine. It even handles the track OK - I had suspected it would be all right since I don't think it's any lower than the 306 was but I was a bit anxious the first time I brought it up to the house. The bellowing exhaust is embarrassing however, and once up to highway speeds is very annoying with a constant drone.

Tonight I dug out two old Spectrums and tested them, a classic 48k and the more rare +3 with the disk drive. Both work but the +3 didn't want to read disks. I've listed the 48k on Ebay and will put the +3 on tomorrow.

Then watched an episode of Red Dwarf while eating chilli and then played Mass Effect for a bit, getting a couple of side missions out of the way. The problem I have with Mass Effect and similar games is I can't let side missions go, I always have to complete all the available side missions before continuing the main story.

I think one of the fans has gone in the power supply of the Atom ESXi server and it keeps siezing and groaning. I'll have to strip it down and see if I can fix it. Annoying - the whirr of the fans has been helping me sleep for a couple of years now and with it switched off I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep.

There is a slight whirr from the laptop I left running Seti@home which I thought would die after a couple of days with the CPU constantly at 100% but it's been going for weeks now and seems quite happy much to my surprise. I think the cooling system is designed for a dual-core CPU but it only has a single-core Celeron so it's running nice and cool. Impressive for a cheap old E-system laptop that someone in work gave me for nothing because they didn't want it any more.

Oh well

The week progressed normally.

Last night was badminton and I was quite anxious about it as I haven't played since about mid December. But I had an absolute blast. The saggy face bitch wasn't there and we had some really good games and while my right arm felt like soggy pasta after a while I didn't feel too shattered overall, which was a great feeling. It made me feel a bit more optimistic about returning to the gym, which must happen soon. Apparently being 15 stone means I'm 3.5 stone overweight, something I didn't realise until recently, and I can't say that it's all muscle either. Although apparently I'm now 14 stone 9, so that's a start.

There has been a development on the car front. The 306 is going to the scrapyard, poor thing, and will be replaced by...what? Well, I'll say more once I've got it and decided if I am insane or not. I thought it seemed like a good idea but sadly Direct Line think otherwise...

Bloody cars

Well, the 306 is a goner. The back axle is completely shot and if it was in really good nick, I'd get it done, but it's not. A local place quoted £350, which is about £300 more than the car is worth so it's going. I'm not in the mood for car hunting and it's not the ideal time financially either, bah. At this point I'm just after something that goes and has a decent MOT. One possibility is a local Subaru Forester for sale. Not too big, but with good ground clearance and 4x4 and lots of people giving them good marks for reliability - the only downer is the 2.0 litre petrol engine. Oh well.

Not much else to report.