Decent weekend

Thursday was good, with badminton as usual, but for the first time we went to Steve's house for dinner beforehand, which was great. Chicken korma and various treats, always a good thing. The badminton was fairly decent since more than the usual number of people were there.

Friday was a tense day in work, due to an unexpected test of the backup system. I was relieved when it completed the restore with no issues, other than it taking a while due to the volume of data. Glad it worked, although the alternative is too ghastly to contemplate.

Yesterday was a quiet morning, although I did fit the new rear axle to the road bike so it clamps more securely into the trainer. I used the bike stand my Dad got me for the first time, which is epically useful, makes it so easy to get at the whole of the bike. After that it was off to meet up with the guys I used to work with, which as usual involved vast amounts of food and geekery. This time we played the Star Wars Trivial Pursuit game, which was good fun, and I was in the team that won astonishingly.

Today headed down to Rob and Em's to get some work done on the laptop they are inheriting from me. We got the OS and apps installed, but ran into a snag when we couldn't get the hard drive out of the old laptop since it required a tiny screwdriver. I'm the one who put it in there so I must have one somewhere, so we'll have to carry on with that. We watched Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie, neither of which I'd seen before, and were really funny.

Also found this rather crazy Korean pop video, which seems completely insane until you realise it's a parody of a certain culture over there. Oddly catchy however.

I picked up Lumines Electronic Symphony for the Vita after I really enjoyed the first Lumines game on the PSP. Really good.

Guilt

A fairly meh day in work, but made better by finding and fixing a corrupt volume in the backup system, which was causing lots of curious errors.

Spent a quiet evening downloading some stuff for testing and playing Gravity Rush on the Vita. It's pretty good fun but can get rather hectic at times. Not sure if it would be better on a normal console. Also played LA Noire last night but got frustrated at my inability to sneak into a coffee shop to listen to a woman on the phone. At one point I fumbled the controls and shoved a poor guy flat onto the floor, making it the least subtle entrance of all time.

Otherwise not much to report. Have ordered new skewer for the road bike so it will lock into the trainer properly. The quick release one it has now makes it a bit precarious.

Found Morrisons has some Tomato Salsa type cheddar in at the moment, it's delicious.

Finished reading Stasiland that Rob lent me. A fascinating insight into the GDR and what life was like behind the wall. So weird to think that was only slightly over 20 years ago. I want to head back to Berlin at some point, but finances and other issues are being a bit of a drag.

Feckarse industries

Mouth ached most of today which made the day slow and annoying. Not sure if it is the wisdom tooth playing up or not.

Came home, had a headache and a tantrum since the dog had shit in the garage again when I was trying to set the road bike up on the trainer. I got it done, but didn't feel up to trying it out much so came back in.

Still feeling crappy, bah. Going to curl up in bed with a book and ibuprofen.

A long day

It was a long day today. First it was off to Macclesfield to pick up the road bike. It's nothing special, a Halfords thingy called the Carrera TDF but they get good write ups and it was cheap due to being rather used. The drive down there was OK, made it without any problems although the journey back was delayed on the A55 for unknown reasons. Saw lots of people on road bikes between Knutsford and Macclesfield with numbers so there was clearly something going on.

Went back to my Dad's to watch the end of the Tour de France, which was pretty epic. The final section in Paris was bonkers and it felt like it could have gone either way, but Mark Cavendish absolutely blitzed that final sprint. Bradley Wiggins made it and became the first British person to ever win it, which is awesome. His speech was ace, I think people were expecting him to say more but he seemed rather overwhelmed. And he gets no rest, this evening he's on a plane back to the UK to train for the Olympics.

After that my Dad and I got the bike on a stand and sorted out some things. The gears and brakes needed tweaking, and we swapped out the bizarre pedals for some more sensible ones. The guy also threw in a Cateye bike computer which turned out to be rather a nice one, but since the bike is going to live on a trainer for a while no need to fit it yet. I think it could do with some new tyres before it hits the road though.

Feeling a bit tired and under the weather this evening, but not sure why. Was getting some pain in my mouth too as I think my wisdom teeth are playing up again so have downed some iboprofen and will take an early bedtime.

Terminalities

Thrusday badminton was OK, we had a couple of good interesting games, but the hag made herself known as usual, taking the joy out of it all. Bah.

Yesterday it was round to Steve's as it was his first night in the house. There were a load of people there including Craig who was visiting from down south and Robert from work, so it was a really good evening. Lots of pizza, etc, chat, general abuse, fart noises from phones and a film quiz game on the Xbox.

Not done much today really so it's been fairly quiet. I did however watch The Fellowship of the Ring. The extended edition, both disks, back to back. I think the last time I watched it was when I was living in St Asaph, which would mean nearly 10 years ago. I have the other two as well but the Return of the King hasn't actually been taken out of the shrinkwrap after I got it for Christmas many years ago.

Off to Macclefield tomorrow to pick up a road bike I won on Ebay. The reason being that I think it's worth having a bike on a trainer so I can go on that when the weather is crap. Hopefully if it works and I can get my fitness up a bit, I can also take it for decent rides. Still need to sort out the mountain bike though.

Looks like Bradley Wiggins is all set to win the Tour tomorrow, what an astonishing perfomance all round.

Good car

The week has progressed uneventfully. Any plans I had to get parts to fix the bike were on hold until today when the car had the MOT. Fortunately it passed first go with no issues at all, really good news. Also I got the cash for the old Specialized bike I got last year and listed on Ebay. It went to a guy near Chester who has an industrial unit FULL of bikes, which he fixes up and sells for decent prices. To be fair he got a bargain with that old bike but since I got it for free I'm not too bothered.

Today in work I had to take an AIX blade out of one BladeCenter and install it in another BladeCenter with totally different storage attached to it. It involved quite a lot of stuff that I knew about in theory but hadn't actually done in person, but it seems to be working OK so far. Happy days.

Otherwise it's been a fairly slow week. Rob lent me Stasiland, which is a fascinating look into life in East Germany before the wall fell.

Unlucky with bikes too?

As is well chronicled, I have little luck with cars since I tend to have the tendency to pick out cars which are either ridiculously impractical, or break often and expensively. So far my experiences with bikes have been OK until today.

Today was going to be a nice ride round the Brenig with Andy, Maz and Rob. We had made it a couple of miles which was fine, and then I noticed the cover had come off my right gear shifter. It's done this before. I went back and found it, but then when I went to set off to rejoin the others, the chain snapped dramatically. Investigation showed that the cog on the front had actually bent, which had caused the chain to go.

So I had to leave the others to carry on and trudge back to the car, although I was still able to meet them at the visitor centre for a hot chocolate. I've not really looked at the bike since I got home since I was not in the right frame of mind, but with a bent cog on the front and a rear derailleur was playing up and now has a dodgy shifter, the whole drivetrain is pretty much fucked at the moment. BAH. Oh well. It'll need fixing but I'm not going to do anything until after Wednesday when the car has it's MOT, that's more important right now.

I did clear all the crap out of the garage though, so I can put the bikes in there more sensibly. I'm thinking about putting my old bike on a turbo trainer type thing.

Not done much else really. Had a quick go on LA Noire that Rob lent me, or Grand Theft Fedora as he calls it. Seems decent enough so far. Also had a go on Gravity Rush. It's a rather odd game, but looks pretty promising.


Sabotage on the tour, people can be such pricks sometimes.

Plates and brakes

Productive day, sort of.

I got new number plates for the car and put them on, made it look surprisingly a lot better with nice fresh plates on it. I also went into Rhyl and traded in the two 3DS games I had for Gravity Rush for the Vita, since it's supposed to be amazing. Only had a quick go on it so far but it seems really good. The Vita doesn't feel like a portable system when it's running games somehow, since the games generally seem to be just as good as the real console versions, something the 3DS doesn't manage.

The fixed gear bike now has a new brake lever which has made a real difference to how well the brake works, which is good. Still need to take it out for a good test ride though.

The PowerEdge has had it's new disk installed and the RAID5 array reformed so it now has 400gb of storage across the disks. Not all that much really but plenty for what I'll be using it for. It really could use an upgrade to 16gb RAM though. I'll see if that's manageable after the Astra has had the MOT on Wednesday.

Going to clear the garage out so I can keep my bike tidy in there and perhaps put my old bike on a trainer in there so I can try and get some exercise when its raining. The dog has been using it as a toilet so it's grim in there at the moment. Need to find a way of stopping him, wretched hound.

Off to the pub in a bit to see Andy and Rob, which will be good.

Friday blues

A meh day in work, and not much to report.

Decided I need to get back to learning things on computers, so I've got a machine capable of running lots of VMs. It's a Dell PowerEdge 1950, a 1u server, with so far two quad-core Xeons, 12gb RAM and four 146gb SAS disks. It's going to be booting ESXi from a USB pendrive and should provide plenty of power. Hopefully will take it up to 16gb RAM after next payday. Not sure if I should run the SAS disks separately or in a RAID5. 1u servers are noisy because of the fans but I'm probably weird in that I quite like the sound, unless it ramps the fans up too high which most of the time it doesn't.

Nothing beats a fully populated BladeCenter starting up though, they sound like a jet engine until it settles down and once the blades are up and runinng it kicks out a ridiculous amount of heat.

The rain has been taking the piss today, so tired and bored of it now. Also feeling a little rough this evening, just overly tired and slightly headachy, but I don't know why. Bleh.

Terminator 3 is surprisingly watchable for a movie that shouldn't have been made. Not sure if I can bring myself to get through 4.

Tomorrow I need to get a new front numberplate for the car for the MOT on Wednesday. If the weather is OK I might still do the fixie test, otherwise if the weather is going to be an arse I'll sit inside and sulk with a DVD.


Bradley Wiggins on doping. Nice to see he can be eloquent when he wants to be. Just don't nearly twat him with a gigantic camera, he won't like that.

We're gonna need more paint

After all the hassle with the derailleur on my main bike, I remembered the fixed gear one that my Dad and I put together on the cheap a while back. It's basically the remains of my cousin's old bike, made into a fixed gear using a mountain bike rear wheel put on backwards with a sprocket attached to where the disk brake should go. Anyway I dragged it out and pumped up the tyres. It actually works OK, but the front brake (the only brake) is crap. I tried to adjust it but came to the conclusion the problem was with the lever rather than the brake itself. I've only ridden it up and down outside the house, so I'm thinking about taking out for a proper ride this weekend to see what it's like and perhaps get a couple of decent tyres for it since the ones on it are ancient cast offs although the front wheel is a 700c so not the same as the back.

I took a day off today for the first time since April, since things calmed down in work in a bit. Went to help Steve with his house. We got the furniture sorted out and got a good start going on the living room, so that was decent. Also it was properly sunny for the first time in a while so we were able to take a break and have pizza and tea in the garden, which was nice. I took a break to nip to Halfords and grab a brake lever for the fixed gear, but they only come in pairs obviously. If the rear wheel was the right size it could have a rear brake, but to do that I'd need a 700c disc mount wheel with a 135mm wide hub which aren't very common.

While I was at Steve's, I turned on the data access on my Galaxy S so Steve could make sure it worked before he switched over to Vodafone. I got an Edge signal that worked fine, which means that ICS must have sorted out the data side of things because it never worked before. Unfortunately the Ebay app decided to go and update which promptly ate a quids worth of credit - the perils of data access on PAYG. At least I know it works though, could be handy.

The Galaxy S has actually been pretty decent since the upgrade, especially since it was never supposed to be able to run ICS at all. It's not completely perfect, there is a very slight lag at certain points, but it's certainly livable with. I knew that the finish on one corner was cracked, but now it's finally started to come off, so it's looking a bit more lived in now. But it's still going strong, absolutely brilliant phone.

Bradley Wiggins and the Sky team are still doing well in the Tour. Promising signs, if they actually win it would be ace. Wiggins is certainly an interesting character, I like the way he just says exactly what he thinks and adds a good dose of profanity where appropriate. I'm always slightly in awe at how they can cycle so far day after day, that level of fitness is hard to comprehend.

Bloody rain

Saturday was a decent day. First thing was off to Steve's new house to have a look at it. It's really nice, and bigger than I expected for an end terrace. Should be great once the decorating is done. In the evening I went to pick Rob and a couple of other people to track down the gang for the Route 76 real ale trail thing that was going on. It was OK but like the beer festival I only really go to be sociable.

On Sunday took the bike to the fabled bike guru Nigel to see if he could make sense of the derailleur issue. He got it working better but said the hanger for the mechanism is bent, so a new one has been ordered as they're only cheap. If that doesn't fix it, a new derailleur might be needed. We'll see on that one. In the evening watched Terminator 1 & 2 back to back just because.

Not much else to report. Work is OK, with the backup system still running nicely.

I haven't been keeping up much with the Tour de France as much as I'd have liked to but I thought the rant by Bradley Wiggins after someone asked him about doping had a good point. Shame everyone focused on his swearing rather than the point he was trying to make.

Listening to Wish Upon a Blackstar by Celldweller. Interesting stuff.

AWESOME DAY

Work has been OK this week - the backup system has returned to I think something resembling normality, which is good. Last night was a charity badminton meal where instead of going out for a meal, one of the women there cooks food and we pay what we would have to a charity. It works well and she is an ace cook, but Rob, Em and I all over ate.

Was woken up this morning at 4:30am by ludicrous rain, and didn't get much extra sleep, so spent most of the day being tired. It was nasty rain too, which Andrea in work said was very wet rain. A strange statement but described it perfectly.

Tonight was the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show Live. I took my Dad for his birthday, and Amy, Huw, Andrea, Dave and Robert from work all went too. It was simply incredible, they took many elements from all five of the radio shows and mixed them up to make a whole new thing, that was brilliantly done. It was a little odd how they did it, there was a row of microphones at the front of the stage, which the cast used randomly, a guy in the corner making sound effects with all sorts of things (just like the original show) a live band at the back, and Christopher Timothy in an armchair in the other corner, narrating the Book. They were all reading directly from scripts much of the time too. Strange, but it worked so well, and it was really good fun.

Christopher Timothy had some trouble with his lines since the script he was reading from had too small a print so they had to find him some decent reading glasses, but fortunately he managed to make a joke out of it and so it was absolutey hilarious when he stopped. Marvin in particular was very well done with someone walking round with a life size puppet, and Stephen Moore's voice coming over the PA, but with synchronised mouth lights which made it really convincing. The rest of the cast were great, Simon Jones captured Arther Dent perfectly, Geoffrey McGivern was ace as Ford Prefect and Susan Sheridan and Mark Wing-Davey were great as well. It was just a little odd hearing those so familiar voices coming out of those aged faces. The new people they had got in to play other roles were good as well, in particular the guy who played Slartibartfast. There was also quite a poignant moment at the end when they projected an image of Douglas Adams when the cast were taking their bows.

Afterwards we hung around the stage door and we were able to get stuff signed - I had taken my original 1985 book of the radio scripts in the hope of this and got it signed by all the main cast, which is amazing. I grew up reading that book before I even heard the radio series, so it was already a pretty treasured possession but now I think I'm going to have to put it away in a sealed bag and get another one to read.

What an amazing day. I'd almost forgotten about this coming up and I went into the show knowing absolutely nothing about it, so to be so completely blown away by it was great. Fantastic.

Uneventful week so far

Not much to report. Work has been OK.

Found that there was a new version of Darky's ROM that I was running on my Galaxy S. I backed up the stuff on it and installed it. Since it was already rooted from when I installed the previous ROM, it was dead easy to install. The new version is based on Ice Cream Sandwich, which was never supposed to come to the Galaxy S, so I was a bit dubious. I remember how sluggish my old HTC Magic became when it was unexpectedly updated from Android 1.6 to 2.2. It was useable, but it just felt a little off.

Fortunately the Galaxy S seems to cope OK with ICS. It's a bit weird after being so used to 2.2 but it works OK. The only issue is flickering when playing videos which is a bit intermittent, although after a reboot it now plays them fine

New shower

Yesterday I went to my Dad's, bike in tow, to have a look it. I got some crud catchers which fitted on easily enough, but we couldn't make head nor tail of the damned derailleur. We read up on it, but we just couldn't get it to not slip between gears. Annoying. After that we watched the prologue stage of the Tour de France, which was interesting.

We couldn't due the usual Alwen trip today as there was a race on around it, so Rob and I went to the Brenig and did the trip from the rear car park to the visitor centre and back. It was not the best weather and we got rained on a fair bit, and the track was made into a kind of sheep shit slalom, making me very glad I'd put the crud catchers on, which rapidly lived up to their name. But it was nice to stop at the visitor centre and have a nice coffee and hot chocolate before heading back to the cars. The gears were a pain though, unless it was on the top or bottom rear cog it just kept randomly slipping between cogs, so it was pick a gear and hope.

The new shower is finally plumbed in and sort of working, but thanks to our low pressure water system, getting warm water out of it is a keen balancing act requiring delicate manipulation of the tap. Also had a nice bonfire of a load of crap the work on the shower has generated, which is always fun.