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.