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.