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.