Peculiarities of hideousness

There was no entry yesterday as just as I was about to start typing it, there was a massive flash of lightning and a HUGE crash of thunder, followed by a panicky minute or so unplugging all my various electrical things while rain poured from the sky like the very urine of God himself.

I've been passing a dead rabbit on the dog walk outside the village for about five days now, and I wish something or someone would take it away. It's been getting more and more manky since day 1 and it was pretty gory then. Eew.

After another session of Mario Strikers yesterday, playing against people online, I have decided never to play that game ever again. It is too frustrating, I find the controls annoying and stupid (the A button does different things depending on the circumstances) and the gameplay incomprehensible and repetitive and largely based on luck. However the effect it has on me is nothing compared to Will, who has full body convulsions and screams obscenities at the top of his voice when he loses. This is quite entertaining to watch, mind you.

Don't you hate it when you find a website that has a picture of something you're interested in, and it says 'Click for a closer look!' or some other cheery invitation. So you click on the image and...it opens a new window and shows the exact same image at the same size. Seems pointless.

I just tried to turf the dog off my bed. You'd expect a greyhound to be somehow graceful and elegant in it's movements, like an athlete or dancer, right? Well, somehow he managed to slip and fall flat on his face in the most ridiculous way possible. Reminds me of the time he fell off the bed sideways and ended up wedged on his back beside the bed. I had to lift up the whole bed so he could scramble out underneath, but looking back, it was quite funny because he just looked so surprised.

Linux, NFS shares and Star Wars

Spent a quiet day geeking it up. I spent quite a lot of time playing with my dual PIII Linux machine. It now has a 160gb IDE hard drive installed which it is sharing over the network. I found that it is a lot better to use NFS for the Mac as then it's basically Unix talking to Unix. It is also sharing the drive over Sambda, allowing Windows machines to access the same drive. All good fun. Strangely enough though the machine refused to boot unil I took the 2nd processor out, then it was OK again, even with the 2nd processor put back in. Odd. It's been fine ever since.

When I wasn't fiddling with the Linux box, I watched some Star Wars. The proper ones, not the prequels. It's been a while since I watched them, so that was fun too.

It rained all day so couldn't really take the dog out for a walk, but we did trundle round the fields in a brief period when it wasn't raining. Once again he got all excited about some rabbits, but failed utterly to catch them.

Wiper blades, Windows/Mac stupidity and H-blockx

Went to my Dad's today. We went into Llandudno which was probably a bad idea on a bank holiday weekend. But it wasn't too bad. I was after a cheapo external hard drive to shuffle data around between my various machines, so I could get my backup server ready. We also got some new wiper blades for the Discovery as the ones on it were 2" too short and worn out. After all that, we had fish and chips for lunch which was pretty good.

The external hard drive works well enough, it's a little 2.5" 80gb, which connects through USB. This caused a slight problem with my iBook as it only has USB 1.1 which is incredibly slow. Copying data from it to the external hard drive is actually quicker if I hook the drive up to my PC and share it over the network. However, this caused problems. It failed because there were files with ? in the name. Mac OS X can handle this, Windows can't, so I had to go and rename all those files. But then it failed AGAIN because there was a file with '\' in the name!!!!

The really STUPID thing that OS X does when it has a problem like this is just stop copying, which is infuriating. At least if Windows has a problem, it asks you if you want to skip that file and try again or something. In the end, there were more issues because of various hidden files that OS X creates in the Unix style. They start with '.' and so Windows has problems with them. too. I've since found if you do it in the Terminal using 'cp' it seems to do a better job, and if it finds a file it doesn't like, it tells you and carries on - hurrah!

All this faffing around with file sharing and stuff reminded me of an embarrassing incident a while back. I was showing my brother how to connect to a server over the network in Windows and one of the servers in the workgroup being named 'FUCKSTICKS'. I can't remember exactly what machine that was now, but obviously it had made me angry at some point.

Quite by accident while I was watching various YouTube videos on my Wii, H-blockx came up. This brought back a very distant memory of a track called 'Revolution' which was on a cover disk from either Kerrang! or Metal Hammer. I remember the track being quite good and listening to it as loud as I could on the crappy stereo in my Fiat Panda. Further investigation showed that H-blockx are in fact still going, and have done an interesting if slightly worrying cover of 'The Power" by Snap! and a couple of other tracks. This is a recent one, which is reasonably listenable and the guy is playing a Hamer 8-string bass.

A laser-etched MacBook Pro. Quite nice.

House prices suck but that's a rant for another time.

Super Mario Strikers

Work was boring and pants, although I did manage to sort out the Windows registry stuff that was causing me such anguish yesterday. The evening was much improved by an evening at Andy's house, where we played Super Mario Strikers. We also ate a really nice chicken curry made by Andy, and a vanilla pudding made by me, which was a decent success.

Anyway, I hate football games. Mainly because I hate football. There are a number of reasons I hate football, mainly due to being forced to play it in primary and secondary school. Back then I was always breaking my glasses, so they made me take them off to play. I couldn't see the ball. Or in fact the goal. Or the other players if they were too far away. My strategy was to run away from the ball if I ever caught sight of it. For some reason I was often put in defence. Odd. However, I was usually treated as a last-resort substitute. That suited me fine.

Football games on consoles are even worse. The machine randomly flips your control from one player to another, so just as you get the hang of it, you suddenly realise that you are in fact controlling the player who is running into the edge of the pitch. Stupid. Then you have to remember whether you are shooting or passing, and it's all just annoying.

Fortunately, Mario Strikers barely even pretends to be a football game. It is in fact Speedball remixed into a Mario game, and it's pretty good. OK, I'm pretty bad at it and nearly drove Will to tears by constantly getting the shoot and pass buttons mixed up, but we still won a respectable number of games. It's a really good laugh.

On the way home today I saw some fox cubs playing on the road, they were really cute little things. I know they're supposed to be vermin and hated, but I quite like them. I wish we could persuade them to get all the damn rabbits that are spreading around our fields.

Also, this is something I thought I'd never see: Dell computers with Linux preinstalled. It's using Ubuntu which has got pretty good in the last few releases. I'm typing this in Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04 right now. I couldn't stand Dell hardware a few years ago but it's machines now are OK. Well, the business orientated ones are at least, I haven't really come across it's consumer lines. I use a Latitude D520 laptop in work, which is pretty nice.

One thing I did today was figure out the meaning of life...but I forgot it. Sorry Will!

Fear and Loathing of the Windows Registry

I hate the Windows Registry. It's an essential part of Windows and when it works, you don't even know it's there. But if you have to go into it for any reason, what a nightmare. It wouldn't be so bad if the cretinous editor program wasn't so total cack. Argh. All to get some silly program running without admin rights. Hmm - better be careful what I say - check this out.

Took the dog for a walk which was uneventful except for being joined by a couple of people from the village who enlivened the proceedings by chucking water over each other for most of the distance. Also saw a small wood, where there is so many bluebells growing, from a distance the ground is solid blue. Impressive. A Tesco delivery van nearly ran us all over too, driving like an idiot down the narrow country lanes delivering food to people too lazy to go shopping.

Also the poor hound was once again tormented by squirrels. His breeding and presumably his race training have left him with a fierce desire to rid the world of all things small, grey and fluffy. Unfortunately squirrels fit this category, so when they go up trees to escape, he goes berserk. It's like he thinks they're rabbits that have learnt a new trick.

If I wasn't so useless at crafty things, I'd make a paper AT-AT. As it is I could perhaps manage a Borg Cube.

Pic is of a greyhound and her puppies. Awww. Not that it's a good idea to breed greyhounds as so many are churned out by the racing industry but that's a difficult subject.

A massive shock and a Quarter Pounder

Well, I paid for the work on the Discovery today. It was slightly more than I anticipated. I didn't quite collapse on the spot, but it was a close thing. So...urm. Yeah. I'm now considerably poorer than I thought I was. Oh well. Um. So yeah. It was one of those eye-opening moments. I think the thought process went something like: 'So how much is it then...hmm...what...no, that can't be right...oh F**K...f**kity f**k f**k BOLLOCKS...'

Basically the welding was the killer, it was such a complex job because of where it needed doing. It is a known fact that Discoverys do tend to go at the back end, but now that it's had this done, the only other thing that generally goes is the boot floor and it's already had one of those. So now it should be sound.

I installed a Seymour Duncan SPB-3 Quarter Pounder pickup in my bass too, to complement the SJB-3 which was installed last year. The name comes from the polepieces, which are a quarter of an inch wide, much larger than standard pickups. They are decent pickups, and a lot better than the standard things in my cheapo Squier Precision Bass Special - I couldn't afford a real Fender Precision Bass...

It was reasonably easy to install, though slightly harder than the previous one as the Precision style pickup is in two halves. My little battery powered soldering iron wasn't up to the task, so I had to get my Bernzomatic one out. This thing scares me a little, it's powered by butane. You have to start it with a lighter or a match, and then it starts making a sinister hissing sound, before getting REALLY hot. It's a good soldering iron though. I also took the time to adjust the other pickup I installed a few months ago, as it was slightly too low.

Fortunately, the new pickup worked first time, and it has made a big difference to the sound of the bass, it's louder and punchier. I think the Badass II bridge has helped as well though that still needs some tweaking as the saddles aren't quite right yet. But this cheapo bass actually sounds quite reasonable now. If only I had a decent amp to plug it into.

There's a petition against Scientology being recognised as a religious organisation in the UK.

Currently listening to the live version of 'Muffin Man' by Frank Zappa.

War...Interrupted

Today was a typical Tuesday, spent the day learning more about Unix and tape backups, all good fun. It's interesting and at least a nice escape from the daily grind of user problems.

I was playing Gears of War again cooperatively with Will when we got disconnected. Well, I got disconnected - I got booted off Xbox Live. We realised that my one-month free trial you get with a new 360 must have expired. It was a bit annoying as we had just died three times trying to get past a hard bit in a house. We just got through that bit and then it cut me off. Oh well. A years' subscription to Live is £34.99 through Play, not bad, but I'm holding off getting it until I've paid for the Discovery repairs. There was an absolutely hilarious moment where I sneaked up on one of the rocket launcher goons and basically shot him millions of times in the arse, and from Will's perspective, he wasn't moving, just jerking rapidly around with a huge smile on his face. Also there was a rather strange out of control moment where for some reason things kept coming into a room and we were charging around with the chainsaw bayonets, so there was lots of roaring and blood and screaming. It's hard to explain why this was so funny, but we were both crying with laughter while all this was going on.

Cliff Burton, the original Metallica bassist, was certainly rather different. I've never seen anyone else play bass like he did. It's more like guitar playing really, but it's still quite impressive. After seeing this video I was inspired enough to grab my bass and whack up the distortion. It's quite bizarre. Also found that the mandolin sounds rather interesting distorted.

Started the 6th Harry Potter book again, in preparation for the 7th book. Having reread them all several times, I still think they are pretty good, though I can see why people would dislike them.

Um...

In a move that is bound to infuriate Will, I am going to say that there was something I was going to type, but I can't remember. I think it was quite important too.

Spent most of the evening digging out some of my more obscure tracks in iTunes. Vollmond by In Extremo (angry Germans with bagpipes), the dance remix of Zombie by The Cranberries (sounds sacreligious but I like it) and the only Bjork track I have ever liked, Army of Me. Also Amish Paradise by Weird Al is absolute genius. The best one though is Monty on the Run from the Commodore 64. The sounds that Rob Hubbard got out of that little machine are absolutely amazing.

For no reason, the image is of a big Gretsch semi-acoustic bass. Played one that was similar to this in January and I quite liked it. Quite different from a regular solid body bass.

That's basically it.

Casio SK-1

Went to a car boot this morning and found a Casio SK-1. This was a very early example of a keyboard that lets you sample sounds. It can only record 1.4 seconds and it's low quality, but it's surprisingly fun. It cost £10, which was a bargain really as they still go for about £20-40. The main appeal is recording yourself making noises with your mouth/farting/burping/whatever, and faffing around with it. This is an example. It's also very, very clean and looks brand new.

There were various models that followed, but the SK-1 was the original. I already have an SK-5 which can hold 4 samples and has some more features, though it lacks portamento which the SK-1 has. All good fun.

I finally completed the second gang on Crackdown, after not playing it for a while. There was one particular boss which was driving me insane. You have to get across a quarry avoiding gunfire and rockets, to find a cave where the boss was hiding. My approach was to get into the Agency supercar and drive as fast as possible but usually I'd die just as I got to the cave. However I realised that the cave had openings at the back overlooking a highway and I was able to get in that way after some climbing.

Other than that, didn't really do very much today. I put flatwound strings on my bass as an experiment. They are smoother and have a more mellow sound. I quite like it.

A frustrating day

I tried very hard to take the dog for a walk today. However the weather was being unbelievably annoying. It was windy all day and rain kept coming and going all day. Every time I thought it was safe to go out, it would rain. I don't like walking in rain and neither does the Idiot Hound. So instead, I watched several episodes of Robot Chicken. It's really good.

For the first time ever, I got Samba working on a Linux box, so I could access a shared folder on it from Windows and Mac OS X. I was hoping to use it as a backup box for my various main machines, however due to a filename length limit, it choked on the Documents folder from the Mac. However, all is not lost as there might be a way of getting round it.

Incidentally, it's quite worrying that you can now get a 1 terabyte hard drive. OK, the formatted capacity is actually about 930gb, but that's a hell of a lot of data to lose if it dies. I've become slightly paranoid about backups recently hence the experimentation with the Linux box. It's based on an old dual 550mhz Pentium III server board which emits a loud, distressing squeal when switched off.

The thing is, I would only need about 40gb of space to back up everything I have, including my largely ripped-from-CD MP3 collection. I can't imagine filling up a 300gb hard drive, let alone 1tb. I think that drive will appeal mainly to those people who basically download every film, TV show and album they possibly can, even if they never watch it. It's like a weird status symbol to have several hundred gigs of downloaded stuff.

I found a Hornby Railways catalogue which had somehow survived in my room since 1990 or so. To be honest I thought I had given up my passion for model railways before then, but maybe not. It was rather strange to look at the page with the InterCity 125, which I always wanted.

Currently listening to the track 'Would?' by Alice in Chains.

Gimps of War

Spent the evening playing things on the Xbox 360, watching two mates play Gears of War, throwing cash registers at zombies (Dead Rising demo), rolling enormous balls around and falling over in increasingly stupid ways (Saint's Row insurance cheat).

Got the Discovery back. It had quite a lot of welding done at the back end, under the rear door. It was complicated as they had to cut through the top to get to where it needed welding, and then weld that back up again. So now it's basically sound, just need to keep it clean and get some underseal. Apart from the slightly shabby bodywork, it's in pretty good nick.

Watched the new Transformers trailer. It's going to be shit, I just know it. There are some good moments in the trailer, but the overall feel of the film just doesn't sit right. Also Optimus Prime has a STUPID face. Also the whole thing is basically going to be an advert for GM cars.

When tattoos go bad

Tattoos are funny things. Once they're done, that's it, it never goes away. I think it's odd to see tattoos on people who have had them a very long time, their skin ages and the tattoo looks more and more weird.

So, what the HELL is this going to look like when this guy gets old!? It's bad enough as it is, the poor woman looks like an ancient zombified version or something. The guy who did it has several pages of his work and to be fair some of it isn't too bad, if you like mutant skulls bursting out of people's stomachs at least. Just...weird.

Today should have been the day that the Halo 3 beta became available. And this was indeed the case, unless you were a Crackdown owner. It looks like it will be tomorrow now. Of course all the idiots who bought Crackdown JUST to play the Halo beta are all crying 'waaaaah not fair'. Personally I love Crackdown and think Halo 3 will probably be shite, just like Halo 2 was.

The picture is of a Steinberger bass. As you can see it's rather small and compact. Many years ago I had a copy of this made by Hohner, which I got in 1995. It was basically the same except it was a 5-string and made of wood instead of the graphite the Steinbergers are made from. I used it with an extra high B string instead of the low B usually found on 5-strings. It was a really good bass, very light and easy to play. It had a good sound, but the strings could be a little hard to find. However like an IDIOT I traded it for a hideous Westfield thing. The Hohner was a far superior bass, and all it needed was a good setup. It's one of those things I absolutely hate myself for doing. It was worth far more than I got for it.

One of my pet hates in work cropped up again today - people treating their work machine as if it was their own. I hate that, they download some stupid screensaver or game that screws up the OS and then blame the machine for being crap when we come to fix it. So we locked down the user rights and of course then people were upset that they couldn't download and install their favourite games/media players/file sharing software. I think I'm a bit of a tyrant as if I had my way, they wouldn't be able to change any settings at all, not even the colours or background. One machine I visited had all the colours set to various shades of luminous pink and bright green, it was absolutely vile. And yes, there was another laptop dropped recently, with a smashed screen.

Oh, and the Discovery had it's MOT today. It failed, quite badly. It needs extensive welding to the rear end, several brake pipes, and radius arm bushes. And a bush on one of the rear shocks. Wonderful. Just recently I was telling someone that it wasn't too expensive to run, consdering. Oh well, it's still in good shape for a Discovery less than a month away from it's 17th birthday.

A phone with...a compass?!

I got a new phone in work. It's a Nokia 5410i. It's a continuation of the rugged line they've done for a while now, aimed at the active outdoor type. The manual is full of athletic individuals using the phone in various unlikely ways. As you'd expect it has a rubbery solid case and various features. The most bizarre being a spirit level on the face of the phone. It has a tiny bubble so you can hold the phone flat. The reason to do this? So the built in compass can work well. Yes, it has a compass. It actually works quite well, though Nokia say not to depend on it, so they don't get sued when someone walks off the side of Snowdon and blames the phone. Other features include a DREADFUL camera, a sound meter and a thermometer which is utterly useless.

Other noteworthy events - urm. Not a specially scintillating day, but at least I was more cheerful today. Annoyingly there was something but I can't remember what it was.

Someone left a comment in my last entry saying 'I like your blog, mine's similar, take a look'. OK, my blog is about video games, computers, guitars and various other uninteresting things. Their blog is basically piccies of women with their breasts out. Perhaps it's me, but I don't see the connection.

This is a an article about love on World of Warcraft. It's very funny.

Part 1
Part 2

And here's a woman willing to go that little bit further for a Flying Epic Mount.

http://i13.tinypic.com/42tdfgl.jpg

This is what some person thought of the 5410i. Wow.

" i got dis fone afta ma samsung e310 broke it wernt da bst fone in da world but it woz much betta dan dis fone da only reeson im r8in it 2 stars is coz it haz a radio wich iz ok and da rubery case so weneva i drop it it dnt brke n it dnt scrach wich is gd coz i drop al ma fones a lot even if i reeli lyk em! i obviusly dnt meen 2. if i buy a fone it has 2 hav a good camera but dis 1 has da worst camera iv ever seen and it only holds 20 pics!!! but i dint reeli hav a chois. so if u lookin 4 a fone i wood advise u not 2 buy it !! x x x x x x "

A strange day

I don't know why but I spent most of today in a weird kind of super-tired miserable mood. It wasn't a particularly bad day or anything, I just woke up in that kind of mood and it didn't really go away until I took the dog for a walk in the evening. To be honest, I think I felt the same yesterday hence the rather long rant about religion. No idea what causes these moods to be honest.

There was something else I was going to mention but I really can't remember what it was. It probably wasn't very important. I think it was something along the lines of how annoying Apple's latest keyboard design is, as it's basically a transparent bucket with keys in. This means you can see clearly all the shite that falls into it. Annoying.

I also have to say that Windows Media Player is total utter, unmitigated shite. I like the Cray-1.

Headache. Unbelievably tired for some reason. Feck.

Edited to add that I had two packets of Nik-Naks, Nice and Spicy and Scampi and Lemon. It's been AGES since I had these and they are really very nice.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGH!

A long rant

Uh oh, here we go. A rant on religion. It's probably not going to be very coherant but it's been brewing for a while now.

I was never brought up to be particularly religious, though the vast majority of my Mum's family is devoutly Christian. The way I saw Christianity when I was young was that it was a nice load of stories, and you believed in it the same way you believed in fairy tales. It's a free world, and you can believe whatever you like. Now I've grown up, I just find it incomprehensible that people can believe such things.

My personal view now is that that there is a lot of evidence to support the existence of a very big universe and that life evolved from a more basic form. You can grab a telescope and see other planets and stars and things. I think it is incredibly arrogant to believe that this planet exists solely for the benefit of humans. Religion is like a security blanket, people would rather believe that than face the harsh truth that humanity is a mere insignificance in a vast, uncaring universe. If I die and there is a God, and he asks me why I never believed in him, I'd say that there was no proof. I don't count a book that has been cobbled together and rewritten over 2000 years to be proof. I mean, who isn't to say that in 500 years, that the Lord of the Rings books might not be the next Bible?

The only religion I ever had any thought of joining was Buddhism, but even that has been regarded as a dangerous cult (Friends of the Western Buddhist Order). Don't even mention Scientology. I personally believe that all religions are cults, just some are more successful and long-lived than others. Having said that, I could form a group that aims to promote belief in evolution and the universe in general, but who is to say that isn't any different? (see the Flying Spaghetti Monster)

The thing is, if it was just a matter of people believing what they want, I wouldn't mind. But when they start to push their beliefs on others, that's too much. OK, the guy in the street shouting about the Bible isn't too bad, but when it affects people's rights or people use it as a an excuse to marginalise or commit violence on other people, it is going too far. Also there are far too many cases where people have used religion as a something to push their own agenda. Unfortunately I feel quite strongly about this. Once I was walking down the street in Chester, and a guy approached me from a group of people shouting about the bible. The exchange went something like this:

Him: 'Can I ask you a question?'
Me: 'Is it about religion?'
Him: 'Yes.'
Me: 'Fuck off,' before walking away.

Now, I am normally quite shy and retiring and wouldn't even think of speaking to a stranger like that so it just goes to show how I feel about this. Even now I feel a bit guilty about it to be honest. I don't know how he reacted - I didn't look back.

Anyway, enough of that. If I've offended anyone - sorry! The thing is, I get quite worked up and angry about this. Being intolerant of religion and it's followers is just as bad so I feel guilty about it.

Long time, no post

Well, my birthday was OK. Didn't really achieve much. Sadly I was in work, but it was a reasonably nice day. That afternoon we had BlackBerry training, which was quite interesting. But I think BlackBerries take it just that little bit too far. I mean it's a nice idea to have always-on e-mail, but just look at how many people seem to be battling addiction to these things. They're called CrackBerrys for a good reason. Bleh. The actual devices are quite nice though and the technology behind it is quite clever.

Andy moved into his house yesterday, so cue an evening of Chinese food, Wii Sports, Super Monkey Ball and a rather peculiar card game. As you can see in the picture, Rob, Em and Andy are happy to be in Andy's house, and Will seems to be VERY happy indeed!

New Xbox 360 updates...the Dashboard is different now and there's also been an update for Crackdown. It adds lots of modes and features which is nice, but I really dislike the way that they have added stuff that you have to pay for. I keep finding something interesting and it goes 'Oh! You have to pay for this!' and that includes several weapons in the inventory. Annoyingly it doesn't make it obvious which ones. Also you can now take certain cars back to the Agency garage and use them. This doesn't include the Volk gang car that looks identical to the Land Rover 101" Forward Control.

The 360 looks good on an LCD monitor - I found a 2nd hand VGA lead in a game shop and hooked the 360 up to one of my 17" TFT monitors. It is capable of running it at the 1280x1024 native resolution and it did look very nice indeed. The screen is a little too small to use instead of a TV, and the response time on it isn't great. But it was interesting to get an idea what the 360 would be like on a HDTV.

Here's an interesting comparision:

A house for sale in Denbigh at £96,000.
A house for sale in Cornwall, Canada, at the equivalent of £76,000.

Average house price in Canada is $259,331 which works out to £117,747. UK average house price is £217,624.

I think I have finally found a compatible 2nd CPU for my Dell Precision 450. It needs a 2.4ghz Xeon with a 533mhz FSB and 512kb L2 cache. However I can't afford to buy it until next pay day, and the VRM and heatsink needed to get it working are impossible to find in the UK - may have to order those from the USA. Damn it. I suppose I could always fire up my beastly Compaq Proliant 5500 which is maxed out with quad processors - sadly they're only 200mhz Pentium Pros. It hasn't been fired up for a long time now, mainly because of it's huge appetite for electricity and the fact it takes 10 minutes to get going. In a fit of geekiness, I fitted it with blue LEDs in the drive trays and a cold-cathode light in the main vent.

I was going to write something else, but I can't remember what it was. Now I'm tired.

"It looks like toxic waste with an attitude"

Tomorrow is my 29th birthday. Now that is worrying. 30 is looming close on the horizon, which probably sounds a silly age to be worrying about. But it's just not an age I'll be used to. Thirty years old. Three decades. Still, that's a year away. I remember my Dad telling me how shocking it was to be 70 in 2004. Scary stuff. I hope if I make it to 70 I'll be in as good condition as my Dad is. Mind you he's always been a keen runner and cyclist and is to this day, and is one of those frustrating people who can eat and eat and stay rail thin. However I inherited his eyes and his sense of humour and the rest came from my Mum who is basically the total opposite, so I'll have to work harder to keep fit...

Work was average today. Yet another HP with a failed hard drive. They are always Maxtor drives that fail. Crappy crap crap.

I posted a picture of my bass guitar collection on a forum, and for some reason, my oldest and ugliest bass was the most popular! My very first bass, bought in 1993, it was dismantled many years ago and badly refinished by me. One guy on the forum loved it, saying 'it looks like toxic waste with an attitude'. I LOVE that, and it looks like the bass now has a new name. The attached picture is of the bass in question, click on it to see the full-size image and experience the radioactive green delight. It actually plays OK but sounds like poo. I could never get rid of this bass, though I might stick a decent pickup in it and rewire it if I get bored enough.

Cannonball by The Breeders - hadn't heard this for AGES. What a great track.

Gears Co-op

Not much to report today except a nice long session of co-op Gears of War with Will. It's a really good game. In fact, that's basically it. I'm sure I had something else to say but it's gone.

Yet more Crackdown, Aliens and a rather hurried walk

Today was a spectacular success. I set out to achieve absolutely nothing and succeeded brilliantly. Actually that's a bit of a lie. I was joined by Will for a co-op game of Crackdown where we honed our driving skills by repeatedly running over gang members, with the result that we both have maxed out driving skills. It makes the Agency vehicles much more fun, especially the nitro-powered Truck which doesn't stop for ANYTHING.

Apart from that, I watched Aliens, which I haven't seen for a while. It's such a good film. I own the first DVD boxset they made of all four films, but I think I've only watched the 3rd and 4th films once each, while I've seen the first two lots of times.

Took the dog out for the usual walk, which was proceeding uneventfully until I suddenly and unexpectedly needed a...well, you can guess. I was about half way round and I couldn't run in case it made it worse, so it became a sort of urgent, hurried power walk. The poor dog was most surprised at not being able to sniff and pee as he usually does. It was possibly the longest 30 minutes of my life.

Climbed the tallest tower

Made it to the top of the tallest building in Crackdown - the tallest tower of the central Agency building. It's very high and takes some getting to. There's a race to get to the top of the building and then jump around the three towers, but I'm not good enough to do that yet. I practically cried when I got to the first checkpoint and it said there were 2 more to go, and by then I only had 30 seconds left. Still, at least I got an Achievement out of it.

Ten things to do in Crackdown - this game has so many possibilities for fun
HUGE Explosion in Crackdown - Entertaining, despite annoying voice

I replaced the hard drive in that old laptop with a spare one I had floating around. It's from the same era as the machine and works fine, so it now has a 120mb hard drive. Woo. If only there was a way to replace the backlight, then it would be truly possible to experience the joys of 386 computing. Interesting perspective - that computer is 11 months younger than my 1990 Land Rover Discovery.

Oh GAWD I'm a geek.

Mustangs, Ferraris, the USS Excelsior and lots and lots of gunfire

Well, the Xbox 360 has been getting a workout these last few days. I downloaded some game demos. Mainly Quake 4, which looked pretty but seemed to be more of the same. It looks like it's a direct sequal to Quake II. I then downloaded the Star Trek Legacy demo to see what it was like. Sadly the dreadful reviews were correct. I found myself in command of the USS Excelsior Sounds fun? No, not when the ship is amazingly sluggish and unresponsive, and it take forever to try and lock on to the enemy ships which are a mere 4 pixels wide. Also, if you fly your ship into another, it just goes straight through. Perhaps the most laughable thing is if you approach a planet. You realise that it is in fact smaller than your starship, and if you get too close, you bounce off. So much for the 'realistic physics' that they advertised.

The other demo was Test Drive Unlimited. The idea behind this is quite cool, basically it recreates part of a Hawaiian island and you drive around in various expensive cars. The twist is that the other cars on the road aren't all computer controlled, they are other people who are playing the game. So you can challenge them to races or whatever. It supports headsets too but I all heard was complaints in that weird high-pitched voice that all people seem to have that the guy in the grey Mustang doing donuts is in the way, which was me. Nice idea, but not sure if I'll bother with the full game.

And I finally picked up a copy of Gears of War. It's a very intense game, and it has that rare combination of amazing graphics and also amazing gameplay. The storyline is nicely thought out and draws you in. Very impressive game. The way it works is quite different from most FPSs which can be a little disconcerting.

Car boots this morning - the main big one wasn't on but took a look at a couple of others. Didn't find anything good. I did pick up a Unisys PowerPort laptop for £2, which is very old. It's a 386 based machine from 1991 and I only picked it up because it was very heavy and the entire case is made of metal, with a huge screen. Research has shown that it was a very high end machine and cost over £4000 for a model with 2mb RAM.

I was able to fire this one up with a Toshiba power supply and found that it has 6mb so it must have been pricy back in the day. Sadly the hard drive has failed and the backlight is very dim, other than that it's in good nick and it has a very nice keyboard. Interestingly there was a disk in the floppy drive labelled James' Story 'Dead Walk' which had a couple of Word files. One was a short Frankenstein type story, and the other was a 35 page epic which seems heavily inspired by Lord of the Rings. The author of these appears to be named James Rice. Weird. The 35 page story wasn't finished - wonder if he ever did finish it. Also there was a Flash animation of a guy hitting himself in the head with a baseball bat.

Flying Vs and green arms reaching out of ponds

Some say the Flying V guitar design is the height of cheese, and that's mainly because of the image it picked up in the 70's and 80's. I really like it though, admittedly it's difficult to play sitting down, but I've always thought it was rather elegant. Apparently the original intention was that the V would be used by blues guitarists, and they would put it over one leg with the neck pointing upwards. Strangely, nobody went for that, and the design fell into obscurity until it was picked up by the heavy metal scene. So considering the Flying V has always been associated with heavy metal and that kind of thing, the Dean V-coustic is an interesting idea. It's basically what it says, an acoustic Flying V. It probably doesn't sound very good unplugged, but hey, it's different. Shame there's no bass version or I'd probably get one...

I was walking the dog today when I went past a field that had a murky green pond in the corner, and it dredged up a very early memory from primary school. It was a story in a book, where some kid was warned to stay away from a pond. However he ignored the warning, and something came out of the pond and got him. I remember very clearly it had an illustration of the poor kid kneeling by the pond, and these long green arms had come out of the pond and grabbed him round the neck. That really freaked me out, unsurprisingly. I don't remember the point of the story though, or what happened to the kid, just that nasty image stuck in my memory.

I've never seen a Bulgarian Tambura, but I really like this solo played on one.

This is a very good Frank Zappa song called 'City of Tiny Lights'. It has some of the most screwed up animation I have ever seen. Also there is a live version, which is even better other than the frightening Speedo wearing drummer, but it's really good and well worth a listen. I hadn't heard any of his stuff before I went to Berlin in March, and my brother played some for me.

Finally downloaded the new version of the Wii Internet browser. It's much better than the preview, and the autohiding toolbar is a definite plus.

3 day weekend! Superb! Even more time to waste!

'I'm the commander guy.'

Wow, you've got to love George Bush. Last year, he proclaimed himself to be 'the decider' and now he's gone so far as to say 'I'm the commander guy'. He sounds like a six year old. Crazy.

And if you're towing a Boeing 737 and make a wrong turn, the obvious thing to do is abandon it. How mad is that. I'd claim it and turn it into a house!

AutoCAD upgrades suck. At least today went quite smoothly, and the rhythmic chorus of 'Is it back up yet?' was quite subdued this year. Reminds me of updating the test software at my last job, which went something like this:

1) Call out that it will be shut down and to log out.
2) Shout out over the various cries of protest that they have to finish whatever they are doing and log out.
3) Shut it down 10 seconds later.
4) Ignore the further cries of protest from those who didn't hear me or hadn't bothered to log out, and shout 'Tough!'.
5) Start the update.
6) Get frustrated and threaten to cancel the update and never bring up the application again if one more whiny voice asks 'Is it back up yet?'
7) Complete the update, while continually bitching about the PCAnywhere connection to the server. Start it up.
8) Announce the application is back up. Then log into the application and send rude messages to all those who said 'About time.'
9) Receive another version in the next ten minutes which means going back and starting all over again.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

My hair is getting big. Need to work out what I'm going to do with it. I only really didn't cut it to see what it looked like, as it's never been very long in about 9 years. What the hell do you do with curly hair anyway? I've hated having curly hair my entire life, to the point where I still feel uncomfortable eating bread crusts even now, having been informed at a young age that it would make your hair curl. Suggestions on a postcard to the usual address, but be warned, I'm not growing an afro, that caused me mental scars last time.

Dunno if anyone reads www.digg.com. It used to be good for tech stuff about a year ago, but then it got popular and now it's just a dumping ground for stupid stories about 12 year olds with shotguns, how marijuana is good for you, and various Wii/Xbox 360/PS3/Apple/Linux stories, usually with fanboys getting all het up about something. However there was an interesting episode the other night - the number above is very naughty. It allows you to descrypt HD-DVD, and Digg started to censor stories which mentioned it. Howver, a kind of revolt took place, and eventually the system was overrun with stories which mentioned the number in a roundabout way, and crashed. The moderators decided to just let the stories and comments run and to hell with the consequences. It even hit the BBC News.

In other news, Dell is going to support Ubuntu Linux on it's computers. This is certainly interesting news. I'm not hugely fussed about Dell, some of the hardware is OK, apart from it being weird and non-standard. But it is one of the biggest PC makers. It started using AMD processors, and now it's installing Linux? Intel and Microsoft must be pissed off, and perhaps slightly worried. I like Ubuntu, it does a lot of things right.

Sometimes you wonder what the entire point of life is. I wonder what it's like to actually have a purpose. For some people this is marriage and kids, for others it isn't. How odd.

Duality by Slipknot. I don't like Slipknot, I think they've done about four tracks I liked, but this is one of them. This track never fails to cheer me up, which I know makes no sense for a song that has 'I push my fingers into my eyes' as the first line, but for some reason it does.

Lasers, Mötley Crüe, and laptops that blow away in the wind

What a pointless day. Spent most of it rebuilding a couple of PCs that were rescued from the scrap pile in work. One of them had a years warranty left - how insane. Another is a laptop that cost a ridiculous amount of money three years ago and now has a failed hard drive. It is a Toshiba Portege R100 and is so light and small, it feels astonishingly fragile. Also it stupidly uses a 1.8" hard drive, like an iPod, making it hard to replace. Bah. Also office politics kicked off in the afternoon, which sometimes can be ignored, other times it drives you insane.

Spent some of the evening trying to adjust a laser in an Xbox 360 which refuses to load 360 games, but plays DVDs. I've reached the depressing conclusion that it is not the laser and the drive firmware has been messed with, probably by some 'tard that wanted to play pirated games. From what I can gather, if the drive firmware isn't flashed with the correct key, the motherboard will play DVDs and CDs, but will never load an Xbox or 360 game ever again or at least until some enterprising individual comes up with a way to make it work. Oh well, I can now take a 360 apart in approximately two minutes, which I'm sure will come in useful...right?

Many MANY years ago, when I was about 10, I was given a tape which had lots of Glam Metal tracks on it. I had no idea what I was listening to as it wasn't labelled, but I eventually found out most of them were Mötley Crüe. I just found a video for the track 'Kickstart my Heart' on YouTube, and it was rather a shock. It is so VERY glam, it's upsetting. Also there's a track called 'She Goes Down' where the first thing you hear is a zip being undone and a woman's laugh. To me the laugh sounds rather sarcastic, if a woman laughed like that when I got my todger out, it would be extremely humiliating. That track was a complete mystery to me at that tender age, along with AC/DC's 'Giving the Dog a Bone', which is another very good track about the same subject. I never found out what the other tracks on that tape were, which is a shame as I'd like to hear them again.

Also found a Jackass episode where they took part in the Gumball 3000 race. I only found it because the car they took part in was a Jaguar XJ6, which is one of my favourite cars I'll probably never own. It's quite fun, apart from the bits where they do typical Jackass shite.

There was something else I was going to write, possibly regarding socks, but I can't remember what it was. Oh well. Let's face it though, how interesting can socks really be? Then again, one of mine tried to bite me the other day, so maybe...

Have you seen the 'I'm a Mac' adverts? Dont you just want to punch the Mac guy in the face for being such a smug bastard? At least in the UK versions. I can see what the adverts are trying to say but it just reinforces that apparent Elitist attitude that Mac users are seen as having. I hope I'm a nice Mac user, like the way I try to be a considerate 4x4 driver.

And the Optimus Prime toy for the upcoming Transformers movie looks like total shite. It's all crappy plastic and looks AWFUL, not helped by rather dubious redesign of the character in the first place. I was really looking forward to this, unt I saw the trailer. To me, the trailer made it look like 'wow, look, big CGI robots fighting and destroying things'. I hope I'm proved wrong, but I'm convinced it's going to be a huge pile of fetid dingo's kidneys.

A mysterious encounter

I was taking my daily walk with the Idiot Hound* and had a rather strange encounter. One of the nice things about walking around the quiet country lanes is that you very rarely meet anything. Sometimes a car might go past, or perhaps even someone on a horse, or even maybe someone with another dog. This can be a good thing if it's a woman I meet every so often who has two lovely greyhounds, or bad if it's the couple down the road with an insane dachshund who thinks it can take on my dog when it barely reaches past his ankles.

Anyway, I was walking along in a kind of walking doze, you know how it is when you know the way, you don't have to be anywhere and the weather is good. I was deep in thought about something when suddenly a loud female voice cried "She's so lucky!". This was rather startling, and I looked up to encounter a female jogger hurtling towards me. What was odd that she didn't appear to be on a mobile phone or wearing an MP3 player, so why she would say that out loud at the top of her voice is beyond me. Anyway she jogged past without any more words, so perhaps she was talking to herself.

Picture is of a highway near San Francisco which collapsed due to a tanker fire. Looks really weird how the road is all bent like a blanket.

Played the Command & Conquer 3 demo from Xbox Live briefly. It seems fairly typical strategy stuff, and I remembered how I loved building up an army in Warcraft II and then going out to slaughter the enemy.

Bored and tired now, so just some links:

Excruciating Windows 95 training video with Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston.
Some insanely cool monitor setups that make my dual head system seem a bit...shit.

* Idiot Hound = a friendly name for a not at all stupid and very lovable greyhound.

A machine that runs at 0.008ghz and Xbox Live

I am typing this on an Amstrad Notepad Computer NC100. You may remember this machine being sold in the early 90's as User-Friendly. It cost £199 and Amstrad promised you your money back if you couldn't use it within five minutes. It featured coloured keys which were pressed in certain combinations to select things like the word processor and calculator. I picked mine up in about 1995 for some reason. Mainly because by then they were very cheap and I thouht it would be fun to play with. It has some extra features behind the user friendly stuff, a full implementation of BBC Basic and a serial terminal were the interesting things. Some guy has also worked quite hard to port CP/M to it. It's a very humble machine, powered by an 8mhz Z80 processor with 64k memory, and a cheap low-contrast LCD which can display 8 lines of text. However, it does have a surprisingly good keyboard. I used it mainly to jot down ideas and write things on, the serial port allowing the transfer of the text to a desktop PC.

So why should I be impressed by this very humble machine? Because the last time I did anything with it was about four years ago. Since then, it's been stuck under my bed. I dug it out the other day and pressed the power button. To my amazement, it turned on, admittedly to tell me the batteries were low, but it still turned on. I put a set of fresh batteries in it and found that all those old files of random jottings were still there. Even the clock was correct. It's somewhat ironic that those files were originally backed up from the NC100 to a PC that died and was scrapped about six years ago.

I've always had a fondness for portable machines that don't require a huge lithium battery to run, and that will last for months on AA batteries. It may not be very powerful, but for stuff like simple text entry and stuff like that, you can't beat it. As I type this, I'm sitting in the field in the sunshine. Yes, I could do that with a modern laptop, but I'd be worried about dirt getting into it, and most laptop screens are very hard to see in the sunshine. A similar and far more popular machine like this was the Tandy Model 100, which was practically indestructible. I also have a Cambridge Z88 somewhere, which had a practically silent rubber keyboard, that was very usable. That one was a bugger to connect to a PC though, so I never really used it for anything.

There's something about a machine which allows you to concentrate on a particular task with no Internet, MP3, or anything to distract you. A modern equivalent is the AlphaSmart machines, portable word processors which allow you to simply enter text. The clever part is that you hook them up to the keyboard port of the PC, and the data just comes across as keystrokes. Sadly the modern versions that support USB are quite expensive, so I'll just have to hook this Amstrad up to the legacy serial port on the Dell. It's been a while since I had to set up a serial link, but it soon came back to me.

So, in other news, the phone line has been reconnected. That means I was able to get my Xbox 360 connected up to Xbox Live. It's interesting. I got one month free of the Gold service, so I'm carefully evaluating it. A year costs œ34.95. The game linkup service is pretty much spot on - Crackdown was even synchronising up dead ragdoll pedestrians perfectly, which was impressive. You can send messages, which is infinitely easier with a USB keyboard, and even do voice chat. Things I don't like about Xbox Live are the adverts it puts on the Dashboard, and the fact that complete strangers can see that you're playing a particular game and ask to join you. I was happily trying to complete a race in Crackdown, when it said 'PennsylvaniaButtocks95 would like to join your game'. I can't remember exactly what the name was, but it was something like that. It's plausible, considering some of the weird handles that people use on there.

Being able to download game demos is pretty cool, although it takes a while as they are pretty big. I'm currently downloading the Command & Conquer 3 demo, which is 1gb. I was quite surprised at the sheer number of demos that are available to download, and it's good to know that if I ever get bored of the games I have, they are there.

I also picked up a couple of games the other day, Saint's Row and the original Halo. Saint's Row is based on the same engine as Crackdown, but somehow manages to look a lot less interesting, and more like a good last-gen game. It's also much less fun. The best thing about it is the Player Pratfalls cheat. I think I added a link to a video of this a while back, and it's very, very funny. Sadly you can't do this in multiplayer games.

So all-in-all, I'm quite happy with the Xbox 360 experience. I just wish the hardware wasn't so noisy and hot. It makes a fair bit of noise. It chucks out quite a lot of heat when it's running at full load, but nothing much worse than a typical PC under the same circumstances. The 360 controller is one of the best, and it even works very well with old Xbox games. It's a world away from the giant original Xbox controllers.

Back at last

This was supposed to be posted last week or so.

Well, this is a long entry indeed. Mainly because a week and a half ago, a farmer decided he was going to plough a field which runs alongside our drive. This field hasn't been ploughed for some forty years, but it recent went into the ownership of a young and enthusiastic farmer, which seems to be a rare thing these days. However, he didn't realise that our phone line ran down the hedge and cut across the bottom of the field. Do I need to draw you a picture? I took the dog for a walk, and came back to find no Internet. No phone either. A quick investigation found the severed ends of cable. Joy. Because we get our phone service from Pipex now, rather than BT, it added a few extra steps to go through, and due to some staggering incompetence by Pipex, it took a long time to resolve.

I had a picture of the freshly ploughed field all ready to post, as the sun shining on it made it look like some vast chocolate cake. Then the next day, they proceeded to spread lime over the field, making the houses nearby look like a miniature version of New York after the 9/11 attacks. After this, it looked like the cake had been sprinkled with icing sugar. Sadly now they have gone over it with a roller and it just looks like a field again. Oh well.

Apart from that, the last few days have been uneventful. Saturday morning was dull, went into work to do some overtime, just some mindlessly boring PC reconfiguration, made doubly depressing by the fact it was such a beautiful day. However as I was driving home from the office, something possessed me, and before I knew it, I was travelling home brand new Xbox 360 Premium in my hands. Yeah, not sure what caused that, it was like my conscience was lost for a while. I had intended to get a Core, as I had said to myself many times that the only thing I really wanted in the Premium was the hard drive, the wireless controller didn't matter, and I certainly didn't want a headset. One of the few times I played a game on my old Xbox online with the headset, I was called repeatedly called a 'fucking shithead' by someone who I very much doubt had reached puberty.

Anyway, back to the 360. I remember pouring ridicule on the 360 when it originally came out. It was ugly, it looked like a squashed Dell. It was too expensive, the different versions were pointless, the triple-core CPU was stupid and the PSU was too big. But then Sony revealed the monstrosity that is the PS3. Actually, to be fair I suspect the PS3 is a better engineered machine than the Xbox 360, which has a very suspect reliability record. But Sony forces you into Blu-ray, built a machine capable of running at 1080p resolution and lumbered it with a 12-year old controller design, and some of the arrogant shit they have been saying is just unbelievable. It's also incredibly expensive. The clincher was the news that GTA4 was going to be released on the 360. So I now have the combo known as the Wii60, and like it very much. The 360 does have a dodgy reliability record so I decided that I definitely wanted a new one with a warranty. If the PS3 has some good games on it, I might pick one up. After a price cut...

Having actually used it now, I have to say I like the 360. The Dashboard is very nicely put together, and the controller is excellent. It's a tad noisy for a games console, as it makes the same noises as an average PC. I only have one game at the moment: Crackdown. Now, what a game. Take GTA, make the main character a superhero cop, and that's basically it. It took a little while for me to get into it as for a while I didn't have a clue was I was supposed to be doing, but now I love it.

Annoyingly because I don't have any Internet connection, I can't experiment with the 360 online stuff, like the demo downloads and the like. I think the next game I get will be Gears of War as a friend has it, and it is a great game. It has really good gameplay and tactics, and it has some of the best looking graphics I've yet seen on a console, even on a standard definition TV.

Today (Sunday) I went down to one of our nearest neighbours (1 mile away) who was having difficulties with his PC. It turns out it was an old 1.3ghz Athlon running the original release of Windows XP without a single update, and no antivirus or firewall. It was connected to the Internet directly through a Speedtouch modem. Surprisingly it wasn't a festering mess of viruses and spyware, though there were some viruses on it. But Windows had managed to screw itself up in the way it does so well, and resisted all attempts to get it working again. So I said it needed wiping and reinstalling, to be presented with a CD-R of Windows XP and an illegible handwritten code. A few years ago I'd probably have happily installed this dodgy copy of XP but these days I haven't got the patience to fiddle around with pirate copies of Windows. You can't get all the updates to make it secure without faffing around and it's just irritating, which was the whole point of Windows Update (see rant in last entry). If you don't want to pay for Windows, get Linux or something.

Anyway this guy's wife turned around and just said they'd most likely get a new machine, probably a laptop, as their house is very small. It was odd, I've been past that house probably thousands of times over the years, and I've never been in it. The back of the house is directly on the road and has no windows, and so I was very surprised at how small it was inside. But it was very cosy, definitely my kind of house.

Back to reality

OK, let's start this entry with a slight rant:

I FUCKING HATE WINDOWS UPDATE. Thanks to it, I lost a fairly long and coherant entry about Madrid, video games and the hideousness of Heathrow Airport. Windows 2000 decided to download and install some updates, and then automatically restart my computer. It did this while I was away from the computer, so I missed the 5 minute countdown before it started happily closing down every window I had open, all the websites I was looking at, the VNC session to my media box, the telnet session to WackyMOO and of course the Firefox window with my blog entry. None of the applications were able to cancel the shutdown. Who the FUCK thought that allowing Windows Update to do this BY DEFAULT was a good idea. What a load of shite. Firefox thankfully keeps a record of what you are doing so if it crashes, or is KILLED BY FUCKING WINDOWS UPDATE then it can open the sites you had open before.

I HATE this culture of releasing shit software and then releasing patches over the Internet. Every fucking OS makes you do this nowadays, Windows is the worst, but Mac OS X and Linux do it as well. But it was Microsoft that somehow made this approach legitimate. These days, even fucking games consoles do it. The Xbox 360, PS3, PSP and even the fucking Wii make you do this! It's total bollocks.

OK, that was quite a major rant. I can't remember exactly what I had typed before but it can be summarised thusly:

I like Madrid, the Spanish language, the Metro, and the daily Spanish routine, the Chueca district, but not the Street of Shame, the prices of drinks in Chueca or the big police with shotguns. Transferring through Gatwick and Heathrow sucked arse. Terminal 4 of Madrid airport is amazing. My camera can see into an alternate universe. Went to a local game shop today and bought Phoenix Wright for the DS and Lego Star Wars II for the PSP.

I need a haircut. I also need Battenburg cake.

Currently listening to No More Tears by Ozzy Osborne. Reminds me of night shifts at my last job.

For fuck's sake, thanks to that Windows Update fuckup, this entry has become stupid, rambling and SHIT.

Madrid Again!

Well, Madrid is proving to be very cool indeed. It has a definite European feel to it, far more so than Berlin, but I can´t put my finger on exactly why. I would update the blog with a picture, I´ve got nearly 300 now, but unfortunately the wireless network my laptop was able to see has now been locked so I can only get on with the hotel computer with no facitilities to upload images.

So far we´ve eaten a lot of good food, talked to a squirrel monkey, fed prairie dogs, walked along a LOT of streets, found a 12-string mandolin, drank a lot of beer and vodka, and along with that, had an extraordinary amount of tapas. It has to be said, Madrid rules.

Madrid!

Posting this from a hotel in Madrid. It's handy having a laptop, and even handier that the hotel has wireless access. So far we've visited a lot of bars, had a lot of tapas, and possibly the best sandwiches ever made. Superb. Spanish is proving interesting too, it's an intriguing language. The journey here was rather fraught. The flights weren't bad from Manchester to Gatwick and then Madrid. However, we got a taxi from the airport to the hotel, which was...interesting. First it was rush hour traffic, and the driver had some interesting ideas about junctions and reversing.

More coming soon and possibly even some pictures.

Bits of futon + Scorpio + Random guitar parts = 2 string lap steel bass

Today was an insanely busy day. I got up early to go to a car boot sale. It was pretty big, but when it's big it just means that there is a whole lot more shit out there. People really do try and sell the worst cack you can imagine. I did pick up a Nokia 9000i, one of the original Communicators. If you're not familiar with these phones, they're the ones that open up to have a larger screen and QWERTY keyboard inside. To be fair, this thing is huge. It works fine and came with the charger. It'll go nicely with my 9110 and 9210 models too.

Nokia 9000 Communicator

Today it was Farmer mode. I put on wellies and drove the Discovery around the fields sorting out some things. It was a rather satisfying day really, got a hell of a lot of things done and got all grubby and dirty and then had a really nice shower. It's great to have a shower when you're all dirty.

Also today I was watching a DVD I wasn't particularly interested in, and had the urge to create something. No idea why. So after some thought and seeing what was lying around, I hacked an old futon to bits and cut the wood up using a Black and Decker Scorpion, a scary electric saw that can also be used as a jigsaw. After some drilling and screwing (ahem) and attaching some random spare bass parts, I ended up with what I am describing as a 2-string lap steel bass guitar. It has to be a slide style guitar because the strings are so far off the neck. However, if you tune it to a powerchord and slide a glass up and down the strings, it makes some interesting sounds. Now I just need to find a spare pickup and attach it somehow. The wood is very soft so when the strings are tuned up, it starts to resemble a banana so it has to be detuned rather drastically. Oh well, it was a good learning experience.

Turns out this has been done before, Mark Sandman of Morphine played a 2-string bass with a slide. Interesting sound too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrx4EnkVj50&
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn8n4nLEYIw&

So all in all, quite a productive day.

Last day of work! Spanish! Mutants!

Today was the last day of work before the bank holiday weekend and the trip to Madrid. It was a great feeling to walk out of the office today, knowing I'm not going to be back in there until the 18th. It was made even better by the fact I managed to get my jobs down to practically zero, so that was good news.

I've been trying to get a laptop ready for the Madrid trip in case it comes in useful. I've decided on the Panasonic Toughbook CF-M34, which is a very tiny machine, but is one of the military spec models. It's only a hunble P3-400mhz with 192mb RAM but it isn't too bad. It's got an insanely strong case, the first laptop I've ever seen where you can twist it in your hands and it doesn't move. Not a single creak. All the other laptops I have are big and fragile and I can't be bothered taking a huge one. It also has a touch-screen, which I've never got working.

However, being a tiny sub-notebook, the Toughbook has no internal CD-ROM or floppy drives. Because Linux is tricky with wireless cards, I thought I'd put a temporary install of Windows XP on there by putting the hard drive into another laptop. But no, XP doesn't like being installed on one machine and then booting up on another. It has a tantrum and blue-screens. As does Windows 2000 Advanced Server. I tried formatting the drive from a Win98 boot disk, and copying the install files. The installer ran and spent about 2 hours copying files that were already on the hard drive, but then failed after it rebooted. So after a long session of cursing I put Ubuntu Linux back on it again, going full circle. Linux doesn't like booting up on a strange machine either, but at least it drops you to a command prompt so you can reconfigure the graphics. Ubuntu is a pretty decent Linux distribution, I've ran various versions on both x86 and PowerPC hardware and when it works, it works well. When it doesn't work...well, fiddling around with text files and command prompts is fun, right? Right?

Well, that was a nice bit of geekery for you. I found a nice Spanish tutorial here:

http://www.ielanguages.com/spanish1.html

It looks quite decent. Probably should have looked this up months ago, but hey.

Currently listening to Reise, Reise by Rammstein.

In case you're wondering what the pic is all about, check this thread out on Something Awful. I was inspired by the recent Robocop entry. However the forum thread has been Dugg, so the server seems to be dying. Check back later though, it's quite funny.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2412676&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

That's about it really, can't think of anything else to put.

A slow day

I spent all day feeling tired and unmotivated. I didn't achieve much at all. Probably the only good thing was getting a replacement SCART switch box off a guy in work. Since my last one made everything go purple, the only things I've had hooked up are the Wii and my DVD player. The PS2 and Xbox have been sadly neglected until today.

My ever faithful Nokia 7610 took a tumble the other day and the rear cover finally cracked. So I got a new shell for it. To be honest the original brown/silver/gold cover had never really done it for me so the new one was black/silver/red. And it looks nice again. It's a weird looking phone, but it's astonishingly solid and despite much abuse (accidentally kicked into a concrete wall, dropped multiple times, once down stairs, had wine spilt in it, etc), it has never failed me.

I was looking into replacing it but nothing out there really appeals at the moment except the business orientated Nokia E-series, but they are still quite pricy.. Someone in work was selling an LG Chocolate, which apart from the idiotic name is quite nice. But it was too sleek and shiny and I knew I'd wreck it, and also the OS was a bag of shite. Part of the reason I like Nokia phones is that you can scratch them up completely and then a new shell makes it look new again.

Bored. Probably the most unmotivated blog post ever.

Badminton, fear and Fields of the Nephilim

It was the end of season badminton tournament today, which I was absolutely bricking it for. I got partnered with a guy from the A team, who thankfully is quite patient when I do one of my trademark fuckups. I don't know where we came in the end but we did win one game and managed a respectable score against one of the pairs in the final (though to be fair they started with -9). All good fun. Afterwards we went to the pub to marvel at the fact that it's now illegal to smoke in them - yay! The place still smelled of smoke though.

This is another weird track, Psychonaut by Fields of the Nephilim. I first heard it from a guy years ago who was a real Goth, and I really liked some of their music. This track is really good and has a great bass line. I hadn't seen the video before and it is...odd.

Running people over was never so much fun

Yesterday was interesting. I spent the morning messing around and taking the dog for a walk. Then met up with some guys I used to work with at my last job and spent the entire evening playing Wii and eating pizza. It was a great evening, how can you go wrong with that? My pizza had Chinese Chicken on it and was utterly fantastic. Of course now I have guilt.

Had a play on Saints Row on the Xbox 360 today. We didn't actually play any of the missions, instead we just ran people over and kicked and punched them while laughing hysterically at the ragdoll physics. Also there is a mode where you can make your character go all limp and floppy, which is absolutely hilarious. All this was made all the more funny by the fact that he was dressed as Santa. Watching people bounce off cars and walls is far funnier than it sounds. Especially when the cheat mode was activated where all the people in cars hate you. Leaping wildly out of the way to avoid a car which promptly smashes into a wall, sending the driver flying through the windscreen, is far too funny to be described here.

The Xbox 360 is a nice machine, it's quite hefty compared to the Wii, but it has a really nice controller and the games look pretty decent even on a normal TV.

Oh my God, just came across this video for Wanted Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi on YouTube. Back in the day, I absolutely loved this track, and it was an interesting experience hearing it again. I had a video that Bon Jovi did about the Slippery When Wet tour, and it was one of the things that made me want to play in a band. Scary stuff.

I had a go on a double neck acoustic like the one played in the video, except the 12 string neck was on top. It was BIG but fun. I wish I could play guitar better. When I saw the Bon Jovi video above, I found some tab for the intro and tried to learn it, with some success. Bass is my main instrument but I do like some of the stuff you can do on guitar too.

I hit Pro in Wii Bowling today - I had three games and got a record score in each one. I've never had such a good session of bowling before, so not sure what happened there.

People are finally noticing that I haven't cut my hair for a while. I had it long until 9 years ago and since then I've never let it grow longer than a centimetre or so. However I've decided to let it grow and see what happens. It's just got to the stage where it suddenly looks big, so I'd better do something with it soon.