State of Mind (Kernel panic: Fatal exception)

Worried about car. Doubting myself for ever buying the damn thing. Is it really sensible to depend on a vehicle that's only a few months off being able to legally drink in the UK (18 years), often requires usually expensive repairs and parts, requires £60 of diesel to fill the tank, and is insurance group 12? Plus in the two years I've had it, it really has eaten quite a lot of money. I've made some pretty stupid (and expensive) choices in cars over the last few years (The Pimpmobile, 1982 Audi 80 and the Shitroën Xsara were all very silly mistakes)

Lonely. (this excellent song by Type O Negative seems appropriate, skip to 5:00 if you get bored and ignore the video which apparently was made by some rabid fans of the guitarist)

Anti-materialistic. Why the HELL have I spent so much time and, let's admit it, money, on old computer equipment, which I rarely use, and am now too lazy to get rid of? Example: from where I am sitting now, I can see 28 laptops. Of these, three, possibly four are in regular use.

Unmotivated. I want to lose some weight, do some work on the house and track, but I somehow never manage to get around to it.

Uncreative. People say I can write, and I know I have a half-decent grasp of the English language. But I haven't written anything worth reading for a long time. My bass spasms are fun but I know I'm not musically gifted. I like drawing but I can't. I haven't made anything in a 3D program for nearly a year.

Rugby, alcohol, random gossip and excessive flatulence

Rob, Em, Will, Vicky and I all piled into Andy's house on Saturday, bringing with us pizza, drinks, sweets and general good humour. First we sat down and watched the Ireland vs Italy game which wasn't particularly enthralling. After that, we started drinking and watched the Wales game while consuming the large amount of pizza we had brought. It seemed quite hopeless until the last 15 minutes and the mood was gloomy. But then, amazingly, it all turned round and Wales actually won. Those last few minutes where they were in the lead were possibly the most intense I have ever seen. It was amazing when they finally won.

After that, we headed up through town for a pub crawl, starting a the bottom of town and working our way up. We hit various pubs of varying quality, the worst being an overly full place with sweaty people singing karaoke, which personally, I regard as some bizarre method of self-torture and humiliation. The last place was a strange small club which I didn't know existed, despite having walked past it probably thousands of times.

Finally, we grabbed some burgers and kebabs before power walking back to Andy's house due to the urinal needs of one of our party. Following that, we retired to bed, five of us occupying Andy's living room. It was, shall we say, a flatulent night, probably caused by lots of gassy beer and crappy food. Quite often there would be an outbreak of gas, followed by muffled snorts and giggles from around the room. I don't care what people say, farting is funny.

Next day we emerged and headed out to a new café for breakfast. It was quite a new place with a motorbike theme, being next to quite a large bike dealer. The food was pretty excellent and this was followed by rather a long walk around town. It was actually pretty interesting. I've driven through the place many, many times, but this doesn't give you the chance to see the various little details of the town. We saw many interesting things, little alcoves of houses, and all sorts. It was really good and the refreshing breeze perked us all up a bit.

This was then followed by the Scotland vs France game, which was a bit disappointing. Scotland lost pretty badly and didn't do themselves any favours.

But all in all, a great weekend.

Just need to see what is up with the car. I drove around a bit yesterday morning, and while the grinding noises haven't come back, there is a definite drone and perhaps even a vibration from somewhere. I'm fairly sure it's the front axle. Strangely though, it doesn't do it when freewheeling, only when in gear and because of the engine noise, it's hard to listen out for anything. Probably the front differential, which is undoubtedly expensive to replace.

I hate it when shit like this happens with cars. I start to lose confidence in it.

Strange Grinding Sounds

Work was OK, got a few things done.

Badminton was good, think I played reasonably well. Once again I found myself more willing to throw myself around the court, which can only be a good thing. Pub afterwards was good and when we came out it was sleeting.

Strange thing on the way home (in the snowish stuff). The Discovery made a strange grinding sound from somewhere. It seemed as if something was dragging on the ground but all looked normal when I stopped and had a look. But when I moved off again, there it was and if you freewheeled very slowly, there was a slight jerking to accompany the sounds. At one point it was almost like the right front wheel was braking by itself. Again I looked, but couldn't see anything apparently wrong, so I carried on. And the sound went away. I even stopped on a hill, and freewheeled slowly with the engine off, and it was completely silent.

Strange. I'll have to see how it is tomorrow. It's probably something expensive like the front differential or something ghastly.

Massive letdown

Where is the snow?! I was expecting epic frozen drifts.

Bah.

HD fluffiness and a curious cow

I downloaded some demos on Xbox Live last night, which I tried out today. I played Stuntman Ignition for literally ten seconds before deciding it was shite. Project Gotham Racing 4 was better, but I'm never going to buy it, and it has loads of minute text which is unreadable on a standard TV.

However, Rez HD was released today on Xbox Live Arcade, so I downloaded the trial version. I was one of the few who bought the version of Rez for the PS2 back in 2002. I was intrigued to see how the HD version actually looked, so I connected the 360 to one of my 17" LCD monitors using the VGA cable. The 360 will run it at the native panel resolution of 1280x1024 so it can display the HD resolutions on it. The response time isn't great as they aren't gaming monitors but the image quality is still pretty good.

Oddly enough, Rez HD included a standard mode so it was easy to compare. Basically the HD version has sharper, clearer lines and the odd bit of surround sound and subwoofer rumble. It also has some pointless optional visual effects, most of which make it unplayable. Nice indeed, but I think I'll just get my PS2 version back from Will rather than buy the HD version.

The trial version only has the first level, but I played through it about ten times. I'd forgotten just how much it draws you in, as the music builds and the controller begins to pound in your hands. Interestingly the Trance Vibrator is not compatible with Rez HD but instead you can get all FOUR 360 controllers vibrating at once. Dear God, it was bad enough with that Japanese guy giving his girlfriend orgasms! 'Play through Level 2 again,' she would gasp.

While I had the monitor hooked up, I played through the last levels of Portal with the Developer Commentary turned on. It was quite interesting.

The thing that really appeals to me about an LCD TV is the lack of interlacing. It's the one thing I absolutely detest about playing consoles on a CRT. It's one of the things I'm saving up for. I've seen a Hitachi 37" 1080p for about £499 from Richer Sounds, which would be perfect. Hopefully, by the time I can afford one, prices will have dropped further.

Work was OK today, got a lot of things done and managed to time my support call to a training session just in time for the buffet they had ordered. Mmm, caramel slices...

Today was the first chance I had to take the dog for a walk for the entire route on a weekday for the first time in a while as it's started to get lighter in the evenings now. We did have a rather startling experience. I went past a farm gate and saw something enormous and black on the side of the road. When I shone my torch on it, it had EYES and I had a heck of a fright. Fortunately it turned out to be a cow. I like cows, they are pretty placid creatures but they can be quite inquisitive too. For some reason, cows always seem to be fascinated by The Hound. They seem to think he's an odd looking calf or something, and if they can, they'll come up and sniff at him, which unsurprisingly he finds quite worrying.

It was trying to snow as we got back to the car, and it's pretty cold tonight. Hmm, could be interesting.

This really creeped me out for some reason.

Catastrophe!

Got the house to myself so I fired up my old cranky Carlsbro 100w bass amp, which takes a lot of fiddling with crackling knobs before it will work. I've had it since I was fifteen, and it was a good few years old then.

I was happily playing the 8-string through it and one of the octave strings snapped. Balls. I can only find one source for a set in the UK and I can't afford it right now. Plus it needs the normal gauge strings replacing too, so it's probably going to be £30 or so to replace all 8 strings. Bah.

However I got out the old 1-string and found it was rather fun to play it through the big amp. The sound was surprisingly fat and it actually sounds really good. I had such a good time playing it that I might look into making a 'real' 1-string bass.

One of the TV programs I occasionally watch is Dragon's Den, because of the occasionally insane idea that people try to sell and it can be quite funny.

Strange things

Computers can be so crappy sometimes. They appear to do inexplicable things and you can be there for ages, completely perplexed. And then you realise that it's only because you left out a command argument or something ultra trivial.

Bah.

I don't like this at all. I'd hate to live there and have to cope with this every year.

Morphine

Achieved very little today other than find this great Morphine video. A strange band but they did some really good tracks. This is another good one I think I've mentioned before.

If I had telepathy, I would have told the dick that shot past the dog and I today, that no matter how big an exhaust you put on it, an automatic Volvo estate is NEVER going to be cool in the way you obviously want it to be.

Bloody songs

Literally.

The weather was much improved again today so I took the dog for a walk and washed the car. It looked nice for a while but then the water dried off, leaving the paint with it's usual dull lustre.

Played some Half-Life 2 but got really angry with it and stopped after a while.

Then went to see the new Sweeney Todd movie with Will and Vicky. I didn't expect to like it, what with it being a musical, but I really quite enjoyed it. It has some screwed up stuff in it. Johnny Depp gave a good performance, unsurprisingly as it was his kind of role. I was less convinced by Alan Rickman, but perhaps it was just the character he was playing.

Afterwards, we were planning to go to Pizza Hut but there was a ridiculous queue. So we drove around Llandudno and Colwyn Bay looking for something to eat. Eventually I pulled over after aimlessly driving through Colwyn Bay and said we had to make a decision, and as it happened, we'd stopped right outside a Chinese. So we got a load of stuff and drove away, only to realise that there was nothing to eat it with. So Will went and got some plastic forks from a chippy.

After that, we parked on the promenade under a streetlight and stuffed our faces. It was pretty good too. A rather random meal, it must be said, but it had a certain charm because of that. So a great evening all round.

Another decent day

Work wasn't too bad. Encountered an Asus Eee today for the first time. What a cute little machine. It felt quite sturdy for something so small and low-priced. The screen and keyboard were better than I expected, although you wouldn't want to use it all day. The best thing is that it can be hacked to run all sorts of useful things. It's like an updated version of my little Toshiba Libretto, and even has the same 800x480 screen as some of the slightly later Libretto models.

Badminton was great. Had some really good games and I think I've started to get the hang of moving around more, and trying to anticipate where the shuttle is going to go. Got so into it in the last game that I crashed to the floor and slid under the net on my arse. Funny.

A decent day

It wasn't a bad day in work, got loads done and the 8 mile drive from one site to another was really nice due to the cloudless, sunny day.

Badminton was OK this evening although it was astonishingly cold. The Woman of Evil was her typical self, both Rob and I had had enough by the end of the evening. The drive home was great, really bright moonlight, although I nearly had a head on collision with somone in a Peugeot. They came round the corner on the wrong side of the road with full beams and just didn't seem to even see I was there until the last second.

So yeah, all good (for once).

The dog is asleep on my bed and looks so content I don't want to disturb him, but I suppose I should.

It is done

Crap picture, but you get the idea.

My head feels so much better. My hair sucks. It's curly in a way that looks stupid and impossible to style in any significant way. I've always hated it, some of my earliest memories are from when I was insanely jealous of my best friend for having straight hair.

I would shave it off completely but then when I met up with Rob we'd look like some weird skinhead cult or something.

Thingsy

1) Completed Portal.
2) Started Half-Life 2 and remembered how aggravating the first bit is.
3) Heath Ledger is dead at 28.
4) There's a HD version of the Star Trek teaser.

Fun with teleportation

The Orange Box arrived. I've spent the evening playing through Portal and it's the most fun I've had since Mario Galaxy. It's creative, entertaining and it has a screwy sense of humour. It's also surprisingly believable as the physics with the portals are so well done.

And I haven't even tried any of the other games, though I'm looking forward to Half-Life 2 which I started on the original Xbox but gave up on when I found I couldn't transfer the save to the 360. Hopefully there should be enough on this disk to keep me going for a while and I still haven't finished Mario Galaxy either.

Uncertain about hair. Half tempted to just shave it all off, but might see what the hairdresser can do with it. I wanted to go today but they didn't answer the phone for some reason.

Untitled

My Dad and my cousin came round this morning, which was good. Chatted about various things and I answered some questions my cousin had about her new laptop (a widescreen Compaq, actually quite nice). They didn't want to risk the car on the track and were intending to walk up but because the weather was so crappy I picked them up in the Discovery. Also took the dog out for a run in the field, and he got so worked up and hysterical he actually nipped my cousin. He's done that before to me on very rare occasions but only when he gets too over excited. Also played some Wii Sports which was good fun.

Although when I was playing by myself later on, I lost my Pro status in bowling - gutted. Also realised that playing Wii Sports by yourself can be very depressing.

Didn't do much after they left. I was all set to take the dog for a walk, and then it rained again, typically.

It's not been a good weekend for healthy eating, lots of cheesy pasta yesterday and cakes today. Hate it when my willpower breaks down, especially if I haven't been able to walk the dog. I can almost feel my belly swelling and becoming huge and flabby.

I dug out my AA battery charger today. It originally came with four NiMH batteries but I lost one pair and somehow slipped back into the habit of using disposables again. However I've ordered a new set of 4 rechargables. Sick of disposables and also if I can use the rechargables it all helps with the thriftiness. I have a lot of things which take AA batteries (Wiimotes, Psion Series 3, Psion Series 5mx, Tandy 200, Camera) so I might get another pack next payday.

Still carrying on with the Arthur Ransome reread fest. Just finished Missee Lee and The Picts and the Martyrs.

Currently listening to Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. This was preceded by a load of Rammstein and Offspring tracks while I fecked around with backup software on my other Linux machine, for two reasons - first to have an actual working backup solution for my various machines, and second because I'm learning about the backup system in work.

What I'd really like is a free equivalent of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. There are a few things like Bacula, but they are insanely complicated to set up.

Sick of my stupid hair. Tempted to just cut it all off again. It's totally unmanageable, can't be made to look good, and enough has gone to make it look stupid.

Unproductive

Didn't really get anything done today except taking silly pictures. However the weather was good enough for the first time in ages to take the dog for a walk, which was good.

Just remembered I forgot to check the oil in the Discovery. Oh well.

Listless. Even The Great Southern Trendkill is failing to engage me, whereas usually the unholy screaming guitars will perk me up.

Ah. Head like a Hole. That's more like it.

Wow, even forgot to publish this last night...

Some random pictures of things

A 200mhz Pentium Pro (1 of 4) out of the scrapped Proliant server. It is absolutely enormous because the L2 cache is separate from the CPU but integrated into the die.


A plectrum. I don't use these very often.


Headstock and tuners of my 8-string bass. Sounds good but is quite hard to play and a pain to intonate and keep in tune. It also needs new strings but I can't find a source for the octave strings in the UK.


My Touch after being upgraded with the new apps and firmware. Google Maps works pretty well on it and the others are nice to have, although the Stocks one is basically useless for me. I still like this device.


The logo on my main bass, a mildly upgraded Squier Precision Bass.

Big hair

Oh dear, it's getting out of hand again.

Badminton, stuff and suicidal chavs

Got the car back yesterday. Handbrake now works perfectly and didn't need any parts, just a damn good clean and grease. It held the car on a 1 in 4 hill on three clicks this evening, which was brilliant.

Work has been meh.

What do you do with 1500 hard drives?

Finally managed to get my 360 back online with a 10m cable. Had a look at Xbox Live and downloaded some game demos for the first time in a while. The Simpsons game actually looked really good, capturing the cartoon style very well. But it played like arse. The Sonic the Hedgehog demo again looked very pretty but the controls were horrendous, making it unplayable. Also got the latest GTA IV trailer, can't wait for that. Also I ordered The Orange Box because it is basically just insanely good value.

Badminton was good. Played reasonably well, better than last week. Had a really good energetic time but there was the occasional disturbance from some feral teenagers who kept trying to break in through the fire exits.

On the way to the pub afterwards, a group of chavs ran across the road right in front of me, causing me to slam on and stall the engine. I must have missed the last one by inches. Then the little shits had the cheek to laugh and jeer along with a load of others at the bus stop as I restarted the engine and drove away. I hate driving through town at that time of night, all the idiots are out.

I hate cars. I repeat: I hate cars.

The Discovery went in today for the track rod end. The steering started clonking last week so it clearly needed doing. While they were at it, they centred the steering wheel, checked underneath for any major rust (none) and adjusted the handbrake. All good. In fact, I had been expecting them to tell me the underside was a festering mass of rusty holes as I never got around to undersealing it. Also it's apparently worth about £1200-1400 should I want to sell it. I really don't want to, but I'm getting worried about diesel prices...

So for once, I was feeling quite cheerful about the whole thing. I drove around in work, I took a printer to a site, etc, etc. Then while getting some food before coming home, it started shaking down a road as I slowed down and I realised the handbrake had seized on. It wasn't seized on completely but enough to make it significantly difficult to move.

So I took it back to the place, and have probably destroyed the handbrake shoes, but I didn't really have any choice. I didn't have any tools, any light and my mechanical ability is pretty crap. Land Rover handbrakes don't use the rear brakes like most cars, they have a separate brake which locks around the propshaft to the rear axle.

I probably yanked it too hard. I've done this on pretty much every car I've ever had. I pull the handbrake up hard enough to eventually mean it needs adjusting. The only one that didn't suffer from this was the Pimpmobile which had the handbrake on the dash, on the right side of the wheel. Sounds weird, but I liked it. Then again, absolutely nothing phased that car, except wet roundabouts (rear wheel drive and nasty tyres) and long hills (fuel supply issue)...

This is a cheesy but entertaining German video about the Mercedes W123.

The thought of replacing the Discovery with something like a Suzuki Jimny makes my blood run cold. If such a thing were to happen though, I would certainly have to jack up the suspension and put better wheels and bumpers on it, like the one above. Ironically, despite it's appearance, the Jimny is built more like the Discovery than most soft-roaders, with a separate chassis and low ratio gears and actually has some decent off-road ability. Unlike the cretinous fake 4x4s like the BMW X5, etc, etc.

What does Jupiter sound like? Now you can find out.

Things

Tape libraries are fun things until they break.

MacBook Air: Expensive and impractical, sealed unit like iPod, no RAM or HD upgrades and non-replaceable battery. Shite, for posers only. In six years time, they'll be selling for pennies on Ebay, with dead batteries and failed hard drives, needing skill to repair them. Nothing's impossible, even the iPod Touch is openable with some care, patience, and a spudger.

iPod Touch apps: Cool, but why should I have to pay £13 for them considering they come on the iPhone (which is binary compatible) and new Touches?

Tom Cruise spouting nonsense. If this is Scientology, you can stuff it. I find it hard to watch films with him now because this is what I see.

An eye opening Flickr set. No matter how crappy you think your life may be, there's always someone else worse off.

If this guy becomes president, the United States is completely screwed. It needs someone who can begin to repair the damage Bush has done, not a complete religious nutbag.

Rain is causing problems, and isn't going away. Bah.

Got an old laptop running the OLPC GUI and it's quite interesting, and the word processor is the best thing for writing I've come across recently.

One of those days...

...where I grew more and more frustrated and angry and began to question me, my job, my choice of car, my very existence.

Urgh.

Cheered up a bit when I came home and listened to music and things, even though the weather was too shit to take the dog for a walk. Did some exercise inside though which made me feel better.

In fact, I'm in such a bad mood that I'm listening to Slipknot.

Wow.

Interesting weekend

Epic post coming up...

Friday night was the first badminton night of this year. And it really highlighted how I let myself go over Christmas. After the first game, I was destroyed. It was fun, especially the games with Will, but it was totally exhausting. At the end, my legs were all stiff and weird. The pub afterwards was good though. Got to get back into the dog walks and exercise again though. I hadn't realised how much good it was doing me until I stopped. While I think it's shallow to solely aim to be aesthetically pleasing, it would be nice to be in better shape.

Saturday morning saw Rob, Em, Vicky, Will, Andy and I piling into cars to go walking in Llanfairfechan, or more specifically, Nant Y Pandy (!). We eventually found the actual walk after some trudging around being lost, and it was good fun other than the occasional disagreement about rivers and stepping stones. We went quite far up a river which flowed down a nature reserve, and got a good view down towards the coast and towards Anglesey. Above is a picture of everyone on the Skipping Bridge, so named because Will felt compelled to skip across it.

After that, it was back to Rob and Em's for Tiger Woods Golf, a couple of episodes of The Mighty Boosh, general chitchat and a couple of pints in the Rugby and Social Club across the road. The Newcastle/Man U game was on, which we successfully ignored, but there was an amusing argument from some people there who wanted to watch rugby and were miffed that football was being showed in a rugby club.

Finally we all met up with Caroline and Rob from badminton for an Indian, which was pretty good. They do excellent food there. I had my traditional Butter Chicken. Will had Chicken Tikka Masala, which may be a British dish, and not really Indian, but it was really good. Despite claims of being stuffed, quite a few people had dessert, and I was the only one that didn't get the kids one with a toy, instead opting for a Bailey's Cheescake - mmmmm.

Today was much more relaxed, lay in bed reading until midday and then got up to watch a couple of DVDs. First was Borat which I'd never seen before. It's OK, and has genuinely funny moments and some make you curl your toes with embarrassment. I think it lost it's way about half way through and never really got back on track. Then I watched Men in Black, which I haven't seen for ages. It was a decent enough film but the sequel was horrendous. Then I went on a YouTube run, it's amazing how you can get lost in it. Just keep clicking related videos and then it's suddenly hours later. The same can happen with Flickr.

Rediscovered Poison by Alice Cooper, which is a really good track. I just love it when the guitar kicks in at the beginning and when it all kicks in a the end. This is an interesting but slightly sacrilegious cover by Groove Coverage which is somehow oddly compelling. The video is a bit cliched but has some nice imagery and it gets better after a few listens.

Need a haircut, it's getting big and scary again.

It's been a smelly day, lots of aromatic Indian farts. I'm sat here in a pool of stench. Pretty bad.

My iBook's screen is continuing to deteriorate. The only thing it handles now is my photos, but it is excruciatingly slow due to a 600mhz processor and USB 1.1. Need an alternative but since everything is in iPhoto, that could be difficult.

Finally managed to make use of the workspaces in Ubuntu. Normally you'd get four separate ones but I only get two, which each cover the 2850x1024 desktop that both screens combine to create. One has the Internet stuff (Firefox and Thunderbird, etc) and the other has creative things (OpenOffice, GIMP, VMWare Windows XP box, etc).

Machine running warm, fans going insane. I think it's because I've had my heater on so the room has got rather warm and it's running a lot of stuff, including Windows XP in a VMWare session. If you'd told me a couple of years ago that my main computing needs would be being met by a Dell Precision and a Dell Optiplex, I'd have told you to go away in no uncertain terms. How times change.

Fun fun fun. Work tomorrow. Ultra feckity bah.

Rain, rain and more rain. And then floods. Plus random thoughts.

It rained very, very hard last night. When I got up, the fields were pouring with water, the streams were overflowing and the track looked like a river. The drive to work was fun, over the tops of the hills on single track roads with massive puddles. I hit one puddle at an awkward angle and the power steering went solid, making it suddenly very hard to go round the corner. Bah.

Work was reasonably fun, my first Unix day this year. I was entrusted with updating the firmware of the tape library and the drives, and it even worked again afterwards, which can only be a good thing.

Haven't done much this evening except have a long session of spanking the plank of wank, making funky sounds. *

Facebook is one of those things that seems to have suddenly exploded. In the last few weeks, nearly everyone I know has asked me if I'm on it. The thing is, what comes to mind when I think of social networking sites is loads of so-called popular people who have 40,000 friends they will never meet, and take comfort in that instead of having friends in the real world. That may sound odd coming from an introvert who tends to not socialise very much, but I do think the Internet is not always a good thing when it comes to things like this.

I saw a Golf Country when I was out getting lunch. It's basically a Mk2 Golf jacked up with big wheels, like the one in the picture above. They are very rare. The idea though is somewhat appealing as I'm increasingly aware that the Discovery is expensive to run. Diesel is up to £1.07 locally now, and it cost £60 to fill the tank last time (good for about 360 miles or so, depending on how it's driven). Also the MOT is due in May and I'm really worried it'll be expensive like it was last time.

The thing is, I don't need an old-school 4x4. I need something small and economical that also happens to have ground clearance. It needn't even have four wheel drive. The thing is, very few things are out there other than small 4x4s like the Suzuki Jimny, or silly cars like the Rover Streetwise. At least the Jimny has proper off-road credentials, despite it's tiny size.

But then I start to get worried about driving a small car again. Not because of the safety aspect, but because when I had the Cinquecento, I was easily intimidated by larger vehicles which made my driving angry and erratic. I know I drove best when I had my Mercedes W123 and now in the Discovery. I don't know if this highlights some massive failure in my psychological profile (other than the well known ones) or what. So perhaps something really small isn't the answer.

The Square-1 is still not a cube. Feck.

Listening to Life is Killing Me by Type O Negative.

* For the filthy minded, I was actually playing slap bass.

Great Uncle DoubleL

My niece had her baby yesterday evening. Therefore I'm now a great uncle, which feels quite scary and wrong. Also it makes my Dad a great-grandfather, again quite scary.

Overpriced wireless and getting rid of stuff.

How can Microsoft justify £60 for the official Xbox 360 Wireless Adaptor?! I think I'll just get a new 10 metre Ethernet cable like I had before except the tabs broke off. Since the cable broke in about November, I've not used the 360 online at all.

10m Ethernet cable = £1.99.

Took several things to the recycling centre today. The Proliant went, stripped of useful parts, several scrap laptops and a few other things. I think they were slightly taken aback as I turned up, very farmer-like, in a muddy Discovery, wearing wellies, only to unload a bunch of computer equipment.

On the way home, I picked up a Sweet and Sour Pot Noodle, being in a filthy mood. On the little sachet of sauce inside, it reads 'Did you know: Humans lose more than 4kg of skin cells every year'. What a nice appetizing fact...

The Square-1 is pissing me off. How do you make a Rubik's Cube harder? Make the damn thing change shape when you twist it, that's how. It's hard enough to make it back into a cube shape, let alone get the colours in the right place.

Salad

Salad is fairly dull. Hence why there are dressings. But why do most dressings have to be full of fat, which makes it pointless eating the salad?

Boo.

Day off tomorrow. I was supposed to be looking after the dog for Mum but she didn't actually need to go out in the day. But I've decided to have it anyway. Might actually try to do some tidying and things.

Weird weekend

Yesterday: Washed the car and took the dog for a short walk, before heading down to Andy's for a Chinese and random stuff with Rob, Em, Vicky, Will and also Ed and Kat who we haven't seen for a while. Pictionary certainly seems to bring out the worst in people.

Today was a pointless, wasted day. First I couldn't get out of bed. Then I just watched some DVDs and once again got lost in Flickr. I achieved absolutely nothing today, other than rewatching Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Bah

Didn't go to badminton. Coughing like anything.

The XO laptop seems to have sold quite well when they were doing the pilot of the Buy-one-give-one system. There are even some showing up on Ebay which is probably the only way to get one in the UK. From what I've seen, it looks like a fun little machine and definitely has some interesting features such as the dual-mode mono/colour screen. I downloaded a VMWare image of the OS and it does have some interesting ideas.

The Asus Eee looks quite cool too. The best thing about these is that they are solid state, no stupid hard drives to fail.

But this is the year of thriftiness and if I want a solid-state laptop I guess I'll just have to settle for my good old PowerBook 1400cs/166 booting Mac OS 8 from a Compact Flash card...

Botheration

Nothing to report. Cold. Coughing. Don't want to go to badminton. Weather is horrendous, cold and raining.

On the way home encountered a dick in a new Land Cruiser who wouldn't reverse even though it was clearly my right of way past some parked cars. He just sat there like a cock until I finally realised he wasn't going to move and reversed instead.

Work annoying after holidays. Glad it's the weekend.

Feck.

Time and how it creeps up on you

Oh my God, this is frightening:


It's been 10 years since my character was created on the MOO we wasted so much time on in college.

Scary things indeed.

Last night was an excellent time of food, drink, poker, weird TV, Play-Doh and some interesting home-made gin and a bottle of chilli vodka provided by Caroline and Rob. It must be said that the chilli vodka was vile, yet strangely compelling. I had at least three shots of it that I can remember. Andy's strawberry vodka jelly was a very nice antidote though, and went down very well. Food was shedloads of baps, chilli, nachos with cheese and things and the inevitable tubes of Pringles and dip.

For some odd reason the night absolutely flew by and I remember being shocked that there were only a few minutes of 2007 left. After that vaious people played poker until about 3:00am before retiring to bed.

Much hilarity was caused once again by Will's ridiculous inflatable bed. Ordinarily when the bed is pumped up in the daytime, when not drunk and where there is room for it, it's not so much of an issue. However when the participants are drunk and the bed barely fits into the space for it, it all gets a little silly. I'm glad I had the sofa to be honest.

The morning was quite reasonable, not too many hangovers in evidence and anyone feeling slightly crappy was soon revived by an epic fried breakfast all round, cooked by Rob and Em.

And finally, for your enjoyment, I present Henry the Eighth:

New Year

can't type much will is inflating his bed it is funnyc we've all had a lot to sronk

Can't imagine pepil trying to play poker with this ludicrous noise going on

good evening more info cpmpbh when I have had some sleep not inyerruptedd by Will Himpibg hid bed

A childish day

Felt better today other than the coughing and lack of sleep from the night before. I think somehow my body clock has been reset so I'm worried that I won't sleep tonight either. I'm in work tomorrow so I hope that doesn't happen and I don't want to be sleepy at Rob and Em's tomorrow for New Year's Eve.

Spent today tidying up my room a little. It's a lot better now.

Today was a childish day for the following reasons:

1) I watched Short Circuit, which I LOVED as a child.
2) I got my Lego out and made a three wheeled car.
3) I started re-reading Swallows and Amazons.
4) I played with a few of the 24 Psion Series 3as that I own.

Can't sleep revisited

Once again I am unable to sleep. Possibly due to the late night last night and a very pointless day doing nothing other than play with the PowerBook 1400 again. I also discovered that my PowerBook G3 (FireWire) was actually not dead after all, which is a big yay as it is still the best machine I've come across for music programs. The sound system in it is ridiculously better than any PC I've yet encountered and that sad truth was making me start to consider finding an old PowerBook G4 for that purpose. Now that the Intel transition is complete, the old PowerPC machines are dropping in price.

The weather was horrific today so I didn't get a chance to go out. I hate myself right now. I'm a lazy bastard who hasn't taken any exercise in weeks and eaten like shit as well. Before I went to London I was eating reasonably healthily, walking the dog each day and taking other exercise too, and oddly enough I felt really good for it and slept really well. Since I stopped doing that regularly after coming back from London, I feel lethargic and unmotivated. Got to start again come January, which given the apathetic state of mind I'm, is going to be a bundle of joy.

I know it's Christmas time but that really isn't an excuse.

I feel like shite

It's stupid o'clock. I feel like utter shite, full of snot, lightheaded and pounding head of pain. Why is this cold dragging on so? Also the Idiot Hound is on my bed, but I don't really mind. He may be an angular and pointy presence, but he's keeping my feet warm. Life would be easier in many ways if he was a whippet and half the size but he can't help his birth. Wouldn't change him for anything.

Pakistan is about to explode according to the BBC. I have a bad feeling about this.

Fecking colds. And no you silly iPod, I did mean fecking. Yet if I type decking, you prompt for fecking!!!! Should stop now, talking to your devices is probably a bad sign. Right, iPod?

iPod?

Hello?

Electric cars

One thing I saw in London was a G-wiz electric car. I remember being mildly impressed at the way it pulled up in front of me outside the Russell Square tube station on an empty road and then accelerated away with only a quiet whirr.

And then I saw this.

Wow.

That's pretty bad. And Jeremy Clarkson drove one into a table at 40mph and what happened? The same thing, except that time the batteries exploded acid all over the place.

I think there are two reasons why electric cars haven't taken off - first, the big oil companies stifle their development and second, all of the production ones have so far been shit. Except the Tesla Roadster, but that does cost ludicrous amounts of money.

Funking it up

Pakistan's future looks very uncertain now.

Here's a hint, if you are using an iPod touch to write something in one tab of Safari and switch to another tab, don't expect what you wrote in the first tab to be there when you switch back to it. I just lost a fair bit of blog post by doing that. The gist of it is below.

First day back in work. Unsurprisingly the offices were nearly deserted and it was spookily quiet. On the plus side this meant I was able to get quite a lot done today. I left a little early and went round to Will's, bass in hand, where he and Rob were making music.

They had just finished a track when I got there and we quickly started another one. While Rob wrote lyrics in his encoded handwriting, Will set up a beat which I overlaid with a funked up slap bass line which Will accompanied with random guitar noodlings. Sounded quite good and then it was ready for Rob's vocal contribution. Just needs Will to sit down and mix the tracks together properly.

Whether anything will ever live up to the blasphemous success of Mary Poppins Whore Hour remains to be seen. We didn't stay very long after that though, Rob had to go home and cook and both Will and I have been suffering from a cold and felt too crappy. Will seems to have had it worse though.

First time I've used the Squier bass in anger with the various mods and it actually sounded pretty decent, though the fresh strings put on it yesterday undoubtedly helped.

Coughing well today. My throat is killing me.

Retro laptopping

Had a look through the stack of old laptops I seem to have accumulated and had a play with some of them and set aside others for scrapping.

First was a PowerBook 540. Now this was a truly kickass machine in it's time - 68040 processors, stereo speakers, built-in Ethernet, and they were also the first ever laptops with trackpads. They also looked good with a curvy swooping case. Mine has 12mb RAM, a 250mb hard drive, a mono TFT screen and runs Mac OS 8.1. It still works fine, but the screen has a fault where it'll start to fade from the corners inward, which is really weird. After about an hour or so, it's basically unusable. With the built in Ethernet, it can browse the Internet, but it is really very slow. My blog took about a minute to load and looked a bit weird.

After that, I hacked up a Toshiba power supply and used it to fire up an old Tadpole SPARCbook 2. Now this truly is an orphaned machine, I've never seen another one except in a museum. Tadpole built laptop equivalents of high-end Sun Unix workstations in the 90's, and this is one of the very earliest. It has a 40mhz SPARC processor, 32mb RAM, a colour TFT screen and I'm guessing a 250mb SCSI hard drive and probably cost a vast sum when it was new. While it does still power up and drops into the ROM monitor, it won't boot and the display constantly rolls, as though it's lost vertical hold. I did discover after a bit of research that it needs 18v rather than the 15v from the Toshiba PSU, but a brief test with a 19v Fujitsu PSU did the same thing.

There is very little useful information about this machine on the Internet, and the chances of getting it running again are slim. It needs a special version of SunOS to install and boot from and the SCSI connector is non-standard. Theoretically it would be possible to install it via a network boot, but with the display problem, it's not worth trying to hunt down the necessary software. Shame really, it's built like a tank, and it's certainly something different and it would be fun to play with old-school Unix. But it's just too different from a normal SPARC machine - the later SPARCbook 3 was much more like a normal Sun machine and is therefore easier to get running.

Finally I tried my PowerBook 180, an older machine than the 540. I've always had a soft spot for the 1x0 PowerBooks, being big and square. This one has the maximum 14mb RAM and a 33mhz 68030. But this time it wouldn't start for some reason. It showed a cursor which moved, but didn't want to load the OS. Annoying. I'd like to get it running as is pretty clean and has the weirdness of a SCSI-Ethernet adaptor.

I once again admired the sleek beauty of an early titanium PowerBook G4 and lamented the dead motherboard which prevents it being used. It is otherwise intact, although I stole the keytops for my iBook, and the hard drive is long gone. But the motherboard is truly fried and I can't find a cheap enough replacement to justify it, especially as the 512mb RAM in it is fried too.

I nearly started stripping the Proliant today, but I just couldn't be arsed. It's so big and heavy. It needs to go though and so does a lot of other crap. There's a big all-in-one Power Mac 5500/275 which I'd bin, except it's the black model which is apparently rare. There's a LOT of other crap that can go though.

Can't sleep!

Woke up about an hour ago with a blocked nose dripping horrible fluids, and can't get back to sleep. Feel utterly awake and alert. How annoying.

Nose is clearish now but still has that annoying burning sensation. Still dripping though. Various aches.

Feck. I thought I was getting better yesterday but obviously not. Left nostril totally blocked but then it is much smaller than my right one due to a deviated septum, relic of being rescusitated when I was born.

Christmas Day

Updating blog from phone at my Dad's house. So far all has gone well. I didn't sleep well and so am feeling rather tired and crappy. Shame as the weather is beautiful and it would be perfect weather for walking the dog.

Say what you like about the iPhone or iPod touch, using the on screen keyboard is easier than typing on the phone.

Illness and Tron

Felt like crap all day yesterday with a snotty cold, but not too bad today. So didn't do much at all. Just chilled with the occasional DVD. Watched the weirdness that is Tron today. The Master Control Program freaked me out the first time I saw it and it still unsettles me today.

Eaten a shedload of macadamia and cashew nuts so I feel slightly sick. Bah.

Once again it is Christmas tomorrow. Going to have lunch with my Dad and then evening meal with my Mum. Should be fun. Not hugely fussed about it though, I'm looking forward to New Years Eve more.

Ridiculous filenames

People really need to be more careful when naming files. Over the last couple of weeks I encountered these gems:

ASSQUEST.DOC - a questionnaire
SIMSPERM.DOC - documentation about software permissions.

A tiny laptop and a huge Transformer

The thriftiness is being dispelled somewhat by the Christmas influence. I think I mentioned the Masterpiece Optimus Prime recently. Well, I found a cheap second hand one on Ebay. Cheap because it is used and is missing a finger, it's also the US version which has battle damage and the cut-off smokestacks. Despite that, it's undeniably impressive. It stands a foot tall in robot mode and is amazingly detailed, making it a bitch to transform. It kind of makes up for never actually having the original Optimus Prime as a child. I did have Ultra Magnus, which was actually identical except it was white, but it wasn't quite the same. There's even a Masterpiece Ultra Magnus, which is just a repaint of the Optimus Prime one, and is just as cool. There is a fairly similar sized model of the new Movie Optimus Prime, which looks quite cool. But it just lacks the style of the original.

I spent some time today playing with my Toshiba Libretto 50CT. It's a very old laptop, being only a Pentium 75mhz with 32mb RAM. But the appealing thing is that it is very, very small, only just larger than a VHS tape. When it came out in about 1996 (I think), it was very expensive. But being a computer, of course, it depreciated reasonably quickly and I got this rather beat up one a couple of years ago and dig it out every now and again to play with. Originally it ran Windows 95 but now it runs a stripped down Debian Linux install, and runs it quite well. Discovered it can run an RDP session to my XP machine with acceptable performance which was a slightly surreal sight. It's nice to go back to a bare minimum machine - my new phone has a faster processor and more memory than the Libretto, which is quite worrying.

Weird thing you can get in Sainsbury's - dark chocolate with chilli in it. It's a Mexican thing and is actually really nice. It's not spicy as such when you reach the chilli, rather you get a curious sensation of warmth. Very intriguing.

One thing I'm trying to summon up the energy to do is get rid of my Compaq Proliant 5500 server. I bought it a couple of years ago and pimped it out with quad Pentium Pro 200mhz CPUs, 640mb RAM and blue LEDs in the SCSI drive trays. It ran pretty nicely for something so old.

Sadly something in it has died and it won't power up any more. It is enormous and heavy and takes up a LOT of room. I need to strip out all the useful parts (basically the blue LEDs...) and scrap it. It's just one of the many things that I don't need or want any more.

A great night out

Last day of work was meh. However tonight was a great night out with myself, Rob and Em, Andy, Will, Vicky and captain Caroline from badminton and her husband Rob. We started out at the top of St Asaph and worked our way through several pubs. It was pretty good all round.

Would type more but I'm tired.

Meh

Today was a boring day other than building a rather lovely Dell Precision laptop for a CAD user. It had a 15" 1680x1050 screen which was one of the most beautifully clear and sharp screens I've ever seen.

While I was in Woolies picking up some stuff for Christmas, I came across a small Optimus Prime figure for £3, so I thought I'd get it. It's actually quite cool even if it is from the movie. The best one has to be the Masterpiece Optimus Prime. My colleague has one and it looks perfect in both robot and truck mode, and every single joint is articulated, even the fingers. It does cost about £90 though.

Mario Galaxy has crossed the line where it becomes so hard it's not fun any more. I sold Arsearsein's Creed to someone in work because I hate it utterly. Not doing so well with the gaming at the moment.

A fat day and Windows

My department had a meeting today, and we clubbed together to get a buffet, which was really good. I had three piece of a particularly good chocolate cake, and then found that another department in the building had got the same buffet, so had another piece of the cake.

The Shuffle crashed today. It was playing Metallica happily enough in the car, and then died with the disco lights of death (flashing green and orange). Not a good sign. iTunes refused to touch it, saying it was corrupted and then it failed to restore it to default settings. I downloaded the iPod Reset Utility, which worked after a few tries, and some stupidity from the Optiplex. So it's now full of music again and appears to be working fine. A bit of a relief as quite often they don't return from the dead if you get the disco lights.

Watched the Smooth Criminal segment from Moonwalker on YouTube. Actually quite good, but it's funny how much of a bastard he is. He attacks several people and vapourises one, and then forces the hapless people to join in his ankle destroying dancing before going mad with a machine gun. What a great example for kids, eh? Also the song is actually about a woman who has been attacked by a hit man.

Here is a rant about Windows:

The interface is inconsistent and allows applications to grab focus at any time, incredibly annoying if you have stuff running in the background. The layout of the system files is a complete mess and the registry is just a massive, huge ball-ache. Application installation is a total farce, with installers and uninstallers that hardly ever work properly, spreading files all over the place and adding registry keys galore. How many times have I clicked 'Remove...' in Add/Remove Programs to be told 'The uninstall file is corrupted/lost/broken' and then having no way to tidily remove the program.

One of my biggest gripes is drive letters. This is an example: if I plug a card reader with four slots into a Mac, nothing appears until you insert a card, whereupon an icon will appear with the card's name. Insert another card, you get another icon.

On Windows, when you connect the reader, you get FOUR identically named drives with four separate letters. You then have to choose the drives at random to find the one with the card in it. I don't know how enterprise systems running Windows handle it with massive amounts of disks, but it can't be pretty. Drive letters were fine when it was MS-DOS and all you had were floppies and hard drives but in this day and age of network drives and vast storage? Get real.

Windows is a sloppy and kludgy operating system. Don't get me wrong, XP SP2 is a world away from the horrors of Windows 98 and ME, but it's still fundamentally broken in so many ways. Just because it's become the de facto standard does NOT mean it's great. Linux isn't the answer just yet, but it's getting better and my experiences with Gutsy on this machine have been excellent). Mac OS X may have it's own flaws, but it has a much more consistent interface and handles drives and applications much, much better than Windows, something it inherited from the old Mac OS.

Ah...now I feel better.

Christmas

Not sure why, but I'm sick of Christmas this year. Perhaps it's the constant stream of desperate requests for Wiis and DSs on the work noticeboard from people eager not to disappoint their children, and the near total commercialisation of a religious holiday which has lost it's meaning to most people. Not that I ever gave a toss about that side of it. I remember thinking in primary school when we had to do the nativity play that it was a load of nonsense, which is a bit weird really. Lifelong cynic, I guess.

I remember having great Christmases at a friend's house when we were quite young. His mother is German, so there was a strong influence from her on it. They opened their presents on Christmas Eve, had an enormous tree with real chocolates hanging off it, and there was always a massive gingerbread house covered in sweets. Awesome. It always seemed more homely somehow than the traditional Christmas at home. Oh well.

Experimented with Blender today. It's a free 3D program that is very powerful but I find totally incomprehensible. I'm working through the tutorials though and some of it is starting to make sense.

First day of work with the N93. It's big but does fit OK in my pocket with my work phone. The torch function of the flash LED comes in useful.

Worth a listen.

Soup

It was the soup fest round at Will's today. Basically a day each December to celebrate the joys of soup. It was a typical day, everyone sitting around eating soup, cake and chocolate and talking. Also encountered the ridiculous cat which sits there looking cute and just asking to be petted, whereupon it will attack with every claw it has. My favourite soup today was the spicy butternut squash and apple soup.

It's cold today, and annoyingly the ground stayed solid all day long. Also I just encountered a MASSIVE spider in my room, which escaped

I hate Christmas.

A pleasant surprise

I just dug out the mini-SD adaptor that came with the N93 and found a 2gb card in it. The only one mentioned in the listing was the standard 128mb that comes with the phone, so I'm guessing they forgot it was there.

I might be tempted to contact the seller, but they're only worth £10 these days so it's hardly worth it. There wasn't anything on it.

During the dog walk this morning, experimented with the camera. When viewed on a computer, the pics are pretty good, but the colours are a little washed out compared to my 'real' camera and if you zoom in, there's more than normal artefacting. But it's OK for something built into a phone. The video is pretty decent, it can capture at 640x480 at 30fps.

Supernova

This is really cool: Vela Supernova Remnant (& more) Wide-Field One Gigapixel Interactive Image

Memory leak?

Can you guess at what point I killed Firefox?

A work do and a new phone

It was the ICT Christmas do last night. It was held at a nearby hotel and was a 70's/80's themed 'Boogie Night'. It was actually quite good. Fancy dress was the order of the day and I was one of only two scrooges not dressed up. However fortunately I did have my Superman T-shirt on so that was enough to redeem me. The meal was a sort of Chinese buffet thing, but there was salad as well, so people ended up with random plates full of fried rice and sweet and sour pork, along with beetroot, potato salad and BBQ sauce. Odd but interesting. It was a good evening and the secret Santa presents were a big success. Perhaps the oddest was a piece of toffee which contained an apparently edible real scorpion. Two guys bravely ate it but lost their appetite when they actually reached the scorpion.

New phone time. My faithful Nokia 7610 has well and truly earned it's retirement. In the two and a half years I've owned it, it's been dropped quite often, covered in wine, kicked across a concrete floor into a wall, covered in mud and various items of food, and not a single thing has ever gone wrong. It had a new shell earlier this year but other than that, never needed anything. It is the most solid, reliable phone I have ever encountered. If the keypad hadn't finally started to fail, I'd have simply bought a new battery for it.

However instead I got a new phone. As can be seen in the image above, compared to the 7610, it's huge and complex. It's a Nokia N93, the device where Nokia went mad and included absolutely everything in a single device. It has a fast CPU, a 3mp camera with 3x optical zoom, a VGA camera in the lid, a 320x240 display, wi-fi, TV output and a weird folding, twisting shell design. Compared to the 7610 it feels flimsy and plasticky, but we'll see how it holds up. It's amazing how fast these things depreciate - 18 months ago, this was the absolute high-end of Nokia's line-up, but I got it for a fraction of the original off-contract price.

Hurtling through cake and space

Safari just crashed on the Touch. It does this quite frequently. Not really an issue unless you're writing a blog post...

Not much to report. My faithful Nokia 7610 has started to have issues with the keypad, which combined with the rapidly dying battery have led me to hunt for a suitable replacement. Steps have already been taken and I'll update when appropriate. No, it's not a iPhone. The issue I have is how to move the 580 notes that are held in the Notes program to the new device. I did move the notepad.dat file to the 7610 from my N-gage but they ran the same version of the OS.

Work do tomorrow and it's fancy dress. I'm going as someone from the background of the Terminator who coincidentally looks just like me in my normal clothes...
Low battery, better publish this now!

A sad and lonely day

It was a strange day today. I didn't do all that much. The weather was crappy in the morning so I just read books and lounged around. After lunch it looked a little better, so I took the dog for a walk. It was quite eventful, we met three people on horses, yet another uncontrolled dog, and some gimp on a dirt bike who couldn't get the thing moving without stalling. It took him about 20 tries. Quite funny.

After that, listened to some music and tried to play Mario Galaxy. However the toughness to fun ratio has increased dramatically and I got angry and turned it off. I did however play with the Mii Contest Channel, which is fun. I've submitted a Mii for the new competition 'Someone stuck in the 70's'. Also had a look at the top Miis of the day and found there were two with penises on their face and one with breasts. Oh dear.

Also experimented with the free VMWare server and now I have a fully working activated Windows XP virtual machine. It seems to run quite nicely. Perhaps not as quick as it would on the actual hardware, but certainly well enough. To help with speed, I put the machine on a separate hard drive from the real OS, which may help.

So yeah, a geeky and also slightly depressing day, for reasons I can't really fathom.

Work tomorrow. Bah.

Play-doh, poker and chocolate orange cake

Will and I met up with Rob and Em, before taking a trip into town. The goal? To buy some Play-doh and some poker chips. The reasoning for the Play-doh? Being avid and vigorous Pictionary fans, the concept of Rapidough appealed where instead of drawing, you model with clay. However, rather than drop £25 on the actual game, we reasoned that a £5 tub of Play-doh would be more fun. We also got a nice set of poker chips for cheap as well.

Upon return to Rob and Em's house, Rob spent some time teaching myself, Will and later Vicky to play poker. It was actually really good fun, though I can see how it would be difficult to become a true master of it. This was followed by a session of Play-doh madness. Basically we took it in turns to suggest something and the other four would have to model it. Perhaps the most hilarious were an angel, Concorde, a tractor, Stephen Hawking and a lifelike penis. The Play-doh had that typical marzipan-like smell.

This was followed by epic pizza, more poker and a game of Cheat, which was mainly to laugh at Will who is notoriously bad at that game.

Em also made a marbled Chocolate Orange cake, which was absolutely amazing.

Slightly incoherent, but it's late. What a great day though.

Maybe you shouldn’t have accidentally destroyed the entire cosmos then, you giant regal fuck.

6 biggest arseholes in gaming, and I wholeheartedly agree with the first one, having played Me & My Katamari on the PSP. And don't even mention Tom Nook to me.

Jiggle

Work: pointless.
Badminton: shite.
Self-esteem: non-existent.

Remind me why I bother.

Wet? Just a little.

We had a meeting today and our manager made us do one of those annoying team building exercises. But it was interesting, I found that one of my colleagues has a silver grade in ballroom dancing, another can solve a Rubik's Cube in under a minute and yet another wasn't born in Wales (shock, horror!)

I left home this evening to go to badminton, and it rained. It rained a lot. The roads were horrendous, I kept having to go through puddles which made the alternator light come on and the steering heavy as various belts slipped. All fun fun. After all that, badminton was quite entertaining, though I played like complete pants in the last two games, annoyingly.

All men are fools and what makes them so is having beauty like what I have got.

No brakes

Got into the car today to go to work and as soon as I pressed the brake pedal, it did very little to stop the vehicle, which was quite worrying. Subsequent investigation showed that a branch from a gorse bush that blew out in front of me last night had jammed itself between the axle and chassis, severing the brake lines. I was able to use the low ratio gears to get it safely to the bottom of the track, from where it was subsequently retrieved and repaired by the local Land Rover gurus. It wasn't a big repair, but the labour was pricey.

Didn't get much done in work. It was a somewhat strange day.

In the evening, it dawned on me that the 2.5gb RAM in this machine would probably allow VMWare to run another OS nicely. So I downloaded and installed the free VMWare Server, which installed painlessly. It now has a virtual copy of Windows 2000 Advanced Server installed, which actually runs rather well. So that could be fun to play with. Just need more disk space in this machine, 20gb is not enough and I'm running out quickly. This combined with the ever-present RDP connection to my MP3 playing box means I have a rather busy desktop now. Hmm, if I popped another graphics card in, I could have another monitor perhaps...

London broke me

Ever since I got back from London I have been really bad about exercise and eating less crap. I think it coincided with the clock change and a general phase of crappy weather. Now I feel really lethargic and crap and I'm sure it's the lack of exercise. But it's really hard to get back into it when the weather is cold and wet and windy, and the evenings are dark and intimidating. Oh well.

Nothing reported over the last couple days because nothing happened. Had a real fright today as I had to shut down one of the test Unix machines (one of several virtual machines) and as I did so, I lost connection to the web based system manager, making me think I'd somehow shut down four producton systems at the same time. Really worrying moment.

Oh well. That's about it.

Unusual Pringles, Galaxy and family

Went and cleaned the car this morning, which always gets me odd looks. I get 10 minutes on the jetwash and spent about 2 minutes cleaning the top and then the rest of the time cleaning the mud from underneath.

After that, walked the dog and got some more stars in Mario Galaxy. Still enjoying it, though it's getting quite tough now. But you don't get fed up because it keeps you motivated with new things. Also had a couple of packets of Pringles that Steve and Kara brought me from the USA. One was Ranch, which I love but you can't get in this country, and another interesting flavour called Loaded Baked Potato. It was actually quite nice, and did a passable imitation of a jacket potato with butter and cheese.

Then went to meet up with my brother and sister and their families for a meal. It was a great evening all round. One thing that seems to define the genes on my Dad's side is a slightly twisted sense of humour, and whenever we get together, there are always some slightly odd conversations. Also it was good to see my nieces again, one of whom is heavily pregnant. I'm really not very good at keeping in touch with my family but when I have a good time with them like today, it kind of motivates me to try harder. Got some good photos too, so will get them uploaded at some point.

Hilarity, weirdness, Wii and Dismember

Work was an annoying day.

After work, picked up Will, Steve and Kara for a meal and drinks in the pub with Rob and Em. We had a decent meal and lots of drinks, and were entertained by the internet enabled jukebox which claimed to have 2 million tracks available. Steve stumped it on his first go, but I found 'Dismembered' by Dismember, which actually got switched off half way through by the bar staff - boo.

After that we headed round to Rob and Em's for an evening of homebrew beer, general conversation, Tiger Woods golf on the Wii, hilarity, photographs of hypercheeks, Wispas, and various YouTube videos. It was a superb evening, and a good time was had by all. I would type more but it's late and I'm tired. I do have photos though.

Must sleep.

Too much computers and Red Bull

After spending all day faffing around trying to troubleshoot that weird network issue and things, I spent the evening rebuilding the MP3 playing Optiplex with a 120gb hard drive. It went OK and I was able to get it running quite well.

Yesterday found that Morrisons was doing a 12-pack of Red Bull for about £7, which is cheap. Not a good thing though.

Examined my finances again. Next year is going to have to be very lean.

8-string Rickenbacker

This went for a grand on Ebay. I've never been so tempted to increase my debt so much. 8-string Ricks are rare, and I've never seen one in that colour. Amazing.

Fat fat fat

Oh dear God, when will my fat binge stop? I've been eating pasties and cake for the last two weeks with the occasional geek fest which invariably includes vast amounts of crisps, dip, pizza and sweets. Then this evening went to a newish Chinese restaurant with some guys from work for a meal. It was really good but the pudding was a highly unhealthy chocolate concoction. I think I have put on weight over the last couple of weeks. Mind you, it's that time of year again, the urge to do less exercise and eat more has definitely kicked in. It's really hard to get motivated to walk the dog and take other exercise when it's dark and cold and wet.

Other than that it was a frustrating day. Some machine was generating huge amounts of traffic on one of the networks, slowing everything to a crawl. Very annoying as we couldn't work it out at all.

The last episodes of Heroes are on right now, being recorded by my Mum. I had to steer clear because of the returning from the Chinese after the first one started. I'm listening to The Great Southern Trendkill by Pantera to block the sound of the TV from downstairs. To be honest, I rather dislike the shouty vocals on this album, but I've always been really into Dimebag Darrell's guitar sound. Absolutely astonishing stuff. I can't play guitar, too many strings too close together, but if I could, the ones I'd like to be able to play like are Dimebag Darrell and Angus Young of AC/DC.

The Dean ML signatures made in his name after he was shot are very, very metal, but I've always quite liked them. I saw a basic Dean ML bass for $200 while visiting Steve and Kara in January and I was quite tempted to bring it back as it was pretty good for the price, but the logistics were a bit much.

219mph on a public road

Urm, OK, this kind of thing is fun in Burnout and other games, but someone should tell these guys that driving at 219mph on a real road with actual traffic is a bit of a cockish thing to do.

Uneventful day today. Had a go on a simulator of an Underground train, rather dull but much funnier if you don't bother to close the doors and hurtle through stations at top speed.

Computers piss me off

I just spent a few minutes putting some parts into my MP3 playing Dell Optiplex. I upped the RAM to 512mb and found a suitable laptop style DVD/CDRW drive that would fit in it. However, it all went horribly wrong.

The USB card suddenly stopped working with the Code 10 errors that took days to resolve last time. Unplugging it left the BIOS without any power due to the dead battery so it lost all the settings yet again. The replacement DVD/CDRW drive I put in didn't work, and then a horrible smell of burning filled the room as the accidentally unplugged laptop style floppy drive cable shorted out against the metal case. Fortunately no damage was done to anything important, and I never use the floppy anyway so the burnt out cable isn't a problem.

However, after a tantrum, I discovered the DVD/CDRW drive issue was down to just having not pushed the connector in hard enough, and the USB card mysteriously started working again. Just weird. It seems OK again now, so time to put it back where it was and see if it behaves over RDP. Now I just need to work out how to get the tiny 20gb hard drive upgraded without disturbing anything. Ghosting the partition to another drive might work, perhaps. Dunno.

Given that I actually work with computers, it's odd how frustrating I find them. Windows in particular does some very peculiar things on occasion.

Edit: Took the RAM out, it didn't like it and crashed, and now the FUCKING USB CARD is not working again! For crying out loud!

Further edit: The hard drive has bad blocks and is probably about to fail. I hate hard drives, they are so unreliable. Can't wait until solid-state drives become cheap enough to afford.