Blind foal

Aww, cute.

A few things

A busy and annoying day in work as it was my helpdesk day and so many calls came in I didn't get anything done that I wanted to before going to . The stress caused the consumption of chocolate, which of course led to guilt.

The road I normally take home over the hills was closed, so I had to follow a diversion. Perversely I deliberately went the wrong way and got lost, and for a while I genuinely didn't know where I was. Fortunately I finally caught a glimpse of the nearby wind farm and headed for it, and found myself back on familiar roads. I took a video of the wind farm, as I find the turbines fascinating to watch, and it's easy to forget just how damn big they are when you're looking at them from a couple of miles away. There was one which had it's blades turned so they weren't catching the wind.



This is an overview of one end of the wind farm.



This is the interesting shadow that the spinning turbine casts.

I met Squish the kitten again at lunchtime in her new home. She (not certain yet) is perking up a lot and is insanely cute as you can see! If you stroke her, she purrs like a little engine, but isn't quite at the playful stage yet. She does like to explore though, and will climb up on you and curl up if she can.


Here's a doodle that came about while I was waiting for PCs to image and Windows updates to install.

It works!

I just had another go at the Monstrosity and managed to get it sounding better. The bass and guitar strings are now much more in tune and it now makes some interesting sounds.

Given it's demented combination of parts hacked together in most un-luthier like ways, it sounds quite decent. The bass strings sound OK given that they're 10" shorter than they should be and the doubled guitar strings gives that nice chorus effect that I liked so much on the mandolin. I think if I could get a better pickup and some shielding in there to get rid of the buzz, it would sound much better.

WALL-E

Went to see WALL-E with Will and Vicky. It is typical Pixar, excellent animation and a good story. I really enjoyed it, not least because I've always been interested in robots.

Birthday things

Rob's birthday today, which I forgot as usual. Just texted him now.

Bizarrely I got a birthday card and a collection in work today for my 30th, which was a real surprise, being 2.5 months late. But it was certainly a nice surprise.

Squish the kitten was taken to the vet which showed that it is in good health but undernourished. Unfortunately it is still too small to tell what gender it is. It needs a lot of cuddling and playing to get it used to human contact, and lots of feeding up. Apparently it is already a lot happier than it was, which is great.

Orange Monstrosity

Nearly done. The pickup isn't mounted right yet so it's too low, and the damn thing still somehow is out of tune with itself. Not sure what's causing that but hopefully it's a setup issue which I can sort easily enough.

The pickguard is from an old bass I stripped for parts many years ago. It's actually an eyewatering shade of luminous orange which doesn't quite come across in the photo. I had a thing back then for luminous paint as can be seen by my original bass, which had a similar treatment.

That reminds me, here is a fun Flash game called Pandemic II where the objective is to create a virus and wipe out the human race. It's actually quite good.

Things

Not much today except to report that the kitten is doing fine and has been named Squish (!). Put some strings and other bits on the Monstrosity and it seems to work other than somehow being out of tune with itself, which is proving annoying as I can't figure out why.

Big update

Friday wasn't a bad day in work, and the evening was spent round at Andy's with Rob, Em, Will and Vicky. Rob and Andy made some rather tasty and spicy buffalo wings and there was plenty of BoomBlox action going on. It was a really good evening.

Yesterday was an eventful day. First it was an early start to meet up with my Dad and his wife and some of her family from Norway who I haven't seen for a very long time. It started out with the traditional Saturday coffee and scones, followed by the also traditional fish and chips for lunch, which was good. The afternoon was spent playing with iPod touch applications, laptops and looking at photos from a Norwegian zoo, which were really cool.

After that, I went home briefly to drop off the laptop, before continuing on to meet up with some people I used to work with for the usual Wii gaming and Chinese food evening. However, on the way, we saw something on the road. It turned out to be three tiny kittens. Two ran away from us while one went across the road and nearly got run over. We pulled over and managed to grab one of them but couldn't see either of the other two. A guy pulled over to help but the other two were totally out of sight.

The one we rescued clearly hadn't been handled before as it spat at me as I picked it up but it was far too small and scrawny to put up any struggle, just bones and fluff. The poor thing seemed rather shellshocked as we continued the journey. There was some debate about what to do with it but Amy and Huw decided they would keep it as they had thought about a cat before.
The evening proceeded as normal with Guitar Hero and Mario Kart aplenty and lots of food, but this time everyone was distracted because we were all keeping an eye on the kitten. He was quite subdued but he did a bit of exploring and got stuck under a radiator. He seemed happier when he could curl up on people though.

Today has pretty much been a lazy day of watching DVDs. I did however put some doubled up guitar strings and an old bass string on the Monstrosity and they made enough of an interesting sound for me to hack a pickup into it. It still needs a proper nut and the bass strings, and the pickup isn't the right size, but so it far it seems to work OK.

Malignant Narcissism.

Strikes and an experiment

The last couple of days in work have been slightly odd, due to the strikes. For various reasons I didn't strike, so it was a nice couple of peaceful days. There were still a few people in though.

Today was one of those disappointing Thursdays that keeps feeling like it's Friday.

The picture above is an experiment in progress. It is a left handed Telecaster style neck mated to a Squier Precision Bass body which I never did anything with before because it is made of plywood. I've spent the last hour or so making the neck accept the different machine head arrangement. The reason they look a bit weird and cockeyed is because they were the only spare ones I had so they didn't fit properly. It's a mess to be honest. The neck and body didn't really want to fit together, and there are two bridges because the original Squier one seems to have been screwed in by Superman.

I need some more parts and some crappy strings to test it with and then I can see if the idea is going work or if it'll be a monumental failure.

Spamming yourself

Today was my Unix day which was good fun. While attempting to debug a system monitoring script, I managed to spam myself with 95 e-mails. Good fun.

Had a look at the car after work. It has definitely had replacement panels but the chassis to my eye looks fine. The suspension has been looked at by two people and the general consensus is that there is nothing obvious that would cause it to sag in that corner. So it looks like a new spring would be a good idea. Citroen sell them for £35 each but recommend that they are installed in pairs. This combined with about an hour's labour to install each spring means it'll be about £130 or so to sort it. Bah.

By far the best application for the iPhone/iPod touch is the Remote application. This connects to your desktop running iTunes and allows you to control it over wi-fi. It looks a lot like the iPod internal player but you can see all the music on the PC. This is a really handy little program and saves having to connect to the machine using RDP all the time (it's headless).

TVR Cerbera

Quite by chance I came across this video of Jeremy Clarkson testing the then new TVR Cerbera 4.2. I once had a ride in the 4.5 litre version of one of these which was the same updated version as the picture above, except it was black.

At the time I was driving my little 900cc Fiat Cinquecento (a great little car) and I'd never experienced a really fast car. 0-60mph in four seconds comes as a real shock when you're used to a car that would take five times that time to reach that speed. The TVR was a violent, brutal, snorting vulgar beast of a car that roared and snarled. There was no traction control, no ABS, nothing. Within an instant, it would change from a grumbling muttering hulk to a screaming demon, the exhausts bellowing in rage and the tyres pouring smoke into the air. The brakes were also ridiculous, it stopped just as quickly as it accelerated.

Just look at it. It's hugely long and incredibly low. The body is curvy and swoopy in interesting ways. It has gigantic doors that open magically with a touch of the mirrors. The interior looks like the Tardis from the new Doctor Who series, and there's even two rear seats for your dwarfish friends to ride in.

It remains one of my favourite cars that I'll never own. Ever since that eye-opening ride, I've always had a soft spot for the Cerbera.

You two careful, he is a big

Yesterday was going quietly until I had a fit of energy and emptied out the not-quite-attic. It had 16 years of crap up there, with loads of rayburn dust, gunk from the cooker and mouse droppings. It took a while to take down all the crap and burn what could be burnt and prepare the rest for throwing away. Pretty much the only thing that didn't get binned was a pull-along tortoise, which I got for my first birthday. He was cleaned up and put in a safe place.

I'd forgotten about the sheer hilarity of the Backstroke of the West. It's just as good as Zero Wing.

Apps, costumes and power cut

Found that Apple had sorted out the iTunes store this morning and updated the Touch and tried a few applications. It's great at last to have something different to do on it. There are quite a few free apps to try. It's interesting to see the things people are doing with the touch screen and motion sensors.

I also had a play in a sandbox in Second Life. Sandboxes are areas where you can go and use the creation tools to make things in peace and quiet. I made a little house and a cake and was having fun until someone came along and asked if I wanted to make love to a horse.

After that, went into Rhyl with Andy, Rob and Em to try to find things for our costumes for Ed's upcoming BBQ. We found quite a few things but it's top secret at the moment so I'm not going to say anything. Picked up Midway Arcade Treasures with Rob for Rampart but infuriatingly it won't run on the 360. Also got Pyschonauts on Rob's recommendation but I didn't get a chance to try that on the 360 due to a power cut. The power is back on now.

This is why there is an ironic photo of my computer lit up by candle light. I also had a fiddle with the Inspiron's alternate hard drive which is running the sixth attempt to install Mac OS X. This time I got audio working but it still doesn't report battery times, still no wireless and it will only run one core of the CPU.

Apple is broken

Now it's telling me that the 1.1.4 firmware is the current version and if you try to find it via the website, the store is still unavailable.

Bah.

I have an urge to dig out the unicycle and pump the tyre up. Why, I don't know.

Boo Apple

The App Store is available on the iTunes store, at last. I have a look and there's loads of interesting free apps, so I download a few. I plug the iPod touch in and of course it says that it needs a new firmware update (2.0). Fair enough, so I click the update button. It then tells me that the firmware update is available for PURCHASE from the iTunes store, before telling me the store is unavailable.

So once again I have to PAY for a firmware update? How shit is that? I'll do it, if only to get the Remote application, which allows you to remote control iTunes on a PC from the touch or an iPhone.

But boo to Apple.

Frog kicking

I normally play badminton on Thursday nights but the evening was so nice that I decided to take the dog for a walk instead. While walking along I saw a piece of wood on the ground and idly gave it a kick. Except that I realised too late it was a large frog and it bounced helplessly along the road. But fortunately it seemed to be OK as it hopped away into the grass.

Pictures and a Megane

Work was meh. Went round to see Andy's new car today, which was good. It's a Renault Megane with the big bottom, but it's a really nice car. I had a quick drive and it feels really solid and pleasant to drive. The colour is nice and is coincidentally exactly the same as the Partsocaster. We took a trip up to the Caerwys McDonalds, which is the first time I've been to one in well over a year.

Below are two pictures of the Partsocaster and the Inspiron as I managed to coax my camera into life using the 360 controller rechargable batteries.

You can see the space where a neck pickup would go. I would like to put one in but I'd like to get a hot rails type one like the bridge. However they don't seem to be made for the standard size Telecaster hole and the Strat ones are too big so it would require some modification, especially if the hole in the body isn't big enough. I suppose if you made a big enough hole you could put a full size humbucker in it but that would definitely need a lot of modification. One possibility is a Fender Lace Sensor I just found on Ebay. I was able to play a passable rendition of Enter Sandman on it earlier, which was fun.

The Behemoth in all it's glory. Nothing interesting here except possibly the German keyboard layout. If I couldn't touch type that could be quite a pain. I put a spare hard drive in on Monday and succeeded in installing an alternate operating system from a certain fruit named manufacturer. It actually ran quite well other then only using a single core, and not having wireless, sound or power management. Definitely a work in progress so back to Vista for the time being.

A Mac laptop was tempting when I was looking around, but the cheapest Intel ones you can get these days is a first generation MacBook for £500, perhaps a little less, which is quite honestly ridiculous when a brand new one is £700. This would get you a 1.83ghz Core Duo, 1gb RAM and a 13" screen with integrated graphics. To get the MacBook Pro equivalent of the 9400 with the 17" screen and a proper graphics card would be £800+ easily for a first generation one.

If you can afford a new Mac it's nice that they hold their value so well, but it's real pain if you're after a second hand one.

The last of my DS games went today, so both the DS and PSP are both gone. Now the deed is done, I do miss the DS. I think I'll pick up a Phat one at some point. I don't really miss the PSP, it was a nice machine but it always seemed slightly smug and supercilious compared to the friendly cheerful DS. Ah well, they've both gone to homes where they'll be used instead of sitting there gathering dust. Odd how your interests change though.

Chinook in action

Chinooks are impressive machines with their interlocking rotor blades. Here's one airlifting another broken down helicopter in Snowdonia.

Serial ATA and goodbye to the DS...

Serial ATA has got to be the best invention of recent times. No huge flat ribbon cables blocking airflow, no stupid connectors with 40 pins just waiting to be bent, no more idiotic master/slave conflicts. The new connectors are simple, effective and common between laptops and desktops. Also it's faster and more reliable. I'm a bit behind the times I have to admit, as the Inspiron is the first machine I've had with it.

In other news, the DS went with five games today. I feel like I should be more sentimental to see it go. If it had been the original Phat DS, I might be. The old DS always felt more friendly somehow. The DS Lite, though beautiful, just didn't have the same appeal for some reason.

The only thing that made me a bit sad was deleting my town (Sayatnim) from Animal Crossing last night. It was a strange game and I enjoyed it for quite a while before it got boring. Tom Nook can fuck right off thought, the conniving moneygrubbing little bastard. When you paid off your mortgage, he'd (unasked) expand your house and charge you another few hundred thousand bells. I devastated the place by hacking down nearly all the native apple trees, as apples weren't worth anything, and planting a vast orchard of pear trees, seeded from Rob's village. Every three days I would go round, picking all the pears and selling them for bells to pay off the mortgage. If only I was that entrepreneurial in real life.

Google is my brain. If I think I spelt a word wrong, I Google it. If I want directions, I look on Google Maps. If I want to know about a place, I Google it. If I want to write about something, I do it on Google Blogger.

I find this worrying.

Fun fun fun

Went over to my Dad's today, with the Behemoth. They've just got a new laptop, which is a Toshiba something. It's got the same 1440x900 resolution 17" display as mine except it's a glossy screen so it was interesting to compare the two. I don't like glossy screens. They do make colours look vivid but the reflections they pick up drive me insane. It's the one thing I dislike about the MacBook.

We went out for their usual coffee and scones in Deganwy before meeting up with one of their friends who sells houses on a new development. She's just got engaged to a property developer who turned up in a Mercedes S-class and regaled us with tales of his friend's £120000 6-litre Bentley which accelerates to 130mph in the length of a slip road. I'm glad the AX wasn't anywhere around. It's a whole different world. Mind you when I took at closer look at his S-class, the 17" front tyres illegally had no tread on the edges and it was only the 320 CDI diesel model. The S-class is a lovely car though, I once had the opportunity to drive a previous generation S500 and it was truly sensational. The 5 litre V8 gave it some serious poke, and it was really pretty quick for something so large.

After that I spent some time reconfiguring their wireless network for maximum security, and sorted out the Vista desktop on the Toshiba, which had gone very strange. Then went on an unsuccessful hunt for a laptop case that would fit the Behemoth. The only ones I could find were stupidly expensive so gave up on that one.

While in Staples, I saw the absolute most hideous laptop I have ever seen, even worse than the pink resprayed Dells that people try to sell on Ebay. It was a HP of some sort. The top half with the (glossy) screen was metallic maroon, and the bottom half and keyboard were some sort of chrome. It had lots of glowing touch controls and it was just unspeakably tacky and awful. It was the laptop equivalent of those enormous stereos that were so popular a few years ago with giant mutated speakers that had flashy labels and things but sounded cack. I'd much rather have something understated, which is one reason why I like the Behemoth. Other than it's tremendous bulk, the silver and white case is reasonably understated and the media controls at the front only light up when you press them. It seems to have been inspired by the Apple laptops, which can't be a bad thing.

Also picked up a bottle of that stuff you chuck into your diesel tank that is supposed to clean out the injectors and the fuel system, making it run better. I have no idea if they really work but it was cheap so why not?

.kkrieger

I was reading up about procedural generation after being made aware of it by Spore and I came across this little game called .kkrieger made by .theprodukkt. It's a short FPS but the whole thing runs from a 96kb file. OK so it's not very long and the textures repeat a lot but come on, the file could actually fit into the memory of an Amstrad CPC. Interesting stuff.

Not much to report

Not done much over the last couple of days. It's been quite quiet really. The Behemoth is still running well without any trouble so far. Vista is proving quite interesting and I have to admit the Aero looks are growing on me. Mac OS X will run on this machine though, so I might get a cheap SATA drive to try it out on (120gb for £30!).

I'm currently at 29% battery after running it for a couple of hours with the screen on full brightness and the wi-fi being absolutely hammered by a test iSCSI connection to the FreeNAS box. This pretends that a file on a remote machine is an actual physical SCSI hard drive. I only tried it out because Vista includes an iSCSI Initiator which I hadn't come across before. You can treat the connected file like a real hard drive, format it, defrag it, etc, which is interesting. It's a bit slow because the FreeNAS box is a crappy old Compaq iPaq desktop PC, with a 160gb hard drive bunged in it and the wi-fi doesn't help. iSCSI is meant for enterprise level systems with gigabit network cards. Still, it might come in useful for backups or something. Vista has a function to back up the entire system to an image, but it is quite picky about what you can back up to, so an iSCSI target might work.

A quick glance at Ebay showed there were plenty of spare parts for the 9400, screens, shells, motherboads, keyboard, etc and several complete machines in various states of repair. So at least I know parts are readily available. The service manual is also on Dell's website so I know how it comes apart now. There's also some XPS M170s on there, which was another model I considered as it's exactly the same as the 9400, but with black case parts, more powerful graphics cards and LEDs that emit coloured light of your choosing out of the speaker grills and air vents (yes, really).

Someone e-mailed me about the DS in work but didn't follow it up. I sold the PSP to my colleague yesterday, and he's happy with it. He has a PS3 so can do the Remote Play stuff, and there's also an RPG coming out on it he wants to play. He's now got one of every current console out there - 360, PS3, Wii, DS and PSP. Scary.

The Partsocaster now sounds infinitely better after I discovered that I'd wired the pickup totally and utterly wrong. It now sounds really good and actually sounds much fatter than I expected, probably down to the humbucking pickup. I might look into adding the second pickup at some point, if only to fill up the hole by the neck.

Presenting the Behemoth

OK, so I bought a new laptop, like I said I was going to. It is being financed by the sale of my PSP and DS. I already nearly have sold both, so that's fine.

The laptop I chose was a Dell Inspiron 9400. Back at my last place I was very critical of Dell, as the old Latitude CPi and other models fell apart worryingly often. When we switched to Dell at the council, I was very dismayed. But fortunately the newer laptops are much improved and my desktop Precision workstation at home has been rock solid. The other good thing about Dell is that because they are fairly popular, the machines and spares parts are readily available on places like Ebay. This was just one of many Dells on there, and I had quite a choice.

I had already narrowed it down to the Inspiron 6400 or 9400, as they are pretty much the same other than the screen size. They were quite a popular model a couple of years ago so spares wouldn't be a problem. They are also quite upgradable, it's possible to swap out the Core Duo for a Core 2 Duo, the graphics card can be swapped out and even the screen can be changed.

The 9400 I got has a 2ghz Core Duo, 2gb RAM, a 120gb hard drive, a 17" 1440x900 display and the main reason I wanted a new laptop, a Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GS with 256mb dedicated memory. It's a refurb from a place on Ebay. I didn't actually expect an operating system to be installed and while there is no COA on it, it's got a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate installed. Apparently it is fully activated but I need to check that. It also has a German keyboard, which is interesting. Z and Y are the wrong way round, there are various characters on the keyboard and the Ctrl keys are marked Strg. There was a very similar one with a 1920x1200 display but while that might be nice on a 24" screen, it might be pushing it ona 17".

So far it seems nice, although 'laptop' is rather a kind word for the hulking beast. It's so big that there is even room in the case for a mini subwoofer. I tried to take a picture but my main camera had no batteries and my phone took a hideous blurry picture. So I attached a generic picture off the Internet. I've got one of those beanbag tables that Em gave me a while back and the 9400 is a perfect fit. It makes it possible to use on your lap without blocking the many air vents. The battery works but it remains to be seen how well it lasts.

In other news, the pickup finally arrived and I've mounted it into the Partsocaster. I managed to solder it up OK and it works fine. The switch and controls do what they should and it doesn't make any bad sounds. It needs a good setup and some tweaks, but on the whole it works and makes a nice sound, especially distorted.

GTA IV, depression and general stuff

I have an admission. I'm bored of GTA IV. I'm about 35% in and I'm finding it really hard going.

1) Missions are all the same crap, over and over again. Pick up some people who proceed to talk shite. Steal something/kill someone. Escape from police/gang while outnumbered and accompanied by stupid companions who usually get killed. Repeat. There are no side missions to speak of other than the racing, but with those you can usually tell in the first minute or so that either you will win incredibly easily, or be completely defeated.

2) The AI is hardly improved from the older games. It seems so at first and the police are better. But you watch it when people get into your car and it's just like GTA III all over again.

3) It locks up or gives the unreadable disk error on a regular basis. Not so bad when you're just playing around but if you're trying to do a mission, it is really annoying. The only other game that has done this on my 360 was Bioshock and it didn't do it anywhere near as much as GTA IV does.

4) Once you've made a few friends, they become a real annoyance. They constantly call you and want to go out and drink or play darts or whatever. If you don't answer, they start to hate you. It is really tedious. You can switch the phone off but then you miss things.

5) It's just not fun. Primarily because of the tedious, repetitive missions and the lack of anything to do outside of the missions.

Yes, it looks incredible, the cars drive great and the animation is good and the detail of the city is truly breathtaking. But the actual game content is GTA III all over again. It was good back then, but now, no. I expected much, much more from GTA IV but it feels like a step backwards from San Andreas. To be fair, I suppose I'll keep plugging away at it, but not with the same delight that Vice City and San Andreas brought me.

Also my Xbox Live subscription has expired - not bothered about renewing it to be honest.

No blog updates for a while, had a slightly strange few days where I was feeling very down. Didn't feel like doing anything or talking to anyone. Thursday evening was spent at an Indian meal with some people from work, which was pretty decent. I tend to judge Indian restaurance on their kormas - it's easy enough to make an average spicy dish but the milder ones need to have taste, and the korma I had was pretty good.

Saturday was spent watching the end of Doctor Who Series 3 and then lots of ancient Doctor Who on Youtube. I also sanded down the headstock of the Frankencaster and lacquered a new decal on, so it's now a Bitzer Partsocaster. I've never done this before but it came out OK. Still no pickup, annoyingly. I've discovered the wiring for two pickups is actually easier than the single pickup due to less capacitors and resistors...doh.

Spent most of the day at Rob and Em's playing Boom Blox on the Wii with Will, Vicky and Andy, also eating very nice burgers and trying out Andy's chocolate fountain.

Boom Blox is a simple game but very compelling, and good fun. The various multiplayer modes are excellent. I might actually buy it, which would make it my first Wii purchase since Mario Galaxy in November. Also had a look at the Spore creature creator on Will's MacBook. It looks great fun but I don't think I've got anything that will run it. I might look into selling my Toshiba laptop and some other stuff and getting one with a graphics card. There's nothing wrong with the Toshiba other than the crappy graphics chip though, so that's annoying.

I'm going to sell my DS and PSP. I don't use them any more. I think I'll see if I can get a Phat DS though, there's still some games I'd like to play and I think the Phat suits my hands better. After I built a working Phat DS from spare parts (which I gave to Steve and Kara), I looked into the possibility of creating a hybrid Phat DS with Lite screens, but the electronics are very different unfortunately.

Videos

Weird Al Yankovic - Angry White Boy Polka

I would post a link to another video but nobody else would like it. Or even care. Or read any of the other shit that I spew on here. There's probably a reason why my blog has twice the number of posts as anyone else's but if I think about it too much I'll depress myself.

Car snobbery

It dawned on me recently that my car is probably the oldest and shittest looking car when I park in any of the work sites. Sometimes this really bothers me and I wonder why I'm always resigned to driving crappy cars, especially if I end up parked next to something nice (the answer is my near retardation with finances). But then I remember that there's no point having a nice car because it would lose shitloads of value the instant I drove it up the track and it got scratched and covered in mud.

On the other hand, I've found it's quite a relief not giving a sod about scratches or dents. So long as it drives well, and the panels are approximately the right shape and the doors and windows open and close properly, I've decided it doesn't matter too much what it looks like. Especially as I've discovered the AX must have been in a crash once as the bumper, bonnet, offside wing, door and headlights are from a white older model and have been resprayed in an almost but not quite right shade of red.

I was thinking that if I ever did modify a car, it would be more fun to keep it looking shed-like but upgrade the mechanicals so it drove and handled really well, like a stealth thing. I think people do this already and call them 'sleepers'.

Woohoo, soldering

Got a new soldering iron for a mere £8.50 today and some new solder for 85p. It revealed just how shit my old iron was. Solder melts in an instant, attaches to anything I want, and basically it works really well. I was able to complete the wiring for the Telecaster (other than the pickup) and resolder some joints I wasn't sure about, with no problems at all. Hurrah.

Just waiting for the pickup to arrive. Once it arrives I can finish the wiring, put some strings on it, and see if the damn thing works. I hope it does. The wire I used was some cloth covered wire I had lying around which looks nice and vintage but is a bit of a pain to strip.

If it does work and actually play, I'll take the Squier logo off and put one of these on it:

Looks close enough to a Fender logo but not. If I was building a copy of a Jazz copy I could put his interpretation of the logo - a Fecker Jizz Bass. Hmm. Or perhaps it could be a Fecker Testicaster. Not keen on that either...

Spent some time GIMPing an image of a Telecaster which would have two bass strings and then two dual course octave strings. The idea being that you'd have bass and other sounds on the same thing. No idea if it would work in reality but it was fun doing it. It would probably be easier to use a short-scale bass in reality.

Slow-worm and soldering

While walking the dog, we came across this enormous slow-worm in the middle of the road. It was easily a foot long. I wasn't sure if it was dead until it blinked, which is one way of telling them apart from snakes. It looked really glossy and healthy and was a really nice deep brown. It stayed patiently while I took some pictures and then I gave it a prod and it slithered away across the road, which was good as I didn't want it to get run over. The hound didn't quite know what to make of it and just stared at it with pricked ears. Having just read about them, this could have been a pregnant female.

Most of the bits arrived for the Frankencaster today, everything except the pickup. I started to put them together only to find that the potentiometers wouldn't fit into the control plate as the holes were too small. The pots I got were real Fender parts so whoever made the control plate cocked that up rather. I had to file out the holes so the controls could be mounted. I then spent quite a bit of time soldering the various wires and resistors and capacitors in. This is the wiring diagram I am using, which is for the Esquire (the original single pickup version of the Telecaster).

How I hate soldering. It never seems to attach to the terminals like it should and the diagram said to solder wires and things to the body of the pots, but it never sticks for me. I don't know why. I was cut short when the end of the soldering iron I was using unexpectedly broke off, so I'll have to find a new one now. I should also get some new solder as perhaps the stuff I am using is just crap. It's also very old I think. I was a bit concerned when the control plate almost didn't fit back in as the 3-way switch is so deep. It did go in after I tweaked a few things. I'm not sure how well the crappy soldering will hold up to be honest once it's all together though. If it does turn out to be crappy solder I can redo it with good stuff though.

Busy day

My hopes for a peaceful Monday were dashed the instant I entered the building. I quickly received a call that there was a loud noise coming from the server room and the door was hot to the touch, which pointed to air conditioning failure. Nobody had been able to get in because it's kept locked so I had to leg it and get the key.

Upon opening the door, the caretaker and I were almost bowled over by the heat and the sound of screaming fans as the servers tried to cope with the sauna-like conditions. The air conditioning had failed. So we spent the next few minutes opening the window and stealing a load of desk fans from various desks to provide some airflow. Eventually the room cooled down a bit and the fans began to spin back down. Amazingly none of the servers had crashed. The air conditioning was fixed by lunchtime and the room returned to it's usual tranquil calm.

I was bombarded with calls all day long, everything from a blue-screening PC to misplaced phone numbers to a laser printer with a hole in it, causing me to dash around like a demented bluebottle all day long.

It was a relief to come home and take the dog for a walk. Other than that watched some more Doctor Who and things.

A VERY windy day

It was unbelievably windy this morning. I had a weekend task from work, to drive around the village and see what the GPRS coverage was like from my laptop with a 3G data card. This was made hard by huge chunks of tree in the road, and at one point when I was getting out of the car to move one, the door was suddenly ripped out of my hand and bent right back, putting a massive dent in it. Great. It was also blowing the power lines so hard that the electricity kept flickering off and on, causing problems with computers and things. It did calm down eventually but then it rained for the rest of the day, so no dog walk unfortunately.

There was an interesting moment this evening when the wind farm was caught in the sunset so that the turbines shone bright gold against a background of grey cloud. It was made slightly surreal because all the turbines were shut down.

Wedding

Today was the wedding of a woman I used to work with called Amy. There's a few of us who have kept in touch which is nice and we meet up every now and again for Chinese food and video games. I remember how she'd talk about the upcoming wedding in the office, and we'd mock because it was five years off. It seems unbelievable that the wedding actually happened today. Fortunately it all went off perfectly.

The weather was absolute shite this morning but by the time everyone got to the church, it was actually not too bad. The ceremony went off without a hitch although the vicar spouted some rather strange stuff at one point. Churches bother me.

I came home and started watching Doctor Who Series 3 until it was time to head back to the evening do. It was your typical evening do with lots of drink, food and a questionable DJ. The two extended families get on fine and it was basically a good laugh all round. Amy's brother Martin came out with outrageous scatalogical humour which is normal but it gets worse when he's drunk. Fortunately the other people I used to work with were there so we formed a little huddle with people we knew and watched as various family members gyrated unsteadily on the dance floor.

Also met a guy with the same name as me which is very unusual. Annoyingly he was also rather like me in appearance but with all the bad aspects removed, ie, no excess flab, no glasses, perfect skin, no grey or disappearing hair. DoubleL v2, new and improved.

Tired now, it's pretty late.

Frankencaster

The Frankencaster

I put this together this evening. I had decided a while ago to put humbuckers in my £15 Squier Strat to stop it buzzing. But the humbucker pickguard I bought didn't fit properly. I didn't feel like putting it back together and wondered what to do. The other thing I didn't like about it was the tremolo because it made it really hard to keep in tune, and I wondered about blocking it so it didn't move.

Then I remembered the metallic blue Telecaster body I bought a long time ago. Some investigation showed the Strat neck fitted but the holes in the body were too narrowly spaced. After attacking them with a drill, I found the neck bolted on fine, although there is a gap because Strat necks are rounded at the end and Telecaster necks are square. Also the headstocks are different so it looks unusual.

All the black hardware I bought for the quilted maple body fitted near enough, and so it should work fine. Not all the screw holes for the pickguard line up but that isn't a major issue. The reason it has a single string on it is because I was using it to make sure everything lined up. I think the blue and black go together pretty well.

I managed to find someone in work to buy my Xbox so I've put that towards the remaining parts I need - a pickup, controls, various screws and an output jack. I've only gone for one pickup at the moment even though it has space for two, as I'm still not too good at the wiring side.

Double neck bass...

...with one string per neck. It's silly but I really like it. It was actually made by a guy called Jens Ritter who makes insanely expensive, beautifully crafted basses. I remember hearing about it being made but this is the first time I've seen a picture of it.

In other news, the weather was ultra crappy today, wind and rain all day long. It was payday today so I celebrated by having a nacho chicken wrap from Morrisons - I've started to try and eat more sensibly so this was a departure from the rest of the week.

I also filled up my car as the needle was down in the red and the mileometer was up to 399 miles since the last fill up. In fact it was so low that the warning light came on as I went round a bend. I wasn't actually sure if it worked so that' s good to know. Diesel is £1.31 in Morrisons and for the first time ever it cost more than £40 to fill up the AX. Madness. I've said this so many times now, but I'm so glad I got rid of the Discovery when I did.

I found an IBM JS20 Blade server on Ebay today. It is a POWER based blade which can run AIX. Normally they go for £2000 or so but this one (and 7 more) had a starting bit of £60. It didn't have any memory but that isn't expensive. It sold for £60 in the end as well. Insane. It's a shame that they only work in a Bladecenter chassis, which are huge, heavy, hot, noisy and expensive.

Had a brief play with FreeNAS on a VMmare box his evening. Actually seems quite good. Also Firefox 3 seems pretty decent.

Currently reading Desperation by Stephen King, which is quite odd. It's very long and though I've read it before, I can't remember any of it at all for some reason.

Writing for the sake of it

Not much to say really.

Here is another strange German music video, this time by Tanzwut. Quite good.

Powered up the old Xbox today for the first time since I got the 360. I didn't have the Xbox all that long really before I got the 360, but I had quite a bit of fun with it. I played quite a lot of Half-Life 2, made lots of maps and had multiplayer fun in Far Cry Instincts: Evolution, and painted a Jaguar E-type purple in Forza Motorsport.

I've decided to sell it as I'll probably never use it again and it's quite big and takes up room. I suppose I could mod it to run Linux but quite frankly I'm bored of trying to run Linux on every single piece of hardware I get my hands on. Not that original Xboxes seem to have any value at all but hopefully with five games and a good SCART cable, it should sell.

Met the greyhound woman on the walk today. I last encountered her a long time ago. She has two greyhounds, one black and one white and brown. The black one is really friendly and does the leaning thing whenever he sees you. The white one on the other hand is timid, and takes a while to get used to people.

Firefox 3

Don't forget to download Firefox 3 tomorrow! (June 17th)

Stan Winston RIP

Stan Winston, creator of many special effects in Aliens, Terminator, Jurassic Park, etc has died. I first heard of him when I read the Making of Jurassic Park and was seriously impressed by the various work he has done.

A weird dream

It was really weird. I was looking into a big mirror except it wasn't a mirror, it was a screen. The image was generated by computer. If I moved too quickly I could see myself as a monster, before the image updated to show my normal face. It was really disturbing. Close up it looked like the face of the Cloverfield monster combined with a Predator.

Odd indeed.

Pork & Beans

It's been a long time since I listened to any Weezer stuff, after my copy of the Blue album cracked and the Green one vanished. This is a decent track and the internet meme video is great.

Recap

Ted: "Dougal, fantastic news!"
Dougal: "You're getting married."
Ted stares at Dougal in disbelief.

Father Ted is genius.

Recap of the last couple of days:

Friday evening was a pub crawl with everyone in St Asaph. I was late as shortly after I left I heard a strange slapping noise from the left front wheel. Turned out the tyre was falling apart and the right one looked a bit past it as well. Both of them looked to be remoulds. Went back home and changed the wheel after some hassle. Eventually made it. It was a fairly short pub crawl as it was only four pubs in total.

Saturday morning was expensive, got a pair of new front tyres. After that, picked up Andy and we headed to the BBQ at Em's parents. Lots of drinks, food, general hilarity and experiments with fire. They've got a stove that caused some chaos as occasionally varnished or laminated wood was put in it, causing sparks and hideous smoke. We headed back to Rob and Em's in the early hours and crashed out.

A fried breakfast revived everyone this morning.

Random and incoherant, feeling a bit tired.

The Shuttlecock Has Landed

Busy and frustrating day in work.

Badminton was good, didn't win any games and screwed up a lot of shots but had a good time. I think what I need to learn now is to anticipate where to be on the court, something I find hard. Best moment was landing a shuttle perfectly on a beam. By our reckoning, Em and I should have automatically won by default for this move but sadly the other team didn't agree. Good thing the shuttle was knackered anyway. I had to do some post processing on the image, using the despeckle feature of the GIMP to make it look a bit better.

Burnt toast

Evacuation in work caused by burnt toast. Again. Other than that it was a fairly ordinary day. Cut my hair this evening, a bit of a pain and always itchy afterwards.

Went back into Second Life. I found a beach which existed solely to allow people to stand around looking pretty, or bonk if they wanted to. When you walk into the middle of the beautiful crowd looking like this...
...it causes a certain amount of dismay and confusion. I just stood there as the conversation erupted. Some people laughed, some were offended, some told me quite seriously that I was missing the point of the place and disturbingly one person sent me a private message with offers of naughty things.

Perhaps the saddest thing I found today was a fake Starfleet Academy where you could sign up and work your way up the ranks so you can board a fake starship. At that point I looked normal and was wearing a toga which someone randomly gave me.

Worst book ever. For some reason I want to read it.

Fecking Ubuntu updates broke VMware Server again. Really bloody annoying, having to reconfigure it and build the module for the new kernel. I don't know why this version of Ubuntu does this as the old one was fine. Perhaps it's time to try VirtualBox instead.

Meh

A very Meh day. The only thing worth mentioning was randomly seeing a fire engine in an unlikely place on a field while walking the dog. As I watched it started to come back down and I saw a farmer who I vaguely know by sight. Inquiries showed that there was a gorse fire they were trying to keep under control due to wind. They took it up the road to a hydrant and refilled it while I was there.

I didn't realise that a full size two wheel drive fire engine would be so capable at going over a field, it was quite steep after all.

Fire engines are great in GTA, they are fast and handle well for their size and are nearly unstoppable. Also you can spray pedestrians with water.

Phatty phatty boom boom

Work was OK, got a lot done. My attempts to have a healthy lunch were thwarted slightly by being offered a choc-ice while fixing someone's distorted printing, and chocolate in celebration of someone having won something on the lottery. Also had a slightly bizarre moment when two of the AIX machines sent error messages about fibre channel connection failures. Obviously this was serious until I looked at the date the errors occurred - May 10th. Quite why it suddenly triggered an alert now, I don't know.

Took the dog for a walk which for some reason was a real struggle. I don't think I slept very well last night and I woke up this morning feeling more tired than when I went to bed.

The beta version of Firefox 3 is pissing me off, when you right click it sometimes instantly randomly selects something from the contextual menu. Also it did that thing where it makes the graphics card have a spasm and throws one of the monitors off, necessitating a reboot. Hopefully the final version will be better.

New 3G iPhone. It'll be $199 in the USA, noticably there are no prices on the UK store but it'll probably be another case of swapping the $ for a £. I know a few people who were intrigued by old one but didn't want to shell out for it. If only Apple sold it unlocked.

Image is from a nightmarish week not so long ago when I had six BlackBerrys to set up at once. It was like they were breeding or something.

Interesting thing I picked up last week in the delicatessen - Sweet Garlic Pickle. It's got quite a kick but it's really nice. Goes very well with cold salady meals.

Currently listening to Antikörper (Antibodies) by Eisbrecher. Not as good as the first album but does have some outstanding tracks on it. Vergissmeinicht (Forget me not) is my favourite one on it.

A lazy day

Will and I went to the car boot. It was a warm day so it was quite large, but it was the usual load of crap. There was one item which was interesting, a fairly high-end 16-port network switch, but it was only 10mb so I didn't bother with it.

After that finished off the first series of Torchwood. I rather liked it but as Rob put it, when it's good, it's very good, but when it's bad, it's very very bad. Heard mixed things about the second series, so that remains to be seen.

The rest of the day was spent alternating between the 360 and the amazing weather outside. I went and visited a tree I like, which has got a conveniently low branch and you can climb up and sit on it, which is nice.

Downloaded some game demos for the 360, some stupid racing game, a weird game called Warlords which is basically four player Breakout, a Castlevania game which I hated and the very odd Penny Arcade game.

You make me SICK

"Computer Freaks" - priceless.

This could be a really clever ironic joke. But it's not, which is really quite sad.

Creationism

A look at the Creation Museum.

Various things

Went to my Dad's house this morning for his birthday, which was good. After that, went down to meet Andy, Rob, Will and Vicky in the pub to watch the rugby. This was followed by a gentle pub crawl before heading back to Andy's in my car for a Chinese. All good.

Tired so not writing much.

Pancakes - PANCAKES!

Slow day in work, enlivened by the discovery at lunchtime of a new sweetshop in Ruthin. Lots of oldschool sweets and even a reasonably complete collection of Jelly Belly jellybeans. But, even better, they do pancakes with various fillings. Several of us tried it, most had pancakes and ice cream, but I was different and had one with chocolate spread and marshmallow. It was absolutely superb too.

Spent most of the evening watching more Torchwood. I'm up to about episode 8 and quite liking it so far. It can get a little silly sometimes but it's entertaining on the whole.

Ventured briefly back into Second Life and it is just as crappy as always.

Frankensteining, Badminton and a Strange Mist

Work has been OK. I created another Frankenstein laptop by stripping out the LCD from a broken Samsung laptop and installing it in a working Dell Latitude with a smashed screen. This involved about a million screws and a certain loss of sanity. I didn't expect the connections to be compatible but it actually worked. For some reason the inverter whines a little and today two lines appeared down the screen but it still goes OK. I then inflicted Windows Vista on the poor thing for testing purposes. Actually, the more I play with Vista, and get used to where things are in it, the more I tolerate it. I still think it takes up stupid amounts of RAM and hard drive space though.

Badminton was really good this evening. I haven't played for a while and at first I felt really out of practice, and certainly unfit. But once I got going, I had some good games. Unfortunately, becoming a grandmother hadn't mellowed She Who Gets My Back Up, and she was her usual self. But I must have been doing something right because she didn't do her usual grimaces of disgust and actually said I was playing well at one point.

Weird weather this evening, strange bouts of rain and when I came home there was weird mist everywhere. I took this picture with the N93 which didn't really come across all that well.

Talking of the N93 is still working well and despite me treating it like every phone I've ever had (badly), it's still holding together, even after having been used in camcorder mode while very drunk. I was convinced that the crazy hinge would fall apart but it seems fine so far. This is why I don't want a glossy 'fashion' phone because I view it as a tool and if it can't be shoved in and out of pockets and take the occasional knock, then it's pointless. I apply the same reasoning to iPods, I think they look much better scratched up a bit. It would be interesting to see how an iPhone would stand up to my treatment of phones.

Baby emu!

Awww!

A fat day and GTA

AIX day today which was fun. Spent some time trying to figure out why a couple of scripts wouldn't run. Someone brought Spanish sweets in which must have contained cocaine or something as they were very moreish.

Spent much of the evening playing GTA with Will. We did a number of ridiculous things like taking a drive across the city in airport baggage trucks, attempting a huge jump with the pair of us on a bike with flat tyres and other shenanigans. All good fun.

I hate Ricky Gervais

Why oh why did they pick him to be in GTA IV? Making jokes about cancer and AIDS is really funny, right? What a fucking arsehole.

Priceless comedy moment in GTA just now. I was about to grab someone out of a car when someone did it before me. The driver and the carjacker then engaged in a fist fight while I drove off in the unattended car.

Got a Freesat box. Seems pretty good and worked straight off the old Sky dish. It's a HD one too which may come in useful in the future.

WTF?

Amazon Recommends 'Demon Entrails'.

Eventful walk

Today a colleague and I were trying to take the side panel off a LaserJet 1320. Apparently the sides just unclipped but I was having problems getting it off. I started to lever it off with a screwdriver and with a loud bang, it suddenly shot off and hurtled across the room, terrifying everyone. It was very funny.

The weather this evening was very nice so I took the dog for a walk. Ironically after my tirade about the dachshund yesterday, we encountered it off the lead. We had walked past a field and heard a tirade of yapping. This gradually got closer until the damn thing appeared, heading in our direction. Fortunately it didn't attack the hound, just stood there barking. Eventually it stopped and then it looked quite cute. The owner finally appeared and was quite apologetic. I'm glad the hound doesn't generally respond to things like this.

After that, encountered the woman with the rescued red setter and her other dog. Both of them were rather aggressively staring at the hound so we didn't chat for long as they provoked one of the first real growls I've ever heard from him.

This evening was spent at Andy's, eating a large amount of pizza, watching some Robot Chicken and looking up strange things in Google and Uncyclopedia.

Crappy existence

Is this it? Sitting alone and miserable in my room full of shite, listening to music that everyone else hates, writing shit about stuff that nobody else cares about and eating crap that makes me fat?

Apparently so. Why bother.

4x4 Charger

I really like the Dodge Charger. Here's one on a 4x4 chassis. It always intrigues me when people put normal cars on a 4x4 chassis. The one I've always wanted to see is a Jaguar XJ6 on Discovery chassis. It has been done but mostly as monster truck style things. I think at one point I worked out you'd have to extend the Land Rover chassis by 13", but the width of the axles would be about right. Yes, the resulting vehicle would be ludicrously heavy, probably need special suspension to not handle like a barge, and would have to have a powerful V8 to even move, but it would certainly have presence.

One bizarre thing I once encountered was an XJ6 that had been converted into an extended six wheeled pickup. It was even for sale.

ARGH STUPIDITY

HERE

ARGH COMPUTERS

Went to put a CD in the Optiplex and it ignored it. Looked in Windows and as far as it was concerned there was no CD-ROM. Rebooted it. Same again. Complete shutdown. Nothing.

I extricated it with difficulty from the position it has next to the TV and hook it up to a monitor. It complains again about the CMOS battery and reboots, and the drive is there. Bah. The battery issue means it never starts unattended and you have to leave a keyboard plugged in so when it beeps unhappily you can press F1 to make it boot.

I hate computers. The fact that they remain my primary talent and source of income is probably the greatest tragedy of our times.

ARGH DRIVING HOME

Most annoying drive home ever. I went the quicker way along the main road rather than my usual scenic route through the village. Today proved why I don't usually go that way.

First I was nearly hit head on by someone driving a Mitsubishi Delica, one of those stupid Japanese 4x4 people carriers, who obviously thought that because he was bigger than me, he could ignore the rights of way and just force me to stop dead without any warning.

Then I was followed most of the way by a tailgating git in a black Astra who clearly thought he was God's gift to driving. He was cutting corners and generally being stupid, even nearly being hit head on by a TVR didn't stop him. This was particularly annoying as I know the road so well I can jolly the AX along at a good pace without reaching it's limits so there was no reason to tailgate.

Then on the single track road I turned off onto I was following someone and we met a woman in a blue VW Beetle (the ugly new one).

Despite there being two of us and one of her, she utterly refused to even try to reverse to a layby mere metres behind her and so the car in front of me wedged itself into a layby next to us. No room for me as there was a car already parked in it so I reversed about 50 metres up the road to the next one. Eventually the woman in the Beetle drove past without even acknowledging my existence or the fact I'd reversed all that way for her, which annoyed me a little.

I've seen her and her boyfriend/husband/toyboy/whatever around and they have an expensive house, the supposedly trendy Beetle, and a ridiculous unruly long haired dachshund that thinks it can take on a greyhound. I usually like dachshunds but that one is a little untrained vicious monster. Because of this I've never got close enough to speak to them in case it attacks the hound's ankles.

This is why I usually go the scenic route through the village. It's slower and the roads are narrow but there's much less traffic on it and this hardly ever happens.

Help Firefox 3 set a new record.

Bass workout

Just played the entirety of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Iron Maiden, all 13 minutes of it (except the dull bit in the middle). My fingers ache.

Work wasn't too bad today. It was my turn to have the work experience kid following me around. Fortunately for once we had one that actually was interesting in working in IT, knew something about computers and listened to what I told him to do so I only had to tell him once and not stand over him every time. Also he asked intelligent questions about how things worked and what we did. The worst one we had was a girl who had absolutely no interest in computers or IT at all, and whose sole ambition was to get a job doing filing.

Rained all day. Couldn't take dog for a walk. Boo.

Bomb her womb with your love cannon

Most spam is annoying but that subject line did make me laugh.

Frustrating

I've been keeping an eye out for an RS/6000 so I can learn more about AIX for work. But they are hard to get hold of. And then lo and behold, one turns up on Ebay. Really good spec with dual 1.45ghz POWER4 processors, 2gb RAM, a DDS4 tape drive and even a graphics card. No hard drives but they are standard hotswap SCSI and easy enough to get hold of. In fact it's only a generation behind the ones we have in work. Starting bid of £99 with no bids. Sounds great.

Except that the damn thing is in London and is collection only. It ended at £101 - ludicrously cheap.

Countdown to Extinction, another great track.

Why do dog owners have to pick up after their animals but horse riders can leave their epic piles of steaming droppings in the middle of the road for any absent-minded dreamer to stand in and trip over?

When articles like this come up, there's always some twat who says 'Use public transport!'. Typically, they are from London and benefit from the Tube and buses. Round here it's just not that simple. I hope something is going to be done about fuel prices or things could get nasty.

I pretty much had a beard this morning as I hadn't shaved since last Wednesday and it grows so fast. Scary.

Got hiccups. Bah.

Excessive geekery

Could today have been any more geeky?

Knackered tape drive

I'm sure it shouldn't make that bad noise.

I have sound, and a small Linux machine

Something is gimpy with audio in Hardy Heron. I got it working by playing with the main volume control panel as described by someone. Turning everything off and on again sorted it. I'm sure I already did that though.

Found a HP Jornada 690 at the car boot this morning for £8. It's one of the mini laptops running Windows CE that were vaguely popular at the end of the 90s. It has a 133mhz Hitachi SH3 processor, 32mb RAM, a 640x240 colour screen and a surprisingly usable keyboard. I had to make a power supply for it as it had the standard connector but needed 12v. It's in good nick but the non-TFT LCD seems a bit dim.

The built in operating system is Windows CE 2.11. While this was a BIG improvement over the useless pieces of crap that were CE 1.0 and 2.0, it's still not great. The huge flaw for me was the inability to install network card drivers without connecting it to a Windows PC. This was impossible because I don't have the correct cable. Giving up on that, I quickly found that both Linux and NetBSD have been ported to this machine and so I thought that would be preferable.

I partitioned up a 256mb Compact Flash I had lying round, and after some judicious copying of files, including the WinCE program that actually loads the kernel, it actually booted Linux. It works but I haven't had much of a chance to see what it can do.

I just took a load of crap laptops outside for the scrap pile. Any thoughts about keeping them were quickly halted as it then rained on them very hard.

Random pictures

Wow


Boredom doodling


Inquisitive and friendly cows

The AX doing it's grumpy smoky diesel thing when started from cold

Megadeth

Just recently I seem to have been getting into Megadeth more. Dave Mustaine is certainly a character, and often a bit of a cock, and seems to have managed to alienate everyone who has ever been in the band, but he does write good music. He may have formed the band to get back at Metallica after he was booted, but I think Megadeth have remained more consistent over the years. Metallica have never really been convincing since the black album to be honest. St Anger was a step in the right direction but it sounded so awful nobody cared.

I've had a couple of Megadeth albums for years, but thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I've been able to check out some more songs, and it's pretty good stuff.

It's not often I want to learn to play normal guitar but Megadeth is one of those bands that has that effect on me, especially a pointy V shaped one.

A warm day

It was certainly rather sunny today. Rather than spent the morning in bed I thought I'd go and see if any car boot sales were on. There's usually one at a racetrack near Rhyl and it was particularly large today. It had a lot of proper car boot stuff rather than the usual tons of market stalls selling tat. Didn't get anything though except for a Motorola V3i. It's the one phone that came close to tempting me away from Nokia simply due to the hardware design. Oh, and one guy was selling an iPhone for £240. At a car boot sale. I mean, who is going to buy an iPhone from a car boot sale? Maybe in a few years when the craze has ended.

Although the V3i design still looks good four years after the original model came out, this is one of the remarkably tasteless Dolce & Gabbana limited editions. Apart from the gaudy gold colour, it also has the special D&G firmware so when it's turned on and off a scary voice growls 'Dolce Gabbana' very loudly.

Basically I got it because it was cheap (because it's very battered and worn) and I thought it would be interesting to compare to Nokia. It must be said that the design is really good. It's really thin and light but doesn't feel too fragile. The display is nice and the thing has a surprisingly powerful speaker and vibration motor. I keep looking at it and wondering how they were able to cram it all in. I can see why this phone was so insanely popular in it's time, to the point where it was called the iPod of the phone world.

The software is a bit crappy compared to the Nokia Series 60 platform, and why can't they standardise which is the space button? Nokia has it on 0, Sony Ericcsons have it on # and this has it on *. Also the predictive text and general use of messaging is awkward.

Also got a 2gb card for the N93 the other day as I did a bit of resaerch and found out which was the recommended model (Sandisk Ultra II), as the N93 is apparently picky about memory cards. It's been fine so far with this one. It was just £12.

I went through a phase a couple of years ago of collecting Nokia phones. As a result I have a shitload of them, none of which ever really worked. They are about to be packed up and given to one of the people in work is collecting them for schools so they can recycle them. In fact I've been through a lot of phases, hence the sheer amount of crap I have which I'm now trying to get rid of.

Took the dog for a walk in the sun, which was good, and saw the people down the road who recently rescued a red setter. It was neglected to the point where half it's tail went rotten and dropped off. The poor thing is still a bit underweight but is looking much better and seems quite happy considering.

Big fat Mexican

A meal that is. There's a new Mexican takeaway round the corner from County Hall. I tried it out with a colleague yesterday. He got a burrito and I got a quesadilla, along with some potato wedges. It was really good. So good in fact, that we went back today with another colleague who wanted to try it out (any excuse!). Two of us got a chilli bowl each, which was basically a load of potato wedges with an epic portion of some of the best chilli I have ever had on top, with some sour cream and cheese. The other guy also had Armadillo eggs which were jalapeno peppers, stuffed with cream cheese and covered in breadcrumbs. We also got a portion of nachos between us. It was all really, really good. Mexican food has taken a little while to grow on me, particularly after getting the squits from both Chipotle and Taco Bell in the USA, but now I really like it.

The afternoon was spent having our usual Friday meeting, which took place with a rather completative atmosphere and the occasional digestional rumblings.

Subways

Ah, subways are fun. When you push someone onto the track in front of a train, and they only get winged by it and run up and down the tracks crying out in German.

GTA has a lot to answer for.

Still no fecking sound!

[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.24-16-generic (buildd@palmer) (gcc version 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu7)) #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:23:42 UTC 2008 (Ubuntu 2.6.24-16.30-generic)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 00000000000a0000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000009ff75000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 000000009ff75000 - 000000009ff77000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 000000009ff77000 - 000000009ff98000 (ACPI data)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 000000009ff98000 - 00000000a0000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 00000000fec90000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000fee00000 - 00000000fee10000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000ffb00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] 1663MB HIGHMEM available.
[ 0.000000] 896MB LOWMEM available.
[ 0.000000] found SMP MP-table at 000fe710
[ 0.000000] Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 655221) 0 entries of 256 used
[ 0.000000] Zone PFN ranges:
[ 0.000000] DMA 0 -> 4096
[ 0.000000] Normal 4096 -> 229376
[ 0.000000] HighMem 229376 -> 655221
[ 0.000000] Movable zone start PFN for each node
[ 0.000000] early_node_map[1] active PFN ranges
[ 0.000000] 0: 0 -> 655221
[ 0.000000] On node 0 totalpages: 655221
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 32 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 0 pages reserved
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 4064 pages, LIFO batch:0
[ 0.000000] Normal zone: 1760 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] Normal zone: 223520 pages, LIFO batch:31
[ 0.000000] HighMem zone: 3326 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] HighMem zone: 422519 pages, LIFO batch:31
[ 0.000000] Movable zone: 0 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMI 2.3 present.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDP signature @ 0xC00FEB90 checksum 0
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDP 000FEB90, 0014 (r0 DELL )
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDT 000FD4E7, 0038 (r1 DELL WS 450 8 ASL 61)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACP 000FD51F, 0074 (r1 DELL WS 450 8 ASL 61)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: DSDT FFFD53C5, 2989 (r1 DELL dt_ex 1000 MSFT 100000D)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACS 9FF75000, 0040
[ 0.000000] ACPI: SSDT FFFD7E8B, 00BA (r1 DELL st_ex 1000 MSFT 100000D)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: APIC 000FD593, 0084 (r1 DELL WS 450 8 ASL 61)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: BOOT 000FD617, 0028 (r1 DELL WS 450 8 ASL 61)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: ASF! 000FD63F, 0067 (r16 DELL WS 450 8 ASL 61)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: PM-Timer IO Port: 0x808
[ 0.000000] ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled)
[ 0.000000] Processor #0 15:2 APIC version 20
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x06] enabled)
[ 0.000000] Processor #6 15:2 APIC version 20
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x03] lapic_id[0x01] disabled)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x04] lapic_id[0x07] disabled)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x08] address[0xfec00000] gsi_base[0])
[ 0.000000] IOAPIC[0]: apic_id 8, version 32, address 0xfec00000, GSI 0-23
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x09] address[0xfec80000] gsi_base[24])
[ 0.000000] IOAPIC[1]: apic_id 9, version 32, address 0xfec80000, GSI 24-47
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x0a] address[0xfec80800] gsi_base[48])
[ 0.000000] IOAPIC[2]: apic_id 10, version 32, address 0xfec80800, GSI 48-71
[ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 9 global_irq 9 high level)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ0 used by override.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ2 used by override.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ9 used by override.
[ 0.000000] Enabling APIC mode: Flat. Using 3 I/O APICs
[ 0.000000] Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information
[ 0.000000] Allocating PCI resources starting at a8000000 (gap: a0000000:5ec00000)
[ 0.000000] swsusp: Registered nosave memory region: 00000000000a0000 - 00000000000f0000
[ 0.000000] swsusp: Registered nosave memory region: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000
[ 0.000000] Built 1 zonelists in Zone order, mobility grouping on. Total pages: 650103
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: root=UUID=14ab892f-ad5a-4d2f-abc2-663b27b61340 ro quiet splash
[ 0.000000] mapped APIC to ffffb000 (fee00000)
[ 0.000000] mapped IOAPIC to ffffa000 (fec00000)
[ 0.000000] mapped IOAPIC to ffff9000 (fec80000)
[ 0.000000] mapped IOAPIC to ffff8000 (fec80800)
[ 0.000000] Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
[ 0.000000] Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done.
[ 0.000000] Initializing CPU#0
[ 0.000000] PID hash table entries: 4096 (order: 12, 16384 bytes)
[ 0.000000] Detected 2392.090 MHz processor.
[ 15.813171] Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
[ 15.813175] console [tty0] enabled
[ 15.813637] Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
[ 15.814133] Inode-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
[ 16.023897] Memory: 2586392k/2620884k available (2157k kernel code, 33132k reserved, 998k data, 364k init, 1703380k highmem)
[ 16.023907] virtual kernel memory layout:
[ 16.023908] fixmap : 0xfff4b000 - 0xfffff000 ( 720 kB)
[ 16.023909] pkmap : 0xff800000 - 0xffc00000 (4096 kB)
[ 16.023910] vmalloc : 0xf8800000 - 0xff7fe000 ( 111 MB)
[ 16.023912] lowmem : 0xc0000000 - 0xf8000000 ( 896 MB)
[ 16.023913] .init : 0xc041b000 - 0xc0476000 ( 364 kB)
[ 16.023914] .data : 0xc031b5a4 - 0xc0414dc4 ( 998 kB)
[ 16.023915] .text : 0xc0100000 - 0xc031b5a4 (2157 kB)
[ 16.023918] Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok.
[ 16.023968] SLUB: Genslabs=11, HWalign=64, Order=0-1, MinObjects=4, CPUs=2, Nodes=1
[ 16.103981] Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 4788.66 BogoMIPS (lpj=9577320)
[ 16.104016] Security Framework initialized
[ 16.104025] SELinux: Disabled at boot.
[ 16.104042] AppArmor: AppArmor initialized
[ 16.104047] Failure registering capabilities with primary security module.
[ 16.104058] Mount-cache hash table entries: 512
[ 16.104230] CPU: After generic identify, caps: bfebfbff 00000000 00000000 00000000 00004400 00000000 00000000 00000000
[ 16.104245] CPU: Trace cache: 12K uops, L1 D cache: 8K
[ 16.104248] CPU: L2 cache: 512K
[ 16.104251] CPU: Physical Processor ID: 0
[ 16.104254] CPU: After all inits, caps: bfebfbff 00000000 00000000 0000b080 00004400 00000000 00000000 00000000
[ 16.104268] Compat vDSO mapped to ffffe000.
[ 16.104284] Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
[ 16.120391] SMP alternatives: switching to UP code
[ 16.122227] Early unpacking initramfs... done
[ 16.491395] ACPI: Core revision 20070126
[ 16.505256] ACPI: Looking for DSDT in initramfs... error, file /DSDT.aml not found.
[ 16.531975] CPU0: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz stepping 09
[ 16.531997] SMP alternatives: switching to SMP code
[ 16.532699] Booting processor 1/6 eip 3000
[ 16.542697] Initializing CPU#1
[ 16.619901] Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 4784.46 BogoMIPS (lpj=9568935)
[ 16.619911] CPU: After generic identify, caps: bfebfbff 00000000 00000000 00000000 00004400 00000000 00000000 00000000
[ 16.619920] CPU: Trace cache: 12K uops, L1 D cache: 8K
[ 16.619923] CPU: L2 cache: 512K
[ 16.619925] CPU: Physical Processor ID: 3
[ 16.619927] CPU: After all inits, caps: bfebfbff 00000000 00000000 0000b080 00004400 00000000 00000000 00000000
[ 16.620146] CPU1: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz stepping 09
[ 16.620184] Total of 2 processors activated (9573.12 BogoMIPS).
[ 16.620483] ENABLING IO-APIC IRQs
[ 16.620674] ..TIMER: vector=0x31 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1
[ 16.768028] checking TSC synchronization [CPU#0 -> CPU#1]: passed.
[ 16.788044] Brought up 2 CPUs
[ 16.788080] CPU0 attaching sched-domain:
[ 16.788084] domain 0: span 03
[ 16.788087] groups: 01 02
[ 16.788092] CPU1 attaching sched-domain:
[ 16.788094] domain 0: span 03
[ 16.788096] groups: 02 01
[ 16.788370] net_namespace: 64 bytes
[ 16.788383] Booting paravirtualized kernel on bare hardware
[ 16.789119] Time: 17:51:49 Date: 05/23/08
[ 16.789151] NET: Registered protocol family 16
[ 16.789455] EISA bus registered
[ 16.789462] ACPI: bus type pci registered
[ 16.808259] PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfbde8, last bus=5
[ 16.808262] PCI: Using configuration type 1
[ 16.808264] Setting up standard PCI resources
[ 16.880130] ACPI: EC: Look up EC in DSDT
[ 16.905309] ACPI: Interpreter enabled
[ 16.905315] ACPI: (supports S0 S1 S3 S4 S5)
[ 16.905336] ACPI: Using IOAPIC for interrupt routing
[ 16.946709] ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (0000:00)
[ 16.947183] * The chipset may have PM-Timer Bug. Due to workarounds for a bug,
[ 16.947185] * this clock source is slow. If you are sure your timer does not have
[ 16.947186] * this bug, please use "acpi_pm_good" to disable the workaround
[ 16.947236] PCI quirk: region 0800-087f claimed by ICH4 ACPI/GPIO/TCO
[ 16.947240] PCI quirk: region 0880-08bf claimed by ICH4 GPIO
[ 16.948249] PCI: Transparent bridge - 0000:00:1e.0
[ 16.948282] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0._PRT]
[ 16.948753] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.PCI1._PRT]
[ 16.949109] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.PCI1.PCI2._PRT]
[ 16.949405] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.PCI1.PCI3._PRT]
[ 16.949783] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.PCI4._PRT]
[ 17.144168] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 *11 12 15)
[ 17.144495] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 *11 12 15)
[ 17.144819] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 *9 10 11 12 15)
[ 17.145143] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 *10 11 12 15)
[ 17.145464] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKE] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 15) *0, disabled.
[ 17.145788] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKF] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 15) *0, disabled.
[ 17.146110] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKG] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 15) *0, disabled.
[ 17.146437] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKH] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 *11 12 15)
[ 17.146707] Linux Plug and Play Support v0.97 (c) Adam Belay
[ 17.146754] pnp: PnP ACPI init
[ 17.146765] ACPI: bus type pnp registered
[ 17.172456] pnp: PnP ACPI: found 11 devices
[ 17.172460] ACPI: ACPI bus type pnp unregistered
[ 17.172465] PnPBIOS: Disabled by ACPI PNP
[ 17.172811] PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing
[ 17.172814] PCI: If a device doesn't work, try "pci=routeirq". If it helps, post a report
[ 17.199838] NET: Registered protocol family 8
[ 17.199841] NET: Registered protocol family 20
[ 17.199932] AppArmor: AppArmor Filesystem Enabled
[ 17.203825] Time: tsc clocksource has been installed.
[ 17.211883] system 00:00: iomem range 0x0-0x9ffff could not be reserved
[ 17.211887] system 00:00: iomem range 0x100000-0xffffff could not be reserved
[ 17.211890] system 00:00: iomem range 0x1000000-0x9ff74fff could not be reserved
[ 17.211894] system 00:00: iomem range 0xf0000-0xfffff could not be reserved
[ 17.211897] system 00:00: iomem range 0xfec00000-0xfec8ffff could not be reserved
[ 17.211901] system 00:00: iomem range 0xfee00000-0xfee0ffff could not be reserved
[ 17.211904] system 00:00: iomem range 0xffb00000-0xffbfffff could not be reserved
[ 17.211908] system 00:00: iomem range 0xffc00000-0xffffffff could not be reserved
[ 17.211926] system 00:0a: ioport range 0x800-0x85f has been reserved
[ 17.211929] system 00:0a: ioport range 0xc00-0xc7f has been reserved
[ 17.211932] system 00:0a: ioport range 0x860-0x8ff could not be reserved
[ 17.242570] PCI: Bridge: 0000:00:01.0
[ 17.242573] IO window: disabled.
[ 17.242578] MEM window: fc000000-fdffffff
[ 17.242582] PREFETCH window: f0000000-f7ffffff
[ 17.242590] PCI: Bridge: 0000:02:1d.0
[ 17.242594] IO window: e000-efff
[ 17.242600] MEM window: fe300000-fe4fffff
[ 17.242604] PREFETCH window: disabled.
[ 17.242610] PCI: Bridge: 0000:02:1f.0
[ 17.242611] IO window: disabled.
[ 17.242616] MEM window: disabled.
[ 17.242620] PREFETCH window: disabled.
[ 17.242626] PCI: Bridge: 0000:00:02.0
[ 17.242629] IO window: e000-efff
[ 17.242633] MEM window: fe100000-fe4fffff
[ 17.242637] PREFETCH window: disabled.
[ 17.242641] PCI: Bridge: 0000:00:1e.0
[ 17.242643] IO window: disabled.
[ 17.242648] MEM window: disabled.
[ 17.242652] PREFETCH window: disabled.
[ 17.242693] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1e.0 to 64
[ 17.242708] NET: Registered protocol family 2
[ 17.279905] IP route cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
[ 17.280289] TCP established hash table entries: 131072 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)
[ 17.281192] TCP bind hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
[ 17.281731] TCP: Hash tables configured (established 131072 bind 65536)
[ 17.281736] TCP reno registered
[ 17.292027] checking if image is initramfs... it is
[ 17.739892] Switched to high resolution mode on CPU 1
[ 17.743748] Switched to high resolution mode on CPU 0
[ 18.025527] Freeing initrd memory: 7683k freed
[ 18.025723] Simple Boot Flag value 0x87 read from CMOS RAM was invalid
[ 18.025726] Simple Boot Flag at 0x7a set to 0x1
[ 18.026364] audit: initializing netlink socket (disabled)
[ 18.026381] audit(1211565109.880:1): initialized
[ 18.026687] highmem bounce pool size: 64 pages
[ 18.029472] VFS: Disk quotas dquot_6.5.1
[ 18.029579] Dquot-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order 0, 4096 bytes)
[ 18.029757] io scheduler noop registered
[ 18.029760] io scheduler anticipatory registered
[ 18.029762] io scheduler deadline registered
[ 18.029776] io scheduler cfq registered (default)
[ 18.029859] Boot video device is 0000:01:00.0
[ 18.030315] isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
[ 18.384424] isapnp: No Plug & Play device found
[ 18.424919] Real Time Clock Driver v1.12ac
[ 18.425048] Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled
[ 18.425179] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
[ 18.425337] serial8250: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
[ 18.426126] 00:07: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
[ 18.426484] 00:08: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
[ 18.427638] RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 65536K size 1024 blocksize
[ 18.427731] input: Macintosh mouse button emulation as /devices/virtual/input/input0
[ 18.427954] PNP: No PS/2 controller found. Probing ports directly.
[ 18.430478] serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1
[ 18.430484] serio: i8042 AUX port at 0x60,0x64 irq 12
[ 18.439730] mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
[ 18.439907] EISA: Probing bus 0 at eisa.0
[ 18.439949] EISA: Detected 0 cards.
[ 18.439953] cpuidle: using governor ladder
[ 18.439956] cpuidle: using governor menu
[ 18.440071] NET: Registered protocol family 1
[ 18.440106] Using IPI No-Shortcut mode
[ 18.440142] registered taskstats version 1
[ 18.440267] Magic number: 8:863:896
[ 18.440330] hash matches device ptyy6
[ 18.440382] BIOS EDD facility v0.16 2004-Jun-25, 0 devices found
[ 18.440384] EDD information not available.
[ 18.440674] Freeing unused kernel memory: 364k freed
[ 19.749532] fuse init (API version 7.9)
[ 19.778811] ACPI Exception (processor_core-0816): AE_NOT_FOUND, Processor Device is not present [20070126]
[ 19.778828] ACPI Exception (processor_core-0816): AE_NOT_FOUND, Processor Device is not present [20070126]
[ 20.187619] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
[ 20.187656] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
[ 20.187920] Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - version 7.3.20-k2-NAPI
[ 20.187926] Copyright (c) 1999-2006 Intel Corporation.
[ 20.188001] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:0e.0[A] -> GSI 24 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 20.188068] usbcore: registered new device driver usb
[ 20.200893] USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v3.0
[ 20.200987] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1d.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 20.201003] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1d.0 to 64
[ 20.201008] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: UHCI Host Controller
[ 20.201386] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
[ 20.201417] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: irq 17, io base 0x0000ff80
[ 20.201586] usb usb1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 20.201618] hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub found
[ 20.201627] hub 1-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
[ 20.211761] SCSI subsystem initialized
[ 20.304194] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1d.1[B] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
[ 20.304208] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1d.1 to 64
[ 20.304212] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: UHCI Host Controller
[ 20.304242] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
[ 20.304271] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: irq 18, io base 0x0000ff60
[ 20.304486] usb usb2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 20.304518] hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub found
[ 20.304527] hub 2-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
[ 20.408172] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1d.2[C] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 19
[ 20.408186] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1d.2 to 64
[ 20.408190] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: UHCI Host Controller
[ 20.408223] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3
[ 20.408253] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: irq 19, io base 0x0000ff40
[ 20.408402] usb usb3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 20.408434] hub 3-0:1.0: USB hub found
[ 20.408443] hub 3-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
[ 20.467212] e1000: 0000:03:0e.0: e1000_probe: (PCI-X:100MHz:64-bit) 00:0d:56:11:20:0c
[ 20.482127] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
[ 20.482730] libata version 3.00 loaded.
[ 20.497118] FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
[ 20.512857] e1000: eth0: e1000_probe: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection
[ 20.514670] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1d.7[D] -> GSI 23 (level, low) -> IRQ 20
[ 20.514689] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1d.7 to 64
[ 20.514694] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: EHCI Host Controller
[ 20.514736] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 4
[ 20.518647] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: debug port 1
[ 20.518655] PCI: cache line size of 128 is not supported by device 0000:00:1d.7
[ 20.518670] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: irq 20, io mem 0xfe500800
[ 20.531045] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: USB 2.0 started, EHCI 1.00, driver 10 Dec 2004
[ 20.531229] usb usb4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 20.531267] hub 4-0:1.0: USB hub found
[ 20.531276] hub 4-0:1.0: 6 ports detected
[ 20.635310] PCI: Enabling device 0000:00:1f.1 (0005 -> 0007)
[ 20.635319] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.1[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 19
[ 20.635374] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.1 to 64
[ 20.635393] ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:00:1f.1 disabled
[ 20.643378] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.1: version 2.12
[ 20.643400] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.1[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 19
[ 20.643455] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.1 to 64
[ 20.643551] scsi0 : ata_piix
[ 20.643616] scsi1 : ata_piix
[ 20.643654] ata1: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0xffa0 irq 14
[ 20.643657] ata2: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xffa8 irq 15
[ 20.832407] ata1.00: ATA-7: WDC WD1600AAJB-00PVA0, 00.07H00, max UDMA/100
[ 20.832413] ata1.00: 312581808 sectors, multi 8: LBA48
[ 20.832442] ata1.01: ATA-5: WDC WD400EB-11CPF0, 06.04G06, max UDMA/100
[ 20.832445] ata1.01: 78165360 sectors, multi 8: LBA
[ 20.839356] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
[ 20.855175] ata1.01: configured for UDMA/100
[ 21.331116] ata2.00: ATAPI: SONY DVD-ROM DDU1615, FDS2, max UDMA/33
[ 21.331145] ata2.01: ATAPI: HL-DT-ST GCE-8483B, 1.05, max UDMA/33
[ 21.495015] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/33
[ 21.659107] ata2.01: configured for UDMA/33
[ 21.659249] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA WDC WD1600AAJB-0 00.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 21.659413] scsi 0:0:1:0: Direct-Access ATA WDC WD400EB-11CP 06.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 21.660018] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM SONY DVD-ROM DDU1615 FDS2 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 21.660352] scsi 1:0:1:0: CD-ROM HL-DT-ST CD-RW GCE-8483B 1.05 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 21.674173] Driver 'sd' needs updating - please use bus_type methods
[ 21.674294] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 312581808 512-byte hardware sectors (160042 MB)
[ 21.674314] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 21.674318] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 21.674346] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 21.674417] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 312581808 512-byte hardware sectors (160042 MB)
[ 21.674433] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 21.674436] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 21.674464] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 21.674469] sda: sda1 sda2
[ 21.680410] Driver 'sr' needs updating - please use bus_type methods
[ 21.703791] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
[ 21.704492] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] 78165360 512-byte hardware sectors (40021 MB)
[ 21.704512] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 21.704515] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 21.704543] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 21.704607] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] 78165360 512-byte hardware sectors (40021 MB)
[ 21.704623] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 21.704626] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 21.704653] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 21.704658] sdb: sdb1
[ 21.731359] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[ 21.738569] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[ 21.738596] sd 0:0:1:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[ 21.738621] sr 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 5
[ 21.738646] scsi 1:0:1:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 5
[ 21.739979] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 4x/48x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
[ 21.739986] Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[ 21.740058] sr 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
[ 21.743977] sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/48x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
[ 21.744059] sr 1:0:1:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1
[ 21.767783] usb 2-1: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[ 21.949893] usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 22.065292] Attempting manual resume
[ 22.065297] swsusp: Resume From Partition 8:2
[ 22.065299] PM: Checking swsusp image.
[ 22.065526] PM: Resume from disk failed.
[ 22.119190] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[ 22.119202] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
[ 22.191622] usb 2-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 22.372728] usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 22.614522] usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[ 22.793545] usb 3-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 22.796599] usbcore: registered new interface driver hiddev
[ 22.828021] input: Microsoft Microsoft Notebook Optical Mouse with Tilt Wheel as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/input/input1
[ 22.838512] input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft Notebook Optical Mouse with Tilt Wheel] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-1
[ 22.852735] input: Microsoft Natural® Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input2
[ 22.862529] input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.11 Keyboard [Microsoft Natural® Ergonomic Keyboard 4000] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2
[ 22.883649] input: Microsoft Natural® Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.1/input/input3
[ 22.902500] input,hidraw2: USB HID v1.11 Device [Microsoft Natural® Ergonomic Keyboard 4000] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2
[ 22.902527] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
[ 22.902532] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-core.c: v2.6:USB HID core driver
[ 27.781430] pci_hotplug: PCI Hot Plug PCI Core version: 0.5
[ 27.829111] shpchp: Standard Hot Plug PCI Controller Driver version: 0.4
[ 27.870484] Linux agpgart interface v0.102
[ 27.912146] agpgart: Detected an Intel E7505 Chipset.
[ 27.915269] agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xec000000
[ 27.978992] EDAC MC: Ver: 2.1.0 Apr 10 2008
[ 28.066271] intel_rng: FWH not detected
[ 28.179120] iTCO_vendor_support: vendor-support=0
[ 28.210254] iTCO_wdt: Intel TCO WatchDog Timer Driver v1.02 (26-Jul-2007)
[ 28.210421] iTCO_wdt: failed to reset NO_REBOOT flag, reboot disabled by hardware
[ 28.210430] iTCO_wdt: No card detected
[ 28.231244] input: Power Button (FF) as /devices/virtual/input/input4
[ 28.246187] ACPI: Power Button (FF) [PWRF]
[ 28.246306] input: Power Button (CM) as /devices/virtual/input/input5
[ 28.278186] ACPI: Power Button (CM) [VBTN]
[ 28.962257] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
[ 29.727255] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input6
[ 29.872958] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 29.873221] NVRM: loading NVIDIA Linux x86 Kernel Module 96.43.05 Tue Jan 22 19:36:58 PST 2008
[ 29.879961] usbcore: registered new interface driver libusual
[ 30.021816] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
[ 30.065883] scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[ 30.093769] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[ 30.093778] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[ 30.093785] usb-storage: device found at 2
[ 30.093787] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[ 30.170122] dcdbas dcdbas: Dell Systems Management Base Driver (version 5.6.0-3.2)
[ 30.181602] parport_pc 00:09: reported by Plug and Play ACPI
[ 30.181660] parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778), irq 7, using FIFO [PCSPP,TRISTATE,COMPAT,ECP]
[ 30.334065] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.5[B] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 21
[ 30.334090] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.5 to 64
[ 30.752638] intel8x0_measure_ac97_clock: measured 55056 usecs
[ 30.752642] intel8x0: clocking to 48000
[ 32.323183] lp0: using parport0 (interrupt-driven).
[ 32.391892] Adding 971924k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:971924k
[ 32.951446] EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal
[ 33.703980] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[ 33.712011] EXT3 FS on sdb1, internal journal
[ 33.712019] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
[ 34.251250] ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
[ 34.680118] No dock devices found.
[ 35.093849] usb-storage: device scan complete
[ 35.106515] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic USB SD Reader 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 35.108943] scsi 2:0:0:1: Direct-Access Generic USB CF Reader 1.01 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 35.111865] scsi 2:0:0:2: Direct-Access Generic USB SM Reader 1.02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 35.122953] scsi 2:0:0:3: Direct-Access Generic USB MS Reader 1.03 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 35.125862] scsi 2:0:0:4: Direct-Access Generic USB FM Reader 1.04 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 35.169902] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 35.169959] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[ 35.213874] sd 2:0:0:1: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 35.213935] sd 2:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
[ 35.257949] sd 2:0:0:2: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 35.258009] sd 2:0:0:2: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0
[ 35.301839] sd 2:0:0:3: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 35.301898] sd 2:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg7 type 0
[ 35.441731] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Spinning up disk...<6>apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16ac)
[ 36.412128] apm: disabled - APM is not SMP safe.
[ 36.455218] .<6>ppdev: user-space parallel port driver
[ 36.642403] audit(1211565129.410:2): type=1503 operation="inode_permission" requested_mask="a::" denied_mask="a::" name="/dev/tty" pid=5100 profile="/usr/sbin/cupsd" namespace="default"
[ 37.586946] .<6>e1000: eth0: e1000_watchdog: NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX
[ 37.970298] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.11
[ 37.971503] NET: Registered protocol family 31
[ 37.971509] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[ 37.971515] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[ 37.999229] Bluetooth: L2CAP ver 2.9
[ 37.999235] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[ 38.059942] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[ 38.060692] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[ 38.060697] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.8
[ 38.722686] ..<6>agpgart: Found an AGP 3.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
[ 40.073042] agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 8x mode
[ 40.073953] agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 8x mode
[ 40.999723] .<6>NET: Registered protocol family 17
[ 42.197842] ...<6>NET: Registered protocol family 10
[ 44.680233] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
[ 45.609038] .........<7>eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[ 55.809550] .......................................................................not responding...
[ 135.558379] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] READ CAPACITY failed
[ 135.558386] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
[ 135.558391] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Sense Key : Not Ready [current]
[ 135.558396] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] <> ASC=0xff ASCQ=0xffASC=0xff <> ASCQ=0xff
[ 135.604365] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
[ 135.604374] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 135.604458] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 135.604525] sd 2:0:0:4: Attached scsi generic sg8 type 0
[ 135.804295] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Spinning up disk............................................................................................not responding...
[ 236.965572] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] READ CAPACITY failed
[ 236.965580] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
[ 236.965585] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Sense Key : Not Ready [current]
[ 236.965592] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] <> ASC=0xff ASCQ=0xffASC=0xff <> ASCQ=0xff
[ 237.012557] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
[ 237.012568] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 237.149499] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Spinning up disk............................................................................................not responding...
[ 338.325787] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] READ CAPACITY failed
[ 338.325795] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
[ 338.325804] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Sense Key : Not Ready [current]
[ 338.325812] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] <> ASC=0xff ASCQ=0xffASC=0xff <> ASCQ=0xff
[ 338.372775] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
[ 338.372784] sd 2:0:0:4: [sdg] Assuming drive cache: write through