Work work work

Work has been interesting since I got back. I was quite alarmed to see that my inbox had 278 mails but about 70 of them were automated reports from the backup system and there wasn't anything catastrophic in the rest of them. It's been a slightly odd week as I'm off to London next week for a training course so it's been quite fiddly trying to get the important stuff done.

We've got BlackBerry devices now. They aren't bad to be fair but they have some strange quirks. For example it can open a PDF from an e-mail but not from the memory card, and the interface as a whole is quite strange and takes some getting used to.

Been playing both Lost and Damned on the 360 and Chinatown Wars on the DS, both good fun. I'm still finding the GTAIV mode of play a bit more challenging after so long on Saints Row 2 but I'm getting there.

Huge update

The USA trip went pretty well. Everything worked out OK, such as the car and the hotels. The car itself was a Chrysler Town & Country, a big van type thing which had three rows of seats. We knew it was going to be big but it was still a bit of a shock. It was OK to drive, although it did feel quite different from a car.

The first part of the trip was spent with Steve and Kara in Manchester CT, which was great as always. The time was spent mainly chilling and exploring Manchester and some of the further reaches of Connecticut. It was good to see more of the town where they live and we had probably one of the best burgers on the whole trip in a place called Catsup & Mustard. Even better, they do Ranch flavoured fries, which were really delicious. Another highlight was taking a trip to the Groton submarine base and touring the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine which is now parked up there.

On the Saturday (4th), we started out on Stage 2 of the trip, which was Washingon DC. This was the longest drive of the whole trip. We travelled in convoy with Steve and Kara with a break at Pottsville in Pennsylvania to have a look at the Yeungling brewery, which was pretty cool. The journey itself was quite unremarkable until we encountered the horror that is the Beltway. Things weren't too bad until some git pulled out of the slip road onto the carriageway. Everyone had to slam on, and an SUV behind us lost control and slammed into the central reservation. This flipped it onto its roof, and then it was hit by another car that rolled it back onto its wheels. This happened probably 10-15 feet behind us, and was distinctly scary. We were all a bit shaken up and very glad to make it to the hotel 20 minutes later. The Sunday was spent having a look around the Mall, the Washington Monument and the various memorials and things in that area. It was incredibly sunny and hot that day so it was a bit uncomfortable. Monday was spent looking at the Smithsonian but annoyingly it was very busy, which made the Air and Space Museum in particular very frustrating.

On Tuesday (the 7th) we bade farewell to Steve and Kara before heading off to New York, Stage 3 of the trip. This was a nice quiet journey with only a slight detour to Redbank, New Jersey, which is the home of Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash. It is pretty much a glorified comic book store but it was worth seeing. The only bit of the journey which caused us worry was getting to the hotel, which is right next to the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. We had such worries about getting sucked into it and having to drive around Manhattan that we took a very circuitous route to the hotel. We quickly made our way to the Path trains and spent the evening in Manhattan, hunting for the Times Square Brewery, which sadly had closed down.

Last time we came to New York, we spent 10 days in Manhattan which was a bit of a mistake as we got burnt out fairly quickly. This time though, four days was plenty. The first day was just spend wandering around Manhattan. We got out of the Path at the Christopher Street station and took a walk through Greenwich Village and up through Manhattan, finally ending up at the United Nations. It was great to just stroll along and see what was there without any particular rush. We found the Strand Bookstore with 18 miles of books, which isn't a lie or exaggeration. After that we got the subway to the south end again and ended up at Ground Zero, still a sobering sight.

The second day was spent in Brooklyn, which was pretty interesting as it has quite a varied atmosphere. Some parts are really quiet and nice, while other bits were like Manhattan but smaller. After lunch in Prospect Park, we headed to Coney Island. Sadly this was a bad mistake - it's like Rhyl, but worse. Even more unlucky, I had to use the toilet. The ones in the subway station were unbelievable and the ones out on the promenade weren't much better. We spent hardly any time there but the subway trip was quite interesting as it is elevated over most of Brooklyn, and there was a lot to see. The day ended with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, which was great. Rob insisted that this had to be done in the dark, so we waited for it to become dark in the Henry St. Ale House, which had good drinks, and eventually, good food. The walk across the bridge was really cool, although slightly alarming when you realise you're walking directly above the road. Everyone did their own thing for the last day, so I just wandered around Manhattan, seeing various things.

That Saturday it was the final drive from New York back to Boston, Stage 4 of the trip. This was probably one of the worst trips in the car. It was raining hard nearly all the way, with terrible visibility on the highway. This wasn't helped by the Satnav which picked a completely stupid route which included the northern tip of Manhattan. After the highways and things, it also took us the wrong way to the Avis place, which was annoying. We managed to get the car back with 7 minutes to spare, so that was lucky. The hotel turned out to be really good and we were all on the 10th floor. The weather was still horrible that evening so we ate quite near to the hotel. Sunday was spent with Steve and Kara and Bridie, walking the Freedom Trail around the city, taking in various landmarks. Despite it being clear and sunny, it was bitterly cold. On the Monday we took in one of the famous Duck Tours, which was really interesting and entertaining. The driver was an ex-magician and the way he did it could have been hideously embarrassing but somehow it worked. After that we went up the Prudential Tower and gazed down on the city from the 50th floor, and went to the fire station so Em could buy a sweatshirt. After a meal in a place recommended by the Duck driver, I headed back to the hotel for an early night. The next day everyone did their own thing, while the last day was spent visiting the USS Constition before the flight home.

The trip back was uneventful except for Rob's entertainment screen getting stuck on an image of a dying woman 40 minutes before landing in Heathrow, which was slightly alarming.

Since getting back it's been a case of trying to adapt back to UK time and not doing much at all really. On Friday it was the annual badminton club bash which is always entertaining. Yesterday I went to see my Dad and today it was a trip to the big car boot sale with Will and Kat. It was the usual crap and only Kat ended up buying anything, a couple of vinyl records and a giant sketchbook. The weather was great today so I took the dog for a walk and attacked some of the overgrowth on the track.

Back to work tomorrow, should be interesting.

I also did end up with a DSi after half-heartedly thinking about picking one up. After the incident on the Beltway which included severely heavy braking, we found a DS Lite in the car which must have been left in there. I had a cunning plan to trade it in for a DSi until I found out that DSi specific stuff is region locked. So I bought one in the tax-free PC World in Heathrow. I wasn't planning to, but they had one out on display and the feel of the buttons did it. Nintendo finally fixed the mushy and useless D-pad of the Lite and made it more like the old Phat DS. So far it's interesting. The camera and sound features are quite good fun and games look nice on the (slightly) larger screens.

STUPID

Why, why, WHY is the Xbox 360 music player so crippled?! You can't skip back and forth within a track, which is completely stupid. How utterly pointless.

Back with a vengeance

So, after a few months away, I'm back in Liberty City with a vengeance. Both in GTA IV: The Lost and Damned, and now in Chinatown Wars on the DS. The Lost and Damned feels better than the main GTAIV storyline, which I still can't be arsed with, and Chinatown Wars has the same map but looks and feels like a cross between GTA 2 and III.

I think Saints Row and GTA can co-exist quite happily. They used some idea from Saints Row in GTAIV and Saints Row 2 used some ideas from GTAIV, so if the franchises keep going and feeding from each other, both can benefit. GTA for the more serious stuff and Saints Row for the ludicrous over the top action.

With all the shovelware crap on the DS, it's easy to forget that it's a capable little system. Probably the most impressive game I saw on it before I sold my DS Lite was Metroid Prime Hunters. But GTA comes quite close. It has it's own look and feel, and somehow feels more 'right' than the PSP games. One thing that has become clear is that the Phat DS is far superior to the Lite. It's bigger, easier to hold, and it has a far superior D-pad that actually lets you hit diagnonals. I just wish there was some way to retrofit a Phat DS with Lite screens.

I actually tried to cook something this evening, a sort of pasta bake thing that came out unexpectedly well. It had a cheese topping made from the wonderful caramelised onion cheddar that Morrisons is selling at the moment.

Many things

Friday evening was spent at an Indian with a load of people from work for a couple of people's birthdays. It was a good evening with 14 of us there and the meal was pretty good. Someone along the line though the bill got cocked up which caused a certain amount of hassle.

Saturday consisted of watching some rugby round at Andy's and having a go on the new GTA:Chinatown Wars on the DS. It's actually really quite good. I've ordered my own copy and now I just need a DS to play it on. I'm certain I want one of the old Phat ones as the Lite cramps my hand and I can't afford the DSi. After that it was time to meet up with some old work colleagues from my last place for an evening of food and Wii. As always we ended up with far too much food and things. I always enjoy the Wii in this kind of situation as this is where it works but it sucks for ordinary gaming sessions.

Today was spent cleaning out my Mum's car (the first time she's ever asked me to do anything for Mother's day) which was quite a lot of work. I jetwashed the outside in town, got some special gunk to clean the brake dust from the alloys and hoovered the inside to clean out all the dog hair, mud, soil and leaves that seemed to have accumulated. It looks quite nice now. This was followed by an epic session of listening to the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show. I haven't heard it for years and when I last heard it, it was taped off the radio. Listening to it in proper stereo on a decent sound system is really cool. Also, we never had the eighth episode on tape so it was the first time I heard that one.

The phone development is an E90. I read a lot of good stuff so I picked one up. It's more of a business phone than the N93 so it's quite different, and lacks the games and multimedia features. But it has basically the same features as the N93 with the bonus of the internal screen and keyboard, and GPS. So far it's been pretty good. Mine is brown, or Mocha, as Nokia calls it. It actually looks quite nice though.



This is the E90 with the original 9000 Communicator released way back in 1996, which is an absolute monster. This one does actually work but isn't charged at the moment.

I hate the way everything hassles you to update in Windows. You get all these wretched popups all the damn time at the bottom right.

So very tired...

Work has been rather busy this week and I think its that making me so tired. That and waking up too early and those annoying little fears and worries that gibber at you in the night and seem so much worse when you're lying awake in the dark. The other night I had to get up and reassure myself that my passport was still safe and where I had last left it.

Not much else to report really. It's been an odd couple weeks for some reason.

There has been a development on the phone front. Details forthcoming...

Urm

It's huge, red, triangular and has three strings. There's nothing more to say.

Much too nice to be in an office

It's been a fairly strange week. It's been annoying trying to keep the computer room from melting down each day after the air conditioning failed, this time in a way that meant it's been a week now. Bah. Other than that it's been fairly average other than the stunning weather taunting us from outside the office. At least it meant the evening dog walks were very nice.

In other news it was payday today, the last one before the (hopefully) epic trip to the USA that I'll be embarking upon with Andy, Rob and Em in April. Shame the exchange rate is so poor at the moment - when I last went it was about 1.92. Oh well.

The Lost and Damned is interesting. It feels new because it starts off in the 3rd island in the main GTA IV storyline, which I never made it to. I did a mission last night which had a very satisfying gunfight. It was difficult to adjust from the Saints Row 2 method of simply charging in, wildly spraying bullets from the infinite ammo rifle, but once I got used to the cover system again, it was good fun. Especially after Will gave me hints on how to get headshots easily.

IBM is apparently in negotiation to buy Sun Microsystems, could be an interesting turn of events if that happened.

Realism...fun?

Well, having just played the Lost and Damned for a little while and dying repeatedly, I completely forgot about the difference in Saints Row and GTAIV. You sort of get used to being some ubermensch who is able to take multiple bullet and stab wounds, regenerate his health and survive any fall, sprint for miles without stopping and teleport out of water. I can see that it's going to take some adjustment to the GTAIV mindset again.

On the plus side it looks good and the bikes work well, as promised.

Edit: I think I've got the hang of it again. Also I just won a race by smashing the the leaders of the race off their bikes with a baseball bat.

A great weekend

Yesterday was pretty good. Didn't do much in the morning, just slobbed around a bit and then it was time to head over to Rob and Em's for the rugby. I managed to provoke a huge tirade of abuse from Rob by waving a piece of cheese with caramelised onion in it, which Morrisons are doing at the moment. It's really, really nice. I also had carrot sticks and a tub of humous with caramelised onion and roast garlic. Although Rob wasn't able to help, there were plenty of volunteers to help and the cheese disappeared alarmingly rapidly.

The rugby itself wasn't particularly inspiring. The Wales game provoked many groans of dismay and the one after was mostly ignored. This was followed by a rather amazing batch of chilli and home made rolls and then lots of conversation and hilarity and all sorts of stuff.

Today has been busy in a good way. Took the car to town to wash it, got some better headlight bulbs for it, and worked out how to route the cable to hook the iPod shuffle up and while I was in town, threw away some crap I don't need. After that, walked the dog, and watched the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, which isn't great but does have some good bits. This evening downloaded the Lost and Damned expansion for GTA IV after having a go on Duke Nukem 3D on the 360, which seems a lot harder than I remember.

Crushed in defeat

It really has been one of those weeks. I wasn't really looking forward to badminton, but I went anyway. It was a good evening although I ended up playing with the same guy almost all evening. Unfortunately both of us were having an off night and weren't playing well at all. At least it was good exercise and we found our lack of ability more entertaining than anything else.

Beat It, the metal version. I rather like this, but then again you could probably make a metal version of Barbie Girl and I'd like it. Well, maybe not.

Second Life is about to have a major crackdown on adult content, moving it to a special zone and making people pay to access it. This will undoubtedly be the thing that kills it as that's pretty much all it's good for, at least if your thing is watching avatars have badly animated glitchy sex with organs that usually...urm...don't 'mesh' very well.

Tired. But in a good way.

The fun fun things

A week of meh.

If you ever watched Star Trek TNG, take a look at these. They are pretty funny and a few are quite, quite brilliant.

Shuffle jumps the shark

Apple has finally broken the iPod Shuffle, irretrievably. They've removed all the buttons and moved them onto the headphone cable and then put in a speech synthesiser that tells you what is playing. The epic fail part is that the remote is built into the cable so you can't use it with anything else.

Frustration and boredom

It was another stressful day in work. It just was one of those.

Came home and had a nice quiet geeky evening not doing much. Fiddled around with an old laptop that has a bootable CD of a prototype Linux distribution that was designed to be used without a screen. It has built in speech synthesis and is quite interesting.

In a bit of a weird place at the moment, for reasons I won't go into. Not sure what to do.

Bah.

One of THOSE Mondays

Work was rather stressful and annoying, unusually so for a Monday. This wasn't helped by one of the AIX boxes running out of space in /tmp, bringing everything to a grinding halt. The main Unix guy wasn't in so I had to sort it out and it was a right pain. Also of all the boxes, this was the most critical. It turned out to be corruption that took seconds to fix, but it was shutting down everything that was running that was a pain.

I came home in that furious rage mood with a hair trigger temper, so I took the dog out for a walk which really calmed me down and by the time I got back, I was cold and wet but reasonably cheerful again.


Found this cute but unwelcome visitor running around the bathtub, so I persuaded him to run into a pint glass so I could take him far away into the field and let him go. They are really quite sweet little things, I just wish they'd stay outside.

Nothing comes close

Took this by accident and it looks quite nice.

The N93 has been the best phone I've had for a long time, and I can't find anything that comes close to replacing it. There's things like the N95 but I don't like sliders. The E90 Communicator is really nice but is big and I don't really need all the stuff it can do. The only non Nokia I might consider is an iPhone, but they are so expensive and locked to O2.

The only thing I've found that could feasibly replace it is the N93i, which is just a slightly shrunken version of the same phone. Sadly, these are still remarkably expensive for some reason. Truth be told, my N93 is still working perfectly, it's just getting more and more worn-in, so I can't really justify replacing it anyway.

A fun weekend

Yesterday was quite a long day but fun. In the morning I went over to my Dad's to see how the new house was shaping up and to see my cousin who had come down. We spent the morning picking up some things from Homebase for the house and picked up some fish and chips for lunch, which was good.

After that I headed over to Rob's and before heading into town with him and Will in search of Futurama. Annoyingly we couldn't get the third of the four movies, only the last one. It was pretty decent to be fair. This was followed by meeting Andy and heading into Rhyl to The Best Curry House in Wales 2009. It's near the sea front in Rhyl and couldn't be more out of place. It was nice though and the food was good, although it was a little pricey. OK, well, very pricey. We walked out to find wind and horizontal rain, so when we got back to Rob's house, we were all only wet on one side, which was annoying. The drive home was not fun, once past Denbigh, it was very difficult to see anything past the driving rain.

Today has been a stupid mix of wind, snow and sun. I took the dog for a nice run in the field, but didn't trust the weather to go out for the whole walk. Spent some time removing the 16gb SSD from the Eee, which is faulty, and installed Ubuntu on the internal 4gb one, which works fine. It only leaves 1.4gb free though. I thought about using an SD card as the /home partition but it didn't want to do it so I left it like that. At least it works to a degree now. After that, did some more missions on Saints Row and finally got some points to get the full version of Rez HD.

Shattered

It's been one of those weeks. Today wasn't too bad but there were still some moments of stress.

Badminton was OK this evening. Played twice with someone who is exceptionally good and has this mysterious ability to teleport around the court and extend arms like tentacles to reach the most improbable shots. This really highlighted my lack of ability to get around the court and in the process of trying to improve this, my knee started giving some warning twinges. Bah. It would certainly help if I was a stone or two lighter, that's for sure.

Really, really tired now.

Yay food

It's been a busy couple of days in work. Came back from two days off to a lot going on. Today was my Unix day which involved laying a new fibre connection for a new tape drive that's going in soon. All good fun.

It was the annual badminton meal this evening, which was at a different place which hasn't been open that long. I must have driven past it dozens of times but never noticed it. The food was excellent though and reasonably priced.

Before that, did a couple more missions on Saints Row. It's proving harder going than the sequel, although I discovered that there are a lot more character customisation options than it looks like at first, so I was able to make him look a lot more like my character in the second one, which is nice.

Losing weight

One reason to lose weight, when you have a bass strapped on and it sort of rests uncomfortably on top of your stomach so you have to shift it to the side.

Damn it.

The Offspring is one of those bands where you know pretty much what you're getting when you get one of their albums. The new one is OK though.

Holidays = nice

I had yesterday and today off as annual leave. Mainly because last year I pretty much didn't take any holidays at all and I had a lot to use up. It worked out OK though as yesterday my Mum had a a hospital appointment, and today my Dad and his wife moved house.

Yesterday was a fairly uninspiring day, didn't really do all that much, just slobbed around and watched a couple of DVDs. Also did something that I've been meaning to do and watch the bit in the first Star Trek movie where two people die in a transporter accident. I was quite young when I saw that for the first time and it absolutely traumatised me. The distorted and agonised screams emanating from the blurry misshapen form caught in the beam was utterly horrific for some reason. It wasn't as bad this time around, but it still wasn't very nice. I once glanced at that section from the novelisation and that was even worse, going into graphic detail about organs pumping outside the body and things. There have been worse and more graphic accidents since, mind you.

Today was helping out my Dad and his wife move. They had some very efficient removal people so the morning was standing around a lot before loading some stuff into my car and heading over to the new house. It's not as far to drive from home, so that's good. I spent much of the afternoon unpacking the kitchen stuff and attempting to work out just how the 40" plasma connected to all the various boxes. Lunch consisted of sandwiches from Sainsbury's and the evening meal was a quick takeaway from a nearby Pizza Hut. I never realised just how well caramelised onion worked on a pizza before, but it does. Mind you I've had caramelised onion in basically every way possible since I found out it existed a couple of years ago.

Meh

A very unspectacular day.

A long day

Rugby last night was OK. The first place we went to was heaving and smelled of wee so we went to another place which was quite empty. Will and I left early as I was tired and his car was in the way of mine. On the way back we saw the beginnings of a fight at the bottom of town and when I went back that way a few minutes later, two police cars were in attendance and there were at least two people flat out on the ground.

The overtime went OK today as much as reconfiguring dozens of PCs can be. Lunch was good, chips and a battered sausage, slathered in curry sauce. After that, it was over to Andy's to watch some uninspiring rugby and sort out the final gap in the USA holiday in April. The Ireland/England match was stupid, the England players were being cocks and the only entertainment was at the end when Martin Johnson was being interviewed and clearly trying to contain his fury and not punch the interviewer out. We also ate some rather tasty burgers from a local butcher and spent about an hour and a half thinking of alternate things to do in the holiday gap, only to go back the original plan in the end and book that.

All good fun.

It's been a bad week for food and exercise. Need to crack down on it tomorrow and next week. I'm off Monday and Tuesday, which is nice.

Argh

A very busy day. Didn't sleep at all well last night either, so knackered now. I would be looking forward to a nice weekend of relaxation but there's overtime tomorrow. Oh well, hopefully it won't take too long and we always get chips for lunch so that should be fun.

Rugby tonight, should be fun. I don't think I'll be out too late though, so tired and need to be up for the overtime.

Holy crap

Work was OK today but I have a bad feeling about tomorrow.

Picked up the new Prodigy album when I went out for lunch and put it on in the car on the way home. I'd already heard a few of the tracks, but through laptop speakers, and I think 'Omen' is the best thing I'd heard by them in a long time. It's just amazing when it all kicks in at the beginning. There's some other great tracks too.

Badminton was OK this evening, played reasonably well I thought, especially as I've felt really tired all day, well, all week really, and I wasn't sure how well I'd play.

A Saints Row movie will suck, because it'll focus on the whole hip-hop gangsta thing. The second game only really worked for me because having the character played by a sarcastic cockney bastard made the gangsta thing rather more tolerable for some reason.

One of those weeks

It's shaping up to be one of those weeks. Today was particularly annoying with hassle coming from all quarters. It was made worse by not having the car so I had to traipse half a mile across town with a laptop in tow to deliver to an ungrateful user.

I got the car back this evening. It was definitely the crankshaft sensor so they put in a new one and it's running perfectly now. I hadn't realised how rough it was running while the light was on but I suppose that's understandable if it was in limp mode. As to the cost, I don't know as the garage guy didn't have the bill handy so is posting it.

Played around a bit with the RS/6000. I successfully mirrored the hard drives, which is something I remembered doing on the course. This is really why I wanted one because the AIX implementation of LVM is really powerful and flexible, but it's not easy to practice without a machine that doesn't matter if I break it. I'd like to get a couple of tapes for the drive in it so I can back it up before trying stuff that might break the OS, as it took quite some time to install. It's an ancient DDS3 drive and the tapes are about £1 each these days.

Anyway, I'm going to shut it down now and try and relax.

RS/6000

So that RS/6000 I mentioned had a significant price drop, so I ended up with it. It's old, but it does support AIX 5.3, which is what we use in work. Also, unlike most of the other machines I've seen for sale, it isn't a hulking great beast of a server and is about the size of a large tower PC. It has the following specs:

400mhz Power3-II processor
256mb RAM
2x 36gb SCSI hard drives
DDS3 tape drive (12gb per tape)

As you can see it's not the most powerful machine, but it should run AIX nicely enough and certainly will be good enough to play around with LVM and disk management. It has two free RAM slots so allows room for expansion and a third hard drive could be installed. Also it's capable of running AIX in 64-bit mode, which is nice. There is no graphics card though so it has to be accessed via a serial console. Annoyingly RS/232 ports are rapidly disappearing from modern machines so I had to use the Latitude D400 as a console.

The installation of AIX 5.3 went as expected, but when the machine tried to boot from the new install, it hung when it tried to start the kernel. Investigation showed it had a very old firmware version that didn't support AIX 5.3. I found the latest firmware for it, but it required installation from floppy disks. I had to go and dig out a USB floppy drive, and then find a disk, not that easy. Then I found that it wasn't able to update the firmware from the system management so I had to download a diagnostic CD from IBMs website, write that to a CD, boot from that, install the firmware, and then reboot and see if the OS would load. It finally booted and I was able to set the initial system settings, and then finally reboot again. I was slightly worried that I didn't get a login prompt on the serial console but I was able to telnet in over a network connection.

So hurrah, I tamed the beast. I found a quote that probabaly describes this quite well. "Unix IS user friendly. It's just selective who it's friends are."

Stuff

In preparation for the Watchmen movie that is out next month, I thought I'd get a copy of the graphic novel and reread it. The last time I read it was in about 2004. I've read a few chapters so far.

Completed one of the gangs in the first Saints Row yesterday. It was quite decent but seemingly harder than I expected. Also I didn't realise just how much of a bonus unlimited rifle ammo was until now. Unofrtunately there doesn't seem to be any way of getting it in the first game without cheating.

New Prodigy album is out and Will sent me links to some of the new tracks, and from what I've heard so far, it's pretty good.

Chinese Democracy

Well, everyone's heard all the stories, hype and rumours about this Duke Nukem Forever of music. Axle Rose might be a cock of the highest order but after all this time, it would be rude not to listen to it at least once.

If it had been entitled 'Axl Rose and the Amazing Musical Variety Show' it would be more appropriate. It's definitely not Guns N Roses, or at least not if you have fond memories of Appetite for Destruction. It has some interesting tracks and a couple I quite like.

But I'll stick with Velvet Revolver, thanks anyway Axl.

A nice lazy day

The weather today was absolutely fantastic, so I took the dog for a good long walk in the sunshine. Really nice. One of those days where I stopped on the road and marvelled at the scenery. When you live somewhere like this, it's very easy to become used to it and just take it for granted. Due to the car woes, I stayed at home otherwise.

Other than being V shaped, the drunken rugby bass doesn't do anything in particular that my other basses can't do. So I took one of the sets of octave strings from a 12 string bass set (which I got a long time ago when I wanted a 12 string) and put them on it, making it into a piccolo bass, which is tuned exactly the same as the bottom four strings of a guitar. This is quite often regarded as a pointless thing to do but it lets you play it like a bass and get guitar like sounds.

I fired up the first Saints Row and have played it a bit. Probably because I'm so used to the second one, it's far better than I remember. I think it's because I was so used to GTA San Andreas that I never gave it a chance originally. It has more rough edges than the sequel but it's not as bad as expected. The city is also a lot smaller, but I keep driving through areas that I recognise from the second game, and it's interesting to see the original Saints Row area which has been completely redeveloped in the second game, much to your character's dismay. Quite a lt of other things are the same, mainly a number of the cars and some of the character animation. The character creation is much more limited but I managed to make him look a bit like he does in SR2. Not really necessary though as the story dictates that the character has extensive plastic surgery while in a five year coma between the two games. One thing that is difficult to get used to is that your character never speaks in the first game, while he never shuts up in the sequel.

Finally got to listen to the second Velvet Revolver album, which is really good. Also listened to Chinese Democracy, which is...well, it sure as hell isn't Guns N Roses, despite what it says on the cover and whatever Axl might say.

Yay badminton

It was a fairly busy day in work and it was one of those annoying days where I felt tired for most of it. As a result I nearly didn't go to badminton this evening. To be honest, what with one thing and another and bouts of laziness, it's been ages since I went on a Friday so I wasn't sure if there was any point. I'm glad I did go though as it was a really good evening. I played reasonably well but there was one game where I had a complete blast and both myself and my partner played really well, so that was good. After that, it was time to go to the pub which was good fun as always.

Nothing's going on this weekend, which is probably a good thing. It's nice to have two days of nothing to look forward to.

I took the car to a garage at lunchtime where they hooked it up to a PC and read the fault code. Apprently it is the crankshaft sensor. They cleared the fault and said to drive it back to the office and see how it went. For half a mile or so it was fine, just like normal and then it went back into safe mode and the light came back on, so that'll have to be looked at next week. Boo. Oh well.

The drunken rugby bass turned up. It's a cheapo Wesley which was ordered during the first boring match last Saturday. Alcohol and Internet access should not be combined - this is why I own a unicycle. Anyway, it's a white Flying V which is very 80's metal, and given how little it cost, it's actually rather nice. I think my reasoning was that it would be a nice platform to modify but all it really needs is some extra shielding in the cavities. I've always liked the Flying V guitar and you don't see bass versions very often. It's rather strange after a normal bass though, mainly because it's so long.

Dwi'n hoffi Cymraeg

Work was OK today, being my Unix day which is always entertaining and a nice break from the usual stuff that goes on.

The Vectra tried to start this morning but the battery was too low. I had to take my Mum's car to work and then come home at lunch time with jump leads. Once the Vectra was started it ran OK but clearly is stuck in safe mode In theory it's possible to cross two pins in the ECU connector to make it flash an error code but I'll see ifI can get someone to actually use the proper tool. Apparently the most common cause of this is the crankshaft sensor, but who knows. The top end of the engine has always been a little noisy, hope it's not anything to do with that.

It was badminton in the evening, which was good fun and very energetic. There was also the now usual impromptu Welsh lesson, which is surprisingly entertaining and it's quite surprising how much of it I remember from high school lessons. I wish I was more fluent in it.

Orange Light of Death

I was merrily driving home when the engine management light on the dash lit up. It still drove OK and there weren't any other signs of issues, so I carried on. However when I got home I switched the engine off and tried starting it again, and it was very reluctant to restart. Eventually it did and it seemed OK once it was actually running. I suppose I'll have to find someone who can plug it into a computer to find out what the fault is that it has picked up and hope it's not serious. Apparently it's far more common for the various sensors to fail rather than the actual thing they are monitoring, which is a bit silly.

One of those evenings where I wanted to put some music on but couldn't decide what to listen to, so I put iTunes on shuffle. And then The Great Southern Trendkill by Pantera came up - perfect.

Life is fundamentally unfair - there's an RS/6000 on Ebay right now with enough power to run AIX 5.3. It's reasonably affordable, has hard drives (most are removed before sale) and the only thing wrong is a lack of RAM (256mb). And what with holidays coming up, car failures and things, I can't really think about getting it. Annoying.

Cuba has banned Windows and is creating a custom Linux based OS for everyone to use instead. Seems a bit OTT.

Long time no post

The last two work days of last week were much the same as the beginning of the week, unnecessarily stressful, due to various reasons. I went to Rob and Em's for badminton on Thursday but Em wasn't well, and Rob and I decided we couldn't be arsed. So we ended up looking at laptop options to replace the venerable iMac they've had on loan from me since about 2005 and drinking hot chocolate with Twirls to dip into them.

It was the rugby on Saturday which worked out quite nicely. We ended up on the top floor of a club in Denbigh with the matches on a projector. Somehow we ended up with that top floor all to ourselves for the whole thing, which was nice. After that it was out around more pubs, stopping off to get chips on the way.

Sunday was spent doing nothing much due to tiredness, other than doing some more crap in SR2 and watching a couple of DVDs.

The Lost and Damned came out today, the DLC for GTAIV. I've heard encouraging things from Will about it so I might just pick it up, especially as I've got SR2 up to 97% complete and little motivation to get the last 3% as it's mainly the last levels of some activities which are annoyingly hard.

I did put GTAIV on today anyway to see how it felt and it was a distinct shock after the craziness of SR2, primarily the more realistic handling of the cars. The first car I got into was a typical 70's American land yacht, which was almost impossible to control at any kind of speed. Fun though, especially as it drifted sideways yet again onto a pavement, sending hapless crowds of people flying. It just feels so dull after SR2 though, you miss the bizarre little touches like when I left my character standing around in a nightclub and he strolled over to the dancefloor and started dancing. You'd never catch Nico doing something random like that. Also I found Nico infuriatingly slow in his movements, even running.

Found a great invention in Morrisons. USB AA batteries. You pop the end off and put them into USB sockets to charge. Once full, you put the end back on and use them as a normal AA battery. What a great idea.

Not much else to report really. Payday tomorrow, woo.

Touchy feely

Work was better today. A couple of meetings in the morning and Unix in the afternoon. This just reminded me of why I need an AIX machine to play with. There's a load of things which I haven't had a chance to practice and an actual physical machine is really the best way of doing it.

Saw a 3G iPhone in person which was nice. They are very nice devices, it must be said. If they were available on other networks than O2 I'd probably own one. The iFart application is just as puerile and hilarious as I expected. There is also a BlackBerry Storm in for evaluation, not impressed. The way the screen responds with an actual click is quite interesting but the software is pants. Sluggish, unresponsive and clunky.

Took the dog for a walk and went the full circuit for the first time this year. The light has got better so while it was pretty dark towards the end, it wasn't too bad. The roads are annoyingly wet from melting snow though.

Downloaded a few things onto the 360, a Watchmen trailer, and a couple of game demos. Nothing particularly interesting. The Lego Batman demo was fun for about two minutes until I realised it was more of the same. I replayed the first level of Rez HD, which looks absolutely awesome on the new screen. It's not really the kind of game you'd expect HD to make a difference but somehow seeing all the lines rendered so sharply makes it much easier to see what's going on. I've never yet bought any Microsoft points but I might just do it to get the full version.

Argh, work

It's bad enough going back to work after a week's holiday anyway, but when there's office moves going on, it's a recipe for a whole load of stress. Things could have gone better, but today was very annoying. I was finishing off the phones and merrily ripped out one of the lines and rewired it, only to find it was the wrong line. Oh well. It didn't take long to sort but was frustrating.

Other than that it's been a fairly ordinary couple of days.

They won!

Well, after the retro madness of the morning, it was off to Rob and Em's, picking up Andy and Will on the way to watch the Wales/Scotland rugby game. It was a good match with Wales playing really well until it all suddenly went to pot in the last 20 minutes. They still won though. After that it was a good few hours of conversation, YouTube videos and some rather nice chilli made by Rob.

Before that I downloaded the ST version of Captain Blood as it's supposed to be the best one. It's a really good game, and the visual style in it is absolutely amazing. It also has the best sounds apparently, which are important when you are communicating with the aliens. I remember seeing screenshots of the CPC version and that itself looked pretty decent, other than the resolution being rather low. A friend of mine actually had it on the Spectrum, but that didn't look quite as good.

For some reason I'm feeling astonishingly tired, and depressingly today feels like Saturday.

Amstrad CPC

In a fit of retro madness I downloaded an Amstrad CPC emulator and some games. Playing them on the keyboard was a bit crap though so I hooked up the 360 controller. It actually works pretty well and the analogue stick works quite well when mapped to the joystick input.

Currently playing Captain Blood, which was an amazing game that I never actually got hold of at the time, so I thought I'd try it out.

Video game addiction

Video game addiction is an interesting thing. I've had it a few times where I've played a game far too much. Most of the GTA series (but not IV) did this, BioShock, Fable II and most recently Saint's Row 2. It's quite weird when you realise just how much time you are spending on it. But at least these games come to an end. As much as I've enjoyed Saints Row 2 there isn't much more I can do in it except finish off the activies and finding the tags and CDs dotted about. I thought about replaying it with a new character, but I found that all the cutscenes and missions seem faintly ridiculous if I change the character at all. The other voices in particular just don't seem right.

Hilariously when I was experimenting with alcohol in the game, I found the character drunkenly says things like 'I really hate this fucking town'. 'I only hurt people because I'm crying inside' and 'Oh Christ I want to give up', bringing to mind a gang leader who secretly wants to dump the whole thing and move to the countryside.

Anyway, online games such as WoW don't come to an end, they keep changing and updating, keeping you coming back for more. I can't really speak from experience with this but this might be why they can be more addictive. The closest I've come to this is playing Second Life. I was worried that I might get too involved in it. Fortunately, it's such total shit that it didn't happen.

Shopping, rugby and steam engines

Supplies were low so I had to go and get the car from the bottom of the track and get some supplies. Morrisons was annoyingly busy but it didn't take too long. After that I hung out at Andy's with the krew for some rugby. While watching it we tried out the new flavours that Walkers crisps are trialing. The results were as follows:

Chocolate and Chilli: Nice but flavour too weak.
Builder's breakfast: Quite tasty with bacon and egg easily distinguishable.
Cajun Squirrel: Interesting but eew after a couple.
Crispy Duck and Hoi Sin sauce: Pretty nice, but not great.
Fish and Chips: Not too bad but a bit fishy for my taste.
Onion Bhaji: Easily the nicest, agreed by all.

I got home OK but the last bit of the track needed about five goes to get the car up to the top. After that, spent some time recovering the data from Sian's laptop hard drive after deciding the motherboard is toast, and then resuming my experiments with USB RAID under FreeNAS.

The new Tornado steam engine has made it's first long distance trip with actual passengers. The shot at the end where it pulls up next to a modern train is awesome.

The curious case of hailbound

Didn't do too much today. Faffed around a bit in Saints Row 2, doing some of the activies that I hadn't done and replayed a couple of missions.

After that, met up with a couple of people from work to go and see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The journey didn't start out well. As I approached Denbigh, I noticed some hail falling, and by the time I got to the town, the roads were thick with it. I had to go to a cash machine and the road was blocked by idiots so I had to go to another one. After that though, the journey was uneventful. After going to Pizza Hut (a large cheesy bites BBQ deluxe is to die for), we watched the film.

It was long. Very long, but unusually, while you noticed it was long, you didn't really mind. It was a very odd film though. Also, with all the stupid hype about Brangelina, it's easy to forget that Brad Pitt can actually act when he puts his mind to it.

When I came home, the hail hadn't melted, and the roads gradually became more and more treacherous. I had a go at the track but couldn't get anywhere so I had to abandon the car right at the bottom and walk up. Oddly enough, it was a very pleasant experience in the cool air and bright moonlight. Having just typed that, it's started hailing again, so that was lucky.

Snowbound

It was snowing all the time at my Dads' and when I drove home, the roads were pretty slushy. The track was pretty bad at the bottom, then it was OK and then the top bit was too much. The Vectra battled valiantly up the track with the traction control light blinking all the way, but finally the snow got the better of it. Still, it was only a short walk from where I had to leave it.

That was the 1000th photo I've taken with the N93.

The Fart Machine is complete

The string tree and the pickup cover on the Fart Machine are now in place, effectively making it complete, assuming that the wiring hasn't come undone during the work. Just need to sort the finish out on the back, but that isn't too urgent.

The Fart Machine strikes

Went out to Will's today. The track was still quite snowy so the car basically tobogganed all the way down. After that, the roads were OK.

The modified bass proved to sound quite nice when hooked up to Will's system, which was definitely good. The new pickup is only really good for big fat low frequencies by itself, which is why they're generally called mudbuckers. We ended up making a track which is hard to describe but starts off with a bass duet, a weird bit in the middle and a death metal rampage at the end. Good fun.

I wasn't expecting to make it up the track on the way home, but much to my surprise, I got up fine. There was a nasty bit at the bottom, which I got past by flooring it around the corner, startling some people with dogs who thought I was revving at them. Once again the traction control proved it's worth.

Going to my Dad's tomorrow, we're going to attach the new pickup cover to the bass, and it could also do with a string tree on the headstock if I can find a spare one. I'm trying to think of a way of removing the damaged finish on the back of the body. It's this nasty thick lacquer stuff. Ideally, if I could be at all arsed, I'd pull it to bits and strip all the finish off, but I'm not quite in the mood to do that yet. It would be easier to just strip the back, make it smooth again and chuck some lacquer on it.

Installed FreeNAS on a VM and set up some iSCSI targets. These work quite well as remote storage, appearing on the client machine as an actual connected disk. I'm sure it would come in insanely useful for something but I can't think what.

Argh, why did I start

I was slightly at a loss as to what to do this morning, so I decided to have a go at installing another pickup in my main bass. It's a giant chrome humbucker. To make room, a big hole would have to be created in the body. As I don't have a router, or the knowledge to use one, I spent ages making a hole with a drill and chisel. This actually worked, and I was quite pleased until I turned the body over and realised that my energetic pounding (ahem) had created a slight crack between the bits of wood the body was made of and wrecked the finish on the back. Undeterred, I hacked up the pickguard to make room on the front, which also went a bit pear-shaped, and then attempted to wire up the pickup using a spare volume control.

The soldering didn't go too well and it took a while to work out just how to add another volume control and wire it in to the existing controls. After a tantrum, I had to rewire the whole thing, so I did. The new pickup actually worked, and the two originals and the tone control did too, so that was good. Then as I put the pickguard back on, it started buzzing, and I haven't been able to work out why other than it being some sort of grounding issue. So I threw it aside (gently) and decided I'd had enough. Tomorrow I'll have another go at the wiring. It looks like a bit of a clusterfuck at the moment with the finish and the gimped pickguard, but before it started buzzing, it sounded quite good.

Update: I put the strings back on, plugged it in and no buzzing. WHY?! It sounds pretty good. The new pickup is a bit much by itself, basically making it into a fart machine but combined with either of the other pickups, it sounds really good. The last thing left to do is to screw down the pickup cover, but I don't have the right screws at the moment.

It just keeps on giving

Did a few activities and things in Saints Row 2 and managed to complete a perfect base jump, allowing my character to survive any fall. This can be very funny if you lead a team of homies to the top of a building, and jump off. Their loyalty will make them follow your example. Also bought a long macintosh which allows you to flash people, which is really funny. The best part is doing it in your territory so if someone gets offended and attacks you, they are instantly beaten to a pulp by your fellow gang members.

I was driving along and saw this billboard, unexpectedly showing my character as the new owner of the Leather and Lace store. I've since found more showing adverts for the other stores I've bought.


This happened when I was trying out the falling thing. My character got stuck arse first in the ground, but the game seemed to think he was falling; it played the whooshing wind sound, and the character's voice screaming. He stayed in that position for about thirty seconds, until the game finally realised something was wrong and respawned him. It was very funny. To be fair though, I've not seen many glitches like this. A lot of the reports of major glitches and crashes in both games seem to be blamed on the older 360s which can't stream the data off the drive fast enough. I installed it on the hard drive anyway, so maybe that helps.

Also watched the end of the fourth series of Doctor Who. Not quite sure if the series as a whole grabbed me quite as much as the previous ones, but the final three episodes were madness, a complete clusterfuck of insanity.

The End

I completed Saints Row 2 today. I'm not going to say anything about the ending or the missions because I know people may be going to play it, but it's been good fun. Not bad for a game I never expected to take seriously at all, and really only got for a laugh. But it grabbed me in a way that GTAIV never did, and gave me pretty much a solid months worth of good entertainment. There's still plenty of activities and diversions left to finish off, but it's a bit sad to not have any more missions to do. It is nice to have a solid purple map at last though.

The character creation definitely helps draw you in, as you're playing with a character that is completely your own. I also think that Stilwater is a lot better than Liberty City. It's not as detailed but there's a lot more in it to find, and I keep discovering new things. I got a completely random achievement as I was driving along. The Final Countdown started playing on the radio, accompanied by my character singing along, very badly. It was quite funny.

The first game never really appealed, although I do own a copy. Now I'm wondering if I just never gave it a chance. At the time of course, it was up against GTA San Andreas, and seemed like an inferior game. Then came the serious and boring GTAIV and now I'm wondering if I should have a go on it again. Unfortunately when I started playing Saints Row 2 properly, I read up on the plot details for the first game to get an idea of what leads into the sequel. Apparently though they've started work on Saints Row 3 so that's something to look forward to.

Google had a bit of a cockup today, where every single site was listed as malware in searches. I noticed this myself and thought it was a bit strange.

Went round to Rob and Em's with Andy this evening to sort out more details for the America trip. We have now sorted out a hotel in Boston, which is good, but still need to sort out what we're doing in the gap in the middle.

It's cold. I hope it's not going to snow.

Holiday again

I'm off on annual leave next week, again, which is nice. Basically I just had too much holiday left over after hardly using any in 2008, so I took this week off.

I slept terribly last night so work was spent in a tired confused state. I got most of my stuff sorted out before the holiday though so that was good. After that I came home and had a nice quiet Saints Row 2 fest again. Got quite a few missions done and I think I'm getting close to the end.

Badminton and Welsh

An average day in work. There was a rather fraught meeting in the morning though.

After work it was time to head to Rob and Em's for food before going to badminton. It was a very entertaining evening, although Rob and I played dreadfully, we ended up playing with Nan. She's a fluent Welsh speaker who helps Em out with her Welsh, so the matches and conversations in between usually end up turning into impromptu lessons. It's really quite entertaining. I'm always quite surprised at how much I can remember from my Welsh lessons in school. Shame that my GCSE years were gimped by stupid policies as I'm sure I could have done better in both Welsh and German if I'd had the chance.

The Vectra has a quirky fuel gauge. When you fill it up, the needle then drops quite drastically in the first 100 miles, but then the next 200 it doesn't drop as quickly. It keeps making me panic about how much fuel it's using but then it goes on for quite some time.

I'm on holiday next week, something I'd almost forgotten about until yesterday, so it was almost like a nice surprise. Hurrah.

An OS but no computer

I've said before about my attempts to get an IBM RS/6000 or Pseries capable of running AIX 5.3, so I could have something to practice my newly acquired l33t AIX skillz on. Sadly, the machines that have come up have either been too expensive, too large, crap, or very far away. However, I did find a media pack of AIX 5.3 on Ebay, with the latest technology level (Dec 2008), for £25. Given that AIX media is ludicrously difficult to get hold of, I snapped it up. So now I've got the operating system, just no machine to run it on. I wish I did as it's an interesting OS. Unix at heart but with its own twist on things.

Also ended up with a sat-nav. Being left alone in Bangor yesterday with no idea where anything was and a PC World with a sale on led to, well, you know. It's just a basic Tomtom One with UK and Ireland maps, but it works really well.

The eating well thing took a bit of a dive yesterday and today was going well until the late afternoon when myself and a colleague got into a discussion about Indian food. Sadly the idea didn't leave my head and I ended up with a takeaway. I went a bit over the top, not quite an atlas moment (Andy can explain) but it was getting there. Oh well.

Day off

I took the day off work as I had to drop my Mum off to an eye appointment and take her to Bangor to start the new module for her course. Normally she can drive herself but not after the eye drops and things.

Did a mission in Saints Row 2 which was going pretty much as usual until the final cutscene, which was rather awful. It was one of the few moments in the game so far which really freaked me out and for once it wasn't because of something your character does, although he then does have to do something unpleasant. Bleh.

A busy but fun weekend

Yesterday was the wedding of a guy I used to work with at my last place. I went with a bunch of people who I'm still in touch with after we all got made redundant. The venue for the reception had to be changed at the last minute as the original place went bankrupt two weeks ago, and they luckily managed to get into this place.

It was a good day of usual wedding stuff, a reception, speeches, a really decent meal and a whole lot of drinks. Then back to Amy and Huw's in her brother's Discovery so we could all crash out there. After that, up early in the morning for bacon butties and then off to my Dad's to meet up with him and my cousin. All good fun.

Also spent some time watching Doctor Who series 4, which is so far quite decent. I'm not convinced by Catherine Tate yet though.

Played some more Saints Row 2, this time it was a mission which was one of those ones that drove me completely insane, bouncing up and down with rage and hurling obscenities at the screen. Then I realised that instead of making myself and my idiotic homies run past millions of people with guns, it would be far easier just to steal one of the cars the enemies were using and drive past and over them. It worked very well. The AI isn't too bad in the game but your homies still have a worrying tendency to throw themselves in front of enemy fire and get too close to exploding cars. I also found some new shops. One did many piercings, which was fun and then I found a shop that specialised in leather and bondage gear. The comedic possibilities of this are endless.

Eating bad = bad

The day was going OK until someone mentioned the C word. Not that one. So we all ended up getting chips for lunch. It was pretty good too although it ended up causing the usual rather bloated feeling and general atmosphere of guilt all afternoon. After that I really had to take the dog for a walk, which was reaasonably uneventful.

Glad it's the weekend. Going to a wedding tomorrow and then my Dad's on Sunday, so that should be fun.

Eating better = good

I've been eating much better this week. Not quite up to the point of taking in lunch to work but instead finding healthy things. So far it's been various soups from a place in Ruthin, which come with a home made roll. Very nice indeed. Also picked up some fruit to go with it. I've also walked the dog each night except for tonight, when I played badminton. Not sure if it's psychological or not but I already feel better.

Bah computers

Computers can be infuriating sometimes. The 2gb DIMM for the HP turned up today so I popped it in. Had a look in the BIOS and the memory was reported as 512mb, shortly before the display garbled. I checked it was seated properly and tried again with the same result.

I thought it was faulty memory until I realised that the Inspiron 9400 takes the same RAM, so I tested it in that. It worked perfectly. I read up on it and it looks like the HP can be picky about RAM. So I put one of the 9400s 1gb DIMMs back in, leaving the 9400 with 3gb RAM and the HP with 1gb again.

Oh well.

Windows done right?

Windows 7 is proving to be quite interesting. I've got it on a VM and the HP 2133. The HP is a very lowly machine when it comes to CPU power, and the VIA chip is most likely outperformed by the 1.3ghz Pentium M in my four year old Latitude D400.

However, Windows 7 runs pretty well on it. It's the first OS I've installed on the HP so I haven't really got anything to compare it with, but it seems to run about as well as XP would on the hardware. I'm sure upping it to 2gb RAM will help improve performance more. If I get bored enough I might see if I can make it dual boot with Linux too.

Did a mission in Saints Row 2 where your character involuntarily gets trashed on drugs and you have to survive a massive gun battle with your screen all warped and distorted. The cut scenes for this one were really funny too.

Odd to think that Barack Obama is finally the president. I just hope he can sort out the sorry mess that Bush left him.

Also watched a film called Primer which is a total headfuck about time travel. I'm going to have to watch it again because I've got no idea what happened in it.

Things

Work wasn't too bad today after the holiday. I did have an unusually large amount of e-mails after a week off, but nothing too catastrophic.

Decided to order a 2gb DIMM for the HP. It works reasonably well with 1gb but I'm sure that 2gb will help and RAM is so cheap these days it's worth doing. Apparently replacing the hard drive with an SSD can also make it run better and cooler but they are still not that cheap. The rugged aspect of the SSD is also a good point but it does have the motion activated hard drive parking sensor that seems to be quite common these days. I forgot that was there until I picked it up too suddenly and the hard drive activity light went red.

Gang warfare

So after playing Saint's Row 2 for quite some time without doing many missions, I finally got tired of the activities and decided to give the missions a go. From my brief experience with the first game, I wasn't expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. The missions are mainly the usual driving and shooting affairs you'd expect in a game like this but there's quite a few which make you do other things.

The cut-scenes and dialogue are also quite good and build up the plot nicely. Having your character speak in a sarcastic cockney accent also makes it all much more bearable and entertaining than if it was being spoken in the usual gangsta speak. There's also a dreadful fascination with seeing just how horrible the main characters actually are. Unlike Nico from GTAIV, the character you play has no morals, and never agonises over the things he has done.

Back to work tomorrow. Bah. Oh well, it's been a good holiday.

Holidays are coming

Yesterday was a reasonably quiet day other than having a clean up and getting rid of some old crap. In the evening it was off to Mold for a nice Chinese with people from work as someone was leaving. It was a good meal all round as it was the Imperial Chequer, which I've never had a bad meal at.

Today was spent faffing about with computers and another session of Saint's Row 2. It's worked out quite well that I've done loads of the activies than any actual missions as I now have shedloads of respect, a laser sighted rapid fire pistol with infinite ammo, infinite sprint, reduced notoriety from one gang and my health regenerates three times faster than normal. So when I actually start to do the missions, it should be quite helpful.

This evening was spent at Andy's with him, Rob and Em. The idea was that we would get hold of Steve and Kara on Skype and discuss aspects of the trip to the USA in April. However, the only working machine I had with Skype was the HP 2133 with Windows 7, so I was dubious as to whether it would work. So we tested it with Will and his MacBook using full-screen video. It worked really well, so much so it was like Will had been encased in tiny laptop case and was sitting in the room with us, especially when we left the laptop sitting on the sofa as we ate chilli.

The call to Steve and Kara worked perfectly, and we had a good chat about hotels and things. The logistics got a bit complicated at one point and there's some sort of festival going on in DC at the time we're there which means hotel prices go up. However, with Rob's brother Phil giving us expert guidance, we did end up booking a car. We ended up going with Avis and have got a people carrier, which should work out nicely. The cost for that type of vehicle was the same as a Lincoln Town Car, but practicality won out over prestige.

It's always exciting to have booked something concrete for a holiday. It feels more real now, somehow.

A few things

Well, it's been an interesting holiday so far.

Tuesday was spent round at my Dad's as my brother had come over from Berlin. I haven't seen him in a while so that was good. Spent the day catching up and setting up a few things on his nice new Thinkpad laptop. This was complicated slightly by the German version of Windows XP, but we got it sorted out.

Wednesday was spent trying out the monitor I bought for my Xbox 360. It's a Dell S2309W, which is a 23" monitor. The difference is that it has true 16:9 ratio and the full HD resolution of 1920x1080. It was also cheap at £155. The 360 looks pretty decent on it, which is good. I tried out all the games on it to see how they looked and it was fine. DVDs look good on it too as the 360 does a good job of upscaling them.

Today was spent on a photography trip with Will. I picked him up and we headed off to Snowdonia and the surrounding area to see what we could find to take pictures off. We started out at Betws Y Coed before heading off to find suitably nice places, and eventually ended up at Blaenau Ffestiniog. Now, I'd heard all the things people say about this place but I thought they might be exaggerated. Oh no, it's awful. The town might be OK if it wasn't surrounded by bleak oppressive hills, and the huge piles of mining waste. We had a look at the station which was quite interesting with the narrow gauge tracks alongside the main line.

After that we drove around and found a nice place with a river. It looked really nice but there was something in it that led to some rather unpleasant looking foam build up. Very odd. After that we headed back to Betws for a hot chocolate and then I dropped Will off before heading to my sister's place. I spent the evening there catching up with her and family before heading back.

I have to admit that I've been looking for another tiny laptop. The Eee is OK but I've never got on with the keyboard and recently the Ubuntu install has been spewing out I/O errors when it tries to access the SSD. Not sure if it's software or hardware. I've been meaning to try reinstalling the original Xandros OS and see if that helps. Also I think the battery may be dead.

So I've ended up with a HP Mini Note 2133 which has just been replaced with the Atom based 2140, so that they are blowing out the 2133 cheap. These are a business orientated laptop that is only a bit bigger than the Eee but has a very large keyboard and a higher resolution screen (1280x768).

It arrived today. So far it's very nice. The CPU is a 1.2ghz Via C7-M which despite being having a higher clock speed than the Eee 900mhz Celeron , offers somewhat lesser performance. Reports vary on it though. Physically though it's a world away from the Eee. The case is aluminium and feels very solid, and the screen and keyboard are amazing. Unlike the Eee, this has a standard 2.5" hard drive with 120gb space, but it could be swapped out with a SATA SSD. The default operating system is Novell SuSE Linux. I've never got on with it to be honest and I'll probably replace it with Ubuntu, or perhaps XP. Reports are that the Windows 7 beta works well on this machine too so that might be an intriguing possibility.

Busy weekend

This was the weekend of Jane and Wes's wedding, so it's been a busy but fun weekend.

Friday consisted of travelling down to Maidstone in Kent through London with Andy, Rob, Em and Rob's Mum. Things looked like they were going wrong when we got to Crewe and our train was cancelled. After a couple of minutes of confusion, we found ourselves on a different train that went to London but stopped a lot more than the one we should have travelled on. This slight problem was offset by the fact the train was brand new, quiet, comfortable and almost completely empty, so we had loads of space to lie around. After making our way through the Underground to the Maidstone train, we arrived at the hotel at about the same time as Ed, Will and Kat who had driven down. While the familes of the bride and groom had a meal, we set off to a place called the White Rabbit which was recommended for food. It was decent too.

The hotel was really pretty nice, even if as Kat said, it started out looking palacial, but as you went further in, it became more and more like a Travelodge. However, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and the rooms were fine.

Saturday morning consisted of a stroll in the frozen fields near the hotel, before heading into town in search of lunch and alcohol, to sustain us before the wedding lunch. After that it was time to get into decent clothes and attend the wedding. The ceremony itself was reasonably straightforward. I always think it works better when it's not in a church as it's more about the couple and the commitment they are making instead of the guff about it being God's special thing.

The meal was held shortly afterward which was excellent. Everyone was on film themed tables and it just all worked out really well. The food was very tasty and the speeches proceeded with the usual mix of hilarity and seriousness. After that was the evening disco which was the usual arrangement, with the added bonus of a dancing Stormtrooper. The day was basically spot on from beginning to end and everyone had a great time, especially the bride and groom.

This place had a rather early checkout time of 10:00am so after breakfast we got a train to London and headed to the Travelodge there, parting ways with Rob and his Mum on the Underground at King's Cross. We had to pay £10 to check in early to leave our bags in one of the rooms, but it was worth it to be able to get back out into the city without them. The evening then consisted of a wander round the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, a big meal at Belgos (with plenty of schnapps) and then another wander round Regent Street and Soho. While everything was closed, it was nice to see the streets without the usual hordes of people. We had intended to go on the Eye but it was closed for maintenance. Bah. That's about the fourth time I've been to London and not gone on it.

We spent today having a look at the Apple and Nokia stores, followed by a tour of Hamley's. The last time I went in there was when I was about 10, and it's not really changed. After that we had a look at St Paul's Cathedral, which I have to admit was very impressive. We walked up to the top which was a bit of a workout, and had a look from the gallery at the bottom of the dome. It was rather wet and cold though so we didn't stay up there long. This was followed by another wander across the Millenium Bridge to a tube station and back up to Euston to get the train home.

So I'm now exceptionally tired after all that walking and travelling, but at least the train journey was quick. There was a slight delay due to a signal failure but it only added 15 minutes to the journey.

The holiday begins

Work was fine today. I got rid of all my helpdesk calls and critical jobs so I could start my holiday with a clear conscience.

The evening was spent packing for the trip to Kent tomorrow for Jane and Wes's wedding, before another SR2 session with Will. This time we experimented with pimping cars, before going on the rampage in a reinforced armoured car painted pink with gigantic alloy wheels and nitrous. It was rather fun. Then some hilarious drive by shootings on tiny motorbikes and a fist fight on the roof of the tallest building which ended when I punched Will so hard that he flew off the side to what should have been his certain death except he landed in an ornamental poot a foot deep.

Smelly me

Well the water supply finally froze up last night so I wasn't able to have a shower this morning. To flush the toilet I had to go out with a bucket and find some water in a spring which amazingly hadn't frozen over.

Mad day in work. As I'm off this Friday and next week I was trying to sort out my jobs and things but the helpdesk went crazy with calls, so I was hurtling around like a mad thing. Good thing the day was quite mild so the car parks and things were better.

Saint's Row 2 is still taking up a lot of my gaming time. I've done a couple of the missions but still mostly fooling around with the activities. The insurance fraud one is good fun and when complete, gives you infinite sprint which is very handy. One thing I noticed in the missions I did is that the character you play is a complete sociopath. He/she/it (all are possible in the character creator) shows no remorse whatsoever for all the violence and killing that takes place. Even CJ out of San Andreas had some qualms about it, and Nico out of GTAIV was a big wuss at heart. But in a way that's part of the completely over the top nature of the game.

I have found however the fun of mutating your character into a hideous alien type creature and replaying the cut-scenes. Especially the one where a woman says 'You look great. Did you do something with your hair?' to the bug-eyed jowly obese monstrosity of indeterminate gender sitting on her couch.

Ice cold

Yesterday and today have been rather cold so there's been sheets of ice all over the place. It's made getting to work tricky and the car parks in the various offices have been lethal. Very annoying. I've had two close shaves, one where a woman in a Ka slid out of a junction in front of me and nearly sliding into a gate when leaving a site.

This evening was spent putting some new flatwound strings on the modified bass. They are a really light gauge, so it's really easy to play and sounds good as well. After that it was a Saint's Row 2 marathon with Will. We found that low gravity, super explosions and satchel charges could be a intriguing combination, while playing with miniguns, flamethrowers, a pimp cane shotgun and all the other fun weapons that GTAIV didn't have.

I actually did a couple of missions in the game, which are quite fun. The combat system actually works really well and is quite forgiving.

Various things

One of the things I've decided to to this year is to get back into the reasonable diet and exercise thing I had going back in 2007. I'm not calling it a new year resolution as that would inevitably lead to failure. It was going OK until I went to my Dad's today and had fish and chips for lunch, but I went for a walk with the dog when I got home. I'd forgotten how nice it was to go out in the bracing cold and come back to a nice warm house.


Spent some time with my Dad working on my latest bass modification. This time it was installing a new neck on my original Squier bass. It had a fretless neck from one of my other Squiers but I didn't like it very much, so I found a nice neck with a maple fingerboard on Ebay. It went on OK but I had problems fitting the machine heads, which my Dad gave me a hand with. This has now been done and it plays nicely and sounds quite decent with the flatwound strings from when it was a fretless. Sadly the G-string snapped (ooh-er) when I was tuning it. I've also got a giant Gibson style humbucker I want to put in it but it involves complicated things like making a cavity for it which I don't have the tools for.

Hello 2009

Well that was a fun evening of food, drink and good conversation. 2008 was a strange year.

Saints Row 2 > GTA IV again

I'm not the only one who thinks that SR2 is better than GTA IV. I agree with every point on this list bar one - the driving.

The driving was one of the things I really liked about GTA IV. It was a shock at first how much effort it was to control the cars, but I soon grew to love the genuine sense of weight of each car and how they all handled differently. There was real satisfaction in hurling a huge 70's American barge into a bend and watching it lean wildly and the tyres howl in protest as it went sideways with a little tap of the handbrake. You could get into the aforementioned barge, a small hatchback, a people carrier and a van and they'd all handle differently and usually about right for what it was.

But all the other points are spot on. SR2 doesn't even try to take itself at all seriously, and it's all the better for it. Also the sheer amount of side missions is bewildering at first. I've played it for hours and have done hardly any of the main missions.

The hitman missions are quite fun. You usually have to do something to get the target to appear, like picking a fight in the trailer park, or getting drunk in the stadium, or in an extreme case, getting killed to get a doctor to appear in the hospital.

Cough cough

Still coughing away. I hate this part of having a cold.

The author of the iFart application for the iPhone has made $40,000 in two days and it's now the #1 non-free application on the App Store. Two things came to mind when I read about this.

1) People are so damn puerile - what does it say about the future of the human race? *
2) DAMN WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF IT FIRST????

I bet people everywhere are downloading the iPhone SDK and trying to work out what bodily function they can convert into a compelling and popular application. iSneeze? iBurp? iPuke? iLactate?

* I'll admit that I was bitterly disappointed to discover that this application wouldn't install on an iPod touch.

Picking at the corpse

Went to Denbigh to see what was going on in Woolies as it was the last day it would be open. It was quite weird as loads of shelves were empty. In fact the shelves themselves were for sale along with pretty much everything else except the actual cash registers. I ended up with South Park season 8 on DVD for £4 and a new iPod universal dock for the same price because it wasn't registered on the system, and at that point the staff didn't really give a toss. They had some 360 games left but only crappy wrestling ones. I haven't seen any South Park since the movie, but the episodes I've watched so far have been quite funny. The iPod dock works great with the touch once the adapter it came with was fitted, which is nice.

Other than that haven't done much except have a go at some missions on Saint's Row 2. I've not done any more main missions, instead I've been having a go at some of the activities and diversions, some of which are actually pretty good fun. The Hitman missions are OK except I'm sat around on a pirate ship waiting for some tosser in a pirate suit to turn up.

I've resurrected the 1 string bass as a dual course slide bass, so it has two strings tuned to G an octave apart. Sounds quite interesting. However the strings are slicing through the crappy piece of wood I used for a bridge so need to find something different.

Christmas once again

Scary that Christmas has been and gone again. I'm not quite sure where 2008 has gone.

The day itself went OK, spent the morning and lunch with my Mum and then round to my Dad's for the afternoon and evening. Everything went OK and it was quite a nice day.

Today has been a quiet one. The weather was spectactularly nice, but I found that if I went outside the cold made me cough, so I didn't spent much time outside.

Saint's Row 2 > GTA IV

Yes, it's true. I rate Saint's Row 2 above GTA IV. In theory, it should be a worse game by far. The original Saint's Row was a joke compared to San Andreas. It looked and felt like a game for a previous generation machine, and tried so hard to outdo the classic GTA humour and entertainment.

But then GTA IV came out and as I've said before, it took the classic GTA format and stripped it of the ironic sense of humour and parody and the many many things you could do other than the main missions. Instead of the glorious world of San Andreas where you could do almost anything, it went all serious and 'realistic'. Saint's Row 2 is fairly similar to the first one, but it's got more fun to it than GTA IV.



I've just spent a few hours playing Saint's Row 2 in co-op with Will. We found many hilarious things. Charging around naked and streaking was a good start, followed by attempts to land planes and helicopters on the tallest building, before parachuting down off it. Ramming petrol stations at top speed with one player surfing on the car roof caused some interesting results. Then we used the pratfalls cheat in various hilarious ways before triggering wars between gangs and police with inevitable chaotic results.


After dressing my male character up in fishnet tights and a fetching dress, and Will's ambiguous fat character in a suitably bizarre outfit, we found a huge hill to throw cars and ourselves off with various results.



And of course, it wouldn't be Saint's Row without the glitches that pop up every now and again, usually with entertaining results. This guy was stuck in the side of the car for quite some time.

But this is what I miss from GTA IV. All the fun stuff that you can do while not doing the main missions. I have done some of the missions in Saint's Row 2 and they weren't too bad, although the whole gangsta thing the game is built round is quite irritating. The cut scenes are made far more entertaining if your character is naked though.

Aaaargh

The dog is curled up in a ball on my bed, which is very cute, except he just let rip with a huge smelly dog fart.

Bleurgh, the vile plague

Not much to report. Thursday night was the work do which was good fun. It's always interesting to see your work colleagues in an informal situation. Noticed I had a slight cough that day.

Friday was one of those days which was completely uninspired, due to feeling tired after the late evening and having that depressing feeling that I was coming down with something.

Yesterday I woke up feeling awful, achy all over and generally feeling crap. It's sort of like a cold without the runny nose.

Ordinarily this would have been an excuse to stay in bed with a good book but I had to go to Ruthin to drop the car off for it's service. I spent the time while it was being done with Amy and Huw where we went for a nice breakfast in Siop Nain and then took a stroll around the bypass.

The car is definitely running better now and everything is fine except that he couldn't get a gasket for the back end of the exhaust where it connects to the silencer. This means that it is still rather loud, but now it sounds different. In fact it actually sounds like it has a sports exhaust, and I'm ashamed to admit I rather like it. This will be sorted tomorrow.

Yesterday evening was the biannual pub crawl but I had to go after the first pub because I felt so crappy, unfortunately. This also meant that I missed out on the soup fest today as well, bah.

Fun with DOS (!)

I found a spare 64mb CF card knocking about and found that it fitted into the 200LX with a PCMCIA adapter. Tiny by modern standards but respectable for a DOS machine. In a search for something to run on it, I found a copy of Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS. I was able to decompress it on XP and run the setup program, and then copied the final folder to the palmtop. Amazingly enough it works fine, once the colours were set so the mono LCD could display them properly.

The truly scary thing is that the entire program takes up just 2.6mb. It seems unreal somehow that we used to be able to get by on such tiny resources.

The 200LX is one of those machines I find really interesting because it was an attempt to compress a desktop architecture into a palmtop. It's quite unusual because it actually worked, and was a really good machine, made when HP still made interesting things of good quality. The modern equivalent is probably the OQO or the Sony Vaio UX, which are handheld machines that can run full copies of XP or Linux or even Mac OS X.

The most pointless thing of all time

Playstation Home. It's like Second Life but you can't create anything, instead it all has to be bought through microtransactions. You can pay actual money to outfit your avatar in Diesel clothes. Also unlike the Miis in the Wii and the Mii-like Avatars in the 360, the Home avatars are much more realistic.

But the worst thing is that there are many, many reports of anyone with a female avatar being harrassed and stalked by hordes of males. It's that typical thing where some people feel they can do stuff online that they would never do in the real world.

Scales

From one extreme to the other...



Dell Inspiron 9400
Dell Latitude D400
Asus Eee 900
HP 200LX Palmtop PC

The HP is a vintage relic, relatively famous in its day for being a fully PC compatible palmtop, so it can run DOS applications and even early versions of Windows if you feel like being horrible. It's not too bad to use despite the miniscule text on the screen and that calculator style keyboard.

An evil man in blue hotpants

My new evil character in Fable II is coming along nicely. So far he's managed to piss off basically everyone and is completely evil due to performing random acts of violence. There's one village which has no house with doors intact because he's been in and stolen everything from every last one, murdering anyone who tried to stop him. Most of all though, he's evil due to performing 41 human sacrifices to get a powerful sword. But he's not just evil, he's corrupt too. People don't like it when he buys out shops and jacks up the prices, and buys houses and rents them out at extortionate costs. It's somewhat hilarious though to have this guy doing all this, with great red cracks in his skin, covered in battle scars with huge horns protuding from his forehead, with people crying and screaming whenever he comes near, but yet he's wearing bright blue hotpants. Perhaps that just adds to the terror.

Other than that did a bit of tidying today and tried to work out what the hell to do with some of the more useless computer crap that's lying around. Didn't get very far though. It's been one of those weeks and as a result, it's not a weekend where I feel very motivated.

N93 anniversary

Well, it's been a year since I got the N93. It's been a really good phone, nice and powerful and with a good camera. To be honest I expected it to fall apart within months with the crazy hinge and fragile camera, but it's been really good. It's looking well worn from my pocket and I've dropped it at least twice, but it's still going strong. The best thing has to be the camera, as it takes pretty good images for a phone, and the video recording is top notch. It's really handy to have something that can take good pictures at a moments notice.

The only issues are a slightly sticky # key and the battery life. I've tried it with a couple of batteries but it seems to eat them pretty quickly and the latest one has started to swell slightly, which is not a good sign. I think I'm going to bite the bullet and just order a brand new one from Nokia.

Changing it for something else hasn't really ever been a serious consideration. The logical upgrade is the N95 but they are still expensive and I'm not keen on sliders as they leave the screen exposed. I wondered vaguely about making the leap from Nokia to something like the ludicrously named LG Viewty which has a 5mp camera with a 120fps video mode. But nothing really appealed. The iPhone might be a contender if it wasn't so expensive, locked to O2 and disgustingly trendy. The ultimate has to be the Nokia E90 but they are still pricey, and chunky too. I did use a 9210 Communicator for a while but it was too big.

Took a look in the Denbigh Woolworths closing down sale. I wasn't too fussed about anything on sale, especially as all the games were only discounted by 10%. Also all the 360 games had gone. They did have an 80gb PS3 with a nice discount but even if I could afford it, there wouldn't be much point in getting one. LittleBigPlanet looks good though. There was a good selection of DS games but a quick scan made me rethink my plans to get a Phat DS again, it's just shovelware shite like the Wii is suffering from. It's a real shame.

Badminton was OK today. One of those days where I didn't play very well but still had a good time and got lots of exercise. The Woman of Hate had some bad games which is always funny. She swears a lot under her breath.