General

It was a rather entertaining qualifying session yesterday, and I'd rather like to watch it again, using the wonderful iPlayer service from the BBC.

The session ran on for far longer than it should have, due to rain. BBC showed the session on BBC 1 up until 1930, then switched to BBC 2 after that. So, having watched the first bit on iPlayer, time to watch the next bit...

Oh.

I thought the BBC were envisaging people moving towards the VoD service more and more. If this is the case, then they really need to make it usable, so that people can actually rely on it.

Edit: Lots of other people asking the same thing:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbiplayer/F13735683?thread=7006092
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.autos.sport.f1/browse_thread/thread/722557aafba41aa9/70efd919390ee317?#70efd919390ee317

I rather like the format of this video.

Whilst I can't see what good it would end up doing, I still think that this petition is probably worth the 30 seconds it'll take to fill in:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/nfppostcodes/#detail

As a result of my last blog posting, there's now a petition asking the Prime Minister to encourage Royal Mail to make the PAF available to non-profit and community organisations for free. Like I say, I don't imagine much will happen what with an impending postal strike, but still...

Via Neil, I found this article on Tom Watson's blog which has now been reported elsewhere about Royal Mail sending round the boys about use of postcode data. I've had involvement with trying to do geolookup on postcodes, and as I wrote in a common on Tom's article, Google is neatly sidestepping a lot of the issues here - I suspect that this would be more problematic if Google Maps' API didn't allow this. However, without Google offering this function, I suspect that the web would be a much poorer place. I feel that Royal Mail are actively trying to hold back a lot of new ideas which would benefit from either cheaper, or a more relaxed usage model for PAF, but I don't see anything like this happening any time soon. It's an excellent monopoly, and one which must bring in a fairly substantial sum for them. Turkeys, they don't vote for Christmas.

Whilst there's been underground movements towards creating a Welsh language interface to various phones for a while now, Orange and Samsung have apparently made the first official release of an interface to use the language. This is likely to interest a lot of staunch Welsh speakers and probably bring a decent number of new customers over to both the network and the manufacturer. I'd be interested to see how well it handles mutations and the like, although I imagine that Samsung have already comfortably got around the issue with various other Celtic languages.

On the back of my recent blog post about moving forward to new file servers, BackBlaze have published a blog post about how they're managing to fit stupid amounts of storage into 4u of rack for significantly less than the comparable players (EMC, Dell, Sun, etc). If you're looking at adding additional storage or sanitising your existing storage infrastructure, the article is well worth a read.

I popped to McDonalds on Mostyn Champneys Retail Park in Llandudno earlier, and as I drove out, noticed that Llandudno Superbowl has apparently taken the decision to travel back in time towards the days of racial segregation by employing a separate entrance for Poles:

Each photo is clickable which will give you the high res/full size original, so you can zoom in on it if you need to.

I'm sure if I was the owner of the business, I'd nip across to B&Q pretty sharpish to buy anything to cover over that.

I've had a couple of previous generations of file servers before this iteration, each one was a bit kludgy, so this time things have been done properly.

The first version was, admittedly, a full on file server, but bought because it was cheap more than anything. 8x9.1g SCSI drives in RAID 5, in a bloody huge case with (If I remember correctly) dual P2-400 processors. Or something. Either way, it was massive, totally pointless and dimmed the lights across London (where I lived at the time) when powered up.

The next iteration - where I am now, was two boxes, each with a pile of disks, which mirrored via the magic of rsync and crontab each night. This was pretty handy, as it meant that should one of the machines catch fire, or a disk fail, then I'd still have a clear backup of (almost) everything. The hardware is P3 and P4 desktop based, and pretty damn reliable, to be fair. The limitation was that the disks are all PATA, so 500gb each.

With the disks on these machines coming alarmingly close to breaking point, it's time to look at the next version. I've got a fair amount of data, video projects, photos (RAW files come in at around 10-20mb each), music, audio projects I'm working on... all together, it's not insignificant. Hardware wise, I've gone for a SuperMicro chassis and board combo. The chassis can take 6x 3.5" drives, a slim CD or DVD drive, floppy drive and another 5.25" bay with rails preinstalled for a 3.5" disk. Dual on board 10/100/1000 network. 4gb of RAM on there, and a single 3.2gHz processor (ability to add another one, but doesn't seem much point...) So, doing things properly with the disk setup this time involved a little thinking. What exactly did I want from it, and what did I need it to do? Speed isn't a massive issue - the current setup sees me lucky to get much above 4MB/s off the disks, so any improvement over that would be welcome.

The sweet spot on SATA disks at the time of writing is about 50 quid for a 1tb 7200 SATA2 32mb cache disk. Indeed, I managed to purchased 3x1tb disks from different manufacturers for a total outlay of £147 delivered. Why different manufacturers? The reason for this is there's some empirical evidence (and also Sod's Law) that says buying all of your disks from one manufacturer is akin to putting all of your eggs in one basket - get a dodgy batch of disks, and you could see a high number of failures within a short time, possibly wiping out out your RAID.

Anyway - the disks were put into RAID 5 configuration under Linux' software RAID. This might seem an odd choice to some people, but I'm confident that software RAID has matured enough now that it's had all of the quirks and gotchas removed. There's ups and down to both hardware RAID and software RAID. I think each one has to be taken on its own merits. Granted, if I had the money, I'd probably go for a 3Ware 9550 series RAID card, but you have to stop somewhere.

Once the array had built, I then used LVM2 to set them up as one big partition. I'd now got a single 2tb partition backed up under RAID 5. Next step was to use cryptsetup to encrypt the disks. Whilst I don't have anything dodgy on the disks, nor do I intend to, there doesn't seem any particular reason not to do this. My laptop also has encrypted disks - it's there, so why not? Finally, formatting the disks. Whilst ZFS is nice, I don't think it's going to be available to Debian users for some time yet, so ext3 it is.

That's pretty much it. The machine is running nicely and has copied over nearly all of the data from the old machine. Of course, I'm not intending on relying purely on this machine. Once I'm happy with this one, I'll be repeating the performance for a mirror machine to replace the other mirror machine (if you follow me).

Performances from the array: newfs:~# hdparm -T /dev/md0

/dev/md0: Timing cached reads: 1838 MB in 2.00 seconds = 919.25 MB/sec newfs:~# hdparm -t /dev/md0

/dev/md0: Timing buffered disk reads: 172 MB in 3.01 seconds = 57.22 MB/sec

Total outlay for the entire setup (chassis, board, processor, memory, disks, cables) was £308, which is pretty reasonable.

This seems like an interesting idea: http://www.norhtec.com/products/gecko/index.html - the key selling points for this device seem to be that it's possible to run it on AA batteries. The price is also worth mentioning, too - it's not ground breaking in this sense, but it is cheap. The site suggests it to be around $200, which equates to around £150. There are already machines in this price range.

So - the AA side of things. How useful will it be? Some of the higher spec machines such as the Samsung NC10 will happily do a 5-6 hours on a charge, in real world conditions. Whilst the ability to take AAs is a nice idea, I think it seems quite gimmicky.

I've been doing some fairly intensive work modifying a couple of tables within a larger database recently, and rather than backing up the entire database every few minutes when I was doing this work, I looked at the possibility of backing up just a certain subset of tables. mysqldump doesn't have anything built in which allows you to do this - your options are either a single table, or the entire database. In the first instance, if you've got a large amount of tables (as I did), you're going to have a lot of time taken each time, or in the other instance, a lot of space taken if you want to do incremental backups.

So, I decided to script it. The code seems to work pretty well. If anyone has any pointers as to where it might go wrong, then please feel free to comment:

mysql [dbname] -u [username] -p -e 'show tables like "[term]%"' | grep -v Tables_in | xargs mysqldump [dbname] -u [username] -p

Obviously, replace everything in the square brackets. This will ask for your password twice. If you're lazy with security, then go right ahead and pop your password in there. Most people would want to have their backup go out to a specific file rather than stdout, so you'd want this:

mysql [dbname] -u [username] -p -e 'show tables like "[term]%"' | grep -v Tables_in | xargs mysqldump [dbname] -u [username] -p > backupfile.sql

and possible also to add a drop table in, like so:

mysql [dbname] -u [username] -p -e 'show tables like "[term]%"' | grep -v Tables_in | xargs mysqldump -add-drop-table [dbname] -u [username] -p

I think there's been a missing link for a while now in the area of user generated content - wikis, blogs, and sites like Youtube in that there's nothing which can really tie them all together. Of course, a document within a wiki can link to a blog, which can point to a video on Youtube - but what if you're wanting to look further than that and include things like presentations and photos?

I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on the MySQL Librarian project which aims to answer these questions. The post over at http://blogs.sun.com/datacharmer/entry/the_mysql_librarian_is_here has a lot more detail on it, but I can see this idea being used in many more fields. That said, though, the fact that it's being tied to a particular community is going to be an excellent way to ensure the value of it.

I think they're on to something rather useful, here.

It's been, ooh, almost a year since the last entry to the blog. Of course, it's not died. Well, it had. I'm hopefully going to reinvigorate it, and move away from the inwardly facing stuff and hopefully be posting up some stuff which might be useful. Kind of like a scratch pad for bits of code, and so on.

A few years back (probably 5 or so) I built up most of my current main AV setup[1]. It's an all Yamaha rig, with JBL Control 1AT speakers (main and centre) and a Celestion sub. At present, it's:

CD player: Yamaha CDC-685 multichanger. This has now been discontinued, but I'm not going to be changing this because they're not making any new multichangers at the moment. It's a fantastic unit, and has optical out. I also like the PlayXChange function which means you can change discs whilst one of them is playing. MiniDisc - Yamaha MDX-793. Again, this is discontinued. Not many people use MiniDisc now, but I've still got a whole pile of them with concerts on and such. I could transfer them, but well, I'm happy with it for now. Why bother? Cassette - Yamaha KX-580SE. Discontinued again. Brilliant bit of kit. What it does with noise reduction is amazing. Again, we've got loads of tapes. Can't fault it, and I'm happy not to transfer stuff whilst I've got this.

So, that's the stuff that I'm keeping. What am I upgrading?

The tuner deck is currently a TX-492RDS. This is going to be replaced by a TX-761 DAB tuner deck. The DVD player is currently a DVD-S796. There's nothing wrong with this - optical out for the audio, but it's being replaced with a DVD-S1700 which has HDMI (and optical) as well as upscaling to 1080p. Yes, Yamaha have just announced their Blu Ray player, but the specs on it look a bit pants for the £600 or so they're asking, and there's no point buying the S2700 when I'll be upgrading to Blu Ray shortly (when they've got a better offering). So why bother? The amp - I'm not sure on that one. I can't justify a Z11, but the RX-V2800 is apparently just around the corner. But that' been on the cards for months now. I'll probably hold off on making that decision for a while yet.

There's also a new panel on the way. I've been putting off getting a new telly until: A) 1080p panels drop to a sensible price B) The contrast ratios get to a decent level.

Since it's now possible to get a Samsung 1080p with 15000:1 contrast ratio that does pretty good blacks, I'll be getting one of these at some point soon, hence the major updates to the AV setup.

I've been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to get my domain portfolio (both my personal one and that used by my employers) all into one place, as they were spread across a mish mash of registrars and pointing at various different name servers and whatnot.

One thing that struck me whilst I was doing this is the scarcity now of three letter domains (and, indeed, "good" domains) under the most well known TLDs (.com, .net and .org) as well as, to some extent, .co.uk. Whilst a quick Google revealed no hard numbers, I'd suspect that the last of the three letter domains under .com were hoovered up some years ago by Domainers (those who purposefully register domains purely to resell them at a profit). Of those remaining, there's obviously a split between business, and personal users.

The only ways in which these domains might come back into circulation are someone forgetting to renew; a business going under; in the case of a domain registered by a person, that person dying.

This is what I'd been thinking about. In the case of the last two, we've been aware for a while now of the value of three letter domains, so, in the future are we likely to see these domains valued by administrators when a company goes under? What about the Government (in the UK) for inheritance tax reasons? Who would decide these values? With a house, it's relatively easy to do. But with a domain, surely the value is much more difficult to calculate.

I found out yesterday that the exam board used in a project I'm involved with will accept the audio recording from an oral test (ie the speaking part of a test) as an mp3 file. This seems somewhat interesting as it's extremely easy to manipulate the files after they've been generated using freeware audio editing tools, such as Audacity. Obviously, though, this problem isn't a new one - certainly, it's possible to manipulate audio on tape or CD with as much ease.

The easiest way to prove that a file has been edited is to generate a hash of the original. If the hash doesn't match this file, then there's obviously been a change to the file. But how does one know that the has generated is that of the original file, and not one of the edited file? What's to stop someone just generating a hash based on the edited file?

Thinking about this a bit further, I hit on an idea. There's open source mp3 players/recorders out there such as the iRiver. This device runs an operating system which can be developed for applications such as this. It would be possible to create a custom operating system for devices such as this which could generate a hash based on the file that's just been recorded, along with the time, date, and a secret cipher. This hash could then be saved to an associated file.

From here, both the audio file and the file containing the hash would need to be sent to the exam board. As usual, if the hash matches the contents, all is good. It wouldn't be easy to create a new hash based on the edited file unless one knew the secret cipher and the other bits associated with the hash (ie method, and the date and time element). There's got to be something I've not considered here, though. What am I missing?

My Macbook Pro has been having some odd problems with the DVD writer for a few weeks now. I use Toast primarily for recording DVD-R and CD-R. Although the machine would read any media quite happily, I was having increasing problems with writing to CD-R and DVD-R. Out of a cake of 100 CD-R, I'd perhaps get a successful write with about 60, gradually decreasing over time to 20 or so. Not good. Googling suggested a dead drive.

Toast would give an error of "Sense Key=Medium Error 0x73, 0x03". Trying to record the disc from Finder would give me an error of "The device failed to calibrate the laser power for this media".

For reference, this is the device information:

MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857E:

Firmware Revision: ZA0E
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO
Media: Insert media and refresh to show available burn speeds

What concerned me was after the drive failed to write to a disc, the cache line would change to:

Cache: 0kb

After trying the various fixes listed on forums (including Apple's support site) I only had one solution left - a lens cleaner. I've always been somewhat dubious about these things as they seem a little bit snake oil to me. Colour me surprised that it seems to have fixed it.

When I got into the office this morning I found a Dell D630 waiting for me that'd only taken two weeks to arrive due, I'm told, to waiting for a battery. Anyway. The machine had turned up with Vista installed on it. The University is rolling out Vista slowly, but it's by no means well supported yet, and there's still a lot of unknowns with it.

Popping in the XPSP2 CD I'd got ready resulted in the laptop giving me a BSOD, with the helpful error message of STOP: 0x00000007b. I've got an XPSP3 CD which resulted in the installation finding no drives to install to - this was a little more helpful.

To resolve this, pop into the BIOS (hit F2 during startup) and change the SATA operation mode from AHCI to ATA, and also disable the Flash Cache.

Once done, you should be able to install XPSP2 or SP3 as you would normally.

Sioned decided to book a holiday for us a few weeks back through Thomson. We left on 14 June from Manchester, headed to Verona airport, before our final destination of Parc Hotels Italia's Parc Hotel Paradiso hotel. When the booking was made, the following was specified as absolute requirements:
o Kettle in room (for making up Gruffydd's feeds)
o Fridge in room (for keeping said feeds cool)
o Quiet room (such that he can sleep - he's a light sleeper)
o A proper cot (not a travel cot - something for him to sleep in)
o Interweb in the room (taking away a geek's interweb is cruel)

All pretty basic stuff for a 4-star hotel, you'd think. On arrival, we found that the hotel room we'd been given had the following:
o Kettle in room
o Fridge in room
So an overall FAIL so far. We asked at reception about the cot since that would be quite easy to solve. Except it wasn't - the only cot they could offer was a travel cot, the sides on which weren't removable. We're currently at the stage of him only going to sleep if there's no sides on the cot, then putting them on once he's asleep so that he can't roll out. The only solution here was for him to sleep on an open bed next to us and hope for the best.

Saturday night closed in pretty quickly as we'd arrived relatively late, and we found that a wedding that the hotel was holding had their party in the courtyard area outside our room. Our room was 2 rooms away from something called the Grill Bar which was being, unsurprisingly, used as the bar for the event. We spoke to our rep the following morning when he visited the hotel and in turn he spoke to reception about it, who told us that there'd only be noise outside the room at the weekends. We asked if we could take another room as it would likely be noisy on the Friday night before we were due to leave, but were told that the hotel was full. On asking about the rest of the stuff, we were told that there wasn't anything that could be done about it. In true British spirit, we decided to soldier on.

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, the weather was overcast, but still nice and warm. We had a good few days, good food, nice and relaxing (alas no interweb in the room but I managed to find open wireless in the basement of the hotel near one of the restaurants). Wednesday rocked around with blazing sunshine. Again, another nice day. I mentioned above about the Grill Bar. On Wednesday evening I noticed a PA sitting on a trolley in the corner of the Grill Bar. At around 2130, hearing the impressively loud sounds of a drum kit, I realised that the PA was being used. Now.

Anyone who's got, or has had young children will know that they need routine, and also that they tend to go to sleep quite early. Also, this model is a light sleeper. 2200, the usual time for sleep rolled around and the entertainment outside started belting out crap covers of Elton John, U2 et al. We asked at reception about moving to another room but were told non were available. Ok, fine, we can put up with it for one night. Asking if the entertainment would be outside for the forseeable future (ie the next few days) and we find that "If the weather is good, entertainment is outside". That doesn't bode so well.

Thursday rocks around and - yep - blazing sunshine. Sioned isn't too happy when I mentioned that I'd seen the same "musician" from the night before and the same PA (which I'd taken a nosy at - 500W is pretty impressive for a small venue, I feel) being set up. Again, we speak to the reception staff who tell us that no rooms are available (even after we point out we'd seen people checking out during the day). The music finishes just after 2300, with the bar remaining open until just after midnight. It was at this time the staff elected to reset the seating by dragging metal tables across the slabs outside for around 15 minutes.

Net result of this was a baby that was... rather unhappy, and rather disturbed. Sioned was in tears frequently after a distinct lack of sleep due to having to deal with a confused baby.

We saw our rep again on Friday morning and with pressure from him were given an offer of alternative accommodation in a 2-star property. We asked if we could see the property, but, after 90 minutes, the staff were still unable to produce a key to a room there. We also found that if we were to move, we'd be required to sign a disclaimer (in Italian only) that would waive all rights to a refund (in part or in full) and also require us to not make enter into any discussion with Thomson (the tour operator). Needless to say, this offer was declined.

With our options running out, we elected to book a flight home. We managed to get an (expensive) last minute flight from Venice airport (a 2 hour drive away) and also through our rep, Craig, secure a taxi to take us there. To give you an idea of how bad things had become, we were prepared to pay in excess of £500 to travel home a day early.

One advantage of being a pessimistic tech is that I was able to gain the following:
o Audio recordings of the discussions (some might say arguments) with the manager and reception staff
o Audio recordings of a member of staff confirming the times the music and bar would close
o Video recordings showing the location of the room in relation to the PA
o Video recordings showing the time and audio levels

Hopefully we'll find a satisfactory conclusion to this through our tour operator, although this blog posting is primarily Google fodder to try and warn people about the quality of the hotel and their customer service. That said, the rep from our tour operator was immensely helpful and went well beyond the call of duty to try and help to rectify the situation. Certainly Thomson and Craig did what they could to help - the issue is the service that the Parc Hotel Italia staff and specifically the staff at Parc Hotel Paradiso in Peschiera provided during our stay.

As a general question to the masses, are we being unreasonable? Is it ok to expect that a hotel can provide what's requested, and, furthermore, provide a quiet room for a baby?

The Bangor University Summer Ball took place over this weekend, headlined by Athlete, and I was there taking photos. This was a pretty hard going test, primarily on the amount of time I was on my feet, with the camera in my hands - around 9 hours. One of the things I like most about the Nikon bodies is that they just feel so at home in my hands. The D2x isn't light by any measure, but, after that amount of time to still not feel like my wrist is about to snap is pretty impressive. I was also dragging all of my lenses around with me and various other stuff in my Lowepro AW100 bag - again, this caused me no issues at all - no pain in my shoulders or anything. So, all in all, a good night. The processing took me a fair while to do - the results are available at http://photos.garysmith.org.uk/ball08/

My installation of Office 2008 under OS X automatically updated earlier today and seemed to break itself quite spectacularly. After the update had installed, any of the applications on the suite refused to start, instead automatically starting the installer for the update again, and then trying to check for updates.

The way around this is to make sure you've got your serial number, then delete the following files:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office\ 2008/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008\ Settings.plist rm /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

After this, click on one of the applications that are part of the Office suite, it'll take you through the registration (asking for your serial) and then that's it - sorted.

I've been using Parallels on my Macbook Pro since I purchased it, because I still need to do a fair bit of stuff in a Windows environment. I occasionally do some work in Visual Basic, as well as Access - both of which aren't available under OS X. I'd been running the 3170 build for some time, and whilst it was totally stable, there was an irritating bug in it which would cause the fans to run at full whack (around 6kRPM according to iStat Pro) after a few minutes use. The processor and memory usage would rise significantly. Until now, I'd just put up with it.

Obviously, this was an older version. Today I upgraded to Build 5592, available here which certainly seems to have fixed the problem. The look and feel of the container has changed as well, and it just feels, well, nicer. Well worth the upgrade.

Hafodunos Hall is up for sale. Again. It looks like they're accepting comedy bids for it. I really, really hope someone takes it on this time that can actually bring it back to what it once was. There's so much that can be done with it.

I've got a Cisco router here in front of me, the router is "reconditioned", but was received with a console password on it. Now, this is interesting for two reasons. As it's reconditioned (apparently) it shouldn't have a config on it anyway, and even so, whoever had it beforehand should really have cleared the config off.

More interestingly, the router is identifying itself with the name of a medical company. Interesting. So, rommon the box, get into it and do a sh start and see what we've got.

Username and password for the VPN service that said company uses, further identifying information for the company, firewall rules, SNMP server information, and, of course, the console password (in type 7, so easily breakable) for the router. What says that the same password is used on a number of bits of their kit?

It's not difficult - really. This is basic network security stuff. Just clear any configs off before the router gets taken away.

I'm a big advocate of using flash in indoor photography to make sure you get the photo. I hate the disappointment of reviewing afterwards and finding blur in the photos which, when corrected in Photoshop still doesn't look right. Visiting Leicester yesterday we were at my Grandparent's house which gets a good amount of natural light in through the conservatory and managed to get some excellent results without using flash. Indeed, this photo, when put through Photoshop for colours/levels/contrast didn't require anything at all - essentially as it came off the camera. The same also applied to this photo. Hopefully with the sun making more of an appearance now, I'll be able to play with natural light a little bit more.

I've used Google webmaster tools for quite a while now, primarily for work stuff. That said, I've also got my personal site and this blog submitted to it.

I've been perusing the top search queries that bring people in to the sites - some of the search terms are rather interesting, leading me to wonder how the site had become so high on the list. Others terms are related vaguely to what I post, but then I know that there's nothing closely related to that subject matter. Some examples:

"how to access ip address for cisco aironet 1130 through hyperterminal" "cisco 1231 won't boot" "Nikon D3 resetting" "Possible spyware infection detected"

Maybe I need to post some more tech foo on here.

One of the issues I'm slightly concerned about with regards to Gruffydd growing up is that my parents - indeed, most of my family aren't going to see vast sections of this, as they live in Leicester, over 150 miles away. We're doing a lot of stuff with photos, and some stuff with video as well, but the video stuff is merely snapshots.

I've spent today playing around with: o QTSS (Quicktime Streaming Server) o Quicktime Broadcast

Quicktime Broadcast is a funky little bit of software available from Apple for OSX that takes a feed either from an iSight camera, or from a Firewire input. I've rigged up a Canon XM2 to the Firewire port (the same camera that's used for the snapshot videos). Broadcast then has various options for encoding the video and audio - as well as framerate and so on. There's various network options - if your network supports multicast, then there's an option for that. You can also do manual (single) unicast, and automatic unicast. I'm using automatic unicast via the server in London.

The server is running QTSS which compiles quickly and easily on Debian Etch (make sure you've got a qtss user added before you run ./Install otherwise it won't work properly - this doesn't seem to be mentioned in the documentation, but you do get an error whilst it's running saying that the script can't chown some files because the user doesn't exist...)

From here, it's simply a matter of tuning the setup against what you're wanting to do. My parents have been happily watching the stream using Quicktime Player from Leicester, which is what I'd intended. I've tuned our setup to 2fps - the reason for this is it gives the overall best frame quality and audio quality at 320x240. This takes around 28kB/s which is pretty much the size of the upload path over our DSL.

The reason I chose to use the server in London is there's a chance my Grandparents (and obviously, anyone else) will want to watch at the same time as say my parents. The London server obviously has the bandwidth to cope with this. In essence, the London server offers the ability to have more than one client viewing the stream at any one time.

Photos of the setup are here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/7306123.stm

On a few cases, ITV have cut away from the race or qualifying just as something big has happened - that, or something big has happened whilst the adverts have been on. Hopefully, this will see things back at they should be. As long as they don't interrupt the coverage with whatever rugby/football/blah is going on, it'll all be fine. I wonder if they'll poach the commentators from ITV? Everyone apart from James Allen, that is.

There's a saying amongst techies that gaffer tape can fix pretty much anything. That, and that it holds the world together. We've been having some difficulties getting the baby to sleep recently as he doesn't seem to like lying flat. We'd also noticed that he's taken to sitting in his activity chair really well. He'll happily spend all day in it, and, importantly, likes to sleep in it.

The difficulty we've got is that we have a sleep apnea monitor. Each sensor for this is rigid, and roughly the side of an A4 piece of paper. The activity chair is soft on all sides. Trying to put the two together was clearly going to be difficult.

I ended up gaffer taping the sensor across the back of the chair, so his back is on it. The top is gaffer taped in place, and the bottom held in place using cable ties (so that his weight doesn't cause the tape to stretch and thus lose contact with the sensor). The top is gaffered because the top of the chair is circular and cable ties won't hold on it without slipping.

It looks rough and ready, but it works. All those years of working in theatre have taught me something...

I mentioned previously that my trusty Leatherman Wave has been away for repair. Just to close this off, after getting back this morning, I found a package from Kendal containing a brand new Leatherman. Turns out they'd discontinued the model I had, and instead of repairing it have given me a new one. Yay!

So - where did I get back from? We've been out this morning to register Gruffydd's birth. Lucky him, he now gets to pay taxes when he starts earning. :)

During the week I usually get up around 0720 and head in to the office, so attempting to keep with the routine, I got up with Sioned & Gruffydd at around 0700ish, did the usual stuff (feed, change), had some breakfast and whatnot before the midwife arrived. Straight after that, we headed over to Bangor and dropped in on a few people, including the offices I work for, all in all taking around two hours. This afternoon, we had the audiologist from the hospital over to check Gruffydd's hearing, which was all fine. Immediately after that, we had the Doctor over (he's sort of a family friend) to do more tests. Straight after that, Sioned's parents came over - I'd asked her Dad for a hand with a wardrobe we'd bought from Ikea which is, frankly, crap. I was having problems hanging the doors on it - they wouldn't hang straight. He pointed out this is because one bit of wood is warped, one bowed, and the whole thing seems to have twisted. Top marks to Ikea on that one, then. We made the best of a bad job before they headed off and we had some tea. Gruffydd elected to have his tea just as Sioned was serving up. Whilst this was happening, I was wondering why my laptop had lost the DHCP lease from the server, but thought I was doing something a little odd.

No. Wrong. Way more than a little odd. The UPS in the rack had switched off. I suspect we'd had low incoming power most of the day due to the storms, and the batteries eventually ran out. On powering everything back up, I seem to be one disk short of the quota - fortunately it's a backup drive, so it's not all bad. The issue being it's the one with the bootloader on it. Arse.

I'll have a quiet day tomorrow, please.

Do all babies smell like barbecue and look like Furbies, or just this one?

I'd quite like this if it was possible to get the control software onto something smaller than a laptop... http://revver.com/video/719432/etch-a-sketch-clock/

Sioned had to stay in the hospital overnight as they were concerned about how she was healing. She was adamant she was fine, but decided that their advise was best heeded. I ended up getting to bed about midnight, got up at 0715 and headed over to the University to drop some bits off, before getting to the Hospital at around 0830. Fortunately, the nursing staff held true to their promise yesterday of getting us out quickly and we were heading out to the car at 0945. Mum, Dad, Laura, Grandma and Grandad have come over today to visit us, they arrived just before 12. We spent some time at our house, and have been at Sion's Mum & Dad's for the rest of the day. Lots more photos, lots of video - pretty much everything is as you'd expect it to be. Still quiet, though, which is good. :-)

Sioned woke me up at 0411 and said that she was suffering some pain and said that she wanted to call the hospital for an opinion on if what was being experienced was the early stages of labour. The result of the phone call saw us dressed, in the car and with the required stuff and heading for the A55 at 0431. After driving at speeds around *cough*, we arrived at the hospital a mere 15 minutes later (yep, I'm quite pleased with that). After heading to the required ward, we were put in a side room where examinations took place and the on-call Doctor gave us the two options: Sioned could delivery naturally, or they could start to organise a Caesarian section. Since there was a schedule for the section tomorrow, it'd take some organisation to get this ready in time. They suggested that, at this time, she was 8cm dialated. Between us, we decided it'd be best for a natural delivery. At 0705, Gruffydd Cynan Smith was born, weighing 7lb1/2oz. Head-toe length was 50cm, head circumference 32.5cm. Photos are at http://photos.gruffyddsmith.com, and video will appear shortly at http://video.gruffyddsmith.com. Sioned is fine, and now able to eat normally again. Baby is fine and seems to respond to stimuli as expected.

I think it's important to know your own limitations, primarily so that you don't make an utter idiot of yourself. People remember stuff like that. This pretty much encapsulates that idea. Avril Lavigne trying to cover System of A Down - Chop Suey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfM1U74tMJw

Reports have been circulating for the last few days now about one of the security mainstays of many of the larger web services such as Google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo being broken. CAPTCHAs are those little boxes of text which are obscured in some way - you usually have to enter your interpretation of them to prove that you're a human. The Wikipedia article for CAPTCHAs is quite good at the moment and also has examples of CAPTCHAs. The reason for this is primarily to stop software from signing up to these services and then using them to send out spam. For instance, having software sign up to the Google services means that GMail accounts can be created, then from here, spam can be sent.

You'll appreciate, if you look at some of the examples shown in the Wikipedia article that, in some cases, it can be difficult even for a human to decode what's being displayed. Indeed, there's numerous times that I've got the test wrong. With this in mind, it's somewhat surprising to find that software developers are now at the stage - if reports are to be believed - that software is able to get the CAPTCHA test correct in as many as 20% of cases.

This presents us with the question of where to go next. Spammers, and the software developers that work with them are always playing a game of catchup - the good guys build em up, and the spammers will knock em down again. So whatever the next phase is, they'll find a way around it - or solve it. It'll just take some time.

As it stands, they're currently able to solve - at best - 20% of the CAPTCHAs presented to them. This will only get better, but I think it's going to be a long time before they're even at 50%. I think that one of the better ways forward at the moment is CAPTCHA + something else, so you essentially have to pass two tests to validate. There's numerous ideas which would possibly work. Some ideas off the top of my head include matching cards together. The method would be something along the lines of you being shown five cards. Two of which are half of a face, with the third being half a cat, the fourth half of a dog, and the fifth half of a car. Clearly, the two halves of the face match. Another would be an array of ten cards, 8 with pictures of animals (for instance) and two with humans. Pick the humans.

The issue you've got to get around with anything like the above is that at the moment it's totally non-standard. People the world over generally recognise CAPTCHA and know what to do with it. With any new test, you've got to get around the language barrier, and possibly any cultural barrier. Those in the UK at least will know the HSBC adverts - what if people in some part of the world get given a new test involving a black cat? Is this unlucky for them? Different things have different meanings, so anything like this would possibly need checking to make sure it has no negative connotations.

Plenty to think about, though.

For a long time now, I've been heavily reliant on the charity of other people to provide me with DNS (primary & secondary), e-mail (secondary MX and also IMAP service) and web service. I know a lot of people who've got their own machines hosted in various datacenters around London. Whilst, hopefully, the load that my sites and e-mail exert on these machines shouldn't be too high, I've always felt a little cheeky as I didn't feel able to contribute anything back to them - obviously, hosting many of these machines is a cost to these people. There's also the requirement for them to invest significant amounts of their own personal time on the upkeep of the machines in terms of security, and also the occasional "Can you do " e-mails from me. Not regular e-mails, just zonefile updates, stuff like that.

After a recent discussion on one of the tech lists I'm on, I decided to take out a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with a company called Bitfolk. The company came well recommended, with one of the guys behind it (at least) being on said tech list. Since most of my personal (development) machines already run Debian Etch, I elected to have this as the base for the VPS. Putting everything on to the new VPS means that I've got everything in one place - this means that I'm not having to rack my brains (or run queries) to work out where a website is, where the DNS is run from, etc. I've decided to farm the actual management of the DNS out to Portfast, which is run by a friend of mine. You can't argue with the prices, and DNS isn't something I'm particularly good at.

I've spent the weekend installing software on the machine, testing out configurations and so on, and then pointing the DNS for websites at it. Obviously, leaving the website on the old host running in parallel with the new one on the VPS whilst the changes propagated. I'll leave the old sites running for a few weeks, monitoring the log files before taking stuff out. After that, I then did Exim, Dovecot and Squirrelmail installations, before starting to move over MX services to the new VPS. One of the tricks of spammers is to hit the lowest priority MX as an attempt to inject spam - their theory being that this part of the chain will have the least protection. I'll admit to being surprised at the amount of attempts that the new VPS was getting within half an hour of the MX changes starting to propogate. When I installed Exim, I also installed SpamAssassin, but in its vanilla state, this was doing pretty much nothing to stop the increasing deluge. I elected to use the zen.spamhaus.org DNSBL. It was stopping probably 25% of the hits I was seeing. As I say, it was in a vanilla state, so undoubtedly, with tuning and addition of extra rulesets, this would've been fine. The addition of the zen.spamhaus.org DNSBL, though, is far simpler.

Exim4 under Debian makes this relatively easy to do. I'm running a split configuration, so it's simply a matter of inserting this into /etc/exim4/conf.d/acl/30_exim4-config_check_rcpt just after the accept hosts = : line

# RBL List Begin
# Always accept mail to postmaster & abuse
accept domains = +local_domains
local_parts = postmaster:abuse
#
# Check sending hosts against DNS black lists.
# Reject message if address listed in blacklist.
deny message = ${sender_host_address} is listed at ${dnslist_domain}; See ${dnslist_text}
dnslists = zen.spamhaus.org
# RBL List End

Once you've done this, you'll need to update the config by running update-exim4.conf and ensuring the service has restarted.

This bit of code sees mail being referred to zen.spamhaus.org. If it's listed there, then a message is returned (as detailed above) in response. This sees us rejecting the e-mail at SMTP time, so it exerts far less load on the machine overall, and gives the sender an immediate response.

Having left the machine overnight, I'm pleasantly surprised at the amount of spam that didn't get through - just a small number, which will need some more fiddling to get right.

I'm going to be selling the GSXF600 shortly, so decided that it needs to be put into shape. The MOT is due on it, and it also needs some new tyres. Sioned's Dad also managed to put the brake light lens through, so a new one of those would be needed as well.

Saturday saw me heading down to Woods Motorcycles in Abergele, who usually do work on my bikes. I knew that this wasn't going to be a cheap job - tyres aren't cheap for a start, and the MOT is 30 quid. Maybe 300 total?

Monday brought a little shock - I should perhaps be expecting more around 550. Ouch. The current breakdown of costs is likely to be something like: o Tyres - £140 + VAT (but they're a decent pair) o Brake light lens - £35 + VAT o Fork seal (at least one will need replacing) - £15 + VAT each (potentially need two)

The bad bit comes from the fact that the front brake is going to need rebuilding as it's binding. So that'll be two new brake seals at £30 + VAT each. Add on to that the cost of the MOT - a little under 30 quid.

So, our running total stands at around £300 (give or take).

The rest - that's the labour part. At a mere £50 an hour. Oh dear. Around 5 hours labour, totalling £250.

Needless to say, I needed a little sit down after that one. I'm expecting to have the bike back sometime around the end of this week. So if someone fancies a nice 600cc sports/commuter bike, let me know. I don't think it'll need much doing for a while yet...

So, as well as having the screen replaced on the Macbook Pro a couple of weeks back, I've also had to return my in ear monitors to Shure. I tend to listen to a lot of music whilst I'm working in the office. Because it's open plan (and nobody else there shares my somewhat unique tastes) I use a pair of in ear monitors. Unfortunately, after 15 months of use they developed a fault. Sent them off Tuesday of this week and had a brand new pair turn up Thursday morning. Impressive service.

I've also managed to break the knife blade on my Leatherman Wave. This isn't the first time I've done this. Leatherman have a 25 year warranty on their stuff which is about as basic as "you break it, we repair it". Leatherman are an American based company, with another company called Whitby & Co handling their work in the UK. After sending the Wave off on Friday last week, I had a letter from them on Thursday saying that I'd managed to break it so spectacularly it had to be sent off to America for repair back at Leatherman. Oopsy.

I've decided that it's worth buying stuff that's well made - even if it does break, the company behind it gives a damn good amount of support.

I'd been holding off on upgrading to OSX 10.5 for a while now - firstly because I don't, as a rule, upgrade stuff until it's been out for a good while (giving chance for any bugs to come out and get blatted) and also because I didn't feel the need to. Since 10.5 has been out for a good few months now, I decided to get hold of a copy and pop it on to my MBP. For something that weighs in at 7 odd gig, it installed surprisingly quickly - admittedly coming off a Firewire hard disk, I was back at a login prompt in 24 minutes, which is pretty impressive. That said, there's now around 550mb of updates coming down which I don't expect to complete as quickly, being as the machine is behind my 2mb ADSL - if I'd done it at work so that I can use the gigE JANET link, I'm sure it would've been much quicker.

I picked the machine up this morning - absolutely spot on the money. Brand new glossy screen, all tip top. I had a quick browse through /var/log/secure.log to see when the machine had been used, and it looks like twice - once the day after (I assume to diagnose the fault), once on Thursday where it was on for a fair while (I assume after they'd installed the screen) and again yesterday just before they called me.

All in, rather impressed - Applecare seems well worth the money. Well, if you paid as little for it as I did - 30 quid for the extra 2 years.

I had a call from Digital Store Manchester at half four today to say that the Macbook Pro had been fixed and is ready for collection. As the store closes at six, it'd be hit and miss as to if I'd get there in time - so I've elected to go and collect it tomorrow instead.

That's not too bad, though - a touch over 4 days to get it all done.

Hopefully trying to catch Google with the title - I called Digital Store in Manchester earlier on today and they said that they'd not had the screen delivered yet, that it usually took a few days longer for the glossy screens (apparently matte screens are more readily available), but they hope to have the screen either tomorrow or Monday. Here's hoping...

I've been playing pool for a local league team - Menai B since September last year. The team was new for this season (the season started in September). Tonight, we chalked up our first victory (after, according to the league, 6 draws and 4 losses). We're all rather pleased, to say the least :-)

For longer than I can remember (at least six years now) I've been using a laptop as my main production/development/blah machine. Taking the decision to put the machine in for a repair isn't one that I've taken lightly, trying to schedule in my head when it's going to be best to be without it.

I ended up calling a few places that aren't too far away to try and gauge how long I'll be without the machine to have the repair done. There's a bit of dust seemingly inside the screen (other people report it as being "dust behind the screen" - it's certainly visible, and definitely not dead pixels and so on). Whilst this isn't that common, it's not entirely unheard of, with reports coming up through Google of people saying much the same thing. (Here, here, here... and numerous mentions on the official Apple forums.

The Apple store in Manchester's Trafford Centre said they'd got no idea how long it'd be. Another independent Apple Authorised Service Provider (AASP) suggested a wait of 2-3 weeks (which is pretty unacceptable for me), whilst the outfit I plumped with - Digital Store reckoned on less than a week. The guy I spoke to on the phone was really helpful giving me all the information I needed.

I arrived in Manchester and dropped the machine off with them at lunchtime, having spoken to the same guy that I'd earlier spoken with on the phone - seemed to be a pretty top bloke who seemed to live and breathe Apple gear.

So, we'll see how this pans out - hopefully the extended Applecare I've taken out will be worth the money. I'm not into the extended period yet, my first year (which is given anyway) runs out in June.

Hopefully, anyway, I should be back with it later this week. We'll see what happens.

Whilst I do some pretty big file transfers around my home network (mainly photos and video) from the laptop to the file servers, I've always left these going in the background whilst I'm doing other stuff, so never paid too much attention to how fast or slow these are. In recent times, I've changed the setup of the network here, such that the network is now split into two. The servers are split away, and the only way of connecting them now is powerline ethernet converters. I'd purchased a pair of these from Solwise, the pair costing about 50 quid. Put them in, and forgot about them.

I was transferring some photos today and noted that they're only giving me about 250KB/s. My first port of call was the consideration that the access point (Cisco Aironet 1231 with a G card) or the laptop were being a bit odd. The access point is on the other side of the powerline segment, so it was a possibility. Taking it right down to the point of the laptop being directly connected to the powerline converter still giving roughly the same speeds.

I then took the laptop and connected it directly to the switch (a Cisco 2950) which has the servers hanging off it and saw speeds around the 5MB/s mark, more towards what I was expecting.

I'm now running a test of 700mb, rsyncing from the laptop. In both instances, the same fileset will be used. In the first instance, I'll do it using the powerline segment, in the second instance, I'll do it without the powerline segment and report the results back here.

...and the first set of results, with the laptop connected to the powerline segment are: sent 709976661 bytes received 3320 bytes 271554.78 bytes/sec

...and the second set of results, without the powerline segment: sent 709976661 bytes received 3320 bytes 4264144.03 bytes/sec

So, what, nearly 16 times slower with the powerline in. I think it's safe to say that if you're doing large file transfers, you don't want to be using powerline. I know there's issues of how long the link is/how new the cabling is/blah so you may get better results if you're not having to go as far.

Two posts in less than a week. I must be spoiling you all. I know you're all hanging on my every word. No, really.

Things are starting to spool down a little now, I'm counting down the number of shows (I'm only working three more) before the panto ends. The number of weeks before Sioned has the baby is now into single figures. Obviously, this isn't something that's entirely unexpected - it's something that, in many ways, we've been able to prepare for. But the reality is still there, and is going to hit very very soon. I've been reading a book between cues on the show, written by Marcus Berkmann called The Truth About Fatherhood. I'm a pessimistic being, and I suspect that the book - which was given to me as a birthday present by some friends - was perhaps a way to try and alleviate this somewhat. My feelings towards the impending doom, sorry, birth are not those of joy and glee, and the friends that gave me the book are more than aware of this. Really, the book only told me what I was already most afraid of.

First up, my boss in my main line of work is extremely understanding of the way that I work. I work when I want to, as long as the work gets done. Sometimes, I'll be up till 0300 if I'm on a run writing code. I'll go to bed, and roll into the office whenever I get up, and knock off when I get bored. It's a setup which works well for everyone. I fix things when the break - they don't wait for me to get into the office. This works well for me because my sleep is important. I sleep when I'm tired. I hate having my sleep broken. Obviously, these two things aren't going to work well. Sioned says that she'll get up when the baby wakes during the night, but even so - I know that my sleep is going to be disturbed. Put this on the "things I already know" pile.

Next, project work. This is a difficult one. Many projects require an investment of money on my part, which is recouped when I invoice at the end of the job. Also, they require an investment of time and effort on my part. I'm pretty much blocked on every bit here:
o The amount of time I'll be able to put in will be vastly reduced due to having other things to look after (ie a baby)
o The amount of money I'll be able to invest will be vastly reduced as it'll be spent on 60 nappies a week, milk, clothes, whatever else.
o The amount of effort I'll be able to put in will be vastly reduced through lack of sleep.

So, that'll be a significant reduction in income due to loss of project/contract work. I can probably just about deal with that.

Next, house financials. Sioned is fortunate in that she'll be on a relatively decent income for a good few months after having the baby. But even so, this thing is still going to be a pretty hefty drain financially. Apparently, many couples who've already had children are only too pleased to get rid of things that their children don't use any more or have grown out of - clothes and so on. This is obviously extremely generous and serves to reduce on the burden (not only that of finance, but also that of time saved in going out and buying the stuff) on us, but there's also ongoing costs of food and so on.

Toys. My toys. Not just buying them, but concern about what I've already got. The expensive stereo gear under the telly that will no doubt get kicked, or get sticky fingers rubbed all over it. The expensive kitchen gear which will no doubt last mere minutes when subjected to baby. The camera and lenses which will no doubt get picked up and dropped when used as a telescope. The laptop which will get trodden on. The in-ear monitors which will be ripped to pieces. The 1200 quid sofa which is guaranteed to get baby shite and vomit all over it. The humanity.

Next up, there's the becoming-even-more-boring bit. I admit I'm not the most interesting person in the world. When I start working with something new, or get into something new, I fully immerse myself in it. I need to know exactly how it works, why it works, how it's built, and so on. I'm the person that takes things apart to see how it works, then puts it back together again (successfully, 9 times out of 10). So does this mean that I'm going to be boring you all rigid with tales of what the baby is doing, what new things it's doing? I hope to God that I don't. I'm acutely aware of people that already do this and it really does bore me rigid. People ask me why I'm not excited about having a baby. It's not something new - it's something that's been happening since the year dot. It's almost something that's expected. It's something that you're programmed to do. So why the excitement? There's no reason. This is, assuming I still have the mental capacity, why I won't be boring people every day with the fact that he or she is now able to suck their thumb. It's standard development - it's to be expected. Great, so he or she is able to sleep through an entire night without waking up. Fantastic, but does everyone need to know about that? Not really, no. Hopefully I won't become even more boring. Let me know if I do.

So, there we are. That's why it's all going to go horribly wrong, and why I'm being as pessimist as normal about it all. Any questions?

I've been utterly crap at keeping the blog up to date recently, so what better time to look back on the year, and also conveniently put everything that I've not put on here already, er, on here.

December is, as is now standard for me, panto season. It's been a little bit more busy this year as December also saw the first data return to the Welsh Assembly Government for the University. This was a little bit stressful as most of the providers had either forgotten, sent in incorrect data, or submitted their data late. Lots of late nights and whatnot, and it was in on time, and I'm pretty happy with what we've sent. I'm also working on some new stuff for the website which includes media management and a Health & Safety system. All of this will only be visible to the providers, so not something for the general public. This is all tying in to a presentation I'm going to be doing to the other University techies on what I've been doing for the past year, how it's all come together, how it works and whatnot. I've got a few ideas for the presentation, but not started writing it yet. Panto - I said I wouldn't take that many shows this year as I'm fairly tired, and also it's not really financially viable at the moment for me (I get paid less at the theatre than I can justify). So I only ended up taking 20 shows this year (I think I did about 40 last year). Sioned still thinks that this is far too much. Ho hum. Only a few more left to go, then that's it for another year. Christmas was spent at my Mum & Dad's, and was rather enjoyable this year. Sioned & myself received some very nice gifts, there was excellent food, and the company was good.

October and November saw me working on an interesting project for another department in the University which caused a hefty political argument, eventually seeing the whole project canceled. Fortunately, I think I've come out on the other side without too many battle scars.

The department within the University that I was seconded away from (Work based learning within the School of Lifelong Learning) has slowly been making more and more people redundant. The have a contract with the Welsh Assembly Government which is typically renewed each August. This year (August 2007) the renewal was, financially, much lower than in previous years. This put a large amount of pressure on to the department. As a result, in March, the department will begin the final wind down. Students currently on program will be moved to other providers, and remaining staff will either be made redundant, or, where possible, be re-housed elsewhere within the institution. What does this mean for me? The department I'm now working for (Canolfan Cymraeg i Oedolion) has funding for a further three years. After this time, we either get more funding or I'm looking at redundancy. We're in a pretty good position within the institution, and within the country as a whole. Hopefully it should be ok.

The summer saw Sioned finding out that she's pregnant. We're going to be having a baby in late February/early March. Sioned is feeling poorly pretty much constantly, and seems to have a pretty much endless set of appointments with various people within the medical profession.

Also over the summer, we got rid of the Saab and now have a BMW 3 series diesel. In some ways, I still prefer the Saab, in others (especially the economy), the BMW is a nicer car. Ok, it hasn't got the pickup that the Saab had, nor the top speed, but it's still just as nice.

March this year saw us getting married, and then heading around Western Europe in the car. Absolutely brilliant time, really enjoyed it. Germany is a brilliant place, especially the Nurburgring.

I've also started playing in the Bangor pool league - I've got a win rate of 50% which is pretty decent, I think, for someone who's only just started playing. We're a new team to the league, so to also not be rooted to the bottom of the table is pretty decent, too.

As posted on the blog, I changed from my slightly-long-in-the-tooth Nikon D100 to a D2X. I've used the new body in anger a few times now, and it's a joy to use. Over the last week, I did just over 1000 exposures in a few hours and the battery is still over half full. The images it produced, in quite a few cases, required very little processing/colour correction. It's a brilliant piece of kit, although as you'd expect, the noise at anything above ISO500 is noticeable. I gather this is well corrected in the Nikon D3. Hmm... ;-)

This year also saw the purchase of my Macbook Pro. I'm really getting on well with it now - there's quite a few shortcuts and the like which, once you get to know them really do increase productivity. The machine was, within a few days, my main development/production machine, and has since stayed there. It's a brilliant bit of kit. It's been dropped once and - as you'd expect, hasn't suffered any illness as a result of it.

I think next year is going to be a whole lot different.

I've been using a Nikon D100 for a few years now, and it's given me some absolutely amazing results, and I'm really pleased with it. That said, it does have limitations. When I bought it, it was an old(er) bit of kit, already being in some respects superseded by the D70. The D100 had been given a hammering and has done sterling service, having done a good few gigs, the honeymoon, had a pint of beer chucked over it - and that's just off the top of my head. Recently it's been giving some banding, a sign of a possible shutter failure. These things happen. It's regarded as a consumable part. I'd been starting to feel like I'd outgrown the D100 for a while now, specifically being bound by some of the limitations on it (ie the way it talks to the SB800 flash I've got, the number of FPS it can do, the AF areas, etc). I'd been lusting after a D2x for some time, but not been able to justify the outlay. So - when a chap I know mentioned that he was looking to sell his, and the result of lots of overtime sitting in the bank, it seemed like a good opportunity. I'm *really* pleased with it. The amount of fine tuning one can do is breath taking. I took some sample images outside the office at lunchtime, which are up at my photo site. Some of the detail being brought out in the shots is spectacular - the beads of water, as well as what's shown in the background in some of the other photos is - well, as I say. I'm impressed.

If you sign up to Tesco DVD Rental before 10am tomorrow morning, for at least three months (cheapest option is £4.47), they're offering up an iPod Shuffle. An iPod Shuffle for £13.41 can't be sniffed at, with a load of free DVDs thrown in too!

Winner.

I find that someone under iraq.centcom.mil is looking for a Welsh course. Unfortunately the coverage area for the North Wales Welsh for Adults Centre doesn't quite stretch that far. Nice to have the enquiry anyway...

I've been a customer of Orange for my mobile phone for, apparently, 7 years now. This is quite a feat judging by some people's experience. Their data service is crap at best (Vodafone is *far* better), but I generally get on well with them, and haven't had that many problems. Sioned joined me on my contract this time last year, and we both took out Nokia N80s. We were rather pleased with them, and elected to upgrade this year to a Nokia N95 each.

First thing you have to realise when upgrading phones is that you don't pay what you're offered first. Initially, they wanted £90 from me (since I use my phone quite a bit and thus spend quite a bit with them), and wanted £199.99 from Sioned for her upgrade.

I'd already done my research and found that we could move to T-Mobile and pay £60 per handset and pay roughly the same as we do per month now (give or take), so asked for my PAC - the code which lets you keep your mobile number and move to another mobile provider. Upon asking for this, I was transferred to Customer Relations, who told me that I could, in fact, have both handsets free of charge. Shock, awe. We spend roughly 80 quid a month between the two of us, so it was with further delight that the lass on the end of the phone said that she could get this down to around £45-£50. Then, she said "Um, hold on, let me just put you on hold".

A couple of minutes later, she confessed "Er, those prices I've just quoted you are all for an 18 month contract. Is that ok?"

Back to the drawing board. I certainly use my phone in anger - whilst it doesn't get chucked at walls, it's certainly showing signs of wear after 12 months, and my N80 is certainly having problems now (rebooting, falling off the network regularly, etc) - so I declined their kind offer and asked what my options would be for staying on a 12 month contract.

Long story short, after 53 minutes on the phone with them, I got to stay on the existing price plan (ie we pay £80 a month and use most of our quota) and pay £100 for both phones. Seems pretty reasonable all in.

It shouldn't take that long, though. Really.

No updates for a while, so it's time for one of those mega updates that come along every now and then. Working from today backwards...

Today has seen me moving the rack from its previous home upstairs in the office to somewhere else. This involved de-racking everything, taking the rack apart, huffing it all down two flights of stairs and then putting it back together in its new location. The UPS (3u APC 2.2kVA) weighs far too much. Managed to do it all in about 5 hours, which wasn't too bad. The reward, after sweating buckets was a nice bath, a glass of coke and a pack of marshmallows.

Yesterday we headed over to see Joel, Nicky and their kids for their summer barbecue. We needed to give the new car (see below) a run out - we'd also not seen them since the wedding, so it was good to catch up with them.

Last week, we took delivery of a new car. We'd sold the Saab due to it starting to become a bit impractical before the Eisteddfod, and since then I'd been borrowing a jeep from Sioned's Dad. Due to the miles I'm doing now, a diesel was required - so we're now the proud owners of a BMW 3 series diesel - photos here. This also involved seeing a couple of cars which... weren't quite up to scratch. I'd originally been looking at Mercedes C220 CDIs. Myself and Sioned's Dad went to see one in Bradford which was - for want of a better word - a bit of a shed. For the money, it had surface rust, knackered wheels and stained seats. Nice. We then went to see a BMW 3 series diesel in Nottingham. You'd kind of hope that a diesel engine (well, any engine really) would have oil in it. Not this one. Plus (bearing in mind it's a diesel) hadn't been serviced for around 30000 miles. Ouch. We walked away in both cases. I'm rather pleased with the one we finally bought.

I've been working from home a bit during the two weeks since the Eisteddfod, mainly due to being horribly knackered after it, and mainly because it had given me some good ideas about where I wanted to go with the website that I've been working on. Most of this has come through to fruition now, with a nice enquiries management/CRM bolted on which does some bespoke functions, as well as building in some other things which we needed. Pretty productive all in.

Over all, the Eisteddfod was pretty successful - and I rather enjoyed it, much more than I did the one in Swansea last year. I also did some followspotting work there, which involved actually sitting on the rig. I love doing work like that :-) The Internet connectivity didn't get much better during the week after my previous post - we were lucky to see more than half of the day with any connectivity, much less anything capable of uploading photos/videos. Whilst traffic shaping there was obviously a taken (since it was being run with ADSL as the backhaul), you'd still hope for some form of upstream bandwidth.

During the Eisteddfod (well, before actually - but I'd not been able to put my finger on what it was) the D100 suffered a shutter failure. It's not a total failure (yet?) - exposures faster than 1/320th see a black banding appear over the image. Fixation want £180 to replace this. In other news - Nikon have announced the D3. 9fps! 9! My god.

In other news, Mum & Dad are up this weekend - it'll be good to see them again. They're staying overnight as well, which means we'll be able to do a few more bits with them than usual.

This week I'm working at The Eisteddfod in Mold, for the North Wales Welsh for Adults Centre. We're relying heavily on an internet connection as we're uploading photos, video and webcam output live to the website. It's kind of important to us.

The company providing the connection (I'll not mention names, but they're quite big in North Wales) are charging a fairly high fee for what's essentially just ADSL (think over £100 for a week). We've had in the region of 4 hours service during the 9 hours I was on site. When it was working, it was shaped to hell - mainly, I suspect, because it was ADSL. I'd be interested to know just how many customers are being shoved down a single DSL because the latency was shocking (131ms to a machine that usually returns about 5ms from my home ADSL, and <1ms from the University).

Hopefully the rest of the week will bring a better service, but I'm not holding out much hope.

In other news, apparently I walked through a shot which was subsequently broadcast on national (Wales) telly earlier this evening.

I like to think that I can live a pretty simple existance (for a geek) - give me a laptop, an Internet connection and the occasional bit of food and drink and I'm happy to go on for as long as I need to.

I've been down in Swansea in South Wales for the past week - it's not often that work send me away for stuff. Perhaps the last time was when I was at the Eisteddfod, strangely enough in Swansea, this time last year. That was only for a couple of days, so the effects weren't quite as pronounced as they are now, and things were slightly different then anyway.

When you're away with work - whatever the reason, if it's being away on training courses, or conferences, or just working away - that's why you're there. To work. That's true to a point, the point being that I'm only paid to work for a set amount of time each day. If they want to buy more time off me - fine, go for it. As it stands, I feel slightly taken advantage of. The rest of my day isn't even my own when I'm away, because I'm in an area I don't know, with nobody around me that I know, fitting in to someone elses version of the world. It's just gone 2300, and I'm bloody starving. I phone for room service, because I fancy an ice cream. Can't be done - last food is served at 2200, it's a choice of sandwiches or wraps (isn't that essentially the same thing?). Apparently people don't want food after 2200. But wait, isn't this just an all expenses paid holiday in a fancy posh hotel? On the one hand, you're having your food and drink paid for, but on the other, you've got nobody to enjoy the going out bit with. Sitting alone in restaurants, eating alone. Going to the pub in the hotel with nobody else to enjoy it with. All of the empty business suits are sat there doing the same thing - apparently relaxing after a hard day doing pointless but oh-so-important business deals that'll change the world. Does the sneer give away that I'm totally fed up?

I think this reinforces the point that every single person is unique, and taking the person out of their own environment and putting them into the one-size-fits-all world of being on the road doesn't work for me. I've got an Internet connection that feels like wading through treacle, a telly that shows Sky News (no BBC News 24), the single music channel available is TMF (how many times can they rebroadcast the same show in 24 hours?) and the only kids channel is CBBC, which finishes broadcasting at 1900 each day. Great. The menu in the hotel bar hasn't changed once, and eating out in town ensures you end up feeling like a social lepper because you're eating alone. One of my friends suggested I take something to read (note: Make sure you get the free newspaper from the hotel each morning) just so that you don't end up studying the wallpaper in the restaurant too heavily.

There's only so many things you can do before you just end up being bored with trying to stop yourself from being bored. Last night I found myself organising the Documents folder and doing the things I'd been procrastinating over for far too long. Things that had long ago been put in the "far too pointless to even consider doing" pile are now finding the light of day.

To the people that like being on the road - good luck to you, and long may you enjoy it. It's not for me though, and I'm going to pay far more consideration to the length of the stay whenever something like this comes up again. There's far more to working away than first meets the eye.

I've been slack in my updating of the blog again of late, it seems, so an update on everything interesting (not that much then...).

Firstly, work - as usual, this is pretty high up on my agenda. In the past week I've been put on notice that I'm going to be losing a pretty big ongoing contract that I've enjoyed for nearly a year. In one way it was a bit of a shock, but in others there'd been signs that it was on its way out. This isn't something that's down to me, but the department that pays me has lost a significant amount of funding - there's going to be significant job losses across the board, and it looks very much like I'm going to be out. That said, the fact that the contract has lasted this long is frankly quite shocking. It's good that it's lasted this long. On relaying this information to Sioned, she said that I shouldn't worry too much as I'll no doubt manage to fill the gap quite easily. Still, I didn't think that it'd be as quick as having an e-mail some 7 hours after hearing the above news asking if I'd like to consider working on another contract with another public sector organisation around here. A further phone call today sees me scheduling the meeting for the middle of next week. Monday I've got another meeting to finally hand over a working version of a piece of software I've been developing for the last few weeks to a local SMC. It's been an interesting project as - whilst it's just-another-piece-of-software, it's been developed for use in a sector I've got absolutely no experience of. This is one of the nice things about working in the way that I do - I get to experience a lot of new things and constantly add to my knowledge. Next Wednesday sees me heading down to Swansea for a few days for a training course. The University are sending me down there, and I'm staying in the new SA1 development. I gather there's a lot of nice places to go out and intend to have a good mooch around the area whilst I'm there. If anyone can recommend good eateries that cater for vegetarians and any other places I should look at whilst I'm there, then let me know! I'm there for 5 days all in, so I've got a bit of time.

In geekery news, I've been giving the new Macbook Pro a hell of a hammering. It's been used to edit about 60 hours of video so far, done some audio recording (doing editing on the fly) under Logic, as well as doing a fair bit of work under Parallels. Frankly, it's been utterly flawless. I'm really rather pleased with it, although as expected, the video editing eats disk like it's going out of fashion.

Our car is up for sale. The Saab is going to be gone soon, and we're replacing it with a Mercedes C220 or C270. The Saab - whilst bags of fun to drive, is costing me an absolute fortune to run being as I'm doing so many miles at the moment. It returns a not-unreasonable 30mpg from a 2.0 litre petrol with a turbo behind it. That said, it's still a bit too low so we're opting for a boring-but-more-economic diesel next.

House stuff. We've pretty much decided we're going to stay where we are for now. Whilst our house is still worth a pretty respectable amount, we're now at the stage where we're close to being pretty happy with it. During the last week we've managed to finish off the new kitchen which has been a project going on for about 6 weeks. We've now got some rather nice new worksurfaces (black, of course) with funky new cupboards everywhere. We've also changed the format of the kitchen ever so slightly (moving the cooker a bit). Today has seen us taking the back garden apart - ripping the whole lot up in preparation for another change there. We've now got a skip full of crap just outside.

I somehow managed to end up being one of the few that were chosen to be offered tickets for Live Earth at Wembley this weekend, although we didn't really much fancy the line up, nor the trip down to London and ending up back here at some stupid hour, and besides - it wasn't exactly a cheap gig either (£125 for a pair of tickets?! Screw that) so didn't bother going. It's been a pretty reasonable decision, I think, as I've had far too much stuff to do this weekend (finishing touches to the software et al).

I think that's about it for now.

I've used a laptop as my main machine for some years now - probably around 7. As such, the machine gets a lot of abuse, and needs a fair bit of grunt behind it to cover everything that I'll possibly throw at it. This ranges from: o Database development (MySQL, MS SQL and Access) o Web development (primarily in PHP, but written by hand in a text editor) o Application development (usually in VB) o Graphics editing (Photoshop usually) o Recently, video editing (Premiere) o Massive amounts of e-mail (Thunderbird, which usually takes about 600mb of RAM)

My previous laptop - a Toshiba 1130 had been bought 4 years ago. It's done an *amazing* job and I'd have no problems recommending a Toshiba to anyone who needed a laptop. So why have I changed to a Mac now?

Toshiba weren't able to offer me a machine which fitted my needs exactly. The previous laptop was pretty basic in what peripherals it had. The physical an technical needs of the machine are: o It's got to be small(ish) and light. o Needs to have onboard wireless networking. This is a *must*. o Ideally have onboard Bluetooth. o Decent amount of RAM. My previous machine had a gig. Anything less than this isn't any good to me. o Firewire. I'm going to be doing a considerable amount of stuff over the next year with video editing. o With the above, it's going to need a big-ish hard disk on it and a DVD burner. o It needs to look relatively pretty. This doesn't bother me personally, but being married to (and living with) a non-geek, it needs to be relatively unobtrusive.

Toshiba (and some other contenders) were able to offer something which ticked some of the boxes, but not all of them.

It was an odd choice that I started investigating the Mac. I know Joel relatively well and have a deep respect for his technical ability and consider myself to work in a similar way. He's recently converted to a Macbook Pro (from here known as an MBP) and is working extremely well in it. One of the things that I need to be able to do is take to a new machine easily and not have to go through a significant learning curve. This was one of the things that's always steered me away from OSX (Mac's own operating system). With the recent developments within the Apple field of things like Bootcamp and Parallels, which allow you to run Windows (and other operating systems) natively on the newer Intel based Mac hardware, this was becoming a non-issue rapidly.

Sioned and myself headed over to Manchester a couple of weeks ago to the Apple store there to compare the different models. Did I want a Macbook or an MBP? Glossy screen or matte? After making the choice, I put a call in to the Apple sales people and ordered a 15" MBP with glossy screen. It arrived yesterday, taking a total of 11 days from ordering to delivery. Why didn't I order over the counter in the shop? Because I work for a University I get a significant discount which isn't available over the counter.

I was concerned that the screen would have problems with glare, which was one of the reasons for checking it out in the shop. This isn't a concern for me, although if you have any possibility at all of using the screen in direct sunlight, go with the matte screen.

Out of the box, OSX is rather intuitive. It sets itself up quickly and easily. I'm rather impressed. Some of the foibles of it are taking some getting used to, but I suspect that's partly coming from a ridiculous number of years using nothing but Windows. I remember changing from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 and wondering where Program Manager had gone. This feels pretty similar.

I downloaded the Boot Camp Beta and set about installing that, but found that A) You can't install from a USB memory key B) If you burn a CD, it needs to be bootable. This caused a few coasters, but I was well on my way after a bit of googling.

From here, I set Parallels up so that it would use the existing bootcamp setup, so essentially I can run XP natively and also within OSX. This seems a pretty decent setup. Whilst Parallels is absolutely fantastic, it's still suffering some issues in that giving it a really intensive workout can cause it to slow down. Because resources are shared between OSX and XP in this way, the whole machine isn't available to either OS. As such, when I'm running resource hungry applications, this does become apparent.

Safari seems a bit unstable, having crashed on me four times so far - quite often whilst looking at results on Google, which is a little disturbing. I've given up on that for now since I prefer the UI of Firefox anyway.

Overall, I'm rather pleased. There's lots of nice little things that've been well thought out, ranging from the charger having the inability to tear itself, instead being held in place by a magnet. The keyboard which lights up and the screen which dims when in a dark room... you can tell it's a good amount of design time has gone into it.

I'm looking forward to using this machine for the next few years.

Me: "So basically, you make your pricing up as you go along, but want the system to account for that?" Them: "Um, sort of..."

Pfft.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2106031,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=11

I agree.

Last week (a week ago today) I ordered a Macbook Pro via the Apple UK Store. The "priority" shipping still seems to take a while. Saturday, they e-mailed me to say it'd been dispatched. It seems they dispatch from Shanghai, so it's going to take a couple of days yet before I get my hands on it.

Anyway.

The tracker that Apple user is a bit pants, but once it's actually shipped out, they'll send you a number starting 80. Pop that into this website: http://www.apecode.com/appletrack/ and you'll get some far more verbose information. Apparently mine landed in the Netherlands earlier today, and has subsequently left again.

Yesterday Sioned & me headed over to the Trafford Centre in Manchester for me to coo over the new Macbook Pro lineup. I was undecided between the glossy and matte screen of the 15" versions (anything bigger would be too much for me - I like to be able to travel light when I need to and sling everything into a single bag). It came down to how much glare the glossy screen would give. I'll be going with the glossy screen and putting an order in through Procureweb, which gives an impressive discount for University people. The reason for the new purchase? My four year old Toshiba Satellite is now showing its age - depending on where pressure is laid on the keyboard, it'll simply switch itself off. This isn't a battery or power supply issue - the same thing will happen on either. I've taken the laptop apart to a reasonable level, but I suspect that it's a cracked mainboard.

The weather was also with us for the journey there (and back), with us having the top down the whole way.

Today I watched an the Canadian Grand Prix which, to be honest, was utterly storming. The first race win for Lewis Hamilton was well deserved, but it's very rare that we see such attrition in a race now. The fact that Robert Kubica survived such a large crash, as well as the others who piled it into the final corner shows how far F1 has come now. Interesting also that two were black flagged. When did that last happen?

Good to see that the Judge in the Paris Hilton case actually finished what he'd set out to do. Looks like he set out to prove a point and he's now made it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6735631.stm

The line "Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton has been taken screaming from a Los Angeles court..." sets the scene well. A veritable woo and yay to the Judge.

Sioned & me went to see the Manic Street Preachers, supported by The Enemy. Although people didn't immediately recognise the name of the support band, but given that they've been getting a fair amount of airplay on Radio 1 (amongst others), their music brought the "Aaah, them!" response. The Enemy did a good job of warming up the crowd ready for the main act, doing a 25 minute slot. I'm sure we'll be seeing plenty more of them soon. Someone asked how long - a year perhaps? I'd suggest less. 6 months - if that. The Manics came on at 9, and I was in the pit for the first three songs. Opening with some of their older stuff, including Motorcycle Emptiness, their set lasted for just over 90 minutes, mixing in some tracks off the new album as well. The acoustic Ready For Drowning - which covered a wardrobe change for Nicky Wire - was an excellent half way marker, with them saving the best for last - Design For Life, which showed them on good form.

Good gig.

As some of you will know, a fair portion of the work I do is in the Higher Education sector. I recently needed to buy a small amount of kit (just over a hundred quid). A quick search on the interweb showed that Expansys was going to be the cheapest supplier of said kit.

On checking our finance database, it turns out that the University has an account with Expansys. Yay! I call them up and say "Hi, here's our account number - I'd like to make an order please!". But what's this? Because I didn't open the original account - and I have no idea who did (let's see... 3500 employees. It could be someone from Finance itself, or someone from an individual department...) I can't place an order. Hum. Ok. Apparently we can't open a credit account with them because we've not got an order history (WTF? The University already has an account - you've just said that - but we can't open another because the University hasn't ordered from you before?). This strikes me as a bit chicken and egg, but anyway. Most suppliers fall over themselves to open an account for a University. My options, apparently, are pay for it myself and then claim it back (The University frowns on this as, I understand, the Tax man really doesn't like it), or get a pro-forma from them. Once this is paid, they'll ship the goods. I opt for the latter, since this is the only option open to me.

The pro-forma is paid on 15 May 2007 by BACS from our end. Now, I know BACS is slow, but it's absolutely 100% in their account on Monday. This we know. I ring them on Monday. "We've not received the payment". Fine - maybe it's taking a day to show on their end for some reason. I ring back Tuesday. "We've not received the payment". By this time, I'm starting to do my nut. It should not take 10 days to order a hundred quids worth of stuff. I give them all of the references from the BACS transfer - the bank for the University has spoken to the receiving bank and they've confirmed the money is there - but Expansys are saying it's not. They agree to get their finance department to look into it and contact me.

This morning - finally - an e-mail. They've received the money. Yay! But wait - there's more: "We expect the stock to arrive on an internal transfer in the next 3-5 days".

Expansys. Bunch of utter muppets. Keep well away from them if you want any chance of seeing your stuff within a reasonable time frame.

The A55 stretches all the way across North Wales, from Chester in the east, to Anglesey in the west. Coming along this road, as you pass Llandullas and head towards Colwyn Bay, many people would see the landmark 70 Degrees Hotel sat high above them on the cliffs. It's a building regarded by many as a local landmark, telling them that they'd not be much longer on the road - an early "welcome home" type of thing. The hotel was a 70s design, and didn't really receive the love and attention it deserved - quickly falling out of favour, and soon became derelict. It's long been boarded up, with signs on it announcing that it was for sale. The site became a haven for drug use, with areas hidden away from site. I'd been up there before and found possible entrance points, but the possibility of having my (not inexpensive) camera nicked was something that had put me off.

Heading east along the A55 late last week, Sioned and myself noticed that there was significant work taking place - the site was being demolished to make way for new housing - 56 new residences (apartments and houses). We went up the next day and I spoke to some people on the site who agreed to let me take photos of what was left.

I've tried to capture some of the design of the building - many of the internal and external walls, as well as the stairs, for instance are set at 70 degrees instead of the "standard" 90, which gave the hotel its name. For instance, you can see it here: http://photos.garysmith.org.uk/p41456611.html.

There's split opinion on if this is a good thing - in some ways, the hotel was perhaps giving a bad name to the area. Whilst locals regarded it as a landmark, people from outside the area would've seen it for what it was - an eyesore, which was greeting people as they entered north west Wales.

http://myfriendlyfox.com/extensions/ebay-toolbar/

Adds lots of nice eBay functionality to Firefox for those who (like me) seem to spend far more time on eBay than they should.

I've had my D100 for a while now, and one of the things I've never been able to work out is how to "reset" the folders that the photos are written to on the CF card. Whilst I've not managed to go "round the clock" with it yet, through various uses of the camera, I'd ended up on 111ND100. This isn't really a major problem, but one of those minor niggles.

In the playback menu, there's a folder designate option - this is used to decide where the images that are shown are taken from (for instance, you can use this as a back door to hiding photos). This option, unsuprisingly, doesn't do what I was looking for.

I played about today as I had a few spare minutes - this works. There's probably another way of doing this, but this works for me. Take the CF card out of the camera. On the CSM menu, go to File No Seq (on my D100, it's option 5 of the CSM Menu) There's three options: Yes, No, Reset. Select reset, and then press right. With the CF card out of the camera, stick it into an external reader/writer and delete the existing folders on it. Put the card in to the camera, and take a photo - it'll be called 100ND100\DSC_0001.JPG.

It should really be possible to do this with the card in the camera and without having to delete the existing folders... but it's not (or so it seems)

I've neglected the blog a bit of late. I usually try to write the interesting (well, to me, anyway) stuff I've been doing. I've been feeling a bit "Meh" of late, and not really been up to much, and what I have done hasn't been that interesting anyway. Or, at least, it didn't/doesn't feel like it.

On the work front, I've toned down on what I'm doing with the theatre as I'm absolutely knackered. Having said that, a desperate (ish) phone call over the weekend is seeing me working there tonight. That, and I've got a few bits on the go at the moment (designing and implementing a client management/stock management system for a small trader near where I am, which should also entail some ongoing support for them), as well as some ongoing projects in the University. I was on an interview panel last week which recruited a new System Information Officer for my old post within the University. This doesn't mean an immediate end to the contract I'm doing there - if anything, it's going to ramp up for a few weeks whilst the new chap gets bedded in, and then will start to drop off in mid-August to September time. My other main contract with the University is term-time only, so will be coming up for a rest in a few weeks time when the term finishes.

I took a brand spanking new Mercedes C200 CDI out last weekend (ie not the bank holiday weekend) for a test drive as we've pretty much decided that's what we're going for (well, it'll be a C200 or C220 - there's not much in it. Same engine, just the C200 is chipped down). The toss up was between the BMW 320d and the Mercedes C200/C220 CDI. The Mercedes won it for us as they just feel that bit nicer. It seems to pull sluggishly compared to the Saab, but then the Mercedes is a diesel, and also doesn't have a turbo on it. On the subject of cars, the front left tyre on the Saab had a valve failure last week. Trying to park the car with half the pressure it should have (usually has 33PSi, but had 14 in it) was an odd experience. Turn the wheel and nothing happens.

We've bought a new kitchen! Delivery is next week (Tuesday). Sioned has been muttering for aeons that she's not happy with it. The arrival last week of a new Smeg FAB32NE4 pretty much cemented that we needed a new kitchen to go round it (how does that one work then...?) We managed to get the price down from a mere £1037 to £410. Again - how does that one work then?

This weekend (bank holiday - yay!) saw us have some friends over on Friday evening for the first barbecue of the season. The evening went on for a good while, before people left at around 2330. Ace. Sunday saw Mum & Dad up for the day and the traditional visit to the Llandudno Victorian Extravaganza. Unfortunately the weather had turned on the Sunday - up until then it was top notch, with Friday and Saturday (as well as the days before) nice and warm. Sunday was overcast, damp and drizzly. The original plan had been for another barbecue, but this wasn't to be, even after we'd spent 30 quid on food for said grilling.

Yesterday saw us shopping for a new telly. Not that we need one, but we thought it'd be rather nice. We're a bit restricted on how big we can go at the moment - the largest that'll fit in the gap being 32". Could we find something with a decent colour reproduction in that size? Hell no. Well, not at a sensible (ie <£900) price. We're not too fussed about 1080p at the moment, but even so - a contrast ratio greater than 1200:1 would be nice. Apparently achieving real black in anything 32" or lower is unheard of. Ho hum.

That is all.

Fotopic moved house yesterday. I drove over to Wakefield and met up with Joel, Nicky and Keiron. After a couple of hours rest there before the driving and the work started, we left Wakefield at 1700 with Nicky driving down to London. Arriving at Docklands at around 2000, we headed for food at Pizza Express. Whilst here, Joel received a call from Clara.net, the current hosts of Fotopic asking what was happening about routing. Nice and on the ball. We left Pizza Express and went straight to GS1 and started de-racking the gear, getting it loaded on to trolleys and taken down to the cars. Small problems with paperwork not having been passed between people slowed us down, but no major problems. We left GS1 at 0030 and hit the road. Minor GPS problems involving tinted windscreens later, we picked up the A12 heading north at 0100, arriving at Fotopic's new home in Leeds at 0345 (a good run, those of you that know UK geography will agree *cough*)

Re-racking there, we didn't come across any major issues. I put in all of the network cabling and tried to keep things relatively sane, even though in an environment like that it won't last for long. Everything was back just before 9, and we left the building at around 10.

I decided that rather than getting some sleep at Joel & Nicky's that it'd be better to drive straight back and go straight to bed there, but only do a couple of hours sleep, instead catching up tonight. We'll see how well that one works out.

Just getting my first listen to Mark Ronson's new album - Version. I've written about how eagerly I've been waiting for this album before now.

I cannot emphasise this enough: Buy this album.

The guy is an utter genius.

More words would detract from how bloody amazing this album is.

I had a phone call just now from the chief LX at the theatre. Janet, the operations manager passed away over the weekend. One of the few managers that really understood techies; absolutely top person, who I really got on well with, and always had time to listen to us and what was going on in our lives.

Will be missed. :(

After dropping the D100 near to the end of the honeymoon, I found I'd got a massive amount of dust on the CCD. I was concerned that the fall might've actually damaged it, but this wasn't the case. I popped to Cambrian on Saturday and picked up a proper cleaning kit from them which set me back 20 quid, which is from a company called Green Clean. The kit is a wet and dry kit - 3 lots of wet, 3 lots of dry. If the dry doesn't work, give the wet one a go. Fine.

Absolutely amazing. One sweep with the dry stick and it's like new. Photoshop picked up absolutely nothing from a test shot I did afterwards.

Well worth it, says I.

We actually arrived back home late on Friday, at just before 2000.

Distance travelled during the honeymoon: 2218 miles Top speed: 139mph Average speed: 72mph Total driving time: 28 hours 42 minutes Total spent: £1851 Total time away: 12 days 6 hours

The journey back was long, but the weather good. The E40 between Belgium and France was a real pain, with lots of delays. The GPS reckoned on 2 hours 10 minutes for that section. It actually took us nearly four hours. Dover onwards was absolutely fine though.

Why has it taken so long to get round to writing this? We needed a good rest.

For some reason, our stay in Hannover was rather cheap. Perhaps this made up in some way for the lack of things to do there. The drive on to Antwerp was going to be long. Very long. We'd estimated at least four hours, probably more. As we were leaving Germany today, I had my last bit of fun on the unrestricted autobahn and hit a new top speed - 224kmh or 139mph. We crossed from Germany to .nl after lunch, spent an hour driving across the Netherlands, then hit Belgie. It's worthy of a note that if you're looking for the Novotel in Mechelen, don't trust the GPS as it's not possible to drive to it. Instead of putting Van Beethovenstraat 1 in, put Guldenstraat in instead, and it'll get you to the car park. The Novotel is next to the Match supermarket - it's entirely possible to drive by it and miss it, so keep an eye out for the Match sign.

The area is absolutely gorgeous. We went and had tea at a place called De Kraanbrug which is rather top notch, before doing some shopping at the aforementioned supermarket, then spending well over an hour wandering around the streets. The Stella advert with that pub in it which looks like it's in a glorious part of southern France or somesuch? It's exactly like that. A warm night that we were able to just slowly wander around the area and admire the place.

Back to the hotel then for the end to a pretty damn good evening.

Tomorrow - we're probably going to head back early. It's about 2 hours to Calais from here, so it looks like we're going to do the whole lot in one fell swoop - from here back to North Wales. It's going to be a long slog, but with Sioned still being a bit under the weather, it'll probably be for the best.

We decided after writing the previous blog entry that Sioned wouldn’t be too good going for breakfast in the tower, so Sioned said that I should go on my own. I thought that some night time photography from there would be pretty spectacular. I wasn’t wrong. It costs 8 Euro to get in and it’s open to anybody. The lift takes you up to just over 200m. It can only be described as mind blowing. If you’re ok with heights, it’s one of the places you have to do. It’s the third largest tower in Europe and really does offer amazing views over Berlin. I’d done the balloon the previous day, and seen some other towers as well. Absolutely nothing on this place. I was up there for about an hour, just looking across Berlin.

Sioned was waking up quite a bit in the night – she’s worse today than yesterday, but that’s not all bad since we weren’t aiming to do much today anyway. It took about 2.5 hours to get from Berlin to Hannover – the A2 was pretty quick most of the way with an occasional burst up to 120mph. Once in Hannover, the hotel wasn’t too difficult to find. As soon as we got here, we had a look at stuff to do. I’ll be honest – there’s very very little. The only real thing that took our fancy was the Sealife Centre. We dropped some bits off in the hotel room and headed straight back out again and found that everyone else had the same idea as us. The queue was ridiculously long. That idea aborted, it was back again and have a google to see what else there is. The short answer: nothing. The long answer: still nothing. I decided to go and scout out the area to see if this really was the case and also look for somewhere decent to eat. This only came with one condition: absolutely no more Italian. I ended up finding the local bus station and passed about 4 non-suitable-for-various-reasons eateries on the way. Returning back with the bad news, we considered our options: A) Eat at the hotel B) Ask reception C) Pick one of the places we’d already discounted D) Get in the car and drive around randomly until we find somewhere passable.

We chose D. After about 10 minutes driving, we happened on what seems to be a Spanish and/or Mexican area of Hannover, with a couple of Tapas places, and a Mediterranean. We opted for a quiet little Tapas which left us absolutely stuffed for the princely sum of 33 Euro. Not bad. We asked the waitress exactly what there was to do in Hannover, mentioning we’d just come from Berlin. Our suspicions were realised: absolutely nothing to do. That said, it is quite nice to not have anything to do and just spend time with each other.

Tomorrow we’re off to Antwerp. Hopefully we’ll be a bit luckier in finding things to do.

Sioned was feeling a bit better this morning, so we left the hotel before 10 towards Checkpoint Charlie. It's a short distance - a five minute walk from the hotel. We spent a good while looking around the museum there which is well worth visiting. From here, we had some breakfast/lunch at a place we later noticed was called Snackpoint Charlie (sigh). After food, we went over to Potsdamer Platz - we took a train the short distance down Willhelmstrasse from our hotel at Anhalterstrasse since Sioned was still feeling a bit iffy. After a brief look around here - the display about the wall, the Sony Centre and so on, we decided to try and make our way to Brandenburg Gate. This didn't go too well. I wasn't too sure where it was - we ended up back at the hotel and I popped the location into the GPS. 1.7kms. Hm. It must be close. It was about 200 yards from where we were stood. (sighs again)

We eventually parked up and had a brief look at the gate, before deciding to get on a rather warm looking sightseeing bus. It was cold, and raining - this would take us around the places without having to get too wet. Woo. TBH, the guide was pretty good and was able to relay what we were seeing to us very well. A few of the places, we went back to a bit later on to get a better look - the Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) and also the Fernsehturm Berlin (Berlin TV Tower). I visited the TV tower on my own, but the queue there was pretty hefty. There's a viewing platform at just over 200m which is open to the public there - hence the queue. I'm aiming to get back there early tomorrow and see if I can get in then.

By now it was rather late - we'd spent about 2 hours on the sightseeing bus, and a further 45 minutes or so looking at the Cathedral and tower in more detail. Food was in order again. We'd noticed a vegetarian restaurant on our travels, which turned out to pretty much do curry or curry - not what we wanted. A brief wander turned up a top notch Italian (yes, see previous blog entries about the German love of Italian food) which our stomachs told us to settle for.

We had a stop off at a supermarket on the way back - stocking up with supplies for the journey to Hannover tomorrow and a picnic somewhere on the way. Sioned is still feeling a little ill, but is far better than yesterday.

We left Hamburg pretty early on and after a minor mishap with the GPS vs one way streets, we picked up the Autobahn. Pretty uneventful really - however, I did manage to set a new top speed. We've now seen 135mph, or 215kph. Pretty impressive. We arrived in Berlin at around 1430 and checked in to our room. Another small issue that they'd not got our booking - firstly, it was under the surname of Gary and forename of Smith. Second, it was booked for the 02/05 instead of 02/04. Still, we've at least got somewhere to sleep. We took a look around the area and Sioned complained of feeling rather poorly. Got her back to the hotel and put her to bed whilst I went and sorted some stuff out on my own. It was at this point that I managed to drop the D100 - hard - on to the surface of the car park. It picked up some scratches to the memory card door, but other than that, looked fine. I looked in again on Sioned and she was feeling pretty awful - running a high temperature, lethargic, swollen glands - not really the first thing you'd ask for on your honeymoon. We decided I'd go to the nearest pharmacy and see if they could do anything for us. Absolutely top class chemist who understood pretty much all of the English I threw at her (my German doesn't stretch to swollen glands and sore throat), but could only say that she'd had lots of people describing the same thing recently - ie we're stuffed. However, she did say that there's a top notch doctor just down the road who'd have a look if we were wanted a second opinion. Fair enough. I phoned Sioned and let her know what I'd found out, and she said I should stay out and do something whilst she slept. Sioned had spotted a balloon bobbing up and down from the hotel window and suggested I go and have a look at it. The Berlin Hi-Flyer is pretty much just over the road from where we're staying - a massive helium filled balloon tethered to earth that costs 13 Euro to take a ride on. Mindblowing views across Berlin from 150m up. Well worth a visit. Unfortunately, whilst 150m, the D100 started acting up - badly. When I released the shutter, it would "lock" - the camera would die entirely. Nothing on any of the screens, it wouldn't switch on or off. I removed the battery, but it back in again and the display said err. Bugger. I did this a few more times and managed to get a few more photos out of it, but some of them were immediately appearing as corrupt. This wasn't looking good. After the balloon landed, I went straight back to the hotel and googled for the symptoms. Apparently I could've knocked the aperture link arm from the camera to the lens. A costly replacement at around 0, and something prone to going in this model. Another article mentioned the same problem, but found it was experienced with either the EN-EL3 battery was at the end of its life, or the alkaline batteries used in the MB-D100 grip were losing their charge. Although the battery in the camera was still showing full, I'd be able to take one exposure - then it would show that it'd lost some charge. Go to take another, and the camera falls over. I replaced the battery - and all is well in the world. To say I breathed a sigh of relief is an understatement. I also called NPS and they've said they'll send me out a spare memory card door to replace the scratched one. A veritable woo and yay all round. Sioned was still in bed at this time and feeling no better. We decided we'd call a doctor out to her to make sure that nothing was really amiss, and generally to put her mind at rest. I organised this, then headed out to have a look around, and also grab some food. I've only got as far as Postdamer Platz, but Berlin is an absolutely mind blowing place. Take a look at the display opposite the Pricewaterhousecooper building, outside the train station - the photo of the church being blown up to make way for the building of the wall is certainly one that makes you think. I found something to eat at a restaurant opposite the Discover Legoland building, then headed back to the hotel. It wasn't long before the doctor arrived and diagnosed what the chemist had said - it's something doing the rounds, but he's given us the name of something to buy which might make her feel a bit better, as well as leaving us a hefty bill for his visit. Hopefully Sioned will feel a bit better tomorrow so that she can experience some of what Berlin has to offer. It seems a spectacular place.

A lie in was well needed, so getting up at 1145 wasn't a great problem for us. We immediately headed out and caught a bus to the U/S-Bahn station at Ohlsdorf to get to Hamburg hbf. We'd heard from some other Brits that certain parts of the train network wouldn't be running today, but weren't sure which areas would be affected. Sure enough, we were turfed off the train at Barmbek station. After a bit of asking around, we found we could continue our journey on the U2 line. That out of the way, we opted for lunch at a little bar/cafe thing right next to the station, before taking one of the touristy-sight seeing buses around the city. This took a good 90 minutes and showed us a fair bit of the place. Unfortunately, by the time we'd finished it, most places were closing up. It's worth noting that Hamburg is very much like the UK in that after about 1630 on a Sunday, there's very little to do in the way of going out. After the bus journey had shown us where things were, we took a walk around the Elbe and some of the more upmarket shops in Hamburg, before catching a train from Jungfernstieg back to the hotel. We headed back out again at about 7 with the intention of catching a cruise on the Elbe, but - as mentioned above, there's very little that actually happens on a Sunday night in Hamburg. Everywhere is deathly quiet. No boats were running a service at all. We'd originally intended to get something to eat on said boat, so since this wasn't happening, we took to looking around for somewhere to eat. Now, one of the problems we've found and as documented in previous blog entries - there's only so much eating out you can do. The Germans seem to love their Italian food. Walking down one road, we found 4 pizzerias within 150 yards. It's that bad. So happening upon a restaurant which wasn't purely advertising Italian food was something of a boon to us. The Hamburger Fischerstussen looked good from the outside. A vegetarian (me) being in a fish restaurant is quiet a thing, but they were able to cater for me. Sioned took the prawns and was blown away by them. Apparently they're the best she's ever tasted. A glowing recommendation. If ever you're in the area, give the place a look in. Portions are absolutely massive, too. After the meal, we went over to the Reeperbahn, as I suggested we would in the previous blog entry. Even this was incredibly quiet and gave the feeling that it was far less secure than the previous night had lead us to believe. On the tourist bus thing earlier, we'd noticed a rather large fun-fair at one end of the Reeperbahn which we hadn't spotted on our visit last night (we'd not walked that far), so we set a course for that. What a plae. It'd mind blowing, the size of it. We spent a good couple of hours there. Some of the rides would give the British H&S people a heart attack. I found a brilliant go-kart ride. 5.5hp petrol powered go karts on a track that goes up and over. Lots of mad overtaking, lots of silly crashes. Well worth the 3 Euro it cost. Sioned took a go on a pirate ship which left her feeling rather ill, whilst I went on a pretty hefty big wheel which gave some nice views across the city. We arrived back at the hotel at midnight. Tomorrow we're off to Berlin - our hotel is on the Potsdamer Platz, so on the divide between the former east and west Germany.

1102 completed What a day. The hotel we're staying in - an Ibis - was incredibly noisy last night, so sleep was quite broken. After breakfast, we went to Tierpark Hagenbeck, which is a large zoo in a suburb of Hamburg. It's an absolutely huge place, where we spent a good 4 hours walking round looking at all of the animals, ranging from elephants to meerkats to giraffes. Over 60 different animals. Many of them were roaming freely around the park, so it wasn't unexpected to trip over a turkey. The camels were being walked around the park as well whilst we were there. If you're in Hamburg, it's well worth a visit. Sioned really enjoyed the zoo and kept running off looking at the different animals. On the way back from the zoo, we noticed that it was exactly a week since we'd been married. We headed back via a supermarket where we stocked up on crap (chocolate, crisps, drinks, and cheese to go with some bread that we'd, er, borrowed at breakfast). The evening saw us jumping on the U-Bahn to the Reeperbahn. An electric place which really comes to life at night - a very busy place. We're probably going to go back there tomorrow night as well. I'd decided not to take the D100 as we were slightly iffy about how safe the area would be, but it looks like it should be fine. The Reeperbahn is described in many reviews as the seedy side of Hamburg - which is probably a good description of it. Sex shops, lap dancing clubs and so on - it's a rather odd place to look around but there's so many different people there, it's worth a visit. Tomorrow we're going to go into the centre of Hamburg and do the sight-seeing things. The evening will see a cruise on the Elbe, before a possible revisit to the Reeperbahn.

Hamburg. Filthy filthy city. We arrived here after a fairly long drive, at around 1615. The journey was basically straight up the A1. Although there were lots of unrestricted sections, the road was fairly busy so the most we saw was 115mph, and that was only for brief periods. Lunch was at a rather top notch service area where Sioned ordered half a cow which cost about 4 quid, whilst I opted for the slightly more conservative cheese foccacia. After abusing the free refills of Coke, we were back on the road. Hamburg soon came in to view and the GPS took us right to the door. We headed straight out into Hamburg, catching a bus to the train station, then a train to Central Station. Jesus, what a place. It's got nothing on Kings Cross, St Pancras, Waverley. It's huge. Absolutely mental. We left the station and had a walk around the immediate area. Coming from Britain, it's quite odd how in-your-face the porn industry is here. There doesn't seem to be any concept of specialist planning permission for the sex shops - we're not even on the Reeperbahn and at least two fairly long streets dedicated to it. As I say, filthy place. We decided to head back to the hotel and have a meal there since we're both pretty tired. There's a lot to be said for having some bland food after lots of rich and varied stuff. Spaghetti bolognese for me, with salmon steak for Sioned. Really good to have something so run of the mill. Tomorrow we're heading over to Hamburg Zoo, and will be heading to the Reeperbahn in the evening.

Had a lie in this morning as breakfast is served till a bit later in this hotel. I needed some sleep after driving nearly 300 miles yesterday. After breakfast, we did some shopping at the supermarket just over the road. Sioned found all of the toys which aren't available in Britain now. Gluhworms (Glow-worms), something called Girlsworld, Pez... back at the hotel, we decided we'd head in to Cologne itself. A taxi set us back just under 20 Euro, and dropped us right outside the rather impressive twin-spired gothic cathedral here. My mobile then took a journey back to the hotel, where it was handed to reception by the cabbie. I also took the time to climb one of the spires there which, as usual, gave impressive views of the area. Anyone would think I was obsessed with spires. From here we took a look around the shopping area and found a massive home electronics store with some impressive tellies in it. I think Sioned really wanted a look around more than me as she was quite taken with the 65" HDTVs there. From here, we found a whole store devoted to Lego, where you can buy individual building blocks. Remember all the times you needed a red two-er? You can also build people out of the individual bits, so I built a Sioned, and Sioned built me. Just before we went in the shop, we heard a couple of thunder claps, so it was no great suprise when we found it chucking it down as we left the Lego shop. Over the way was a bakery, so we decided to have lunch there whilst the rain died down a bit. We then took a taxi back to the hotel and had a swim before relaxing around the side of the pool. The evening saw us heading to a Greek taverna. Over the past few days we've both eaten extremely well. I struggled to eat half the pizza they'd given me and only had a small handful of chips. The food itself was gorgeous, and as usual, it was rather cheap. We've just been out and filled up with petrol. Today has been a more expensive day than the others - we've bought a few bits for people back home, and also done some touristy stuff. We've been averaging £120 per day which is pretty reasonable (and close to what we'd budgeted). Today has probably set us back closer to £170. Tomorrow is a long-haul driving day - we're going to Hamburg, which is about 4 hours away, so we won't be spending as much anyway. The weekend will probably see us going out a bit more and experiencing the city :)

They've got good curtains at the Chateau Du Lac. The alarm went off and Sioned got up to open the curtains to see what the weather was up to. Sunlight came streaming through the window and temporarily blinded us. Sight regained, we headed up the tower to have some breakfast, before taking a few minutes out sat in the bar where we sorted out some more hotels, uploaded blog entries and photos and so on, and generally sorted bits out. Sioned voiced reservations that the Etap hotels - the first of which we were going to be heading to in Koblenz shortly, may not be quite what we're looking for on our honeymoon. We headed out for a walk around the lake which gave us a nice hour-or-so long walk, before we headed back to the car and set the GPS for Koblenz. It wasn't long before we crossed the border into Germany and we soon found our first unrestricted Autobahn where we could open the car up. The roads were a bit busy, but we managed to see 190km/h easily. We stopped at services - they're nothing like Britain. Clean, cheap and the food is a hell of a lot better - especially the veggie burgers. The decor is also much nicer. Back on the road and the GPS took us to the Etap in Koblenz. It wasn't what we were after. Unfortunately, we'd paid by this point. We jumped back in the car and headed to the Nurburgring. We got slightly lost on the way and drove through some rather odd little village, before actually ending up at the Nurburgring itself. More people arrived - I saw a fair few Brits there and spoke with them about the circuit and also to see if they could recommend any decent hotels. Suggestions of Adenau were made, which I made a mental note of. I hung around and took some photos of the cars in the car park there. Soon, the track opened and many of the cars went out. I gave Sioned a quick run through on the camera to make sure she was happy with it before parting with 19 Euro for a lap and getting in the car. What a hoot. Stuck the hazards on and went out. Absolutely top notch entertainment. Got some very warm brakes and some tyre squeal on the way round. Sioned got some photos of the car on the pit straight. I came in and Sioned agreed to come out on a second lap with me. It really is well worth doing, although Sioned was feeling quite ill afterwards. We managed to get 120mph down the pit straight, which isn't all bad. We drove the short distance in to Adenau - although it's a very pretty place, we didn't really see anywhere that took our fancy hotel wise. We found one hotelier who seemed distinctly anti-Brit. Back to the car and a quick discussion later, we decided to bring our stay in Cologne forward. It'd originally been planned for tomorrow (Thursday), but the GPS reckoned on a 45 minute drive. 45 (or so) minutes later, we arrived at the Mercure hotel in West Cologne - complete with swimming pool, jacuzzi, sauna, etc. Not wanting to drive anywhere now, we looked around the area but weren't too taken with the restaurants around here, so opted to eat at the hotel itself. Once again, top notch food. Tomorrow we'll try to head in to Cologne as there seems to be a fair bit to look at, but we're also going to make use of the facilities here. A busy day!

The morning dawned with a fog across the gardens - it really did look good. As we arrived in reception to ask if a package had arrived, the postman walked in. Talk about timing! Breakfast, then we decided to go and have a look at Blenheim Palace. We'd noticed it was in Woodstock when we visited yesterday. The ferry had been shifted to 1745, so we had plenty of time to kill. As we drove through the gates at Blenheim, we found that it'd cost us around £25 to get in. Sod that. Straight back out again, and a consultation of the GPS told us that there really wasn't that much else to do where we were. It was decided we'd go straight to Dover at that time - we'd probably arrive at 1300ish, but we'd probably find more to do there than where we were. 2.5 hours later, and Dover loomed in to view. We headed straight for the docks so that we could try to change our booking yet again. We mentioned that when we called, the systems were down (which they were), so things might've got a bit confused. We ended up being put on the 1345 sailing. It now being 1305, that was absolutely fine with us. We drove round to lane 124 and waited to be called. On to the ferry, parked up, and walked up to the decks. The boat - Rodin only had two decks, and there's not a great deal to do aside from be ripped off in the shop, or ripped off in the bar, or ripped off in the restaurant. We paid £8 for a plate of chips, and a plate of chips and chili. The rest of the journey was spent trying to keep Sioned from being sick. Soon enough, Calais appeared and we made our way back down to the car to find the alarm going on it. It wasn't too happy about moving around as we pitched and yawed. First thing we needed to do was fill up with petrol. It was 77 Euro to fill it from almost empty, which is pretty close to what we paid at home, so no great saving, although that was the first petrol station outside Calais, so there's a possibility of variations along the way. That done, we hit the road for Brussels. Just over the border into Belgium, we passed by Nieuwpoort. We also saw an impressive crash happen on the other side of the road - a van went piling into the reservation which showered our car with bits of bodywork. Unfortunately we suffered a chip to the windscreen. It's nothing too bad, but will probably need sorting out back in the UK.

We arrived at our hotel at 1845 (after a missed turning) - and what a hotel it is. Beautiful, set on a lake (as the name - Chateau du Lac) would suggest. Dinner this evening was at a pizzeria a short walk away, which was obscenely cheap - 23 Euro to feed the both of us, including drinks. Fantastic service, friendly staff and well worth a visit. We spent the evening being typical Brits by watching BBC1. The room is luxurious, with the bed at least six foot wide (and I'm not joking. It really is). Tomorrow sees us heading on to Koblenz and the Nurburgring.

Bright and early, Sioned calls the surgery. No dice on faxing the prescription - then, a stroke of genius on my part. Why not just stay in Oxford another night and have the tablets sent RMSD? It'd be guaranteed to be there the following day. I speak to the receptionist at the hotel who agrees we can stay another night (albeit in a different room) at the same rate. I then call laterooms who we've got our hotel in Belgium booked with who tell us we'll still have to pay for the room now, even if we don't use it.

Back to the drawing board. Another short discussion and think later, I call laterooms again and lie through my teeth. Booking changed free of charge, we're staying in Oxford for another night. A call to SeaFrance, who we're crossing the Channel with, and it's all sorted out. This is pretty much ok - it means that I still have the same number of no-driving days, although in a slightly different order. We call Sioned's Mum & Dad and tell them to send the tablets to the hotel RMSD, then head out into Oxford. We went to The Oxford Story - a tourist attraction thing about the background and history of the University there, as well as visiting Christ Church, and ended up spending far too much money in the indoor market. Food of every variety - much of it very rich. Gorgeous chocolate, fantastic cheeses. A wide range of fruit and veg. I also took a climb up the tower of one of the churches for some spectacular views of the city. By now, it was getting late again so we headed out of Oxford. On the way in, we'd seen signs for Woodstock, so stopped off there for a brief look around and the obligatory photo. We then headed back to the hotel. Remember I said we needed to change rooms? We arrived in Room D of the Cottage at Weston Manor Hotel and were pretty knackered, so went for a lie down. Except we couldn't. The four poster bed in the room was too short for tall people like us, so we changed room yet again. Although the room was absolutely spot on, Sioned didn't get on with the bed there - she felt it was too small. The evening saw us go out to another pub for a meal in a small village called Kidlington. The pub itself is part of the Harvester chain, but was pretty expensive as things go. We then managed to waste a few quid on the ITBox, before, once again, heading back.

Sunday dawned bright and early. Too early. We knew we'd lose an hour due to the move to BST, so accounted for that when setting the alarm to get breakfast. Except the alarm was a bit too clever and accounted for it as well, so we wound up getting up an hour too early, and an hour too early (iyswim). We decided not to go back to bed, but instead sat and looked at some photos of the previous day.

Slowly, people joined us for breakfast. Ffion and Fran ended up going the other way timewise and were a bit perplexed when, at 1030, they thought it was 0930 and still had time for breakfast.

I managed to find where all of the suits had wound up, and gathered those together. I chucked the PA into the boot of the car along with all of the other bits - we then said our goodbyes to people who'd stayed in Plas Maenan with us as well.

We needed to head over to Gwydir Castle to pick up the case for the 70-200mm lens which'd been left there, then headed back to our house to meet Steve, Marie and Kev so that they could pick the clothes up that they'd left there.

From here, it was over to Sioned's Mum & Dad's place where we were joined by my parents, Laura, my grandparents, Sioned's Taid, and her Mum & Dad as well as Fran, where we opened our wedding presents. We were, quite frankly, shocked at the sheer amount of presents that had been given by people, and indeed some of the presents that had been given by people. Some of the things that people had written in cards were also extremely touching.

After we'd opened the presents, it was time for Mum, Dad, Laura and my grandparents to head off back to Leicester. After waving them off, I headed over to the theatre to return the PA. I then went back over and loaded the car up with the presents we'd received, before going back to our place to drop said presents off and load up with the stuff we'd packed for our honeymoon.

We were on the road for around three, and the GPS took us right up to the gates of the imposing Weston Manor Hotel in Oxford. We arrived there at around 1830, so a pretty decent run down. However, on the way, Sioned realised she'd forgotten something rather important. Forgetting her pill is, shall we say, pretty impressive. After a quick change of room to a much larger one with a four poster bed and a fantastic bathroom, we had a think about our options. We're due to catch a ferry tomorrow, so our options are: 1) Get them shipped to Belgium where they'd hopefully arrive in time. We later found out that exporting prescription drugs without a licence is a little bit illegal, so that one was out. 2) Call the surgery in the morning and get them to fax a prescription to a local chemist. There's an extremely slim chance of this one. 3) Er, pass.

So we'd go out on a limb and try 2. We headed out and ate at a pub about 200yds down the road - the Ben Jonson. The food really was top notch - anyone staying in that part of Oxford would be well recommended to go. Back to the hotel from here for an early-ish night. I made offers to drive back to our house to pick up the tablets, but Sioned refused - it'd be a 7 hour round trip, and tomorrow would effectively be a write off.

I could condense this entry down into a few lines, but I'm going to just write the whole thing, no matter how long it is, since I'd rather keep this as a reflection of the things that happened, in the order they happened. I'm writing this now whilst it's still fresh in my memory, so that nothing is forgotten.

I ended up getting to sleep at sometime around 0030 on Saturday morning, before waking up at around 0830. Kev was staying at our house, and we'd agreed that we'd go over to the snooker club for breakfast at around 0930. Steve called whilst we were there and asked if I could book a taxi for him as he was having some issues getting the local companies to understand where he was (the Travel Inn) and where he wanted to go (my house). I jumped in the bath after returning from the club, and Steve turned up pretty soon after that.

As I got out of the bath, Sioned's Dad arrived with the buttonhole flowers for us. He stayed around for a few minutes - Steve checked some details about his speech with him and the like, whilst I got my suit on and watched telly.

Neal arrived some time around 11 whilst I was sorting myself out in the bathroom - Erica looked a bit perplexed as I waved out of the window with a toothbrush in my mouth. :) He promptly started to get into his suit - which we found was a bit wrong. The suit hire company had sent the wrong sized trousers. Him being a 38, he wasn't going to get into 34 inch trousers. He agreed to go over to the shop and get the right size, then head straight over to Gwydir Castle and meet us there.

Steve & Kev completed their getting ready - we all looked pretty damn good, so some photos were taken. We hung around outside waiting for the car which turned up at about 1210. Lee, our driver took us firstly over to the Meadowsweet hotel where Kev would be staying for the Saturday night where we dropped his stuff off, and then on to Gwydir Castle. Once there, I checked stuff over - Sioned has given a list of stuff that I needed to do to her Dad, which turned up with the buttonholes. I checked that there were enough seats, that the PA we'd set up there the day before was all ok and the CD cued, met the video guy, met Peter (one of our photographers), met the harpist and checked everyone was ok. Got a few photos outside of the lads waiting around and the peacocks.

Mum called me at 1300 and said that two of the cars hadn't arrived at Sioned's house. The first had been and gone with a batch of bridesmaids, but since then - nothing. I ran out to the car park at the castle and spoke with Lee, our driver who was waiting there. He called the office, who in turn called all of the drivers. Due to the driveway at Sioned's mum & dad's house, and the size of the cars, it was really only possible to have one car in at any time. I'd suggested that one car goes in, picks up, and drives back out. When the next car saw the first car pass, that second car would then go and collect passengers - and so on. A token system, if you will. This all falls apart when the first car doesn't reappear, as it's taken a different route.

Sigh. With the system restarted, the cars turned up and all was good.

Kev kept me in check and told me I had to go in at around 1310, so Steve joined me and made sure I didn't move. Steve and myself went through things with the Registrar, such as where to stand and when Steve could sit down and so on. People arrived, people sat down, and after a lot of standing and waiting around, Neal gave a nod.

The Registrar announced that Sioned had arrived, and asked if people would stand. Firstly, the bridesmaids - dressed in black and absolutely fantastic. The harpist played an arrangement of The Man Who Sold The World (Bowie) which sounded bloody good. This was an unknown in one sense as we'd sent him a score and a CD with the track as played by Nirvana. It really did sound good. Then Sioned, in an amazing purple dress. Really - just amazing. No other words can describe it.

The Registrar introduced himself and gave some background on the castle we were holding the ceremony in, and then in to the vows. Steve then presented the rings, and Hannah, the flower girl gave an impromptu performance as a ring bearer as well. Nia and Joel gave readings - Joel's was... passionately brilliant, although he was shaking far more than I. He really does need to sort that crack habit out.

We then signed the register with our witnesses, Fran & Steve, whilst our soloist performed two pieces accompanied by the harpist. The second piece wasn't quite what we'd agreed, and was perhaps the amusing cockup of the day. Still, can't be helped. Either way, he sounded absolutely brilliant. We then posed for photos - taken by Susanne and Peter (our photographers), and also by Will and Neal.

On cue, Laura opened the CD and we walked back down the aisle to Tonight Tonight (Smashing Pumpkins) into the courtyard at Gwydir. We were soon joined by bridesmaids, ushers and my best man, and eventually all of the guests were milling around with us. Photos were taken by many people. We had some taken around the castle - in archways and so on.

We soon headed off - a convoy of 4 silver Mercedes Benz driving through Llanrwst turned many heads, which is one thing that we wanted to do. We stopped off at Gower's Bridge and had some photos taken by Susanne and Peter. From here, straight on to Plas Maenan where everybody was waiting for us. When we arrived, I told all of the drivers to go in and get fed and watered, and we had yet more photos taken.

Sioned and myself then mingled and spoke to all of our guests, before the meal was announced at 1630. The food was absolutely spot on - really, it was so enjoyable. Starter was a tomato and red pepper soup with parmesan. Gorgeous. Main course for vegetarians was a filo pastry stuffed with vegetables and goats cheese. Again, it was so nice. Non-veggies had Welsh roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with potatoes and seasonal local vegetables. Desert was triple chocolate torte with fresh cream and strawberries. Bizarrely, it'd somehow got to 1830 by this time. No idea where the time went, but Steve was soon on his feet announcing the speeches - and the meal was coming to a close as coffee was being served. First up was Sioned's Dad, giving a speech about Sioned's childhood, and welcoming me and my family. Next up was me - it seems my speech went down rather well, which is nice to know. I managed to make Sioned cry as well, which - I'll be honest - wasn't unexpected. Next was Ffion who regaled us with stories of Sioned's youth, before the final speech - Steve's. I have to say, it was a damn good speech. None of the running personal jokes that've been going for years. Flattering, and full of praise. Nicky said that this is one of the few weddings she'd been to where she wasn't waiting for the speeches to come to an end.

We cleared out of the room where we'd had the meal and let the staff clear the tables. Joel and Will headed off to get changed back at the Meadowsweet. They'd somehow managed to sneak back in whilst I was talking to people and started setting up the PA & jukebox for the music during the night.

Then came a whacking great problem. The jukebox started up, and something had been corrupted. It initially said it was unregistered, meaning that it restricted itself to 100 songs in its database. I managed to get the key I'd been e-mailed, but a further issue meant that the entire database needed to be rebuilt. This took some time, and meant that a lot of songs weren't available. Joel put his laptop through the desk, and there was an iPod as well.

I ensured that Will was fine with what I'd done on the CD containing the music for the first dance, then gave them both the nod - it was announced that we'd be cutting the cake. This actually took longer than I thought it would due to the amount of photos people wanted of us doing this. After we'd finished that, it was straight on to the first dance. Although we'd picked a relatively long song - Nothing Else Matters by Metallica, we didn't really care. The jukebox worked fine, but we realised we'd not put enough choice on there, so Joel put on some interesting cheese to get people dancing.

The night wore on - people turned up and people left. It was certainly good to get to talk to people. All too soon, though, the night came to an end. It was midnight, and quite frankly, we were absolutely knackered. After sorting out a few bits and bobs (ensuring suits were somewhere obvious, for instance) and saying goodbyes to people, we headed off to bed.

But still rather relaxed. I finished work at lunch yesterday and headed over to the suit hire place to pick up suits for myself, Steve, Kevin, Joel and Neal. Arrived, parked and was handed four suits. You may notice, as I did, that there was a problem. Joel's suit was missing. After bringing this point to their attention, it transpired that Leeds, where Joel had been measured, hadn't sent the details through to the branch I was stood in.

This is fine - they've got plenty of stock. They promise a call shortly once they'd got the details from the Leeds branch. About an hour later, I receive the call. Problem. Because of Joel's shape (same as me - tall and thin) they've not got anything in. Solution? They'll courier something over from Leeds, don't worry, it'll be with us tomorrow (Friday). Fine.

I then headed over to the theatre and collected various bits of PA equipment for the jukebox at the wedding reception venue. Nice and easy, except I didn't get as many speaker stands as I wanted. No major problem there.

Got home and spent the night putting the final touches to the jukebox - adding a few more albums, getting the database built, then making sure it worked properly. This caused some issues - the software - Nordbeat Jukebox is good, but has a lot of options. I ended up getting to bed at about 2330 after getting it all right.

During the evening, the harpist called and said he'd only that day received a piece of music I'd sent him which we wanted played as Sioned and myself walked back down the aisle after we'd been married. We were already aware of the fact he'd not received it, but it was only that evening that we realised that there was no way he'd be able to learn it in time, nor play anything in its place. A plan was hatched that I'd source another small PA which we'd use for the wedding ceremony itself.

Anyway, to bed.

Friday rolled around bright and early and saw me collecting a PA at 0845 in Bangor. Headed straight back home where I managed to get some breakfast before loading the car up with 2x PA, enough mains cable to sink a ship, a computer, touchscreen and two bags of clothes, two cd players, my laptop... basically, it was crammed full. I arrived at the ceremony venue at 2 and started setting up the PA there. Another small problem presented itself in that I'd opted for Kevin or Joel to operate the PA. Due to the layout of the room, this wasn't going to happen. Chances are, it would need to be Laura - my sister and also a bridesmaid - doing the operating. I called them, and they were still pretty far away. Estimated ETA before they left was 2. They were in Chester, and it was 1445 now. I decided to head off to the reception venue to start setting up there. I said to call me when they arrived at the ceremony venue.

I arrived at the reception venue to find a room set out with tables and so on. Great, except I could've done with checking I'd got everything to make the jukebox work. No matter, I've hopefully got everything - if not, Maplin is open till 8 tomorrow.

Sometime around then, I get a call saying that Mum, Dad, Laura, Grandma and Grandad have arrived at the ceremony venue and where-the-hell-am-I. I hot foot it over there, check Laura is happy with operating the gear then give a quick crash course in what pre fade listen is, how to cue a CD and operate a mixing desk. Happy with that, I then shoot back over to the reception venue and finish sorting stuff out there, including the worst hack I've ever done - bridging a GPRS connection over wavelan. Ick.

About then, Steve, Marie and Kev turned up. I took them over to the ceremony venue so that everyone was clear on where it was. On the way back, I had a call from the suit hire company. Remember that bit? It's now 1650 and the suit has *just* turned up. Instead of going back to the reception venue, we shoot straight over to Conwy to pick said suit up. From here, back to the reception venue for me to pick up my laptop and camera, before home for five minutes (literally). It was then over to the pub for a meal.

On the way, the company supplying the cars called us. Fantastic people - I've hardly had to do anything with them. It's all under control and they've upgraded Sioned's car to an S-Class. Ace.

Joel, Nicky, Ellie, Ben and Will arrived at the pub shortly after we did. It was quite nice to relax there, although receiving 12 voicemails from individual people once I arrived there was rather odd.

An interesting comment tonight was that this is, apparently, the most organised wedding and it's not even happened yet. We shall see. I'm happier now that Joel and Will are here - certainly, if any of the things that I was concerned (I won't say worried, as I wasn't) about are to go wrong, I know I can rely on them. Joel has a car full of stuff that will probably solve anything that might go wrong.

And now - sleep

This entry mainly serves as google bait because the problem was so bloody hard to track down.

The Saab has been making an odd noise for some time now, which nobody has really been able to solve. Taking it in to my tame mechanic and saying "It's broken, but I don't know why" didn't help. The problem manifested itself usually when under hard braking (think stoppie) or doing hard turns (steering wheel on the stops) - there'd be a clunking or occasional banging sound from the left passenger well. Also noticable was that the steering wheel was aligned slightly off middle (approximately + 10 deg). The wheels themselves are straight, weighted properly and the tracking is good.

So, what's the issue? I took the car to have a new pair of boots put on it recently and the tyre guy said "Hm, I think one of your bushes is knackered" and demonstrated his thinking: The wheel would move a significant amount (about 10 degrees) whilst the handbrake was on. Not good.

Over to my tame mechanic where this was shown. Lots of poking and prodding later, he decides that the stanchion arm was in need of replacing, including the bush on the end of it.

Now here's the thing. The stanchion arm (known as a radius arm to other manufacturers, part of the suspension system and also previously known as a bottom arm or lower arm) on the right hand (drivers side) on my car had been replaced - very recently. Possibly just before I bought the car. Theoretically, these things should be replaced in pairs, or there'll be more work for one side to do. It's entirely possible that replacing one side (instead of both) has caused a faster attrition of the side that's now knackered.

Anyway. Saab dealers quote about £131 + delivery + VAT for this piece of kit - part number for which is 4647004 for the left, and 4647012 for the right. There's a few places which I found after hours (literally) of googling in the UK which will do these parts for significantly less if you're prepared to go second hand. These places will guarantee them for between three and six months. Neo Brothers (01992 719280), Salvo Group (0115 9445644) and Saab Parts ASAP (0117 9406151) all had the part in available for immediate shipping for less than 50 quid all in. I opted for a new part from Neo Brothers for a mere £140 delivered - a saving of about 30 quid over the dealer prices.

Unfortunately I need the part now since I'm heading off to Europe in a few days - otherwise I'd have used one of the American parts dealers, such as EEuroparts who do this part at a significantly lower price.

In some cases, it may be applicable to simply replace the bush on the stanchion arm, which is far cheaper - probably about 10 or 15 quid. However, since the problem had been around for some time, it was felt that the entire arm had probably taken significant strain, and so it was sensible to replace the entire thing.

Just been playing in a pool competition in Bangor. 24 people started, I was knocked out in the semi-finals.

You don't win silver, you lose the gold.

:(

As a geek, I use my laptop extensively. It's with a huge amount of forethought that I decided my laptop had really had a hell of a thrashing over the last three and a half years. In that time, I've not once reinstalled the operating system (Windows XP Pro), instead carefully considering what was going to be installed and how it'd affect other things running on there. In that time, it's had a lot of abuse, having things such as QuarkXpress, VB .Net, Photoshop and many other intensive applications and suites installed, all of which have left their mark. So I decided to start again. A week on and things are pretty much back to usual. I took the important things out of documents and settings - my offline e-mails and so on, and took the plunge. I've not installed any of the software I don't regularly use (which did find me installing Powerpoint about 2 minutes before a training session was due to begin...) Other than that, the laptop does seem a lot happier, and it's a lot nicer to work on at the moment. I've pretty much got all of my sessions put back onto SecureCRT as well.

Last week we met up with the photographer (after our original photographer dropped us due to there being a number of pro-am photographers also in attendance). Nice lass, who's got a lot of good ideas. Looking forward to working with her as she's open to suggestion on what we want to do.

I went to Leicester on Friday night, primarily to sort some bits out hanging over from the IP regrade but actually ended up in the pub with Steve which was incredibly useful in having a sound off about all of the wedding guff. The people sorting our suits out phoned me today so that's one other thing ticked off the list as well.

We've been looking around at new cars recently after the revelation that we're spending about £250 a month on petrol for the Saab. We're paying huge consideration to a BMW 320d compact, which seems to return about 50mpg compared to the 25-28ish on the Saab at the moment. With the mileage I'm covering at the moment, it's a bit of a no brainer.

In other news, Formula 1 season starts this weekend. Yay :)

The above allocation has been sitting happily on the end of one of my DSLs for over 4 years now. Today, however, the allocation was returned and a new (/28) allocation was given to replace it.

A moment's silence for the passing of 217.155.50.176/29.

It's all rather blurry since we've managed to do so much. After the previous blog entry, we immediately headed out for food at an all-you-can-eat place. After this, we headed over to The Angel of The North and took photos, before heading back into the car ("Remember where we've parked lads...") and hitting the road again, this time for Seaburn. It was undeniably cold, and the waves breaking over the sea wall gave an idea of how windy it was. Onwards again, we went to a go-karting track. Absolutely top class entertainment, although I was spun out by someone crashing into me. Sigh. By now, it was still only three, and we'd not eaten properly since the all-you-can-eat breakfast at 10ish. Food was in order.

We all piled back into the cars and went to Whitley Bay. Unfortunately, food wasn't found due to places not really serving food at that time of day. Joel noticed I was starting to get a bit zoned out and tetchy and the like - even emergency chocolate didn't help (although he did give me a useful idea - stash chocolate where you can get to it quickly). Needless to say I was in a foul mood for the next few hours, whilst we went for a meal at an Italian place. From here, back to the hotel to get ready for the night out.

We started off at Lloyds on the Quayside, where we found something that was so odd that it just didn't seem real - an entire wedding party, bride, groom, bride's parents et al were having a wedding reception in the corner of Lloyds. Utterly bizarre.

Various other bars were stopped at along the way, including the one with the mental female DJ who really did seem to have a problem with the entire world. You go girl. We ended up at the Carling Academy at midnight-ish. Yet another oddity - somehow my coat attacked the woman in the cloakroom. Both myself, and Kevin who was also in attendance are still having some difficulty in working out what happened - I merely left my coat on the desk, turned to speak to Kevin, looked back and saw my coat wrapped around the head of said attendant. Utterly bizarre, once again.

We caught a bit of a gig taking place in one of the rooms, before Joel and I talked crap about various stuff. From here, we moved to one of the other rooms where we met a group of girls who were resident in the area. We were chucked out of the club at about 0330, and walked over to the train station to get a cabbage with the girls from the club. In the queue another lass suggested that since I looked like a geek, there was a good chance I'd be able to fix her phone. Fair assumption, but due to us being at the head of the queue, the offer of a taxi took precedence.

Back in the hotel lobby, Joel decided to get changed into a pair of women's knickers that'd been purchased at some point during the weekend. He promptly explained that said underwear was rather comfortable and he'd prefer to sleep in them over his own. And so it was done.

Waking up this morning (Sunday) after a mere 5 hours sleep, I found a distinct lack of hangover (good), but Joel was, to all intents and purposes, dead. Neal wasn't doing much better, suggesting that I was barking for getting up at 10 and going for some breakfast with Steve & Kev. Half an hour later, Joel had somehow got himself looking pretty presentable, and was sat in the hotel lobby, but without his shoes. He'd somehow managed to misplace them somewhere between the hotel lobby and the bedroom. 15 minutes of frantic searching later, including checking with the hotel staff that a pair of size 10's hadn't been handed in, and with the very real possibility that some northerner had nicked them, they were uncovered under a bag in our bedroom. Excellent. We headed back to the all-you-can-eat breakfast place and I remembered that I like to put away about 2l of orange juice after a night out (thank goodness for all-you-can-drink being on the menu). It was then a matter of going back, packing up, and saying our goodbyes.

This weekend sees my stag do taking place. We're in sunny Newcastle. Well, Gateshead, and it's not sunny. In attendance at the moment are myself, Steve, Kev and Joel, with Neal joining us shortly. Steve, Kev and myself set off yesterday, stopping along the way at Bishop Auckland - what a hole that is. Kev's trusty Lonely Planet guide described it as a rather pretty place. No more so than Leicester, unfortunately. After abandoning that, we headed straight for the hotel. The hotel we're staying in is... basic, with a train line running parallel to one side (with freight trains running past at various points through the night - I'll use ear plugs tonight), and restaurants across the other side, so the rooms there smell of grease. We went out into Newcastle last night and visited a few bars. The night life certainly seems rather active around here.

Today we're heading off out gokarting, before doing some other bits (Whitley Bay) before another night out.

Oh, and Orange's 3G service is crap.

As we're heading over to Europe soon, I decided to start getting stuff prepared. First things first, I phoned the insurance company - Norwich Union. I'm insured fully comp with them, so figured I'd have something for Europe anyway, and it'd just be a matter of letting them know. I was sort of right - I only had third party cover for Europe, though. To change this to fully comp would cost me a further £26.

Next up is arranging European breakdown cover. Now, most places seem to charge an absolute fortune for this. Indeed, Norwich Union wanted a further £75 for it. The AA and RAC both quoted relatively high prices (higher than £75), with Green Flag coming in at a reasonable £61.

Top prize goes to a company called EuroRescue who do their top of the line European coverage for £50. But is it all about how cheap it is?

Some googling around suggests that it used to be a case of you get what you pay for, and it's worth reading the small print. If your car breaks down and you need to get it back across the water to Blighty, then some policies won't be able to help you. This can be a relatively costly experience, especially if there's a car full of you (four or five people) to get back as well. Some policies also have limitations on things like "You only get one hour of roadside mechanic time, after that you're stuffed" as well. I was slightly skeptical of the service that Eurorescue could offer for the price, but googling seems to suggest that it's good for what it is.

I'm also just about to go and get some new boots put on the car. My tyre fitter of choice (Nant Conwy tyres) is charging me the princely sum of £235 for a pair - whereas ATS Euromaster wanted £295 for them, and Kwik Fit a mere £312.

It pays to shop around.

As Sioned found out, steelies can be an absolute God send. I'd left a UPS in the kitchen (rackmount APC SUA1500RMI, which, apparently weighs 29kg, or 64lb in old money. Problem being that after struggling to get it from the kitchen to the bottom of the stairs (heading for the office), she gave up and went to put it down, but dropped one edge on her toe.

Ouch.

Unfortunately, I was out at the time - one of the University clubs I'm part of was having a social, so Sioned decided to have a tidy up.

Ho hum.

Played Snooker for the first time in weeks today and managed to win, which was nice.

Sioned & myself went off to see Hot Fuzz tonight at the cinema. It's been ages (well before Christmas) since we both we to see a fillum, so this was something vaguely different. Very good film, in a sit back and veg out way. Enjoyable, if only for the idea that they had to find a small quiet village somewhere that'd let them do handbrake turns in a Subaru. Got out to the car after the cinema and it wasn't happy. It started, but was doing odd things at idle. Gave it a thrash up the A55 for a couple of junctions (and subsequently found it can do 65 in second), but it seemed ok. Switched the engine off after pulling off said road, started it again, and it's still not happy. Hm. Got it home, did the same (engine off, back on again) and all is fine. There was a brief smell of petrol in the car, so it's possible that Shell sold me something sub-standard, or the car was just having a bit of a strop about something. Either way, I'll keep an eye. In other news, I decided yesterday to migrate one of my DSLs to one of Zen's DSLMax products. I'd previously been against this as I wasn't (and to some extent, still don't) like DSLMax for various reasons, but since the way the line is used probably lends itself well to it, I took a jump. I have to admit, it's good. Very good. Very fast at what it does. I'm not totally around to it yet - I'll be keeping an eye on how things pan out on the line for a while yet.

I'm not really a political person - yes, I vote and take part in everything else that's democratic about the nation (I will add, I have never voted Labour, for what it's worth). Problem being is that the Government as it stands seems to be running away with itself. The problem further on from that is that there doesn't seem to be anyone else with a chance of getting any usable amount of power that can do anything to put the brakes on what's being proposed.

So, ID cards? Thanks, but no thanks. The Government is being so bloody shady about exactly what they're wanting to do with them that they really aren't selling the ID that well. There's a whole raft of things we can think of here - the cost. Any ideas? Nobody seems to. Pick a figure between £30 and £93 depending on what day of the week. Then there's exactly what they'll be used for. Courtesy of an e-mail from Number 10, no less, we're now told that the police will be able to use the information harvested "for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register.". Excellent. But wait... wasn't this specifically ruled out? Er, yes, actually, it was. Previously, it was written that they'd need to prove that they wanted to look at Joe Bloggs' record, because they believed that person was a suspect. Looks like they've changed their minds on that one. Maybe the card will help reduce ID theft? Not a chance, really. Think about it. If I have a couple of bits of your information, say your name and date of birth and phone your Doctor and ask for some specific information, I'll get it. Change date of birth to ID Card number. It won't make a blind bit of difference.

If this system does come in, I think we'll end up with a society of people that don't officially exist. Certainly many people aren't going to be in the position to fork out the cash for the cards. Besides, what use would the be to them anyway?

Next up is road charging. So 1.8 million people have said that they don't think it's a good idea. Fine. Various reasons for this: o We're already paying an absolute shed load in fuel duty. So why do we need to pay more? o It'll cripple people that rely on their cars o It'll be so poorly organised that it'll be disaster o It'll be so open to abuse that it'll be pointless

Put it this way - if road pricing does come in, my next car will be something along the lines of a Mercedes E55 (that's the one with the 5.5 litre V8 in it), cause if I'm paying that much more to get around, I'm going to make bloody sure I have a good time doing it.

Y'know in Germany where people only let the Nazis in because there wasn't anyone else better?

Will the last one out turn the light off? This country has gone down the pan.

Went to see the Bluetones last night with Sioned - this was part of the Valentine's present that I'd got for her earlier in the week. The venue was one that neither of us had been to before - Central Station in Wrexham. Absolutely top venue, with really good people. I phoned them earlier in the day and asked about the possibility of taking photos there with professional level gear. Their response was "Yep, we're fine with it, as long as the touring company are". Cleared it with the tour manager when I got there, and managed to get some halfway decent photos, problems were generally caused by the lighting in there - far too much red, some of the photos would take me a fair while to sort out in Photoshop - perhaps when I get some more time I'll try and sort some more out.

Valentine's Day itself was pretty quiet for us - as getting a table anywhere is notoriously difficult, we elected to just have a meal in. We seem to be shopping pretty regularly as Marks & Spencer for food now, so, for me, it was feta cheese & herb parcels and potato gratin, whilst Sioned took a goats cheese tartlette with potato gratin. Rather nice it was, too.

CCIO has run a conference yesterday and today. Being on the other side of the fence is pretty interesting, as in another (and a previous life) I did tech work on conferences, so it's been interesting to see what it's like when the things you expect to be there aren't. I guess it also made me a lot more empathetic towards the people running the venue. On the subject of which, the Royal Victoria Hotel in Llanberis is an excellent place. They're staff there are helpful and pleasant, and did everything I'd asked of them (from a technical point of view) quickly. Top people. The bar there isn't bad as far as hotel bars go, although the cloth on the pool table seems a little thick in places :) I sorted out a couple of small issues they had with their Internet connectivity and left my details if they need any other tech work, so another potential client for me.

I'm back in the office - I was in yesterday morning, but by lunchtime was feeling totally monged out again, so headed home. I've been working on a small project over the last few days - nothing exciting - taking an existing form, prefilling it with information held in our database, so that the individuals who need to fill in the blanks have less possibility of cocking up. I'm now doing the run of all of these, and my new laser printer (new office - new furniture - new equipment) is getting its first thrashing. Oddly, it smells of McDonalds Chicken Nuggets.

I wonder what HP are using in their printers these days...

Ouch. I'm not a person that is ill very often, so it takes a hell of a lot for me to actually take a day off and stay in bed (not least because I'm losing money).

I woke up at about 0115 absolutely freezing - I've got bad circulation anyway, so my feet and hands are usually cold anyway, but I was shivering uncontrollably, which unfortunately woke Sioned up. Lying in bed wearing a massively thick dressing gown, socks, and three (count 'em) extra duvets still didn't warm me up - obviously a bad sign. I slept fittingly for the next couple of hours, still shivering. I ended up getting a drink at about 0345 which pushed my stomach over the edge. Obviously, as a man, I have to make this sound far worse than it should - I've been googling today to find out what it means if there's blood in what comes up.

Anyhow - I managed to warm up after that little episode, and slept a bit more - although still fittingly, being interrupted by a banging headache at some point. Sioned went to work at about 0730 this morning, and I slept through until 1030ish (at which point I was awoken by phone calls). I'm currently laid up on the sofa still feeling full of headache and with very little appetite, and feel weak as a kitten.

Can't wait to get better :/

I appear to have 7 tickets to go and see the above band in May. I suspect that this gig will be rather woo.

http://news.windingroad.com/etc/dinner-for-two-to-go-on-the-nurburgring/. Genius. Utter genius.

is what I said (amongst other things) when I saw "Check Engine" appear on the dashboard of the car, followed by the Saab-esque warning noises.

Ah.

I managed to pull it over immediately as I was pretty much on top of a layby. Engine straight off. Bonnet up. Hm. Nothing obvious there - put ignition to 2 and... it's fine.

Unsuprisingly, I'll be keeping an eye on that. SID (The Saab on board computer) didn't say anything, which I'd expect it to.

It's been just over a week now since I changed how comments are handled on my blog. Whilst I doubt that this blog is in any way regarded as high traffic or likely to get a high readership, I'm quite shocked at just how many attempted spams it's had in a week:

mysql> select count(id) from blog_comments where status='spam' and createtime>='2007-01-31 23:59:59' and createtime<='2007-02-07 23:59:59';

+-----------+
| count(id) |
+-----------+
| 509 |
+-----------+

Impressive.

Mark Ronson's new album, Version is scheduled for release on April 16th. Assuming it's got some of the same work as featured on Annie Mac's show on Radio 1 on Friday, as well as Zane Lowe's show late last year, it will kick much arse. I've been keeping an eye on his Myspace site (amongst other places tracking what he's doing). This guy really does know his stuff. A true technical genius.

What I was actually trying to do when I did the wrong thing with an rm command was implement some anti-blog-spam stuff. It'd been getting pretty dire, with 40 or 50 comments spams a day on here. Previously, there was nothing to stop this - I'd just wade through once a day or so and delete them all. The new version is much more svelte - it'll accept comments and then hold them for moderation. I'm not all that fond of captchas for some reason - they're a great idea, but with visually impaired users, they're not.

Anyhow. Comments are all working fine now - you can even view your own comments whilst they're in the moderation queue. I've also changed the format of my blog a bit - made it a bit less bland. Although the content is still as bland as ever.

Well, that was silly of me, wasn't it. I've just recovered all of my blog entries after making a silly mistake involving a silly mistake involving rm. You can guess the rest.

I work with famous people pretty regularly - besides which, "fame" isn't something that really bothers me. So they get paid to do a job, which happens to be entertainment. What of if?
On the other hand, someone that I have a huge amount of respect for, who has led such an amazing life - that's something different.
So when Murray Walker took to the stage on a conference I was working on, I was a happy chappy.
I met him later in the lobby and talked crap about bike racing and car racing, and also managed to nab some photos with him. Colour me pleased :)

Reading Steve Kennedy's Rabbit were trying to do in the early 90s. For those too young to remember, or who have had too much to drink since then, Rabbit was an early mobile phone system whereby you had to be close by a base station (advertised with the Rabbit logo). If you weren't near one of these, then a call wasn't possible. See the similarities?

I laughed like a drain:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?
in_article_id=430129&in_page_id=1770

Thu Jan 18 15:42:44 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 15:42:46 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 19:17:04 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 19:17:06 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 20:22:33 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 20:22:35 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 20:29:18 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 20:29:20 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 20:44:51 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 20:44:53 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:20:27 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:20:29 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:25:13 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:25:15 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:29:26 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:29:28 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:31:49 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:31:51 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:32:24 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:32:26 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:32:43 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:32:45 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:33:33 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:33:35 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:33:57 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:33:59 GMT 2007 UPS power returned
Thu Jan 18 21:34:20 GMT 2007 UPS switch to battery.
Thu Jan 18 21:34:22 GMT 2007 UPS power returned

14 times in 6 hours. Must've been windy outside or something.

In photography terms, I consider myself to be quite technical - looking at photos and ascertaining how they were taken, what settings were used, how it was composed, and so on.
What makes a good photographer for me is when the photographer can take me away from asking "How?", but move to asking "Why?". This is a piece of work that's probably one of the most powerful I've seen for some time.

http://todayspictures.slate.com/inmotion/essay_chernobyl/

One of the things we're doing for the wedding is having an mp3 jukebox, rather than the "traditional" DJ, because trying to tame a DJ into playing no pap for the night would be rather difficult. It means we get more control over the music generally.
A couple of months before Christmas, I managed to source a CRT Touchscreen Monitor. It's taken from a Kodak Picture Kiosk. 14", and has all of the touchscreen gubbins built into it, presented on a serial interface on the back of the monitor.
I finally got around to starting to sort things out tonight. Firstly, XP doesn't come with any drivers for touchscreens at all, although there's plenty available on manufacturer websites. However, there seems to be little or no relevant documentation on the Kodak PS4 Monitor, which is what I have. So I fired up hyperterminal and had a look at the output from the monitor when I moved my finger over it. A bit of googling later, and I found that Touchware (the software drivers from http://www.touchscreens.com would do the job. Indeed, it did. Downloaded, installed, job's a good'un.

Next came trying to get some mp3 jukebox software which lends itself well to being used in a touchscreen (or kiosk) environment. Again, there's not much in this field, suprisingly. I was getting to the point where I thought I'd have to write my own (I could probably knock something together in VB pretty quickly that answers all of my needs). My needs are:
o Can operate in "Kiosk" mode, whereby options such as being able to add albums, change options and so on aren't available when being used at the wedding
o Can crossfade between tracks
o Won't repeat tracks if they're already queued/have been played recently
o Is easy to use (ie not too fiddly, things are obvious, etc)

SK Jukebox was first on the list. It looks like a jukebox, but my word is it a pain to use. It doesn't really lend itself that well to being used with a touchscreen, even though it looks like it should.
Next up was Albumplayer - it looks the part, but doesn't really offer enough options to lock things out when being used in the wild.
We settled on NordBeat's Jukebox, produced by Nordbeat. It's paid for software, but since it does what it does so well, I'm happy to pay for it. All I can say is, it's bloody good software.
Next I've got to get a dedicated disk for the music that's going on the box, sort out a PA (no problems there), and also get some form of non-intrusive lighting sorted out.

My personal fileserver, sourcefour is starting to get a bit full again. Before Christmas, I ordered a 400gb disk which was to replace one of the older disks in the server. Unfortunately, it was DOA, but the warranty replacement turned up today.
I'm currently transferring across 190gb of data from one partition to the new disk, soon to be followed by 110gb from another.
The whole process of migrating from the older disks is likely to take in the region of 3 months (for a number of reasons, one of which being I don't want to get a batch of dodgy disks, and also because I want to take my time over it).
It's also allowing me to repartition some of my smaller mounts as well, such as the photos which is now vastly underspecified, and will benefit from being changed to just over 100gb.

I've just managed to complete my tax return for the tax year 2005-2006. I've somehow managed to end up with a nice tax refund, which is always a good thing (although not large enough that the tax people say "Er, hold on...".
I'm quite pleased that I've managed to do this as, obviously, it's been hanging over me for some time. As I seem to have loads of box files containing all of the paperwork (P60s, etc) for people I've worked for, it made it somewhat easier - the whole thing completed in about 90 minutes.

Woo.

I took a night shot with the new VR 70-200 last night and noticed what looked to be a large amount of dust in the shot, as can be seen across just above the centre - it looks to be red and green lumps around the third turret from the left. Technically, it should never ever look like that - it should be the odd dot here and there, and hardly noticable unless you're taking long exposures of something bright.

I called my friendly local camera shop who told me it'd be about 45 quid and take at least 24 hours.

So I set about doing it myself. The D100 requires you to have a separate power supply, which enables a menu function to move the mirror and the curtain, thus allowing access to the CCD. The other way of doing it (as I did) is to set a 30 second exposure, whip the lens off, and the clean it that way.
After some hit and miss, I found the solution of putting a anti-static wipe wrapped around the end of a pencil (rubber band holding it in place), then gently dabbing at the CCD worked wonders. Ok, it took me about 90 minutes to get it perfect, but I'm pleased with the results.

After I'd done a sweep, I'd take a 2 second exposure of a bright white (gloss) door at ISO3200, with the lens pulled to infinity focus. This made any dust spots stand out like a sore thumb as they'd appear as black on white.
It's a real pain of a job, and hugely boring. I'm glad I've done it, but I'm not looking forward to having to do it again any time soon.

IPSec. It looks like Microsoft released an update to IPSec which was installed (the machine pulls its updates via autoupdate). This then blocked all "dangerous" ports. Excellent. *sigh*

The panto has now been and gone. I am absolutely *knackered*. I can probably do all of my cues in my sleep. I'm looking forward to a good few weeks of recovering now, and spending a lot of time just doing nothing. Whilst time-wise it didn't seem to be that much work (probably 7 or 8 hours a day once we'd got well into the run), it seems so much more than that.

In other news, last week I took delivery of a Nikon VR 70-200 F2.8 AF-S lens. I mentioned a couple of entries ago about how nice the lens was when I trialled it at a camera shop. I used it in anger on Thursday night, and also Saturday night when I was taking photos of the show itself. My word, it's blown me away. Whilst the photos aren't available for public use, I'm hoping to be able to use it to its full potential sometime soon and put the results on the photo site. Some of the images it gave me from the shows are absolutely awesome.

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things with the University. My current task is beating a Win2k Adv Server into submission - If anyone has any suggestions as to why shared drives/directories wouldn't be visible to the rest of the network, please let me know :)

The rest of my birthday was rather nice, all things said. As mentioned in the previous blog entry, family turned up later on, before I headed out (whilst Sioned stayed in) to Leicester with friends. It was a good turn out, and I thoroughly enjoyed the night.

As usual, I've been working pretty solidly since, but I've got a day off on Monday (New Years Day). It's looking increasingly like we'll be staying in on NYE since we've been lax in getting stuff organised, and I really doubt we'll actually sort anything out this late on.

Sioned and myself have decided on a pseudo-New-Year-resolution that we're both going to see my family more. Christmas brought home the fact that I'd been too busy on various things to actually get back to Leicester much, which is something I kind of regret. Not seeing both my family and close friends is not good, so we're aiming for at least once a month. I'm probably going to try and cut down on some of my work, too. Having seen what I've earned during December, it's more money than I know what to do with. Family & friends are far more important, tbh.

I'm looking forward to the end of the panto now. I think there's only 16 shows left, so not too long to go.

Back in Leicester again as it's my birthday today. Yay me. After having a brief lie in, I opened my presents, before heading out into town to sort out a few bits and have a look around the shops. I fancied having a look at Yamaha's new offering in the HD amp market (the Yamaha RX-V2700 as my current setup sees the amp controlling the entire room - when we upgrade the TV to a HD panel (1080i, natch) it'll cause some issues. This, coming in at 1300ukp, will be more than suitable. It sounds absolutely fantastic. I also bought myself a new pair of Alpinestar SMX 4 boots, since my old ones were a bit worn out. I'd received a 10% discount voucher from the local Hein Gericke, which saw them come down to a fairer price.
Kev and Steve then joined us for lunch at The Observatory, before we headed off back into town so that I could coo over some Nikon VR lenses, including the rather sexy Nikon VR 70-200 F2.8 AF-S lens. Fortunately the manager at the shop still remembers me from when I worked for le.ac.uk, so mentioned various discounts and the like from the advertised price. It's a gorgeous piece of kit - it focuses so quickly, and with the SWM it really is brilliantly quiet.

The rest of the day will see a visit by family shortly, before I head on out for a night in Leicester with friends.

A rather good day all in, thus far.

I managed to escape from the final show of the day yesterday and hot footed it over to Leicester with Sioned, firstly to visit Grandma and Grandad, before hooning off again to quickly stop at the pub to see friends (Steve, Kev, Marie, Andy, Rhys, Ed, Tim...). From there, we went back to Mum & Dad's where we had the traditional not-Christmas, where Mum's side of the family celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve. All in, it was a bloody excellent affair.
Having arrived in Leicester at around 1845, we were back on the road again by 2245. Photos of the evening here.
We've both had some fantastic presents from people - this is perhaps one of the best years we've had. We've also had some presents which we'd have never expected from people. Thing is, though, it's not really about the presents - I think it's perhaps one of the better years just by the fact we got to see so many people.
In some ways, it would've been nicer to have seen people for longer. We were only restricted because we were short staffed on the afternoon performance yesterday, otherwise we could've left earlier. Something to bear in mind.

Today we managed to leave the house at about 10, and headed over to Sioned's parents. More presents were exchanged, in the presence of her Mum, Dad, and Grandad. Sioned and her Dad then cooked a huge amount of food - far too much for me. I was still feeling rather tired after driving 350 miles (from here, to Leicester, and back again) in about 6 hours, after doing two shows, so tried to do very little aside from sit in front of the fire. Christmas Day photos are here.

We're now sat, back at home, and hoping to have a very relaxing evening.

Happy Christmas :)

Boik. I seem to have a bout of tour belly at the moment. :/

I'm one of the 7 techs that operate the flying carpet in the panto. This review was stapled to the board this morning, from The Stage, which is the trade paper for all things stage/entertainments/etc.

"Theatrical magic is an oft-used phrase but magic is the only way I can explain how Matt Baker's personable and delightful Aladdin flies his enchanted carpet so spectacularly and convincingly, with no apparent means of support.

That is the most jaw-dropping moment but there is plenty else to ravish the eye in this sumptuous show, full of stunning sets and costumes. From the moment that Charlotte Gooch.s ethereal Slave of the Ring rises through the stage to the glamorous finale, this must be one of the most beautiful pantos anywhere this year.

[...]

This really is a terrific pantomime."

Praise indeed.

It's starting to get slightly monotonous. When you know the jokes inside out. The feeling of "What day is it? Which show is this? When do I go home? What scene is this?" is creeping in more and more. The fit ups and rehearsals weren't too bad, and I'm pretty much solid on my cues now (after one major cockup).
Today saw the start of the school week, where pretty much all of the performances are for school kids. Tripping off their tits on orange and ice cream... it's a slightly different crowd to the other performances, shall we say.

Saturday night was... well, Sunday morning was worse. I'm still recovering from it. I think I got in sometime around 0400. Fights with beer mats being thrown like death stars (and nearly as lethal in the hands of one of the crew). Some interesting text messages being shown which have changed my view on some people. This is what panto is all about, really. The tally for last week came in at 42 hours at the theatre, and about 12 doing University work. Needless to say, a day off on Sunday was well needed. I monged out and did very little.

Soon be January.

I consider myself cynical enough now to be able to, more often than not spot the real reasons behind those decisions which are made by outside consultants, and have people asking "Why?".
Problem is, I really can't fathom why a suggestion has been made for something.

An important document exists (we'll call it The Development Plan, or TDP - name changed slightly). Currently, the TDP is a 10 (or so) page Word document. The layout for the document is 5 columns wide, by say 40 odd rows.
An outside consultant who is tasked with trying to improve the overall work of the department in question has made various recommendations, one of which is that the TDP is stored in an Access database.

My first comment was "Why?" - I cannot come up with any logical reason to have a single document stored in an Access DB. It just... isn't right. It's like buying a filing cabinet to keep a single piece of paper in.
I consider myself pretty adept at explaining technical issues to non-techies. Problem being is that being as it's not wrong, nor is it right, I was struggling to explain why I thought it was such a bad idea.
My current thinking is that this could morph into a pretty poorly designed CMS/DMS. I've forewarned them of this and told them not to even consider doing anything like this, as it would put the whole setup on a very shaky base. Access just isn't meant for that type of thing.

Quite simply, I'm really not sure what he's trying to do, and it's got me scratching my head a bit.

Various blog entries have probably alluded to me not being quite right at the moment. I'm still not sure what's causing it, but today I had a whole raft of nice things happen which have cheered me up somewhat.

Firstly, I had an e-mail today about one of my contracts which is due to finish next Thursday asking if I'd be interested in continuing for another semester (about 3 more months), since they're impressed with the quality of the work I'm doing. This is rather nice, as I was preparing myself for the financial drop associated with this. I've asked for further details (as it would involve a slight change to times that I do stuff), but they've prepared to get a contract out immediately. Which is nice.

Secondly, I put an e-mail out yesterday asking for cashmoneyplease for work I did on another contract 6 weeks ago. Reply within a few hours saying something like "Oops, forgot! Want more work?" - obviously, I shall wait for payment from the first lot of work first, but it's good that I had an immediately (near enough) reply, and also that I'm being offered more work here.

Thirdly, I spoke to someone in another department at the University who is extremely interested in some of the work I'm doing within the University, and wants to use my work elsewhere. This gave me a good push to get my code tidied up so that it's ready to go live shortly. I've got to write in the error catching, but then I'm happy that it's good to go to bug testing/beta. I'm quite pleased and proud that someone is prepared to take my work on for pretty wide usage. Whilst it's not paid work (I've got enough of that at the moment, to be honest), I'll be getting my name spread around, which is perhaps more useful to me.

Fourthly, arriving home elicited a nice surprise in the shape of a cheque from my secret project, with an e-mail later on in the evening leading me to expect another one. It's all rather woo.

I was wanting to go in on the bike to the University tomorrow, but with the weather being like it is at the moment, I'm really not going to risk it. The car was getting blown around horifically on the way home tonight. This week is probably going to be one of the last chances before Christmas with the panto coming up.

In other news, probably one of the few times that I'll ever be picked first for a team (remember when you were at school all the sporty kids got picked first for football?) - I'll be representing the University Snooker & Pool Club at a match on Sunday night, which I'm rather looking forward to.

I also now have a standard answer to When did you last take a day off?"

Zen Internet (who supply DSL for my family) have just e-mailed me to say that they're implementing what's essentially capping on their older discontinued products. Earlier this year, they announced that they were going to withdraw their Home 1000 & Home 2000 (amongst others) products, replacing them with DSLMax products. The new DSLMax products would be capped at differing amounts, depending on how much you wanted to pay monthly. This had been on the cards for a while.
One thing they said at the time was that the customers on the products that were being withdrawn from sale for new customers is that the existing customers could stay using those products for however long they wanted to - lots of users migrated over to the new DSLMax product. I decided to stay on the existing Home products for all of my lines for the primary reason that it was uncapped. The fact that the highest available download speed on the Home when they closed the product was 2mbit, whereas on DSLMax was 8mbit (theoretical) was the trade off.

The e-mail saying that they're now capping the usage is a kick in the shins. I realise that Zen are a company and that they're obviously not able to sustain vast loses that certain users are causing them. Fortunately the cap is at such a level that it won't cause me any issues - it's more the principal, and the fact that this probably is the beginning of the end.

Original e-mail follows:
On 1st March 2007 we are going to introduce a monthly usage allowance on all Home 1000 and Home 2000 broadband services. The usage allowance will be 100 gigabytes (GB) per month.

WHY?
A small number of our Home 1000 and Home 2000 customers are extreme users of our service. They leave their computers downloading files 24 hours per day, day after day, week after week. This extreme usage costs Zen hundreds of pounds per month for each extreme user . many times our income from the monthly subscription fee. In the past we have subsidised this usage but we are no longer prepared to incur this loss.

By introducing a 100 GB monthly usage allowance we will limit the financial loss generated by the extreme users whilst leaving the vast majority of our customers completely unaffected.

HOW MUCH IS 100 GIGABYTES?
100 GB is a vast amount of usage, enough to download 40 feature length movies, thousands of songs, and to browse the Web for as long as you want. In other words, 100 GB is more than enough for anything other than the kind of extreme usage described above.

WHAT HAPPENS ON REACHING 100 GB?
The usage allowance for Home 1000 / 2000 will be handled in the same way as the usage allowances for Zen 8000 Lite / Active / Pro. If you reach 100 GB part way through a month your Internet access will be blocked and your web browser will display a page giving you the option to buy additional usage for £1.49 (inc. VAT) per GB. For full details, please see:

http://www.zenbroadband.com/athome.aspx?page=510

HOW WILL THIS CHANGE AFFECT ME?
Your peak usage over the last 3 months was only 6 GB so this change will not affect you unless you completely change the way you use the Internet and become an extreme downloader.

If you have any questions about this change please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards
Richard Tang
Managing Director

When I first started working here, Payroll managed to (via HR) cockup my pay for the first two months. Then when I started another smaller technical post, yet again, they messed it up. Once - forgiveable. Twice - an irritation. Three times, and I'm sure they're out to get me.
I checked my bank balance this morning and found to my delight that I'd been paid - quite a significant amount, but less than I was expecting. I'd obviously got carried away in working out what I'd be paid with my new job.
#My pay slip turns up - and, no, I was actually right. They've done it again. I'm 250 short.

They've got something against me. I'm sure of it.

...or wave goodbye to December, since I've just had my call sheet. Effectively, December won't exist for me. Woo. Going on last year, I'll come out of it about a stone lighter, a lot richer, and absolutely knackered. Hopefully I'll have the mistakes made buying a certain person a Christmas present ironed out as well, this time around.

Steve & Marie visited us over the weekend - we went out on Friday night to Bangor where, conveniently, the Snooker & Pool Club (University Society) were having a social which we tagged on to for a while, before splitting off and doing our own thang.

Saturday was a day of getting Steve's suit sorted out before mooching around Conwy, then heading into town where there was a Celtic Festival on. Saturday night I was doing the out for Amazing Grace which didn't go too badly, nor take too long - I was in bed for 1.

Sunday - Steve & Marie left pretty early on, so I had a relaxing day - wound down after work the previous night. Today was another theatre day - Status Quo (and all their associated fans). As mentioned above, I've also got my panto shifts sorted out.

I'm also starting to feel old as I've found myself listening to Radio 2 increasingly over the last couple of days. This isn't a good sign.

Busy busy busy.

Whatever it was that has been irritating me for the last month or so seems to slowly be disappearing. I've still got no idea what it is/was, but it really was getting to me and making me rather unhappy.

In other news my new gaffer keeps throwing interesting projects at me which I'm rather enjoying as I'm having to think about how I'm going to handle them, and how to integrate them into the wider scheme of things for the new department. I've already been put into interesting positions involving me having to put my foot down and explain why having lots of individual little Access databases kicking around really isn't a good idea, and let's hold off and do things properly, eh?

I'm kind of at a crossroads at the moment where I really need to get an official line on things before I can go any further - we've not yet bought the basic but essential domain name, so things that are requiring a web presence immediately are being hosted under personal domain names, which isn't very good. University decision making was never a fast process at the best of times...

The job I've just moved from has been advertised (finally). If anyone is interested in a database jockey job (unfortunately working with a bespoke database) - good knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server, Crystal Reports v10 required - and would like to work for a University in North Wales, then let me know.
If you're prepared to do XP desktop support (don't worry, nothing mind-stretching - just the usual "Can you install my new printer for me?"-esque queries, and know what a patch panel looks like, then you'd be right at home.
I'll be on the interview panel, so I'll be weeding out those who're obviously flying a kite :-)

Her & me went to see Cerys Matthews (ex Catatonia for those that don't recognise the name) at Galeri in Caerfarfon last night. A small 400 seat venue, I'd got front row center seat tickets - which didn't really matter, as even the back row was probably only 25m away from the stage.
Needless to say, we were up close and personal. The stage took the form of a living room with a standard lamp, a table, and so on.
The first half of the gig was... a bit hit and miss, to be honest. Maybe it was just being the first night of a new tour, but some of the pieces didn't seem to gel too well.
First up was Alun Tan Lan - a guitarist (amongst other things). Solo, he really seemed to excel himself. Some excellent use of fx gear, he really managed to bring catch the attention of the audience, as any good support should do.
Alun was joined by Mason Neeley a short while later, who added some interesting percussion to the mix. The two of them seemed to work rather well together, although it was at this point it felt like the whole show was getting a bit gimmicky. That thought carried through the whole gig.
The next problem came when they were joined by Kevin Teel. I'm not sure that Teel really settled for the whole gig - certainly for the first half, he didn't seem comfortable.

After a few pieces from the three of them, Cerys appeared on stage, joining the musicians already gathered, and sang with them for a couple of numbers, before the interval.

The second half was better, although certainly, it wasn't polished. Whilst for a gig of this size you don't expect perfection, but the whole thing did, in my mind leave something to be desired. I'm not sure that Cerys has ever strived for perfection as she's always been something of a rough and ready performer. That's not to say that her voice is that - it's still got the smooth tones that it always has in the lower to mid registers, with that ability to cut and stop in the higher registers when she needs it - that's still all there. The showmanship of the whole show just seemed a little unfinished.

My test for stuff like this is would I go again if I knew what I did now? Nope, probably not on this one.

Ok, it's woo. It's very woo. I've remembered the advantage of having my own office - I've got my music on. I'm not wearing cans, either. It's rather nice.
I've had a meeting with the new gaffer this morning and - to say it was promising is an understatement. I'm really looking forward to some of the things I'll be doing as they're really going to challenge me in a good way.

This is one of the rare times you'll see me smile.

Kicked off with my new job this morning. It's strange not sharing an office with anybody again. The last time I had my own office was in London, some 4 years ago now. The whole building has just been taken over by the department I'm working for - it's all been newly decorated, although we're still waiting for new desks, chairs, and so on.
I'm currently using my own laptop (my computer hasn't been delivered yet) on an old wooden desk, sat on a chair with a wheel missing. Rock on.
The view from my office isn't to be sniffed at, though - I've got one of the front facing rooms, looking out on to the Menai Straits, where the University boat is moored.

I'm still waiting to be allowed network access at the moment, so probably most of the day will be spent using Orange's 3G offering for interweb access. So far I've met my new boss, and also our office manager who seems to be rather chatty.

I've been trying to work out how to set up my office so that my monitor won't be facing the door or the window - one thing I really don't like is people being able to see what I'm doing. Not because I've got anything to hide, but because I'm dealing with people's personal data. Although the office isn't tiny, it's a pain because of where sockets are, and so on. I might hold off on that decision until all of my furniture has been delivered.

The building itself is well off the beaten track, which I don't like that much. I consider myself to be a city boy and a techie. I like background noise, things like the noise of traffic, or the noise of a load of fans in a rack. Anything but silence.

All in all? Reserving judgement at the moment.

Be sat at 0100 on a Sunday morning, rebuilding a collapsed flight case. Mm, rock star lifestyle, me.

In all seriousness, I do love my work sometimes.

Dozing off in bed last night, I was rudely nudged and asked "What's that noise?" by Her. The UPS in the rack upstairs was having a fit because I'd not replaced the batteries and had set its alarm off. Great. Off I toddle to the office and get the batteries (which I'd bought, but not fitted) and set about installing them.
Would it be easy? Nope. The batteries that were in the unit weren't tied together, nor was there a draw string to get them out. My knuckles are rather sore today after gradually pulling the first of the pack of four out, so that I could get at the cable. I've left the new battery pack on the floor for now. Job for the weekend: Get the rest of the batteries out of the chassis, and properly install the new ones.

Got in to work this morning to find the Windows 2000 Server I babysit having crapped itself. Crux of it was that IIS (one of the primary reasons for the existance of the server) didn't exist any more. After about 30 minutes of trying to get to the bottom of the problem (thanks to the extremely verbose error messages that Windows can generate sometimes), I set about sorting the situation out. I got IIS reinstalled sometime around 1115. From then until 1415, the support guys from our bespoke software providers were fighting with the fresh install of IIS, ASP.NET and permissions trying to get the whole lot to talk to each other properly.

Nearly six hours of downtime.

I hate computers.

I hate doing updates from the CLI ona a database. They always make my heart go that bit faster. Especially those that seem to take far too long. Then you have the "Er, have I just overwritten the whole table?" moment.

Query OK, 15 rows affected (46.20 sec)

If you like the track (as currently featured on the Sony Bravia advert), I commend this version, by The Knife, who wrote the track originally to you. It's rather ace, it is.

Hanging a 42" NEC plasma screen from a 30ft high perch on a length of rope as it swings precariously close to a load of metal scaffolding tubes sticking out of the wall.

Photos from the fireworks display in Llandudno this evening. I popped over to Cambrian Photography earlier and treated myself to a nice Manfrotto 785B Tripod. I'd initially looked at getting something along these lines earlier this year. I'd decided that it'd have to be a Vinten or Manfrotto since it'd get a bit of abuse, and anything else wouldn't really stand up to it. Saw this one for 55 quid, which I felt was quite reasonable. It did good service tonight - I did about 250 exposures of about 1/10th to 1/5th of a second each, and they've mostly come out pretty well.
The tripod itself is really light. It's nothing amazing - as you'd expect for an entry level bit of kit. It does have a single sightglass on it. A lot of the higher end ones I've used previously have three on, for example. It does have some useful features, such as easy ability to change how the head works on it.
All in all, I'm pretty pleased with it.

If anyone knows any staff at the University of Wales, Bangor, then please try and swing them round to the idea of voting for me!

There's a position on the University Council, which I'm running for. I'm up against three others.

Vote Gary!

I've been given a laptop to tidy up today which has the usual symptoms of "Running slowly" and "It's got a virus". It seems to have a tendancy to:
A) Open IE at intervals, going to http://antispyweb.net/?aff=242
B) Producing popup bubbles in the system tray at intervals saying things like "Caution! Spyware attack detected... Security Protection Center indicates high possibility of spyware attack! Update Windows antispyware protection (sic)"
And
"Warning! Possible spyware infection detected... Your computer may be infected with dangerous spyware! Update your antispyware immediately"

Problem being is that, as any good techie will do in a possible virus/spyware situation, it wasn't connected to the network. Very good.

So, setting about removal. The exe that seems to produce all of the popup bubbles in the system tray is msmapi32.exe, which is located in windowssystem32 - removal of this file requires safe mode usage, or one of the tools which are freely available to do this for you. An access denied error will be presented if you try to remove it from the command line in normal usage, for example.
Then open a can of HiJackThis on it, and delete the following entries (yes, there's loads of them):
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {00110011-4b0b-44d5-9718-90c88817369b} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {086ae192-23a6-48d6-96ec-715f53797e85} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {11904ce8-632a-4856-a7cc-00b33fe71bd8} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {150fa160-130d-451f-b863-b655061432ba} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {15ACE85C-0BB1-42d1-9E32-07EB0506675A} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {17da0c9e-4a27-4ac5-bb75-5d24b8cdb972} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {1b68470c-2def-493b-8a4a-8e2d81be4ea5} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {1c4da27d-4d52-4465-a089-98e01bb725ca} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {1f48aa48-c53a-4e21-85e7-ac7cc6b5ffb1} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {1f48aa48-c53a-4e21-85e7-ac7cc6b5ffb2} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {202a961f-23ae-42b1-9505-ffe3c818d717} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {2d38a51a-23c9-48a1-a33c-48675aa2b494} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {2e246fae-8420-11d9-870d-000c2917de7f} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {2e9caff6-30c7-4208-8807-e79d4ec6f806} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {479fd0cf-5be9-4c63-8cda-b6d371c67bd5} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {5753791b-f607-48ca-814e-91c14d081f9e} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {7070a8f9-08a4-ca47-0ab0-1eb9e4ee1f3b} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {746455fe-d059-47e7-af0e-140e03f5a447} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {7a7e6d97-b492-4884-9abb-c31281dcc4f2} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {860c2f6b-ca82-4282-9187-beccbb66f0af} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {87185e78-a61b-4db3-965a-3235bbd7a622} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {8dc8f96d-34f7-1501-a2a4-631341aa3ac1} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {9c5875b8-93f3-429d-ff34-660b206d897a} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {a2595f37-48d0-46a1-9b51-478591a97764} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {a6f42cad-2559-48df-af30-89e480af5dfa} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {b212d577-05b7-4963-911e-4a8588160dfa} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {CA0E28FA-1AFD-4C21-A8DC-70EB5BE2F076} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {cf021f40-3e14-23a5-cba2-717765721306} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {d1ac752e-883f-4ed8-8828-b618c3a72152} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e2b2b5a1-b48c-4886-a318-723916a01024} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e2ddf680-9905-4dee-8c64-0a5de7fe133c} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e3eebbe8-9cab-4c76-b26a-747e25ebb4c6} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e6d5237d-a6c7-4c83-a67f-f9f15586fa62} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {e7afff2a-1b57-49c7-bf6b-e5123394c970} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {fcaddc14-bd46-408a-9842-cdbe1c6d37eb} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {fd9bc004-8331-4457-b830-4759ff704c22} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {fe2d25c1-c1db-4b5e-9390-af1cb5302f32} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {ff1bf4c7-4e08-4a28-a43f-9d60a9f7a880} - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF} - (no file)

Seems to have solved it.

Not wanting to make light of the death of anybody - however, I confidently predict a new wave of 419s:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6096420.stm

That really was an absolute pain in the backside of a day. Aside from the computer issue (must e-mail me contact at the company to make my feelings clear on that one), I had people wibbling at me regarding my new project, and also needed to get to the bank to whack a load of cheques in for said new project. All in all, everything was running very close to deadlines today.
#My laptop has been a bit poorly of late, doing odd things (ie saying it's receiving mains power, but not passing any to the battery). It *seems* to be the power supply on the way out - I suspect a dry solder joint on the plug that goes in to the laptop. Anyhow, eBay came up trumps and a replacement was duly purchased for 11. That'll be the third one for this current machine, but then it's certainly done well so far. I think this is the longest time I've had a single laptop, and it must be coming up for about 2.5 years or so now. Blimey.
Edit: Just looked through records, and I bought it on 06 July 2003. Not bad going!

When I order 30 machines and 30 monitors (totalling 60 heavy boxes), it is not funny to send them loose. A pallet or two would've made a whole world of difference, especially when it's chucking it down and the lorry driver has had to park about 250 yards away from my office. I'm sure the driver will be having words with you himself as he himself was not amused.

Lots of love,

Gary

"Gary, you look absolutely knackered. Are you ok?" - said to me by a cow-orker at 1030.

Great. That'll either be an illness on its way, or exhaustion. Either of them bad news at the moment.

Comedy moment in the Brazilian Grand Prix buildup just now. Martin Brundle had been covering the presentation by Pele of a trophy to Michael Schumacher as this is MSC's last race. He finds Kimi Raikkonen stood, leaning against a wall:

MB: "Kimi, you missed the presentation by Pele."
KR: "Yeah"
MB: "Will you get over it?"
KR: "I was having a shit"
MB: "Ok, thanks for that. Obviously, you'll have a nice light car on the grid."

Kev visited this weekend, which was a somewhat welcome relief after a hair raising week last week, for various reasons.

o One of my old contracts (finished in February) e-mailed me asking me to do more work for them
o My current employer has said they want 4 hours per week from me after I move departments. More money, but more hassle.
o Human resources contacted me and said something like "You do realise you're not being seconded, and that this is a two year contract?". My response was pretty simple: "I'm pulling out". This, obviously, put the cat among the pigeons and it was sorted out pretty quickly. My contract for this arrived yesterday morning, detailing everything as I expected.
o Various bits of money are starting to turn up now, which is a welcome relief. I've sunk a fair bit of cash into a new project which is starting to come to fruition now. There was a period last week which was getting quite desparate, but, as I say, it's coming good now.

So, with all that, it was a nice break to do very little. The Conwy Food Festival was taking place this weekend. After picking Kev up from the train station, we went for a drive around and I showed him the local area - the seafront, and so on. We then headed back to the house to drop stuff off, before heading over to the snooker club for a couple of frames. From here, we went back out again. There wasn't much happening to do with the festival on Friday evening, but we stopped off at a pub in Conwy, before mooching back over to The Killer a bit closer to home.

Saturday was a bit odd weather wise when we got up - it went from raining heavily to nice and sunny three times in an hour. Me & Kevin took our chances and walked over to Conwy, primarily because I knew it'd be a real pain to park anywhere with the food festival - it's difficult at the best of times, but it'd be like nothing ever seen before. I was quite right. The whole town was absolutely packed. First thing we needed to do was get him measured up for a suit for the wedding. This was all done pretty quickly. We had a look around the festival and I got a few photos, whilst Kev bought a couple of bits and bobs. Back home again, and I decided to take Kev for a look around some of the lesser known (ie off the tourist beaten track) areas to see what some of the areas of beauty are like around here, which he seemed quite impressed with. His train out was at 1400, so that was pretty much it.
Fran, one of Sioned's friends (and bridesmaids) turned up just before Kev left. She stayed around for most of the afternoon whilst we did a few wedding bits and bobs.

Sioned and Fran nipped off in to town, so I took a bit of time out to sort out some more relaxing things - recompiling the kernel on profile (web server/login server/etc), tidying up some bits on sourcefour (fileserver) which needed doing, and making sure the UPS was happy and fed after it had a flid about its batteries recently.

Today has been a day of doing very little. We managed to get up at about 1130, before I sat doing nothing. The Snooker Grand Prix in Aberdeen started this weekend, so I've been catching up on the output from that, as well as The Brazilian Grand Prix taking place this weekend. I recorded the qualifying last night and watched that this morning over breakfast.

That's pretty much about it - as I say - a bit hair raising.

Nipped up to the office to pick some bits up for work this morning and noticed a big red light on the UPS in the rack. Checking the logs reveals:

Wed Oct 18 20:43:54 BST 2006 UPS Self Test switch to battery.
Wed Oct 18 20:43:57 BST 2006 UPS battery must be replaced.

Great.

It's still dark at 0528 at this time of year. Unfortunately that's when I was woken up by security ringing me to tell me that the alarm in one of our offices was going off.

I feel cold. And I'm tired. I want my nice warm bed.

Instead, since I'd only have about half an hour, I'm sat in my office, which is rather cold at the moment. :(

One of my proudest developments during my time with my current department is the five year computer replacement cycle. Before I started there, machines were only upgraded when money was made available through things like ESF funding and so on. There was no framework, per se. It was obvious that some of the machines were ailing, seriously. I fought in the last financial year to make money available for the most needy cases, and was granted £7500. I proposed a scheme, whereby 15 machines would be upgraded each year. I wrote a list of all of the machines in the department - Year 1 being the ones that were in dire need, Year 2 could probably survive a bit longer, through to Year 5 which had only just been replaced.

The financial year starts in August, so technically the money for this years replacements are available now. I contacted our supplier yesterday and found that I can feasibly afford a couple more machines, so I went round giving everybody the good news. Reactions included lots of hugs, which was nice :-)
I've also got the supplier to pre-install our image, so this will save me a hell of a lot of time.

Today has been rather fantastic. I've done some maintenance on the bike. Sioned has done a lot of cooking, and made a brilliant dinner for us. I also had a few frames of snooker at the club. We've got very little to watch on Sky+. Tonight should, hopefully, see us doing very little.

"Woo".

As I'd mentioned previously about this new job I'm taking, I've received a lot of good advice from people close to me, and people that I trust. There's very few people that fit into those categories, so the things that those people say to me go a long way. One of the concerns I had was that I felt I wasn't really ready for where I was heading.

"It's called the Peter Principle". I popped the words into google, and it matches my feelings at the moment: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Today has mainly been dealing with lots money that's owed to me - actually getting invoices and other paperwork out. I like the companies and organisations that just send me money straight away (like a council I work for - the money just appears in my bank account. That's how it should always work :-) )
Having said that, I made a huge cockup yesterday which meant that some money which should've been arriving either today or tomorrow will be delayed at least a week now. Sigh.

I'm looking at treating myself to another car. Not that I need one, but I fancy something to go alongside the Saab. Just not sure what at the moment. I was thinking about buying a Jaguar (probably an S-Type) since they look rather nice, but the engine is too big for me to justify at the moment (3.0 V6). A Lotus might fit the bill. Will have to consider that one.

I've taken it. Number of reasons, them mainly being:
1) I don't have to wear a suit
2) I can continue the hours I'm doing now (which suit me pretty much ideally)
3) That's pretty much it. I don't ask for much, do I?

I've handed in the required paperwork today to say I'm shifting departments. Looks like I'll be there from mid November.

Yesterday, I was in court defending a speeding charge brought by Arrive Alive/North Wales Police against me. I won - not guilty, and I've been awarded costs. The case relied on a technical defence in so far as the Notice of Intended Prosecution documents that they'd sent did not comply with Section 1 of the Road Traffic Offences Act 1988 (RTOA), and also that their documentation did not comply with Young vs Day where it was found, and held upon appeal that a location given on a Notice of Intended Prosecution should hold specific detail to allow the defendant to locate the offence to within at least four miles.
The legal advisor at Court asked if I'd defend myself in any other way other than the above. "No, unless the prosecution springs something on me". Guess what the prosecution did? Needless to say, they weren't pleased when I defended myself (successfully). "Sneaky bastard", he said afterwards. This made me smile :-)

Congratulations must go to the people that helped me and advised me on this - although I represented myself in court, there've been people advising me and helping me along the way. Thanks everyone!

I'm physically and mentally knackered now. Really, beyond all belief. I've not been like this for some time. I mentioned in my previous entry about a meeting I'd had which could see me changing a lot of the things I'm working on. I had a call offering me a new position - I'll be a manager within the University I work at. This is a daunting offer, and certainly not something I'd actually gave any great consideration to. Why did I go for it then? Pretty much every job I've been to interview for I've been offered (all of them bar one has seen this happen). I guess I've been so busy, I've not been able to sit and think "What if?". I certainly think that I've done a lot of good work in developing systems and procedures where I am now - the thing is, I really do not see myself, nor consider myself as management. It's almost a dirty word to me.
The University have openly admitted that they cannot afford to lose me, and as such have made me a very attractive offer - not just in financial terms, but on every front. They've covered all of the possible bases.
But it still doesn't stop the questions in my own head. I've had a lot of advice from people that I respect about this, and as always, it's still my own decision. Do I want to be the techie that really knows what he's doing in a niche market, was offered the management position but didn't take it? Or do I want to
It's a difficult decision. People that know me personally will know that this is a hugely difficult decision for me. I hate suits. They make me itch. I like to be on the front line. The title "Manager" does not sit well with me. But, as many people have said - I can't have it all ways. Will I regret it if I don't take it? Probably.
After all, since the University have offered me the ultimate package - one of the details being that I can go back to my old job, then I've not really got anything to lose, have I?

As well as this, I've been working back in the theatre this week. There's not been much going on there recently because a lot of building work has been taking place, adding a new arena to the complex. There's only been a couple of shows over the summer, but it's really kicked off again this week. Due to this my fitness level seems to have dropped slightly - so, with all of this having happened in the last week, it's understandable that today I've just been totally drained. I need some more energy.

Across yesterday and today I've managed to blitz a whole pile of stuff that needed doing. Whole blocks of stuff have gone off the list, which has made me feel a bit better. There's still a few bits outstanding, but these are major projects which are going to take weeks, if not months.
Monday I spent a few minutes starting on another project I'm doing. Also ordered the kit I need for it. I've got another couple of hours work to do on that, ideally before Thursday.
It's rather nice clearing stuff off my plate, as I think things are going to get a lot worse between now and the end of the year. More money, but a lot more hassle.

...But it's still not over. We had a very brief power outage yesterday morning. I suspect that it was actually a brownout more than anything, but my logging isn't that verbose. The UPS fell to battery 06:20:40 and power was back by 06:20:43. One of the machines here isn't on the UPS (the webserver cum other-bits-and-bobs box, router, AP and switch is, the file server wasn't), so I took the opportunity to move that machine over to the UPS (I can't think why I'd not done so before). I've also took a lot of time to generally tidy stuff up on the two servers here, and the one in Leicester. I've upgraded the kernel on the fileserver. It didn't need it from a security point of view as it was only one minor revision out from the current Debian stable version, but I needed to add a few things that had been bugging me for a while. I've also tidied some of the startup scripts up on the machines, as well.
ntpdate has been checked and installed on all of the machines, as well as normalising the MRTG output from them. All in all, cleaning up and making things a bit nicer.
The same kernel upgrade as I did to the fileserver will need to be done to the other box here at some point soon - although I'm not in any great rush to do that at the moment. Whilst the reasons I performed the upgrade on the fileserver would be useful on the other machine, they're certainly not essential. They're merely performance enhancement, which, being as that box is far more powerful than the fileserver, isn't a requirement at the moment.

Sioned has spent a lot of time at the hospital over the weekend visiting her Mum, hence me having so much time to do the above. This has been useful in some ways, as it's meant I can work in the office unhindered for as long as I've needed to.

This morning I was woken up early by the phone ringing. I vaguely remember it being before 0800. On a Sunday morning. That time shouldn't exist unless it involves lots of money. One of Sioned's friends had a baby at some ridiculous time this morning. Sioned - being a woman, was overjoyed with this. I, being a man, managed to get back to sleep pretty quickly and stayed in this state until just before 11, before getting up and watching the Chinese Grand Prix which I'd Sky+'d from the live output earlier in the morning.
Crickey. What a race. What a changing track. MSchu really is going to go out in style if he pulls banzai runs like that in the next two races. It's going to be close.

I'm hoping that the week ahead is going to pretty quiet. I've still got a lot of stuff on my plate which I need to get out of the way quickly. I reckon I should be able to clear a lot of that by the middle of Tuesday, with perhaps a couple of small bits falling into later-on-Tuesday. Beyond that, I think things will start to get back to normal and my head will be back above water.

I took on yet-another-project this week. I think I'll stop now because I really feel, for once, that I've actually got enough to be going on with. Strangely, the day after I took the new project, an existing one decided to bring a huge truck and empty the contents on to my lap. Lots of stuff to do. Lots and lots and lots. So much so that I think I've got too much now. The next couple of weeks are going to be mainly getting through as much of it as I can so I can keep my head above water.
Unfortunately, it's going to be a busy time for various other reasons. Still, can't be helped.

Had an interesting meeting today which may see me having to give up at least one of the projects I'm working on and re-comitting my time elsewhere, but for the better (for me). Lots of new possibilities and so on, and certainly moving on to more interesting things. Have to wait and see on that one.

For some reason, even though I've not been horribly busy during the last few days, I've not got round to updating this. So - having had family over last weekend was good - haven't seen them for a while now, although they were late after getting held up in roadworks. Consequently, they weren't able to stay that long. Monday was a nice relaxing day off for me. This was a blessing in disguise as lots of new students were starting and generally looking lost. Tuesday wasn't quite so bad in that respect. Wednesday, Thursday and today, my boss at my main project has been away. I've actually got a lot more done that needs doing. It's been a productive time for me, and extremely useful.

The weekend? A relaxing one, hopefully, watching the Chinese Grand Prix.

Woo. A pair of front row tickets at a very very very very small gig in November. I'm quite pleased I've got those, to be honest. Although there is a no cameras policy, which is a bit of a git. Oh well.

I have to say, I thought that it would be more difficult...

This past week has seen one of the places I work for (the one that pays a significant amount of my wage each month) inspected by Estyn. Before this week, it's not a process I'd come across, so only had stories from other to go by. By all accounts, it was going to be something which would see late nights, early starts, and me jumping through hoops to provide them with the information they would need.
Except it didn't really happen.
The first morning - Monday - I started out at one of our other offices at 0600 as I needed to get a couple of bits done there before starting out proper. Starting this early meant I'd get to my main office at a reasonable time, too. The inspection team were scheduled to arrive at about 1130 - which most of them did. There was a brief stampede to my door with questions from people, but pretty much what I was expecting. I stayed in late doing odds and sods and got home at around 2100. A respectable amount of time off built up.

Tuesday was pretty reasonable. Started at 0800 and... well, it was all rather quiet. Not what I was expecting at all. A few bits here and there, but it wasn't as taxing as I'd imagined it to be. I honestly thought I'd have no time to myself. I was back home before 1800.

The rest of the week was much the same, to the point that Thursday I only needed to spend about an hour doing work for the inspection team. As I say - not anywhere near as bad as it'd been billed.

At the debrief today, we were told our provisional grades - these are, apparently, confidential for now. However, due to the work that I'd done with the inspectors, such as answering their queries quickly and efficiently, as well as making provisions for them (such as making a wireless network available), I received special praise. This was rather nice, and also recognised by my own managers.

I'm taking Monday off next week as I'm physically knackered. The lead up to this week, and also the time spent has pretty much exhausted me and I'm looking forward to a rest.

Mum & Laura (and possibly Dad) are coming over tomorrow for a few hours, mainly so that Laura can be measured up for her bridesmaid dress. Hopefully this weekend is going to be, other than that, very quiet. I rather need it.

Had a pretty nice weekend so far. As well as getting the Killers tickets bought on Friday, the new exhaust for YellowBike turned up. I'd been waiting on this for a while, and originally intended to get it fitted last weekend. No matter - only a week late. I had a quick look on Friday evening after getting in from work, and decided that I didn't have the requisite tools for the job since my socket set is back in Leicester. I called Sioned's Dad and he agreed to lend me the use of the tool sheds there, as well as space and stuff. Popped over there on Saturday in the car and dropped Sioned off, as well as the exhaust, before returning home to pick the bike up and take that over.

The old exhaust came off relatively easily, save from needing to use a bit of persuasion on the nuts to move away from the bolts. I then tried to put the new exhaust on, and found some problems. It just didn't fit properly. Scratched my head a bit and compared the two exhausts to each other. The new one was about an inch longer in the bit that goes into the collector box. This is a bit odd, thinks I. I then realise that the old exhaust had actually left a good chunk of itself in the collector box. So I set about trying to remove it. To say it was stuck quite firmly perhaps understates things somewhat.

I had a good go at ripping out small chunks of metal with pliers and so on, not wanting to pierce the collector or anything. About this time, Sioned's dad arrived back as he'd been out. He had an idea of putting oil on it, then jamming a screwdriver between the bit of the exhaust still in there, and bending it, such that it wasn't stuck any more. This worked a treat, although was perhaps more than I'd have considered doing on my own (being quite concerned about the collector still).

After that, it was pretty plain sailing. The new exhaust fitted on easily, bolts were refitted, and the bike started - it sounded pretty good. It still needs a liberal application of exhaust sealant, but other than that I'm pretty happy. Need some new tyres for it now.

I went to go and get changed back into my leathers - took my trousers off, and noticed absolutely loads of red lumps - my legs were covered. It seems I really needed to go to hospital. I rode the bike home, whilst Sioned and her Dad followed in one of their cars, and whisked me off to A&E, where I was told it was a reaction to chemicals - most likely fabric softener or something like that. Guess what we've just changed? That'll be a waste of a 10kg box of washing powder and massive bottle of fabric softener.

I think the reaction took it out of me - I was knackered last night - asleep on my feet. We watched a couple of bits on telly, including a program I noticed about the Scumball Rally. Sioned agreed with me that it looks to be bloody ace fun. We're probably going to be entering next year.

Today has seen us transporting piles of washing done with the reaction-causing-softener-and-powder down to the laundrette, since it'd put us quite far behind. Ready for collection tomorrow.

Today has been a bit quieter. I took the bike out for a good run to bed the exhaust in, and came across the results of a police chase - I asked the police for comments, but none were available at the time, although I was told a statement would be available for press later - still nothing. Eyewitness reports suggested that the black car had lost control on the bridge, and the two occupants had managed to get away. Not a great success for the police then.
Sioned's Mum has finally gone into hospital for sugery this afternoon - Sioned went with her, and will be back a bit later, leaving me with a pretty quiet afternoon.

The week ahead brings an inspection for one of the departments I work for at the University. This is pretty big stuff, and will be very stressful for a number of people there. I'm pretty confident in what I do, so hopefully it shouldn't be too bad, although I expect to have a lot of people breathing down my neck and taking things out on people and whatnot.

Saturday sees Mum & Laura (at least) visiting - possibly Dad as well. This is mainly so that Laura can be measured up for her dress for the wedding. We'll probably find other things to do as well, but I'll have to have a think about that.

Guess who's got a pile of tickets for The Killers?

I have to say, though, that the system behind ticketmaster is a bit crap. I needed a pair, either for the Sunday or Monday at Brixton. Round in circles I go, being told that none are available. Then I accidentally select 1 ticket, instead of two - and get that single ticket. Hm. Ok. Carry on, and then get two for the Monday night. We'd prefer Sunday, so I carry on - and get another for Sunday.

So I've now got a spare pair for the Monday night. The capitalist on me is probably going to flog them on eBay for a hefty markup.

Having said all that - if anyone has tickets for Manchester that they'd want to swap for Brixton, then let me know.

Anyway - yay!

Yesterday saw me working on the new Nortel BCM that'd been installed at one of our offices. There's a list of things I need to do with it, two of which are pretty much sorted: All of the staff that are permanently based at the office now have their own mailbox on the voicemail side of things, and I've got the first part of the IVR via the BCM's CCR setup. Only problem being is that the IVR needs to be bilingual, what with this being Wales and all. Fear not, though - it won't be a monstrosity. The BCM is capable of handling two languages quite easily, which is a relief.

The next part involves setting up an couple of IP extensions in another office, so that when the receptionist is not available in the office where the BCM is, calls may be routed down to the IP phones (still following me?). Due to a minor cockup involving the IP address I was provided (ie it was on the wrong subnet), I didn't get this done yesterday, so a job for another time.

Unfortunately this morning I was told that I need to add another couple of mailboxes to the voicemail part - except I've run out of licences. Sigh. That won't be cheap then.

Last night Sioned & me headed out to the place where we're having the wedding reception and sorted out a few more things there, clarified other bits and whatnot. Other than that, pretty quiet at the moment.

My thoughts through the F1 season so far have been that MSchu would take another season after this, and then retire (ie at the end of 2007). Looks like I was wrong on that one. The end of the 2006 season will see MSchu leaving his driving position at Ferrari and moving into something else, but still within the team - the press release seems to indicate he'll be moving into another position there.
Rather interesting - he's said he wants to spend more time with his family, but it still looks like he'll have a heavy involvement in Ferrari itself, although how much remains to be seen.

There's lots of organisations now comparing him to people like Fangio and Senna. Michael has played no small part in getting Ferrari where they are today. I think a lot of his personality and sportsmanship have moved between himself and his team - almost like osmosis, that makes the two somewhat indistinguishable. The reason I suggest this is that the result of the stewards inquiry this weekend regarding Alonso "holding up" Massa would be exactly the type of thing that Michael would do if he were his own team. My concern is that with Michael still playing a role in Ferrari next season - and for however many seasons after that remains open to discussion - we may still see things like this happening.

With Raikkonen moving over to the prancing horse from McLaren, I'll be interested to see how his game play changes. There's certainly been visible differences in the way that Massa drove last year to his decisions this year. Part of that obviously comes down to different team ethics, but also in the way the team itself operates.

Certainly, the decision by MSchu to retire hasn't calmed anything down. It's thrown things further into the air.

On a train out of Leicester just now having been to a meeting about some more work for me.

Walking down to the train station felt odd in some ways. I enjoyed walking around because it felt like that's where I should be. Almost like having been away (if only for a few weeks) felt like I'd been missing for a long time. I'm not quite sure why.
Ambling down London Road at 2130 - it was so busy. So many people around, so lively. So much going on. Neon lights glaring out from the shops.
It's a direct contrast to where I live now, where it's much quieter - not just at night, but constantly. It's slightly unnerving, in a way. You get used to the constant hustle and bustle. Hard to explain.
One thing, though, that is easier to explain is that there's no segregation of any type in Leicester. One of the problems with North Wales is that on the face of it, it seems a very accepting place. Look a bit closer and you see that there's still a split of sorts between born-and-bred Welsh, and the English "settlers". Sites like http://ynyfro.com and http://www.notenglish.com document the feelings quite well. It's not that I'm bothered about it - those are people's opinions, and they're welcome to them. What does bother me is that there are places that, being English, would be a bad idea for me to go to. In North Wales, opinions and feelings like this are apparent in shops, as well as pubs - obviously, not all of them, but some of them. And this is part of the problem for me - not knowing where I'll be welcome and where I won't be - simply because of where I was born.

Leicester has always been proud of its mix of cultures, ethnicities and so on - it's much more accepting. I can go anywhere, and not feel threatened. I think that's why I feel more relaxed there.

I plumped for a new Nokia N80 for this years upgrade, which arrived today. Sioned also decided that she liked said phone, so one was duly ordered for her. I'm slightly concerned that this might look ever so twee.

What's more worrying is that it's taken over an hour so far to transfer all of the stuff from my old phone to the new one via bluetooth - and it's still going. I think I'm too reliant on my phone.

We've been slowly updating the kitchen to Geek Standard. This has involved replacing the microwave with one that's capable of, apparently, cooking a whole Christmas dinner in it (a Smeg jobby), getting a sexy new dishwasher (Smeg again), and also, not through choice, upgrading the washing machine. Unfortunately the old one went pop.

The next thing on the list was a black Smeg cooker that Sioned had set her heart on. As well as upgrading the appliances, we're slowly moving over to having a black kitchen, hence the new cooker had to be black. Finding this exact cooker is actually harder than it sounds, so when we found this one we ended up buying it. This is where the problem starts.

Firstly, the cooker we have at the moment is 50cm width, which is somewhat non-standard. The gap for the current cooker is... snug. With the new cooker coming in at 60cm width, we've got to do some minor adjustments involving a saw to the cupboard units.

The next problem is that our current cooker uses gas - the new one electric. It'll be easy enough to fit a 30A spur for the cooker, thinks I. Except it won't. My idea to channel the wall and go through the kitchen ceiling was quickly vetoed by Sioned, who was much more accepting of the idea of putting surface mount trunking in. It'll probably be cheaper by magnitudes as well which is nice. Next problem is that the cupboard containing the consumer unit and meter and whatnot is rather cramped. It will require the addition of something, or the replacement of the whole lot.

I'd looked a while ago at replacing it all. At the moment it's a horrible mess. We've got the 100A incomer fuse, which goes - obviously - in to the meter. From here, it's slightly more concerning. There's the live and neutral tails out of the meter in to a junction box (one for each tail). Out of here, we get two tails - one to a CU at the top right of the cabinet, and one to an unused CU below these junctions. The CU at the top has a 30A for the ring main, and a 5 for the lighting circuit.

In short, it's a real mess.

My idea being to strip the junction boxes out, all of the consumer units and start again, from scratch. Put a nice MK Sentry chassis in and the job would be a good'un. I looked at this more in detail today - no dice. The cupboard is too small, measuring a mere 26cm across. The area above the meter is only 20cm high. It seems MEM do a nice 4 way unit which fits into a space this small, so that might be an option. It would also provide us with enough capacity to fit the cooker circuit.

So we've got a sparky coming on Monday to quote us for the installation of the cooker circuit, and hopefully not laugh too loudly at the stuff in the leccy cupboard.. For once, it's a mess that I've had nothing to do with. Hopefully I might be able to make this one look a bit nicer ;-)

Fy radio newydd for the Cisco access point (the 802.11B/G one) arrived today which I promptly installed after getting home. All up and running. I've also ordered esgidiau newydd since my old ones are falling apart. Hopefully they'll be delivered in the next few days.

Went out to the Killer for a meal tonight which was quite interesting. The service wasn't what we're usually used to - slow, and we were overcharged. The table next to us had slightly worse service - their starter, of prawn cocktail was off. It was rather niffy, all things considered. They immediately skipped to the main course (through no choice of their own) which was... cold. Oh dear. The chap in the couple kicked off though, which probably won no favours with the kitchen staff.

The last few days have all been rather busy. I've got a nice hefty new project at work which is going to take a good couple of weeks, doing interesting things in getting Excel to talk to an MS SQL database and do automated data analysis. Not really the right tool for the job in some senses, but perfected in other jobs. Unfortunately I don't know any other way around it.
Tuesday was spent tidying up the last of the hangovers from the problems experienced during the last week-and-a-bit, and documenting where we are and what's happened as a result and so on. In other work related stuff, I've been given a pay rise. Which is nice.

#I had information about a contract in South London punted my way which is pretty close to what I'm doing for 300 a day. Unfortunately it's sixth months, which is pretty bad timing since that brings us horribly close to the wedding day. It'd have been nice to take, but as I say - it's at the wrong time.

Reading news.bbc.co.uk yesterday, there was mention that CNN are re-running their coverage of the September 11 2001 incidents. This made me realise that, quite strangely, one of my close friends - Kev, has moved down to London almost five years to the day that I did. I think it was about two days difference. If there's another terrorist incident in the next couple of weeks, I'll be starting to get extremely concerned.

The weekend & Monday were rather nice, all things said. Did pretty close to nothing, although a few things have cropped up which need doing: The guttering definitely needs clearing out around the whole house being the main one. We've had some pretty heavy rain here recently which has seen water pouring over the edges of the guttering. Poo. I'm sure it wasn't that long ago I did it last.

That was certainly one of the best races I've seen this year. The start... the finish - and everything in between. Truly gripping stuff. The move that M Schu pulled at the start to cut the Renault of Alonso off, then the twists in between which saw Alonso finish in second were absolutely amazing. It was a shame to see Kimi have "no rear end grip" after his pit due to a knackered rear left. He seemed to be a bit lost as he sat in the car before taking the steering wheel off. :/
The 2006 season is really shaping up now with just 2 points between Ferrari and Renault in the constructors, and 12 between M Schu and Alonso in the drivers. It really has been blown open again.

Having a really quite nice weekend all in. So far I've managed to give the car a damn good clean - it's rather sparkly at the moment. Gave the inside a good going over as well, cleaning some of the marks off the leather and the carpet. I'm rather pleased with it all things said at the moment. Gave the boot a good clean out and checked the fluids as well.
Sioned is having a kip at the moment. I've just made a quick start on the invites for the wedding since these are likely to involve a bit of work, although on my side it's a relatively simple mailmerge from the SQL database containing all of the invitees (this is the same database that handles all of the wedding website logins and so on - it's nice to have all of this type of thing centralised, so that everything is singing from the same hymn sheet. One good thing about geekery is that stuff like this is pretty well planned).

Snooker later. This is what weekends are for.

I've not really had a chance to stop this week. Work has been rather stressful due to the problems documented in my previous entry. It's seen me working late a couple of times and being so knackered when I made it home that I wasn't really in a position to do much. I did, however, take the bike out for a run - something I've not done for far too long, and it was rather nice to have done so. Again - it's finding the time and the round tuits to do things like this.

I really do need to get some of the stuff off my chest about the problems at work though, and also so that I've got a reasonably useful brain dump should something like this jump up and bite again. Essentially it boiled down to a pair of security problems. My previous blog entry mentioned that it may be to do with a "sell by date" in part of the software - this wasn't in fact the case.
The software provider connected to our server and found that the data in the back end DB was actually corrupt. This lead to some headscratching as the corruption was covering approximately 66% of the data held within the table. Either this problem was something that had been going on for some time - not an option as we regularly export our data and the data was only corrupt on the most recent export. That, or part of the software itself wasn't functioning correctly. There was a real oddity here. The field in question is a counter, relative to another part of the database. When a new record is entered, the field increments by one on the previous record. Nice and simple. Except it wasn't working. Each record had this field set as 1. This is handled by the web front end, by a business rules DLL.
The provider had connected to our server at 1130 on Wednesday, and were still working on it when I left at 1645. They themselves finished up about an hour later after running a total reinstallation of their own software, the .Net2 framework, and also IIS. No dice.
Thursday rolled around and they recommenced their work at around 0915. I had to go to an operational meeting from 1000, which I was stuck in for about 90 minutes. I received a phone call pretty much immediately on returning to my desk saying that they'd found the source of the problem. A slightly wonky connection string between the database and the front end application (ODBC) and also a permissions problem on many of the directories - all of which should've been handled by installers and so on. Ho hum. To a point it's poor programming as the errors weren't caught.
This was only part of the problem. What had been solved at this point is why the problem was occuring. We still had the non-too-trivial issue of a rather knackered database. Well, let's just go from a backup shall we? We could do, but that's not going to be an easy job either. Due to an unknown in terms of when the corruption occurred, it'd mean searching through a fair few backups (taken every 6 hours), and the greater problem that all data that had been entered since the failure would also be corrupt and require at least manual changes, or, at worst, a full re-entry of the entire record.
Due to the nature of the field, it was decided that we could repopulate the field by means of a relatively simple SQL script that wrote the field as God intended, following chronological order. Nice and simple.

This seems to have solved most things. I've spoken, again, at length with my contact within the Government who has taken an export of our data made today to check it with their software to see if it causes any issues. If not, then we're go. There's still some small lingering problems - probably about 200 records which I've found problems with which seem to have been caused by data corruption, but it's a lot better than it was.

As I say - a stressful time, certainly. I bought myself a new Cisco radio (a combined B/G unit) for my Aironet AP here yesterday, primarily cause I sort of needed cheering up, and also because it's cheap. I'm considering re-starting my "Ooh, I want that" list because when I need some retail therapy, I'm sometimes a little short on things that I want. I'm a bit odd like that. I'll quite often have the money to buy something, want to buy something, but not know what I want to get. Other times, I'll not have the money, but really want something. Pfeh.

On the subject of which, I've found I can easily afford the insurance for a Yamaha R1 - the bike I've been lusting after for many years now. I think this is the type of thing you're meant to buy and say "I've wanted one of these all of my life". I don't really do that (ie want something for my entire life), so I guess it's the closest I can get to that.

Sioned is out tonight, at a club in Mold. She asked me (numerous times) to go, but quite frankly I'm wrecked after this past week. I drove her & a friend out there (and obviously, myself back) earlier on - a nice 70 mile round trip which gave me a chance to wind down a bit. I'll have a nice relaxing bank holiday, please. Hopefully we'll have a good race this weekend (from Turkey). I'm tired.

In the line of work I'm in now, August is the start of a new contract provided by the Government. Last year saw some huge issues which were primarily down to bad advice given to us by our software provider on how to handle the changes necessary. The procedure is called a contract rollover. All of the data that is still relevant to the new contract is effectively carried over, leaving the data which is no longer required behind, effectively.
#This year, we didn't experience problems of the same nature, but we still encountered a rather interesting issue which has seen about 80k go missing due to an undocumented "sell by date" on part of the software.
Speaking with the software developers today, apparently we've fallen foul of an issue whereby it's not possible to send our data to the Government after the contract has expired and the new one has started. Let me put this in to context: The contract for the previous year expired on 31 July 2006, and the new one started on 01 August 2006. The Government, though, give us a leeway and allow us to send the data for a few days after the contract has expired as paperwork often takes a day or two to make it onto the computers. The deadline for the receipt of the final dataset being midday on 03 August 2006.
The software provider advised me today that any datasets created by the software after the end of the contract year wouldn't provide a true reflection on the data held within the database. When asked why this was, I was told it was to prevent confusion over which exporting software to use. This is because the dataset definitions change from year to year. Fine. Normally, I'd accept this explanation - except for the fact that they only released the new export software on 13 August.

Sheer genius. So our options for exporting the data in that period in between? Oh dear.

The problem I have is that I'm going to need to recommend this type of software to another organisation quite shortly. Unfortunately, the software provider in question are likely to be the best candidates for the job. That really worries me.

The relief comes because Friday saw the Government statistics released for the data that I'd sent at the beginning of August. I wasn't aware that we'd be so far down - it came as a bit of a shock, shall we say. After I'd made the phone call to the gaffer explaining that - somewhere, somehow, there was about 80 grand missing, and no, I couldn't explain how, and that this might somehow be my fault and I've cocked something up somewhere - the relief was that it wasn't actually down to me. A weight off my shoulders.
As I say, though - if I have to recommend this software to another organisation and this type of thing happens again, then I'm going to be a lot more accountable.

Mi wnes i tri recordiadau! Hit my target for the day, which is nice.

Got home about 6ish. I went via Bangor as I tried to return the GPS I'd bought, but found I need an RMA from Navman - apparently you're not able to return one of their items without going through this process first. My mobile battery died whilst I was on the phone to them, and by the time I got to my office in Bangor, they'd closed up for the day. Ho hum.

I met quite a few interesting people today. As with last week, it was certainly nice getting out of the office and meeting new people, but it's really shown up my weakness with understanding & siarad cymraeg.

I've noticed that a lot of people are talking about the comments on the North Wales Police blog regarding bikers in National Parks - BBC News online are covering this as well - it certainly seems to have caused quite a stir. Hopefully we'll see a retraction or an apology, but I hold out little hope.

I'm on Anglesey at the moment, as usual sat on the University stand. There's no wavelan here, so it's over to a pretty poor 3G service from Orange. It's rather overcast here, although there's been no rain to speak of so far. I've managed to get one recording in and have another guaranteed before the end of the day. I'd like to get three, ideally four.
The "safety camera" (speed camera) people are here at the minute and kindly let me take some photos on the back of their van. All very interesting. I have to say, I was a bit shocked that they let me take photos of all of their gear. I'm not complaining though.

Having spent the whole day (a mere four hours so far) on my feet, I'm absolutely knackered. Shows how unfit I am :-(

S'mae!

After the Eisteddfod, and what with going to the Anglesey Show tomorrow, I've decided I really should get my arse in gear with it.

I've spent the last few days buying up kids books on eBay since I tend to learn quite well that way. That's not to say I learn well with kids books generally, but reading something I don't understand and working out what it means is how I learn new concepts.

Anyhow, I've got a copy of Sam Tan coming, and another one as well. I've also picked up some material from work since we run Cymraeg courses as well.

Dw i ddim yn dallt llawer, although I'm already able to put a few basic sentences together - I'm getting there slowly. I had a (very) brief e-bost conversation with the head of Welsh teaching today as well which was nice. Blog entries that are under the Cymraeg category will gradually (hopefully) have more & more Welsh in them. Mae'n ddrwg gen i ;-)

http://www.north-wales.police.uk/nwp/public/en/blogs/viewblog.asp?UID=2&CID=25

My God, what a fantastically stupid idea. Please - anyone who values their freedom, leave a comment. On the one hand, I hope this comes in so that I can buy a house in a national park (there's plenty in Snowdonia) and take my bike with me. Hell, I'll buy a whole fleet of them, and then fit barely legal aftermarket exhausts.

I'm still amazed by the sheer stupidity of this idea. Does the chap even live on this planet?

Today's/tonight's blog entry comes from Crewe. A broken train, to be more precise. I'm on my way back from Leicester, having dropped off a whole stack of DVDs with the latest Medics' Revue on, and also a few other bits and bobs. I've also collected Sioned's birthday present from Mum & Dad which I shall be delivering shortly.

Looks like the train is not able to couple up to the bit that drags us to Holyhead (electric train with no electric wires, so the train needs to be dragged).

I received a letter today which seems to suggest that the Royal Mail may have lost a rather important document. Hopefully I'll be able to clear things up on Monday. If not, it's going to scupper my plans for doing The Anglesey Show on Wednesday. Have to see how things pan out there.

It's now 2147 - our train should've left at 2121. Still no movement. Strangely, I'm still quite glad I didn't drive. I've done far too much of that this week.

I like to think that I can learn things relatively easily. It's part of being in the line of work that I am that if you stop then you're out of a job. Having been at the Eisteddfod for the past couple of days, and now scheduled to be at The Anglesey Show next week, I've been thinking about how much Welsh I actually know and what I know about the language. Suprisingly, I can actually do a reasonable job of working out basic sentences if given to me, and if shown a word written as text I can get the pronounciation right a lot of the time. This came as somewhat of a shock as I certainly wasn't aware of what I knew. I guess a lot of it comes from seeing bilingual signs over and over again.

I'm home. Tired, but home. We got another recording in at the Eisteddfod quite late on, meaning we left the site at about 1630. After heading back to the car, which was parked miles away (on the furthest park and ride away), I needed to drop my colleague off as he is staying on for a few more days. This required dropping him off a bit further east on the M4 at Brigend. Now, I tapped in my postcode to the GPS at the park and ride site and it reckoned on 3.5 hours and about 180 miles to get home. Not too shabby all things in, and so we headed off to his new hotel.

About an hour later (!!) we arrived and I dropped him off. The GPS now reckoned on over 4 hours driving, and 258 miles. Good god. I really wasn't expecting that. Something much shorter would've been better.

I stopped for some food, and also used a slightly better route (in my eyes) than the one the GPS suggested, which saw me home at 2130, even after having picked up a works car from St Asaph.

Stopped at home for 45 minutes or so, then headed over to Bangor to collect the UPS for installation at St Asaph. This job went suprisingly well - the leased line gear all resync'd within about 5 minutes, and - as Barry Scott would say. Bang! The techie was gone!

I slept very well - it was very well needed. I think I'll head in to work in about an hour or so. I'll certainly need a few quiet days to recover from all of this.

Yesterday the BBC had a huge amount of staff on site here - speaking to one of their people today this has been reduced dramatically, with staff being moved to Cardiff airport and the like covering the naughty people wanting to blow up planes.

The Eisteddfod itself is a lot quieter - it's very obvious how few people there are here today compared to yesterday. The weather doesn't help matters - it's very overcast and we're having rain showers quite regularly.

Got another recording in this morning, although that seems to have dried up now. I'd much rather get at least another one - preferably another two in, but that seems unlikely now.

I had a wander around earlier and looked around backstage at the pavillion, where the main acts take place. The tech side of things isn't that large - certainly not on the scale of a large outdoor festival, aside from the default foldback desk and so on.

Hopefully I'll be gone from here by fiveish, then home for a bit before doing a UPS installation in St Asaph.

I've not been to Swansea before - our digs are in Mount Pleasant (photos to follow - the decorative tastes of the owner are certainly eclectic). Swansea is an odd little place. I'm not really sure how to describe it. It seems to be quite poor economically and socially. Only having been here for a few hours I've already come across some quite open inhabitants. I don't think I'd be too comfortable living here, to be honest. I'll put it another way - I'm concerned that the car might not be there in the morning.
I've never seen hills like they have around here - driving from the Eisteddfod to our digs took us up a hill which on first look seemed almost vertical. Walking back from the pub just now left me out of breath - I'd certainly have some good muscles in my legs if I lived around here.

Life on the road certainly has its pros and cons. On the one hand, expenses are good. We spent 20 quid at the pub tonight which can all be claimed back. Depending on your own taste, never knowing where you'll be is either a good thing or a bad thing.

It used to be that I quite liked this type of thing, constantly flitting about up and down the country. Does it mean I'm getting old if I'd prefer to be back at home?

We ended up getting a couple of people recorded today, which is the reason I'm actually here. I'm quite pleased we've got at least something to show for our time. Hopefully we'll get a lot more tomorrow - another four recordings would be fantastic, but I think that might be being a bit hopeful.

I've checked out the route home and it seems far better. Longer (Just under 200 miles - the journey down was about 140, I think), but the roads certainly look a lot nicer - my route straddles the Wales/England border for most of the way.

I had quite a relaxing night. The guy I'm working with and myself went out and had a pub meal, and then found a Riley's snooker & pool hall, where we got 10 games of pool in. I have to say, he's a fantastic player, although I only just managed to scrape a win at 6-4.

Guess I should try and get a good night sleep.

Well, we're here. The GPS took us on some... interesting roads. I may have to investigate my options for the journey home tomorrow as it was certainly one of the more challenging drives I've had to do.

I'm currently sat in the office at the Bangor stand. I went around and took some photos earlier and also found that I'm able to use the press area if I need to, although that doesn't really offer many benefits, so I'll probably not bother with that.

I have to admit - not being Welsh, I'm (again) struggling to see the point of most of what goes on here. Fair enough with the competitions and so on - that's fine, but the rest of it seems just to be publicity for various relatively large companies, and also for public bodies and Government organisations. I've spotted a whole raft of people walking around with DVLA bags, and Food Standards Agency stuff - what's the point? Why do organisations and agencies like this need to be here?

Organisations like Universities, colleges, fine - student recruitment. Totally understandable, as are organisations like the BBC, and the Welsh Rugby Union.

The Eisteddfod is regularly having financial struggles, and have often said that they're considering their options as regards putting on the next one. If I wasn't working here, it would've cost me a tenner to get in - if I had an average family, it would've cost £30. Maybe it's just me not being Welsh, but that seems a lot of money for what's happening here - I'm certainly not getting much out of it. As I say, a lot of it seems to be a PR event for larger organisations - I certainly wouldn't want to pay to have adverts thrown at me. Maybe the entertainment in the Maes makes up for it...

I'm still rather tired after yesterday at the moment - I rolled up to one of the University sites horribly early yesterday morning (about 0600) to have another look at the poorly PBX that I'd mentioned previously. It still wasn't a happy camper. I sat in the server room until 0830 when the first staff started turning up, with a monitor plugged in to it and googled for the symptoms. The equipment is a Nortel BCM (Business Communication Manager) 1000. The problem I was seeing was that any attempt to use the management network interface (NIC) - either through the web interface or telnet promptly resulted in the machine hanging, rebooting, or both. Google did produce some knowledge of the symptoms, but it didn't match the model number exactly (it had previously been seen in BCM200s and so on) - the capacitors on the base tray start to bulge and effectively render the x86 side of the unit useless - the MSC (Media Services Card) will still run fine, so general telephony services are good, but anything beyond that (ie voicemail and other features) are stuffed.
I phoned BT Business Support later on in the day and the guy said "Ah, we've come across this numerous times". I asked if it was due to knackered capacitors leaking their magic everywhere and he suggested that this was more than likely the case.

I finished early due to being a bit tired and went and did some food shopping.
Me and food shopping don't really go together. Sioned had helpfully given me a list. Potatoes. Baking potatotes? New potatoes? I picked two of each and hoped for the best. Ham. What type? Pick one. Variety is the spice of life. I hate supermarkets.

I picked up a few other bits as it's Sioned's birthday today, and then pootled home to watch the race that I'd Sky+'d over the weekend. What a *fantastic* race. Certainly the best one I've seen for a long time, with absolutely everything you could ask for. And Hungary is a bad circuit for overtaking?! Jenson well deserved that win - it was... entertaining to see M Schu have to retire. Williams' new driver is certainly going to make a name for himself if he carries on driving like that, but it was a shame to see his result disallowed due to a technical infringement.

This morning saw me going over to Llanberris to pick up a UPS for the site with the telecoms problems. I didn't realise the APC 3KVA jobbies are so heavy. Struggled to get that one out of the boot. I'll be working there late on Thursday night installing that and putting the BT NTEs onto it.

Tomorrow sees me driving down to the Eisteddfod in Morriston. I'm staying there overnight and then coming back at some point on Thursday - not sure when yet. I might take a day off in lieu on Friday since I'm likely to be just about dead.

Just after lunch on Friday afternoon, I left the office early and headed off to pick Sioned up. We spent the weekend in York to celebrate her birthday on Tuesday. After a brief diversion to one of the University offices where I spent an hour or so fighting against the Nortel phone exchange which seems to be fatally knackered, we headed off on our travels.

We were staying at the Royal York Hotel which is an absolutely storming location. We couldn't ask for much better, really. Arrived there about fiveish, and Sioned decided she'd have a bath and generally relax. Me not being one for sitting about and relaxing, I wandered off out into York to get some photos and scout around to see what we could do later on. I arrived back and we went down to an evening meal at the hotel.
I'll save the rant about the meal for another time (possibly tomorrow). The meal itself was fine, but it certainly gave me a good chance to form opinions on certain things. As I say, I'll save that one for another time. After the meal, we headed on out to a pub called Coopers, conveniently located next to the hotel at the train station. As railway pubs go, it's pretty bloody good, actually. Not too expensive, not too cheap, and plays good music. And not too smokey, either.
From there, we moved further into the city itself, visiting various places including the Hole In The Wall (I reckon it's a better place than BITE suggest), until we happened across a bar/club called Cert 18. As we arrived, we looked at the posters outside where we were accosted by a couple of blokes who asked if we "liked loud music" - if so, we *had* to go in. With such a glowing recommendation, who could turn down the offer? The place seemed to qualify as York's only metal/goth/emo bar. The music was good, although we decided not to shell out the xc2xa37 per person to watch the band who were playing in the other room. Perhaps, really, we should've done.
A wander around the city saw us heading back towards the hotel, where upon arrival we were well and truly ready for bed.

And there the problems started. The hotel had recently been refurbished. It's really been done quite well, but since the building is listed, putting in air conditioning can be a little tricky. That's fine, but the room was unbelievably hot. As in, laying on top of the bed (ie no covers) and the sweat was pouring from us. Needless to say, I was a little tetchy on the Saturday, which Sioned noticed more than once.

Saturday rolled around and I gorged myself at breakfast, before we headed out to do numerous touristy things. First on the list was the castle museum. I have to say, it was absolutely excellent. Well put together and certainly held attention for the whole time we were there. Some of the exhibits there really did entrance me for some reason. After that we had a wander around the Shambles, before we went for a cruise on the river which took an hour or so. By this time, it was after 3 and we were pretty hungry (we'd spent over 2 hours in the museum). Thing with York is, stretch your arms out and you're touching a pub or somewhere that serves food, so we just stopped at the first place that looked like it was capable of serving decent food. This happened to be Plonkers a wine bar by trade, but also somewhere that serves decent food, although the hen party that was in there at the same time were... quite vocal, unfortunately.
Sioned kept saying that I should climb to the top of the Minster, or go on the Yorkshire Wheel, but the cloud was too low which would've meant some relatively poor photographs, so instead we headed back to the hotel. I suggested that we go over to Joel's party in Wakefield instead. A minor disagreement later saw us both hooning down the A64 headed for Wrenthorpe.

It was absolutely excellent seeing people that I'd not seen in *far* too long. Caught up on lots of things whilst Neil cooked enough food to serve the whole of Yorkshire on the barby, Ellie told us she wanted Santa to visit, and Ben hooned around the garden on his car. Ace. We could only really stay an hour or so as we'd got more things that we wanted to do in York during the course of the evening, so we soon hopped back into the car and headed back to the hotel.

Short preparations later saw us trying the Hole In The Wall (see previous day) for food. Unfortunately we'd missed this, so went to a cafe on the corner next to the Minster. Nice food, all things said. From here, we headed over to a pub called The Golden Fleece, which was conveniently located just over the road from the club we'd be going to later. Out of all of the pubs we'd been to over the weekend, this one would probably rank last. It just didn't really click with me for some reason. After a quick drink there, we headed over to Fibbers, where we caught the end of AKP who were actually rather woo. Unfortunately, the club itself seemed pretty dead. We gave it an hour or so before giving up and heading off. Problem being that it was now 2330 or so, and nowhere was going to let us in. So we did the only thing we could - went back to the hotel.
A previous minor strop at reception (no, it wasn't a proper strop - I know that it's a hotel reception so just conveyed myself in a normal manner) saw the appearance of a couple of fans in our room which made a whole world of difference, so much so that we didn't wake until 0900 when the bells from the minster woke us.

A short breakfast later, and we packed the car up and we headed over to the National Railway Museum, primarily so that I could have a go on the Yorkshire Wheel, which towers some 50m over York itself. Some pretty ace views, although I still think the one in Manchester is better. After that we had a quick look around the NRM itself, before picking the car up from the hotel and heading into York itself. Sioned had spotted a fairground ride the previous day outside the castle musem which she wanted a go on, and I'd said I'd go for a walk around the top of Clifford's Tower which was next to it.
From here, we headed over to York Minster. Sioned decided to, for various reasons, not follow me up the 275 obscenely steep steps to the top of the tower (mainly she doesn't like heights). Even though I consider myself relatively fit, I was knackered at the top. Stunning views though. After a slightly more leisurely climb back down again, we headed for Betty's Tea Rooms where we found a huge queue which, in the midday sun didn't really bode well. On the way back to the car we happened across a mime artist - quite oddly, or a mime artist I got talking to him about some of the stuff he's done and is hopefully going to go. Quite a nice bloke.

My body is unfortunately too well tuned to an office lifestyle now, which sees me able to wake up at 0705 every day, even at weekends. I think I'm getting old. When I'm driving the car or riding the bike into work though, I'm able to say in bed a good while longer, and still arrive at the office on time. Did that today and had some *very* vivid dreams. Problem is they've made me question exactly where I am, and what I need to do to achieve the things I want to do. Some of which go at direct odds with my own opinions and beliefs. I'm not sure if this is good, or not. Problem is, it's lead to a slight loss of productivity today due to not really being able to think that straight.

I popped out at lunch and bought a Navman icn 330 GPS at lunch, since I'm doing a lot of driving in the next few days. It fits quite snugly onto the dashboard of the car. Unfortunately it doesn't do European maps, so I'll have to sort something out before the wedding next year for that side of things. I've not had a proper play with it yet, but it certainly seems quite a nice little unit for what I paid for it (xc2xa3150).

The RAM I'd ordered from Crucial arrived just after 1225, the server was down before 1230, physically installed and memtest86'ing by 1245, and up just a moment ago.

2,096,432 KB RAM, says Windows. Woo.

The Saab went in this morning as I wasn't too happy about the left hand front suspension. It seemed to be doing odd things every now and then. Nothing to worry about - the wheel alignment is just slightly off (it looks like it wasn't done properly when the new tyres were fitted). Woo and yay.

Thought I'd better get it checked before I go putting 800 or so miles on it in the next week. Better safe than sorry.

A recent story on the BBC mentioned a hotel which is somewhat of a landmark around here - the 70 Degrees Hotel as it's known, which sits above the A55 as you approach Colwyn Bay. Intrigued by this, I had a google around and found details of various other interesting buildings, one of which was Hafodunos Hall. It's an absolutely gorgeous gothic hall, out at Llangernyw, about 25 miles from where we live. It was gutted by fire (arson) in 2004. It's a beautiful, emotive place and really needs to be restored. If I had the money myself, there's no way about it - I'd do it. It does need a lot of work doing and probably is well beyond economic repair, but even so - a place like this deserves to, at whatever cost, be brought to life again. Photos here.

On the work side of things, today is the start of our new contract at Bangor. Suprisingly, the changeover went quite well, which is is contrast to last year, where it was pretty disasterous. Good to see I've learnt not to trust suppliers. I've also ordered a couple of gig of RAM for the server which seems to be running rather slowly. Keeping an eye on it showed that it was occasionally dipping down to 4mb of RAM free, and stable at 10mb free - the SQL service was also using most of what it'd grabbed for itself. Hopefully this should sort things out. I ordered yesterday so it should arrive tomorrow.

Snooker tonight. Ace.

September sees me due an upgrade to my mobile (on Orange). Last year I opted for the Nokia 6680 which was a pretty disasterous move as Orange had shoehorned their proprietary software on there which pretty much killed any performance advantages and the like which Nokia had put on there by design. What an excellent move. An example of this would be today when the 6680 elected to stop receiving messages due to the fact it'd run out of memory. Fine - not a problem. Except, the phone tells me that it is using 8292kb, has 88kb free, but only shows usage of 2118kb. Where's the rest? Using Orange's proprietary software.

I looked at the Orange website for upgrade customers which frankly showed a pretty poor range on the Nokia front. I've had a Nokia phone of some form since I can remember, ranging from the Nokia 2140, then a 5.1, to the 6110, 702e, 7110, 6600, to my current 6680. Considering the Nokia 2140 was one of the first phones available on Orange when they started up in the Mid 90s, this should give an idea of how long I've been using them. Looking at the same page for new users showed much better prospects. The Nokia N80 seems to fit the bill for me, but isn't listed on the upgrade page.

After a few minutes on hold to Customer Services, I was told that the phone is in fact available for upgrade customers, but at a price of £130. Blimeh. I was also told that because I've been with Orange for so long now that I can upgrade now if I want, a month ahead. Which is in some ways nice, but it'd mean I'd have no leverage on them on that price. Effectively, come the time my contract expires in September I can say "Look, I spend 50 quid a month with you. Vodafone have said they'll give me the same phone for this price (hopefully lower) and play them against each other. I've got nothing to lose in waiting for a few more weeks. *shrug*

Interesting that people still seem to be trying the old ruse of ringing random phone numbers and trying social engineering skills, although I'm not sure for what gain. Just received a call from a payphone number (natch), which saw the conversation go something like

Me: "Hello?"
Them: "Hi... who's that?"
M: "Why?"
T: "I'm Mark - who am I talking to?"
M: "You've just rang this number - you should know"
T: "Look - who is this?"
M: "Who do you want to speak to?"

And so it continued, with the guy getting increasingly flustered, before giving up and calling me a wanker. Nice. I'd have been quite suprised if the call wasn't from a payphone. Still, as long as there's people prepared to give information like this up easily, they'll probably continue for some time yet.

I've started waking up ridiculously early. Even though I'm still getting to sleep at 2330ish, I've been finding myself awake at about 0530-0600ish, yet not really feeling tired during the day. Maybe it's just this warm weather we're having at the moment.

I hauled myself out of bed at 0730 this morning - the alarm was set for 8, but I wanted to get in a bit early and make a start after the complications of yesterday. In the rush I forgot to grab my lunch, so headed over to the shop across the road. It's a little corner-esque shop (except it's not on a corner). I go there and grab my lunch occasionally, but do go over there every day and pick up a drink. They're a) the cheapest and b) the nearest shop to the office. Except they're closing down for good at the August bank holiday. :-(

Dell have delivered another laptop for me to build for a new member of staff which is currently having it's installation done. I've also got the final stuff I need to do after the report which wasn't what was required yesterday - fortunately this one is relatively easy and I can manipulate a lot of what I did yesterday, so it's not a total loss. Yay for weekend!

I had a well needed geeking out session last night. I'd ordered some replacement batteries for the UPS in the rack, which it turns out I don't really need. I did a runtime calibration on it last night and, well, let's just say it calibrated itself well. I decided to rewire the power side of things and put the switch, AP and router on to the UPS. I also put a little more load on (it was reading as 0% with the comms gear on), and put a Compaq DL320 on as well - it ran for half an hour and still had 80% left, which was nice. I tidied up some of the other cabling as well, and also gave the whole rack a chance to cool off a bit (50 Celsius ambient in the rack isn't good).

The whole week so far has been extremely busy. Today I've been arguing with Crystal Reports and generally feeling my brain melt. Once I'd got the report finished (5 hours work) I drove over to St Asaph and found out that I'd been talking at cross purposes, and hence it's all wrong.

The software supplier that provided the upgrade which went live on Friday (never do upgrades on a Friday) still haven't been able to track down why we're seeing such poor performance from our server. The fact it's doing mentalist things like 25000 lock requests per second surely can't lead to a happy piece of kit. I think I might suggest that we do some hardware upgrades soon.

I had an e-mail today asking me to do some freelance work which looks like it could be quite nice. I could do with the work at the moment as, after yet another busy day at work I'm relatively content and happy. Send more work!

Being as I'm incredibly bored at the moment (see previous blog entries) I'm considering taking the ITIL Foundation Exam which a lot of employers seem to be asking for at the moment, especially in the fields I'm looking at doing more work in. Unfortunately, the exam seems to be rather easy. Considering at about 0800 this morning I knew absolutely nothing about it, I'm achieving above 60% on the simulated tests. Ho hum. It's just over a hundred quid all in for the real thing, so I'll give it a week or so of bashing the test simulators and reading up from free resources online and then go and give it a whirl.

http://www.berbee.com/public/learning/webseminar/WS_ITILExam/player.html for the exam simulator, and http://www.itilsurvival.com/ITILterminology.html for a list of essential terminology.

One of the reasons I like to keep myself busy with things all the time (people ask me why I work so much) is it doesn't leave me much time to think about things in any great amount of depth. I don't like doing this as I start to realise that there's a lot more needs doing than I knew about, and it also shows me where I'm not happy about things. Various things - over all, I'm not entirely happy where I am for a whole host of reasons.

Bangor was relatively challenging last week. There was a large data requirement, and I also needed to perform a software upgrade one of the servers on Friday which didn't go well at all. That's all fine and what I like to be doing. Problem is, I've got nothing occupying me during the evenings at the moment.
I spoke to Kev late last week about various things, and he mentioned he's got someone who sounds interested in me doing some work for them - this would be incredibly useful at the moment, and would come at the right time for me. It was useful to catch up with Kev and find out what's happening and so on - he mentioned he's moving down to London in a few weeks time. It's something he's been wanting to do for a while now - I think he feels the same way as I do in someways in that he's getting a bit stifled. Fair play to him and I wish him well. It's something that I certainly think you should experience at some point. I'm glad I did, but I don't think I could do it again.

I've booked Sioned & myself into a rather nice hotel (The Royal York) for the weekend before her birthday. Should be a rather nice weekend all in for us. Joel e-mailed over the weekend to say that he's doing a summer party the same weekend, so we're intending to drop in on that at some point, although we're not entirely sure when at the moment.
Friday evening, Sioned & myself had a walk up the vardre in Deganwy. I got some nice photos from the top, although Sioned was incredibly knackered. Made a nice change though, as I'm sure I'm not getting enough excercise at the moment.

Saturday morning I had an odd phone call from the security office at Bangor. I'm on the emergency call out list in case one of the alarms is triggered. Par for the course is getting one at an odd time of the day - I'm used to it. However, someone was having trouble setting one of the alarms at 10am on a Saturday. Odd. Anyhow, roll out of bed, head towards the car and I get another call saying "It's all fine, but the person said not to call Gary Smith". This concerns me as someone knows my name is on the callout list, and has specifically said not to call me. Hmm... :/

Headed over to Cambrian Photography on Saturday afternoon and had a play with some new lenses they've got there. Nothing really took my fancy. I'm still after a ridiculously huge telephoto lens, but as I say, nothing there really.

I popped over to Mold on Saturday night to see Neal and grab a CD off him that I needed. Really nice run out which I sort of needed, to be honest. I've felt rather couped up for some reason, although that type of thing doesn't usually bother me. It was also nice seeing Neal having not done so for a good few weeks now.

Sunday I got up incredibly late, and after a brief spot of breakfast and generally doing nothing, we opted to head to Bodelwyddan Castle, which, all things said and done is a bloody ace day out and comes well recommended, especially if you've got kids you need to entertain. The evening was pretty quiet. We dropped in on Sion's mum & dad, before heading home where I laughed myself silly at Clarkson & co on Top Gear.

Since I've got not-much-to-do at the moment, I've been looking at my personal development and deciding I'm starting to stagnate a little. I'm not too sure where I want to go at the moment. Either way, I don't think that Bangor are in a position to offer me much that I would want to do. Certainly a lot of the courses that I'd like are probably way out there in terms of cost and so on. I had a brief look at Jobserve (which is incredibly irritating in that searching for jobs in Wales brings up Australia - New South Wales. Grr) and found that there's a couple of things I could do with getting up to scratch on - the knowledge is there, just not used every day. TSQL is starting to fade, and that seems a valuable skill at the moment.

I think the schools must've finished around here. There's some kids set up a slip and slide in front of the office, and have a load of drinks on the go. Not that I'm envious, but it's rather an odd thing to see in front of a University building.

Somehow I don't seem to end up doing stage that often when I'm working at the theatre. More often than not I end up doing sound, which I rather enjoy. I was working at 11 yesterday morning until 2 this morning on a WNO (Welsh National Opera) gig which was pretty big. Five acts, each act with its own individual set. My muscles are pretty achey today as I've not done a gig like that for a fair while. It was nice to get back into it, though.

I also got out to take some photos of the Sport Relief Mile run which was at the front of the theatre. There were a couple of ministers there, including Alun Pugh who seemed to want to tell me about everything he was doing, which was rather... interesting. Got talking to a camera guy from the BBC who had also been harangued by said minister.

Today was nice and relaxing - having got up rather late (see getting in late after a rather physical day) Sioned & myself headed off to Gower's Bridge for a nice picnic. We then wandered into Llandudno where we almost had someone crash into the arse end of us (kudos to the guy behind for leaving a big enough gap: Someone went into his back, and shunted him forward. Fortunately, not into us though), and got ice cream.

This afternoon and evening has mainly been catching up on telly - I'm just watching the end of the French GP whilst I write this which seems to be showing a change in fortunte for Renault. I think the comment made during the qualifying that the championship is far from over seems to be holding true. I'm currently on lap 53 which shows MSC over 32 seconds leading. I think this could really throw the table open.

I seem to have got lots of stuff done today, which is quite nice. Y'know - lots of little things which all together feels quite nice. I worked quite late yesterday getting some data ready which caused a small fallout this morning when it was presented. After a brief explanation and requests for bits to be reworked (feh. 6 hours work and it needs re-doing) and it's all good.
I also spent a few hours fighting against a BIND installation and set of zonefiles which really didn't want to play ball until I realised I'd left a comment closure off a line. Oops. That'll be me being rather embarassed.
I had a call asking me to work a gig on Saturday, which I was in some ways quite relieved to have as I was kind of expecting something this week, just wasn't sure when so that one is firmly in, although Sioned wasn't too pleased - it's 11-2, except it's 11am Saturday until 2am Sunday. As I say, she's not happy.
This evening was rather irritating to start with as the Leicester interweb broke when Dad tried to install some new filters I'd sent: after I installed the new phone extension I realised there was a distinct lack of filters so posted some out. They were duly installed and... nothing. Still, got it all sorted in the end.

I'll probably go in late tomorrow as I'd done overtime last night and I really feel that I could do with the sleep at the moment.

There's not a lot of things that really upset me. I consider myself quite hardened and wise to the world having grown up in a big city, and also lived on my own in London for a few years. Know how to handle yourself, and don't let anything faze you.

After reading on BBC News today that Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd had passed away, I decided to pop some Floyd on whilst I was doing some data analysis at work. To find myself having a small cry because, amongst other things, I'd never be able to experience a concert with the real Pink Floyd was... odd.
The fact that the world has lost one of the most influential bands of the last few years is also rather painful to me.

Some people give an amazing amount to the world of music and entertainment. Working in that same industry leaves you blasxc3xa9 about going to see performances, after all, you get much closer and see the real person than going to a performance, right?

When Roger Waters & Dave Gilmour played at Live8, I said to Joel, another Floyd fan that I would happily pay any amount to see Floyd (in their full lineup) tour again. Really, a band like that will never be seen again in my lifetime, and putting a monetary figure on seeing them isn't something I could do.

Last week was one of those weeks where I know I was busy, I just can't remember what I was doing. The weekend was once again spent in Leicester - this time it was for Steve's birthday, which was all things said and done a pretty good night out. The 2.5 pint glass containing anything alcoholic we could find at Kev's place was impressive. We went out to Braunstone Gate, and I got back in at about 0115. I have to say, I did enjoy myself - I've not been out in Leicester (apart from going to the usual pubs) for a long time now. It's certainly something I need to do more of. Kev agreed with this sentiment. I suspect that the camping holiday which should take place sometime in August will feature this (ie going out) quite heavily.
Popped into the 'bike shop whilst I was in Leicester as well. Needed to get a new cover and had a few minutes talking to Adam there. Walked away with a very sturdy (and heavy) jobby which I'm quite pleased with. It seems to be a tighter fit over the bike, which is nice. Not that the old one wasn't a good fit, this one just seems to be a lot more snug, almost as if it was designed for the machine itself.

Sioned was away in Ireland this weekend with Fran. Sioned went back to Fran's place, where I picked her up on the way back home - managed to get there just after 7, which was a reasonable run considering I'd left at 1615.

Friday afternoon was spent in St Asaph doing more reprogramming of the phone exchange there, before heading off home and packing my stuff up and getting ready to go to Leicester. I needed to install a new phone extension in Leicester to replace the aging and frankly crap cable job I'd done before which took a hideous route and made for a very noisy line. The stats from the line I installed this weekend are very pleasing and should hopefully stop the random disconnects that I was seeing there. Also did some general configuration and tidying up so that if the power goes off, then it'll all come back up neatly, until I can get a UPS sorted out for there. This follows on from an 8 hour power outage around south Leicester on Wednesday of last week. Blimeh.

I needed to pick up a new switch from a place in Birmingham (near the redeveloped Bull Ring). Tried last Wednesday on the way down to Leicester for Humph's leaving do but didn't have the required stuff to pick it up. Sioned & myself were destined for Leicester this weekend, so headed off at 1615 from her office in Colwyn Bay on Friday with the idea of getting to the place before 6. As we headed towards the A55/A494 fork, we found the A55 turn off closed. This didn't bode well. I drove by the J8 of the M6 at 1845. Waaaay too late to pick it up. Sigh. We headed on over to Leicester and got there by about 1930, which wasn't too bad. Dad was the only one in - Mum had gone out, and Laura was at work, so we got pizza and Chinese and had a quiet night in.

Saturday rolled around and I decided to head off to Birmingham to try and pick up the switch again. Arrived at 10 and... not a soul. I waited around for 45 minutes or so before giving up and heading home, quietly seething and planning out the e-mail I was going to write. Got home and found I was actually wrong, and the place was open 1200-1600 today. Bugger. I was due to meet Steve & Kev for lunch so did that, then headed back in time to go to Birmingham yet again. This time, I actually managed to pick the thing up. It's quite amusing now, to be honest.
On the way down there for the final time I noticed (how could I not? It scared me rigid) a knocking sound from the front left wheel which seems to indicate a bush needs replacing in the torsion bar. Fortunately a relatively cheap job.

The rest of the weekend wasn't too eventful. Stopped by at Grandma & Grandad's place after getting back, and then had a quiet Saturday night in. Me & Sioned went out for a meal with Mum & Dad at The Manor and then headed off. We dropped Mum off at the Chili's gig in Coventry, and then got caught in a huge storm on the M6 which saw parts of it flooded. As soon as we picked up the A55, the weather picked up again. The driving over the weekend left me feeling pretty drained and I was glad to get into bed on Sunday evening.

I've been pretty busy at work this week doing lots of data analysis for the managers for things required for next years contract. We're hearing quite a few negative things, though, which doesn't bode well :(

Last night was rather bizarre. As mentioned previously, I was going to Brian Humpherson's retirement do. I set off after popping into St Asaph, at about 1430. I needed to stop by a place in Birmingham to pick up a Cisco switch (and found I'd left my card at home, hence couldn't withdraw the necessary wedge to pay for it - bugger), and got to Leicester with about two minutes to spare before picking Steve & Kev up.

Humph turned up at around 1930 and really did seem incredibly overwhelmed at the amount of people that had turned out. I thought there'd be less people there, but it goes to show his popularity and what he's done for people. Some people it was good to see again, having not seen them for a while. Others, it was rather strange.

For some reason, a lot of people who'd not been back to Guthlaxton had their own odd little moment reflecting on things - mine was sitting on the steps at the front, as the sun was setting. How many times had I done that in what seems a past life, on a Friday evening after big band, with my saxophone, waiting for my Dad to come and pick me up? Now here I am, five years on. Look at what I've done - look at where I am. Look at what I've achieved. Look at what I've still got to do.
Thing is, this is, and won't be anything in comparisson to what he's done - what he's seen, what he's achieved. He's done so much for so many people. I honestly can't put into words the effect he's had on my own life, as well as those of others I know. Without him, I know there's no way I'd have the enjoyment and fulfillment of being able to work in a theatre, working with some of the most genuine people I know. I wouldn't have the circle of friends I've got, who I know will always be there.

Someone asked me why I was prepared to drive three hours each way, which'd see me return home at about 0200 and spend a small fortune on petrol. I've got a lot to thank him for. Strangely, I didn't mind sitting in solid traffic on the M6 at 1245 this morning for once.

http://photos.garysmith.org.uk/c1006523.html

Sioned & myself decided we'd head to Leicester this weekend coming to see people as it's a few weeks since we were last there. Unfortunately (well, sort of) I received a message from Chloe on Sunday when I was working at the theatre saying that H's retirement do - which I'd known about, to be fair - was confirmed for tomorrow.

Arse.

So, due to that only being confirmed on Sunday, I'll be driving to Leicester tomorrow afternoon (and, due to a stroke of luck, picking up a new Cisco 2950 from Birmingham en route), going to this retirement party, and then immediately heading back to North Wales. Fun fun fun.

We've got a couple of house viewings coming up this week, too. One of them is a no-chain person, so that one requires a bigger push :-)

Pretty quiet in work at the moment - bits and bobs happening. The theatre have said they'll probably require me a bit more in the coming weeks as there's the WNO will be stopping by for a week.

Although not whilst driving, I hasten to add. 0621 yesterday morning saw myself & Merfyn getting on a train to begin a pretty hefty 8hr45min journey down to Penzance. We sampled train services from Virgin (not bad, it has to be said), Central (dire) and First Great Western (pretty good, although we were travelling first class here). Nothing was late. Which was nice.

We went and had a look around the car. Aside from one of the tyres needing a replacement, it's bloody nice. Spent this morning giving it a good clean on the outside, polishing, waxing and whatnot. The inside needs a good going over, but I'm intending to have a valet done on it shortly.

So - the car. My god, it shifts. 2.0l turbo under the bonnet. On the way home, we had need (well, not really, but hey) to beat another car off the lights. Put my foot down, and experienced the turbo for the first time. I'm surprised it didn't take off. I have to admit, it did scare me.

Performance wise we've seen 470 miles to a tank which costs £60 to fill.

The roof mechanism is rather woo as well - no problems at all.

Overall, I'm pleased, yes.

http://photos.garysmith.org.uk/saab for some photos.

Sigh. Never rely on things just working in the world of money. I went to transfer the money from one account to another so I had it available to pay for the car. Can I do a BACS transfer? No. Got to be a cheque. I'm picking the car up on Friday. Cheque will be cleared on Monday.

After getting that little problem out of the way, I had to get train tickets sorted out (to get to the car). Elected to buy them on t'interweb and collect them from my local station. Go to the station with my bit of paper with various reference numbers on. He looks blankly and says it means essentially nothing to him. Joy.

Got the insurance sorted today, though, which didn't go too badly. If anything else needs to go wrong, could it please happen tonight. I want tomorrow to be nice and easy, and Friday to be even easier, please.

My alarm went off at 0955 (it really smelt quite bad. Sorry, poor joke) waking me from a very nice sleep. I'd finally gone to bed at gone 3. The rail grinder had set fire to some of the wooden sleepers on the track, so it was rather eventful all things told, with the fire brigade and Network Rail there having a good shufty at things for well over an hour.

The washing machine was delivered and the guys had left by 1030, leaving me to install it. Washing machines are not light things, and subsequently I've done a muscle in near my shoulder. Bugger. Still, at least it's all done now.

I had a bit of a mooch around, before deciding to do some work on profile - upgraded various bits of software and decided to finally upgrade it to Apache2, something I'd been meaning to do for ages. This was not an easy job, something I'd remembered from when I looked into it. Think a maze of twisty packages, all alike. I have to admit, though, it was rather fun. I've only just (some 9 hours later) got everything checked out and done. It should've been far easier, but, well, I like to make things difficult.

Sioned's Dad came over and we had 4 frames of snooker over the road. I have to admit - I was playing out of my skin tonight. I was very pleased with my performance all in. My cue action seems to be coming on quite well.

Got home, and bought a car. I was rather shocked, all things said. A comedy bid on eBay seems me the proud owner of a Saab 9-3 convertible. Problem is, I've got to go to Penzance of all places to pick it up. That is going to be a hell of a long day - 8 or 9 hours there on the train, and then 7.5 hours driving back. Jesus. Mentalist. Sioned was rather pleased to hear it, although I'm still rather shocked that I've got it for the price I have (it's a *very* low price). The guy called me afterwards - he's a dealer and apparently messed up with the reserve price and is making a significant loss on it.

I really could do with getting to bed a bit early tonight. I've got another busy-ish week ahead, although I'll probably have to take Friday off to go and collect the car. Sioned is back tomorrow, so I've had a quick clean up of the house today - the kitchen was pretty filthy after the washing machine delivery (it was raining at the time, so lots of crap got trod into the kitchen). What a busy weekend!

There's a rail tamping thing just gone by spraying sparks everywhere (nice smell of burning metal left afterwards which has just filled the house). I got some pretty spectacular photos of the sparks - no doubt, had I a bit more than a few seconds to set exposure and so on they could've been better, but even so, I'm not complaining:
http://photos.garysmith.org.uk/c994158.html

I seemed to get lots of things done today. Sioned left for a weekend in Manchester at about half nine this morning. She's going to see a Take That (yeah, I know) gig tonight and Foo Fighters (slight redemption there) tomorrow.
I managed to get back to sleep for a while and finally got up at 12. I've not done that for *ages* and, I have to say, it was well needed after a pretty hard week at work.

I'd got an e-mail from the company providing a Xen for me in Amsterdam, so spent most of the afternoon setting that up (it's a secondary MX and NS primarily, for my domain portfolio).

The people delivering our new washing machine rang to say they'll be here sometime between 10 and 2 tomorrow. Not the washing machine we wanted, but since there's none of those in the country at the moment, we've had to make do.

HM Customs & Revenue have *finally* sorted out my tax so it looks like Bangor will be able to finally pay me for the freelance work I've been doing for them (hey, it's only taken 3.5 months so far...)

I popped over to Sion's mum and dad's to drop some stuff off that they needed, which gave me a nice run out on the bike. Really do need the shop to get me the new back tyre for it that's been on order for ages. Might ring them about that on Monday.

Snooker is a possibility a bit later on. At the moment I'm still vegging out on the sofa. This is what Saturday is about.

Actually, yes, you can. If you have the misfortune to spot "Pepsi Max Coffee" on the shelf of your local shop, and fancy wasting a few pennies, then give it a go.

It's as mad as a box of frogs. Vile stuff. Tastes like coffee with 30 spoons of sugar in it.

Tastes bloody vile.

So, for 29p - yes, you can go wrong. *wretch*

My job involves a large amount of data analysis/statistical reporting. It can, at times, get mind numbingly boring. I don't mind saying this where my employers can read it, because they know that it can get like that too (especially when I'm trying to explain complexities of what I'm doing, for example).

The BBC (specifically news.bbc.co.uk) have announced that they're going to be providing information regarding the most read stories/the most e-mailed stories/and variations on this theme. It's like the old BBC MRTG information, just a whole lot more better, but a whole lot less geeky. This *will* be very interesting, especially when major news events happen, watching how people react to it.
Obviously, this type of ability to analyse how people use a service such as BBC News wasn't available before the advent of the interweb.

Bloody cool, I say

The 802.11A radio I'd ordered for my Cisco 1200 access point arrived this morning. Unfortunately it's not quite the model I wanted - down to my own lack of research, so I'll probably change it and get the actual one I need.
I also learnt quite a bit about how upgradable the chassis is. I have to admit, it's a rather well thought out idea, all things said and done. I'm impressed.
You can't get much better than take off a removable plate, slot the card in, and off you go. Took me less than a minute. Why can't all hardware upgrades be that easy?

Jenson Button didn't have his best weekend today, although I was pleased to see Kimi Raikkonen finishing a strong third place, and thus choe to wear my West McLaren shirt with pride.

Sioned & myself have just returned from a meal in Llandudno. Once again she pointed out the amount of England flags across the prom as we went for a walk after eating. It's strange. Even though Wales are apparently in the World Cup (obviously, not following the tournament I've got no idea. Football is a total mystery to me), I can't say I've seen any Welsh flags being flown. Is this a reflection on the Welsh, or more on the British culture of following anyone even though we're pretty sure they're going to fail?

Still, in a month, the World Cup will be over and we'll be able to go out or watch telly, and generally live without having the bloody thing rammed down our throats at every opportunity.

I like to think of myself as being pretty good at pool. Given an opponent I've not played against before, I can usually give them a good run for their money if they're a good player, and in most cases beat them. This isn't blowing my own trumpet - it's taken years of 50p games and a lot of wasted time. I've been playing snooker a lot more recently across the road, and my game is starting to get there - the change between the tables is quite a big step. I've been playing against Sioned's dad with relative regularity. I can usually draw against him, but for some reason, tonight, I had great difficulty in getting a decent score together. I'm not sure why. As soon as someone invents a human that isn't affected by their surrounding, they'll make a fortune

I'm absolutely knackered. I set off from home at about the usual time this morning (0725) but instead of my relaxing train journey in to work, headed for Wrexham and NEWI, where there was a conference regarding the National Learning Network (specifically 'E-Learning') being held. As I mentioned previously, I wasn't sure, and indeed still have no clue now what this has to do with my current job, but the idea does seem an interesting one.
I received a phone call at 0905 (just as the conference was kicking off) asking if I'd be back in the office today, as I was required to do some data analysis. The person sounded rather panicky, so I hooned all the way back across the coast to Bangor to sort the job out, before leaving again relatively early to get home. Problem being it was an obscenely hot day, and I'd just done the best part of 220 miles without having eaten much at all, nor drank much. Ho hum.

The car that I was going to have a look at this weekend (obviously, with the intention of buying it), has been sold. Poo. Looks like a quiet weekend in store for me then. :-(

Bugger.

Sioned's just rang me to let me know that the washing machine seems to have gone pop. Apparently there was a rather loud noise, and the kitchen now smells very much like ozone (from her description). Sigh. Just after we've spent out on a new dishwasher and microwave (which weren't bloody cheap), I've now got to replace this. Mind, it's done good service 3.5 years. I think the washing machine was just jealous of the new kit we've bought

I'm always suspicious when people are falling over themselves for me to do somebody. I'm a naturally cynical person, and always wary of what people really want from me, so alarm bells were ringing when a couple of higher ups came bounding over to me extolling the virtues of a conference at anothr HE institution next week.

Problem being, I don't really do any work in the area that the conference is aimed at. Sure, it'll be interesting, I'm sure - I just won't get that much out of it.

As I've said, there's something not quite right about it. I just can't put my finger on what it is.