David’s Blog

You can tell we’re slowly approaching summer now. Its starting to warm up, and we’re getting more nice days than bad. Not a bad thing in itself, but there’s other things to contend with - driving home with the sun in your eyes, and having the room suddenly warm up so you go into a total flop sweat. I was sitting here quite happily earlier and it suddenly heated right up in here. I threw the window open and put the fan on (not literally) but it didn’t help. It was just dead, hot air, sat in the middle of the room.

Then, for reasons I’m not sure of, I decided to start moving stuff around on my desk. I wasn’t happy with the arrangement - I’d got my music stuff on opposite ends of the desk, which didn’t make sense, admittedly, so I had a shift around, but that just made the room seem hotter still.

I’ve got the window open still, and the fan running still, but its still hot.

Roll on winter…

So I’m sitting here watching Life As We Know It and the adverts come on. I wanted a drink so I was going to go down when the ad break came on, but I was noodling on my guitar and didn’t realise. By the time I do, its right at the end of the ad break, so I just hit the live pause and went anyway.

When I get back, I find the Sky+ box has locked up - totally. I couldn’t get anything out of it, so my only option was to pull the power lead and restart it. The trouble is, my show has now started again, so I’ve missed a few minutes, and the box takes an age to boot up, so I’ll miss a few more.

Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be much story line to miss, but all the same, Sky claim you’ll “Never miss a thing” or something equally as over-stated, yet I missed something!

Still, at least it didn’t miss the whole show - its done that before.

I was coming home late tonight, so I was driving in the dark. I was on the back roads, so I decided to hit full-beam on the headlights. I didn’t encounter any more traffic until quite a while later, by which time I’d completely forgotten I’d switched them on. I approached another car and thought “hmm, he seems all lit up”, whilst at the same time the same driver is flashing his headlights at me. I got a bit further down the road before I twigged quite what he was flashing at me for…

It’s been a long day, OK!

I can see this turning into a regular thing. I really don’t know what it is about Sundays, but they just suck the life out of you! Maybe its just me? I dunno. Anyway, I decided to rebuild my mother’s PC as she’s been having some odd problems with playing CDs and things with it. I’ve got a nice little Duron 1.1Ghz which would be quite suitable for her needs, so I’ve been building that up this afternoon. One install of Windows XP and Office XP later, and its pretty much done. The only thing is Sophos is being an arse and not installing properly. This is the new “5.0″ version which yes, is better, but its got some very weird problems still in fundamental places, like installation and general use. Having said that, the bugs are being wheedled out gradually, so its not like Sophos are just throwing their arms up and playing ignorant. Most software companies would try and blame the customer first. Still, its much better than Norton or McAfee, so I think I’ll just grin and bear it.

I took my mate Will over to Oxford today as he was visiting for a week and needed to catch a train home. I usually go via Bicester and the A34 into Oxford via the north side. Its a pretty simple journey only there had been an accident near to Bicester on the other side of the road to us, and it was backed up a few miles, so I’d have to come back the scenic route via Cowley. I dropped Will off after we got the right exit (Botley, must remember that), so he ran to get his train. I got back on the A34 and found Cowley. I’ve not been that way many times, so for me it was a fun journey trying to muddle my way through. I just followed the road signs and found my way back somehow. I always find that roadsigns NEVER have what I want on them, and destinations appear and disappear. High Wycombe was on some signs, not on others, so you’d wonder if you were going the right way. Still, it was a fun little journey.

Will texted me when I got home - his train had been delayed by an hour and he’d only just got onto a train.

Oops.

Another slow, slow Sunday. I need to find a hobby for Sundays. I thought I’d have a crack at Simcity 4, having not played it for some time. Turns out I’d not reinstalled it since I reinstalled Windows a few months ago. Took a couple of attempts to install, plus the Rush Hour expansion pack. Once I persuaded it to install properly, I sat and played for a while, realised my city was a mess and gave up. I’ll have another go when I’m more in the mood I think…

I just watched the film Spellbound. It was on Channel 4 last night and it looked vaguely intriguing, so I thought I’d have a look at it. Spelling Bees are something of an unknown here in the UK. Its an odd concept - a national competition in spelling words, most of them so wierd and convoluted you’re probably never going to need them. Yet its a really big event in the USA. This film is a documentary about the 1999 final, and follows eight children as they move up to the finals. All of the kids were from quite different backgrounds, so it was obvious race, religion and money had nothing to do with it. These kids were genuinely intelligent, and for the most part, surprisingly quite modest about it.

All of the kids seemed to be there because they wanted to be, but they were all happy that if they didn’t win, it wasn’t a big issue to them. They were happy to be there, and take part. Usually in these situations you find over-bearing parents pushing the kids incredibly hard, but that also didn’t seem to be the case. The parents were supportive, and very encouraging, but none seemed to be pushing the kids to do something they didn’t want to do. The motivation seemed to come from the kids, not their parents.

Overall, it was a nice documentary, and I’m glad I watched it. You certainly felt you were as good as there, under the spotlights, trying to work out how to spell a word you’d never heard of before. Good stuff!

God what a lame title. I’ve been merrily re-ripping my CDs over the last week into iTunes in AAC format, and updating my iPod. With just songs I actually own, I’m up to 2233 which is about 7.6Gb - 5.8 days of music! That’s quite amazing because I’ve not finished ripping yet. I think I’ve got about 40 left to do, then I need to import all the other stuff I want (BNL concerts I’ve downloaded for instance) and a few other random things. What will be left will be the CDs I’ve ‘aquired’, and stuff I probably don’t want or is dupes. When I’ve sorted that out I’ll have a nice, organised music collection. Well - kind of.

I’m off to London for a security show so I’ll definately be taking the iPod with me to listen to on the train, but I think I’ll swap the headphones for my Sennheisers first. I don’t fancy walking around London with such distinctive headphones in - they have ‘Hey look - this guy has an iPod - MUG HIM!’ written all over them. The Sennheisers are just plain black affairs (sound good though - only £9.99 from maplin!) so I should be OK with them. Considering how useless my ears are, its surprising how fussy about audio quality I actually am, but I don’t think its a particularly bad thing. I wouldn’t go and spend £200 on a pair of headphones (I know people who have) but I always look for good sounds. Or should that be listen for? As far as I’m concerned, it adds to the overall enjoyment.

Its been ‘One Of Those Days^TM‘. I woke up at about 4 am then couldn’t get to sleep properly, so when I did get up, I was all groggy and slow. Work was stressful in general. We’ve installed a load of new PCs recently, and without going into too much detail, there’s been problems with them. Some I made - simply geniune mistakes, so easily fixed. Some were very odd problems I couldn’t explain with Group Policy not applying settings that were set. This resulted in some problems that caused the loss of work. I was essentially blamed for this, which needless to say really got my back up. Other tensions related to this whole thing just drove me insane, and so I’ve had a less than fun afternoon in some respects.

I went into my CCNA session and whizzed through an exam on Variable Length Subnet Masks and routing protocols (RIP v2 if you care). I got something like 78%, and when I looked back, the questions I’d got wrong were questions I’d guessed because I couldn’t be arsed to work out the subnets properly. Lazyness didn’t help me out there.

Plus I’ve got this stupid insurance thing next week, which should be the end of my insurance claim from 18 months ago! I think I’ll just get the bus in future.

I started stage three of my Cisco CCNA tonight. For the uninitiated, the Cisco Certified Network Associate, is an industry qualification for networking, routing, and other fun things involving bits of kit on the end of wires. I’ve learned an awful lot about networking fundamentals and TCP/IP and things over the last few months. The only trouble with the course, is that its evenings after work, so it means a pretty long day. Its run at work too, by the Technology faculty, so I’ve only got to wander across the car park and I’m there - travel really isn’t an issue here! The problem is I don’t get home until about 20:00-20:30 ish, which when you consider I leave home at about 07:30 in the morning, it means a damn long day! Still, its not for much longer, and its only twice a week. Yes, I’m well aware some people work these sort of hours every day, but I’m not a long-hours worker, so it really does tire me out. Still, we’re half way through the whole thing now, so that’s not bad.