Archive for July, 2007

I’m quite glad to be back in union politics (for lack of a better term). We had the first CompSoc committee meeting today at The Library, nicely arranged to coincide with lunch which I was quite impressed with. It’s standard pub food but then I love standard pub food so it’s all good.

Most of today was just coming up with ideas and working out the plan of who is going to do what, who is going to contact what, etc but it’s good to get the ball rolling. We have an idea of what needs doing before September and what events we want to throw together next year. Hopefully tommorrow’s A-Soc meeting will prove to be productive too.

There has been very little news on the next Trek film but Comic Con saw some big news – the film will not only feature Spock but will also include Leonard Nimoy! Zachary Quinto will take on the main role while Nimoy will also take on the role for the more aged Spock (whether that is flashbacks, disturbance in the timeline or what remains to be seen). It will also feature Kirk apparently (but then, who really cares ;)).

It’s subject is now a little more cloudy now though, the early rumours of it revolving around Star Fleet Academy seem to have disappeared of the net and Wikipedia‘s page on it talks about how the idea of a film between Enterprise and TOS about the Earth-Romulan War have also been quashed. So I guess we’ll just have to wait for a little more detail to be leaked.

I have a hole to repair in my wall. You see, somebody hurled a chair across my room because my new server isn’t working. To be honest, the chair had it coming. That’s not true, I love my chair but the server would have got very broken, no matter how much I wanted to hurl it.

Meanwhile, away from my summer house, back in the mean streets of Woodhouse I am still battling with network problems. We’ve been upgraded from the Advanced Troubleshooting Team (which we had previously been upgraded from) to the Ops Team apparently.

I got an email from UK Online last night saying our internet account had gone live. So I headed over to try and get it all configured. I spent a good 2-3 hours battling at in and we got some of the problems resolved but it’s still not working in any way and I’ve added another few hours of calls onto my upcoming phone bill which is probably going to bankrupt me by now.

This morning the missing components from my server arrived back so I stripped down my computer ready to put it all back together. I got so far before discovering that the back plate for my CPU cooler has vanished and so I can’t actually put it back together at all. I’ve no idea where it is, I don’t think I sent it back with the rest of the stuff but it doesn’t appear to be here either. So almost two months after ordering my server it still isn’t up and running.

Yesterday my motherboard arrived back for my new server (which I ordered like two months ago). No information what they had done with it. They had closed by the time I got it yesterday so I phoned first thing this morning to find out if they had actually fixed it or not. They had tested it and found it to be faulty and so replaced it I was informed when speaking to them on the phone.

So I have just come to assemble it all back together. But something was missing. What you may ask? The CPU and the memory I left attached to the board (and clearly marked in my covering letter with the returns package I had left on for convenience of testing). They were not on the board nor had they been sent back with the rest of the packaging. Back to the phone.

I eventually find out that they are being shipping in a seperate delivery. I go online to track the order and find out they attempted to deliver it this morning but nobody was there so they left a card. I don’t have a card. Where did they try to deliver it to? Back on the phone to customer services. I spent 30 minutes on hold before being transfered to voice mail.

I ring back an hour later and finally get through to Alan. Yes, I’m now recognising names of the customer services team. He informs me it will be re-delivered tomorrow.

Networking is always fun. Yesterday we wired up the house ready for media sharing, LAN gaming and internet surfing. All the gear having arrived on Friday and the cables having been put in already it was now just a case of unpacking, plugging in, configuring and troubleshooting.

We now have a switch on every floor, a pair of routers for the house network and my sub-network, a gigabit network to link my computers, we’re pretty much plugged in ready to go in terms of internet and last night we got some testing done on getting LAN games working. We struggled to get anything going due to problems with the games themselves but the network works fine – myself and Norm were kicking Si’s ass for a good 30 minutes on Unreal Tournament 2004.

Science I love deliveries! (Lol, guess which episode of South Park I finally got round to seeing recently). I got two today. First of all, my long awaited pair of 320gb external hard drives. They are the Western Digital MyBook Essential ones which had a fair amount of critics but no more than any other manufacturer and model including my own LaCie hard drive which I haven’t had any problems with in the 3-4 years I have had it.

So far they seem to be doing alright, I plugged in one of them at about 11ish this morning and began copying all my music over to it. It is up to P at the moment (after 4 hours) which isn’t too bad. It’s still going to take a while to finish and come in with a slower time than the last external hard drive I did this with but building in time for the fact my music collection has increased in size since then it’s not going to come in with a much slower time.

The second delivery I got was the networking gear for my new house. We’re wiring it all in which means a switch for every floor including my upgrade to gigabit networking plus a pair of routers, a modem for our soon (touch wood) to be connected broadband and a few other bits and pieces. I haven’t played around with my routers’ config options yet as I want to save some of the excitement for tomorrow (lol, that is probably really sad but I feel I’m perhaps loosing my edge as the ultimate nerd). I can’t wait though as it’s going to be pretty sorted because I picked up some rather good ones.

Tomorrow is the last day of the school term. Probably not a good situation for work. Especially tomorrow evening when parents are treating their kids. That isn’t what this post is about though. There is something far more exciting going on. My parents and my sister leave for France on Saturday!

So the house party starts Saturday night and pretty much just goes on solidly for two weeks or so ;). Unfortunately they are only going for a little over two weeks (rather than their normal month) but I am going to enjoy it all the same. The house to myself, the car to myself, it’s going to be so good. I love my house, my car and the suburbs in general but there are all these other hippies that insist living here too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my family. But I also love my independence. I love been able to get out at 2am after a night out and watch ABC1 for the rest of the night. I love being able to go shopping to Tesco at 3am without worrying I am going to wake people up going in and out. It’s going to be grand!

Today I’ve been on the phone with UK Online, BT fault tracking, BT customer services, CCL customer services and Parcelforce.

Some good may finally be arriving though, I finally have my bag back (though I’ve not checked it yet) and, drum roll please, our BT line was finally turned on this morning! To the point where we can now use it at least, I just need to wait for the order to be marked as complete and it will show up in the database as a BT line when broadband providers run their checks. If it ever is.

Thursday saw me spend my day on the phone to Chemical Records, CCL Technical Support, CCL Customer Services, BT, Egg and UK Online.

Friday saw me spend my day on the phone to BT and the tax office. It’s now been 3 months since the tax year ended and I requested the tax they wrongly took from me to be paid back to me. I was informed it would be a good few months before they even processed my form as they were still dealing with mail from April.

Today was a nice easy day. I only spent an hour on the phone to BT and CCL.