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.
I really miss having a portable music device since my 3rd one broke. So it’s time I got myself a new one. At the moment I have one of these.
The iRiver iFP-795. It’s a flash based one with 512mb memory, light as hell, about the size of an AA battery in length, and I love it because the battery lasts for about a month without me needing to replace it.
I’m toying with going hard drive based though. I’ve laid out the case for why flash memory based players are superior which I still fully stand behind it. But I won’t discount the hassle of having a limited amount of storage – not that this is solved by getting a hard drive based player, I still can’t sync my entire collection which is very annoying (unless I get a really, really big MP3 player) but it would reduce the problem at least.
I’ve not really done much product research into MP3 players recently though. So with that in mind, if anyone has, yell out you’re suggestions now. My specification is fairly open, hard drive or flash will be considered, battery life is important, I have quite a decent budget, my only one must have requirement is that it must be UMS – I’m not using any software and it needs to work on Windows and Linux so I need it UMS. It also needs to be able to take a bit of a beating as I put my electronics through their paces. Finally if anyone has suggestions as to how I can huck them up to my car stereo (the radio transmitters look quite a good option) those are also welcome too.
It certain hasn’t been there in a while :p. But yeah, after months and months of being into my overdraft, my bank account is now into positive numbers!
I’m not actually celebrating though. It’s only actually in credit because the direct debits haven’t been taken out of my account for my credit cards yet so my server and my decks are still awaiting payment collection which will drag me back down. Still, for the moment, it looks so beautiful.
