I really should make more of an effort to post regularly given content from other circle and beyond bloggers is quite sparse at the moment (*cough* Kieran *cough* ;)). That said, last time I checked Michelle was still blogging on a regular basis. I can’t reach blog.com at the moment though.
Today saw the second A-Soc summer social. With Norm stranded in Kirkham and Rich still mysteriously missing plus Sarann being a big geek and Claire not being hardcore enough we were a little down on numbers which was a shame really as we had some quite interesting conversations about campaigns for next year and also a discussion emailed to me by Simeon about offering a non-agenda based support group style meeting as an alternative to the kind of support offered by the religious groups which I think has a lot of promise.
I clocked into work at 5:45am yesterday morning. And clocked out at 2:10am this morning.
Long day. You simply can’t beat a good open close. I did the whole thing on only 3-4 bottles of Kick as wel (I brought 12, just in case :D). Having done my open shift which finished at 3, I went home to grab an hour sleep before going back to do a 7-close. It’s the second open close I’ve done though this one was significantly longer than the last one though I worked straight through last time. I can honestly say I’m glad it’s over though.
Continuing my research into what MP3 player to get, I am considering going with an iPod. The latest generation all seem to be video for which you can pick up a 30GB one for £150 or an 80GB for £215. I’m toying with the idea of going for the more expensive option as I would be able to fit lots more of my music collection on it though I only budgeted for £150 (ha, not that my budget even balances, it’s in a bad state as it is).
As I said in my previous post I can’t deal with iTunes or DRM or any of that crap. To get round that I would need to clear off the crap you get with the iPod and replace the firmware with Rockbox (as good as the site is, especially with the comparison and feature list, the Wikipedia article is perhaps a better read).
It’s an open source firmware ported to most of the popular MP3 players and plays Vorbis, FLAC, WAV and they are working on WMA as well as a tonne of cool features.
As for an in-car solution, my car doesn’t have any inputs (or outputs for that matter) which leaves me with the solutions of either radio transmission or stand-alone speakers (which I really don’t want to go with as it’s no way near the same) so I’m going to have to keep searching for a solution there.
For those who have missed it, Michelle has started a new blog called Forever Dreaming which documents her various crazy dreams. It’s providing quite an insight into her mind so it’s well worth a read.
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.
