Chris Worfolk's Blog

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.

There is nothing like having to make half a dozen phone calls when you get in from work which you’ve been since 5:30am.

First of CCL Customer Services to find out where my hard drives are. They haven’t been dispatched yet nor will they be in the next week because they are out of stock with the supplier. Expected delivery date still says 29th June.

Next call is to Chemical Records to find out where my replacement bag is. They’ve lost it. Parcelforce says they have delivered it back to them but they don’t know where it is. They take my number and tell me they are going to ring me back.

Next call is to UK Online to confirm some details about their packages. More bad news there.

Next, I call Linksys for some product information. First off I end up at the wrong place. Second time I get through to some outsourced call centre which tells me to ring another number which is business support. This gets me through to another outsourced call centre that tells me to ring pre-sales. This turns out to be the first place I called.

Next, CCL Technical Support to try and sort my server out. They tell me I need to send it back to them.

Next, eBuyer to find out if they actually have the hard drives in stock or whether they were just pretending like CCL were. They have it in stock so I go looking on how I can order from them as I don’t have enough money on my credit card until CCL refund me for their order. Looking at my back accounts I find Leeds Uni have paid me a load of money and I don’t know why.

So I then phone Leeds Uni who put me through to accounts payable. I then get put through to someone else at accounts payable. They can’t find me on my system but suggest I ring my old halls.

I phone accommodation services. I’m not sure if it is my accommodation desposit given the amount is more than the desposit itself but I give them my details anyway so they can look into it. They take my number and tell me they will get back to me. They actually did call me back a few minutes later (while I was at the door signing for a delivery) and left me a voicemail explaining it was my accommodation deposit refund.

While this is going on I get a text from CCL saying my order has been dispatched by Citylink. I go to check the website and it says I’ve now been invoiced. Time to ring CCL Customer Services again. They tell me they will be with me tomorrow (ha, heard that one before).

I want the last two hours of my life and all my phone credit back.

Friday night saw the first of what is likely to be quite a number of house parties at my new house. Having packed the back of my estate car with the sound system and moved it over we set the stage for quite a evening of dancing, drinking and stripping (of which there was actually unfortunately quite little of).

Attendance wasn’t bad for an out of term time event and with my decks having recently arrived I shipped those over too so we could get a decent beat going. It didn’t go as well as hoped due to the floor being unstable so the records kept skipping when people were walking about plus we started playing records before people were too drunk to notice that a) it was dance music and b) that none of us could beatmatch lol. However once we reached the early hours Kieran managed to get the crowd going with some classic cheese.

The partying went on till about 4am before drawing to a close as the sun rose. All in all, not a bad night.

These opens are killing me. I’m having to get up before 5am! I’m not normally in from work by that time. Fairly easy shifts though, there isn’t really much of a rush at any point like you get on closes over dinner time. It’s got the fairly nice and laid back feel which is the best thing about closes. Which I’m back on tomorrow. Too much sleep pattern adjustment for my liking.