Currently my VPS is going down every 10-15 minutes! Neither me nor my host can work out what is going on.
The end result is, after continued problems with my VPS I’ve ordered a new one with ServInt. I am going to be migrating a lot of my important sites over to that and then those remain will ever stay on my current VPS or will me migrated over to a new VPS with PowerVPS and the old one cancelled depending on whether I can stabilise it or not.
I think I’ve finally found the reason why all my dialog boxes and default fonts on my laptop have started to look strange – I have 8 fonts left on my computer.
I thought it a little wierd when I went into PowerPoint today and I only had a very small choice of fonts. Then when opening up the source files for some posters I had done I was informed the fonts were missing by a different application. I checked the system folder which contains fonts and it looked fine. But when I tried to copy them to my desktop I got an error and all but 8 of them disappeared. Weird.
To be honest, I never thought I would really use the backups I made of my font files. OCD for the win.
The Scottish National Party have recently outlined plans or a referendum on independence. You can read the news report on BBC News.
Alex Salmond talked about the Scottish people needing to work out what kind of a country they want to be. But of course – they aren’t a country! You’re not. You’re a region of the UK. Just like England.
To be honest, I don’t see what the case is for breaking up the UK, which is what we are talking about here. Maybe there is a good case, if so please outline it to me. But at the moment it just seems we have nothing to gain and a lot to lose.
It’s not like the UK is the biggest country in the world. Making it a little bit smaller isn’t going to help that. How about things like the United Nations? Presumably we would have seperate representation then and presumably the U.K. would remain on the U.N. Security Council whereas Scotland would not. How would things like advertising work if Scotland changed their VAT rate? How will border control work? Policing? These are mostly small problems. But there would be millions of them to solve.
I’d be interested to see what everyone else thinks of such plans.
I finally got round to replacing my MP3 player on Saturday getting an 80GB iPod video. As I have previously mentioned, I installed Rockbox on the device so I didn’t have to use iTunes and spent most of Saturday loading as much of my music collection onto it as I could fit.
So far it’s pretty good. It’s easy enough to use once I get used to it although I end up struggling to decide what to listen to :D. The interface is a bit small given the size of the screen and I haven’t worked out how to make it bigger yet (if indeed it is possible). Battery life is awful as expected, I have to charge it up every few days (or every day if in heavy yse) but I wasn’t expecting anything better from a rechargeable battery.
How many people hate me?
How many people dislike me? How many people find me annoying? How many people think I’m not a very nice person? An immoral person? Arrogant? Self-righteous? Judgemental? A loser who will never amount to anything? A control freak? It’s intrieging to think about what people are saying about you behind your back.
It’s 10:30 and I should have been in bed 2 hours ago. I wasn’t though as I needed to rush over to my new house and carry out some more testing in order to try and get this hideous networking up and running properly. I need to speak to Linksys before I can really do anything else and I don’t think I’m going to like the answer to be honest.
Once I had home I had to fire off a couple of emails as well as test some stuff I got off eBay. My inbox is rapidly filling up with items that need attention though not to mention the fact I can’t see my floor and it’s not just from having too much stuff anymore, it’s actually important things need sorting. I need to phone several different people, email dozens of different people, come up with some CompSoc literature in the next week, sort the A-Soc summer work, organise some meetings, do a million other things on my to do list, re-do my budget, the list goes on. And when is my next day off? Next Thursday. Might need to cut down on this whole sleep thing. The 5 hours at best I’m going to get tonight it just too much apparently.
I got out of work (well, on my break) yesterday to find a text from Maths Chris informing me the internet was now working! Looks like whatever UK Online got BT to do at the exchange has solved the problem.
The battle is far from over though. It’s still causing problems due to it all being in testing mode at the moment and therefore having multiple DHCP servers. Also UK Online were limiting us due to the testing so I may need to get that sorted out if they haven’t done it automatically.
I tried pinging the modem from home today and that didn’t work, nor did my remote administration attempts so I need to sort that. Also working out how the port forwards flow through the network to make sure the modem doesn’t get in the way of the router doing it’s job which is probably going to take quite a bit of testing.
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.