Red's Place

That was written on the shopping centre years ago, and seems appropriate. After the clocks changed Saturday night everyone was driving home tonight in the dark. Ok, so it shouldn't be that hard. Obviously a lot of dimwits in Hampshire tonight. Three breakdowns, one remnants of a crash, and one 4 car crunch, in 40 miles! Good Grief, can't anyone drive anymore?

I've swapped my laptop, gave the T30 to my colleague today, and I've got the T40p. Nice machine, its pretty thin, with built in bluetooth, and a 8mbcache 40gb 5400rpm hdd, and a/b wireless. I really wanted g wireless, so I'm looking out for a cheap mini-pci, and a cheap 60gb 7200rpm drive. The 8mb cache on the hdd, and the USB 2 ports have already shown their difference to the T30, and its only day-1!!

Using my work VoIP phone (softphone) on Friday. It worked ok, but people complained it was as if I was "underwater". So I reinstalled the software, and it now sounds much clearer, but as if I'm in a cathedral. I doubt its bandwidth, as my home VoIP system works well, and suspect its down to the Java software they're using.

Right, off to do something less useful.

Ok, so Movable Type doesn't cope with the clocks changing. Perhaps we should move to Arizona and not see signs like this. I've fixed that post, must check the configuration again.

Reminds me, I've no idea what happened here, as I missed the whole thing. All I saw was the bloke sawing the wood! It must have been when I popped over to see the folks on the weekend. Looks very strange in the dark.

Long lines, expected 70% or higher turnout in Florida. This is a good day for democracy, and shows that give people a reason to vote and they will vote. Who knows what will happen.

Ribby has an excellent picture on his blog today!

I think most Europeans find electronic or machine voting to be a little odd. Even in the EU elections where there was a silly number of candidates, it was a "pen & pencil" vote. Obviously the Florida officials love creating controvosy. :-)

I still don't understand the "registering" for a specific party, or registering "not affiliated". Whats that all about then? Hmm....

Guess time will tell!

Of course, that was not at all surprising. At least it gives the comedians of the world more material. :-)

Yes, Phut, that was the usage and word you wanted, hope you get your "Grammah" in check. Cheers for the info on the registration, that now makes sense. Does California have the most Electoral College votes in the union? Is that due to population? (BBC News had an interesting map showing college votes). Hawaii only had 4 and Alaska 3.

For some reason, yet again I'm so tired as to be dead now, and its only 10:15pm. I'm gonna crash now, or maybe that should be BlueScreen.

(Oh, I note there is an update available to my blog software. Nope, I'm not going near that until the weekend).

(anyone use categories on their blog, anyone know why you'd want categories?)

So they now reckon Yasser isn't dead. So he's going to be in suspended animation or something isn't he?!

I rejigged the links on the right, as a few of them don't get updated very often, eg Mr Grumpy (who even now has a nice new PC with a new, and may I add, free, hard drive from yours truly. Wonder if he's blown it up yet?)

So, Ribby and Phut, thanks for your comments, appreciated for the insights. I think I'll do the same as C4 News tonight and not mention the US election, other than to link to Ian's blog, checkout the 2nd November.

So I tried taking the laptop apart last night, following the excellent 'exploded-view' (great term that!) in the hardware manual. I wasn't able to locate the wireless connectors, so I don't know if I can replace the wireless A+B card with a wireless B+G card, but it would be nice. (A is useless in the UK).

Anyway everything went back together fine, except that one of the screws doesn't want to go more than 50% of the way in, in any of the threads. I'm guessing the screw itself is fubar, but its very weird. Anyway, it doesn't seem to matter, it only keeps the corner of the touchpad still. One to look at on the weekend.

Right, time to get some sleep, after I've finished this "gottle" of Becks. Night all.

Apparently the Mirror published their cover with this yesterday....

Yes, there are apparently more episodes of Scooby than of the Simpsons. Zoikes!

Hey Phut, if Coke is that good, I wonder if Dr Pepper would have the same (or better) effect ? :-)

Sorry, I seem to have lost a few days and not posted! Had a reasonably good weekend, although the weather was foul. Monday was my mum's birthday, so we went out for a nice meal. Tuesday the car was being serviced, 40,000 miles already), and needed new brakes. Scarily expensive, but when converted to a price per 10,000 miles, its the same as my old car.

Work wise trying to sort out some resilience problems with our product, specificially our maps keep stopping working. Also I sent my line manager my "complete but can you check" version of my (phut) TPS reports (/phut) paperwork stuff. No reply as of yet.

Its annual performance review time now, and there are quite a few depressed colleagues around. I've got mine booked for the 1st Dec. We are reviewed against the (departmental and individual) objectives that we jointly set in 1st quarter. Part of the process is soliciting feedback from peers in an organised form. My line manager forwarded me my feedback today, all anonymised, and its very good! Fingers crossed I can say I've met the rest of my targets.

So its friday in the office, and its just two of us left holding the 'fort' as it were! The project manager and the finance wizard are both here, but from a support point of view its pretty quiet.

I've not heard anything about my 'professions case' (phut)TPS reports(/phut) in the last day or two except it has gone for approval. Hey ho.

Complete feeling of lassitute today, absolutely no drive to do anything. I've drunk more cups of coffee and attempted to fix a few problems, but nothing serious. Guess perhaps I should go home via Sainsburys and see if they've got any Sierra Nevada or Sam Adams in this week and get pissed tonight. Wonder what movies I've got....

So its comes around again. The Oatsheaf is having another refurb. Yes, less than 3 years after the last one, but this time only closed for a week, not a month. Interesting to spot the parallels with the new regulars saying how it won't be the same, and how it will drive people away. Well, Dave and I still go there regularly, albeit only once a week now. (for me mostly because of the commuting, if i worked local, I'd go out in the week).

I'm really really pleased with iTunes. I've just now bought another 5 tracks for £3.95, excellent, and created a CD for the car. Nice one Apple. (None of this new Napster subscription garbage). You want to know what I bought?

Ok, REM - Leaving new york, some Snow Patrol, and a couple by Keane. And I really want the new Virgin Radio double album released Monday.

Was just thinking about doing a blog post, and then I see that Ribby has posted a comment to the last entry. Heh, hacking? Go and hack something useful, like the Whitehouse, NORAD, or even a bank!! :-)

Yes, the password recovery is quite good, and I suspect you'd be hard pressed to change my email address, as its on the same webhost as the server running this blog. Keeps things 'in house' and thus safer.

Mr Grump got his "new" car on the weekend. It goes like a rocket! Sounds like one too. I suspect he may be spending a lot of time in petrol stations now :-)

US Dept of Homeland Security undersecretary Asa Hutchinson said on the 12th Nov that airlines will have to change their behaviour.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TRAVEL/11/12/bt.flyers.tarmac.reut/

Anyone want to board a flight 6 hours before takeoff? London to LA becomes 16 hours?!

And they wonder why the US dollar is sinking... !

Nice, this machine (my home box) is now a 3.4Ghz Pentium 4! With just a simple chip replacement I've gone from 2.8 to 3.4, and thus 20% speed increase. (In the Northwood core).

As intel have pretty much maxed out what they can do with the P4 range (3.8ghz just launched this week, in the new 'super hot' prescott core) the actual speed benefit over my 3.4 is very minimal, less than 10%, but with over 50% increased heat output, and thus fan noise and potential reliability issues.

So, now I have a speed demon in the house, still converting DVDs to MPEG takes forever, what's next. Hmm, perhaps I'll have to get one of those new Apple G5 based boxes, running OS X, as I hear they actually have a unix command line now.

I think I'm going to concentrate on the finances first, esp with Chrimbo coming up.

So tonight was Children in Need, the annual event the BBC tells the UK public to "get their wallets out". I wonder how many viewers they had tonight. Definately not three of us. Thank (diety of choice) for pay-tv! They don't feel duty bound to do anything remotely connected.

At least this year, I was called by Craig&Von at 6pm whilst on my way home and they picked me up at 6:45, so we ended up at the pub. Of course Children in Need was in full swing, and so the landlord, Rich, had to get his legs waxed as they'd got over £400. Von was the appointed representative, and thus performed the waxing. Possible phone pictures later, when I get the software sorted. Amusing...

Anyway, back home after a couple of pints, to do a Blog entry, and drink some of the Sierra Nevada that I've managed to grab from the few weeks Sainsburys were stocking it. Excellent :-) :-)

The Cranberries - Zombie is playing on iTunes, and I have Californian excellent beer. Despite being alone, life is good at the moment :-)

Off to Manchester in the morning, setup 8 PCs, get them online ready to go for training on Wednesday. Stay over. Wait around whilst training happening in case of any problems. Packup PCs, and drive back to Portsmouth.

Yes, its getting a little hectic. At least today was quiet, and I spent most of it listening to some old music on my iRiver, and doing my personal writeup for the annual review process.

One of my colleagues is trying to buy a place to live in Portsmouth, and having a bit of a nightmare trying to get a mortgage sorted, due to changes in Govt regulation and lending multiples. This despite the fact that she is able to prove the repayments will be significantly less than she is paying out at the moment, and she's cleared her car loan. Reminds me of the chaos I went through back in 2000, at least she doesn't have Thames Valley housing to wait months for!

So Phut's got problems with his phone, or maybe its just the voices in the blog-verse coming to get us all.....

Back from Manchester, thankfully. 6 hours driving yesterday... sheesh.

So I'm in the Farnborough office today, nice and local to home, only gotcha is that all the people I need to talk to are in Portsmouth, thus I'm not actually able to be very productive. At least I have Friday off!

I could have done with these yesterday, and I'm sure Phut would like them. Thanks to Ben for the link.

Haven't had anything to write about lately, but this article in USAToday was linked on another site I read.

Yes, its not news, however its interesting the attacks against the Mac(intosh) are very similar to Windows.

Shame the article didn't go on to say that if you are on dialup, you are at equal risk. Ditch dialup and go broadband and get a router. Once you've got a router, then get personal firewalls on all the machines. Sorted.

If you're on broadband without a router, but a personal firewall, you're slightly better than the average, but you really should get a router.

Defence in depth as the military says. Those guys know security :-)