Sunny Days & Football Madness

Yesterday was Enlgands first game in the world cup, given I have never been much of a football fan so Phil and I took the opportunity to go shopping whilst everyone watching the football. I bought myself a new pair of shoes, and the book Kelly recommended (Stephen Kings Dark tower starting with volume two). At least Ill know what she is talking about the gunslinger now... I also bought a C# cookbook to try and get back on top of the apr calculations for work.
It was such a beautful day so sunny and the sky was blue walking aroun the deserted steets of Stockport feeling the breeze I felt like I was in Cairns again, it seems like a distant memory now, Id love to go travelling again.
Didnt go out last night spent enough money shopping, Instead stayed at home watched a couple of filmes the excellent garden state and the not so excellent oceans 12.
I seem to spend a lot of time worrying about money these days dispite improving my income from the dark days of unemployment on return from Australia I still seem to be struggling to keep m head above water, my dreams of my own place seem as far away as ever which is very troubling as getting along with my parents is getting more and more difficult.

Phil's Birthday do + one week

Bit late this post I've started to compose it on no les than three occasions but due to problems with internet, sleep, and work it never got written, until now!
Last Friday night I, Bruce + Nina, Nick & Bec's and Joe + Holly went to Casa Tapas to celebrate primarily Phil's 26th birthday (though we were also celebrating for Nick on the 31st and Bruce's coming up on the 4th).
Tapas is great especially with beer, lots of beer :) The mood was good we all eat drank and chatted whilst course after course of tapas (and jugs of beer) were delivered to our table.
After the meal we decamped to the Slug and Lettuce for more drinks (I went to Scotch Phil Bourbon) on closing time Phil and I went off into Manchester on the number 42 bus leaving the rest to get an early night. In a kind of blast from he past was drunkenly headed to Deansgate locks for further alcohol consumption we moved onto double vodka and oranges oh dear. The rest was a blur loud music downstairs and too crowded upstairs more and more drinks.
I felt terrible Saturday spent the entire day nursing my hangover, still felt pretty tired Sunday too, but it had been a good time, pity I forgot my camera would have been some ace photos.
Not much happened in the week, saw Nick and Bec's Tuesday had a few drinks watched Nick squirm while Becky talked about children's names (she really knows how to wind him up). Went to the Gym last night it was 29C according to the exercise bikes very hot felt like a sauna in the main room I think I should have complained, spoke to Martin (who has buggered off to the download festival) and he has suspended his membership until the autumn to work on his house and Charlotte ;)

Programmers Fight Club

Phil just sent me a link to this I think I can understand the need for it after a few minutes talking to the lusers.

I see wires

Some days are just frustrating, no matter what you do its wrong today I had promised Russell I would go round and look at putting in some cables to the rooms in his new (parents) bed and breakfast.
What a nightmare, after initial examination the building is an old cottage which has been extended and changed internally several times, so there are all sorts of voids and road blocks in the way of laying cables. Both I and Bruce have been telling Russ for ages just to use wireless and to some extent he agreed but was still adamant certain areas of the house needed wires so we spend ages trying to find a way to squeeze the cable through only to find it was nigh impossible without ripping half the bathroom out.
So in the end we left having acheieved very little for a tiring days work :S

Lan gaming, late night chats and hangovers

Yesterday was terminal tournaments 9 the most popular so far with 16 people present, it went pretty well except for failures with steam. I really wonder why Valve make it so hard to run events off line it just seems like they went totally overboard piracy is a problem but must we all suffer? Had a few new people turn up which is great and generally I think people had a good time.

After the lan I went round to see Ian, Faye is on Holiday so we were able to have a good chat and a few drinks, Nick and Becky were there, she had been out drinking with Nikkie. Nikkie has split up from her long term boyfriend Neil so she and Becs had been drinking and setting the world to rights, I dont think I have ever seen Becky so drunk before. She was on form embarrasing Nick talkign aboutm marrage, and other things. I did take a rather sick pleasure in watching him squirm me bad!

We watched 3 kings together and drank chatting about Frahas birthday which Ina had done providing the bar for her but apparently a load of people started causing trouble so much so the party was stopped early, not a good scene for a memorable birthday. Once the film was over Nick took Becky to bed, and Ian and I stayed up chatting and drinking, we had all the beer than went onto Jonny Walker great stuff. I cant even remeber what we were sayng but by the time i set off home it was getting light.

Today I feel like ive been run over by a train my room is a top, my server imaking horrible noises think it need replacing more money sigh.

Failed Upgrades / Server Failures and other ways to ruin a week

Liz (yes we still talk dispite my best efforts to put her off) wondered why I had stopped blogging, well I havent quiet I have just been very busy. Unfortunatly what I havent been busy with is exicintg life changing things instead I have been working on the things for work.
Sunday night went out for a few drinks felt tired all day Monday but managed to get some decent work done on the discount product, if I could just get the APR correct it would be nearly there.

Monday my server went down again they had a problem with a poweroutage at the server room. It is a little galling my once supurb uptime graph has been decimated by failures out of my control. Oh well.

Wednesday a simple software rollout went bad because testing hadnt been correctly carried out this means more flak for us it couldnt come at a worse time. I am working with my collegue Mike on some new projects visual studio 2005 is really good though I am nowhere near upto Mikes level quiet yet, I think Ill get there eventually though.

I got the one day Spanish guide from the independant I have been trying to learn but I am rubbish at languages.

Last night I went out for a few drinks with Ian Dan Phil Bruce and Nina, we went to the John Millington it was really nice to see Ian its been a while, Danny just kept labouring on about his new car (im going to write an entire blog on that sometime).

Spoke to Lulu today she has a rather ironic post on her blog about losing touch with people and their reactions, at first I felt sad because I konw how the other guy felt then I thought well I guess people make all sort of assumptions about each other all the time, is it fair to prejugde and assume or do you have to in order to get on with you life, I just dont know. Im rambling must be time for bed.

Night.

Weird Requests

Today had a nightmare scenario at work, firstly yesterday Phil Myself Paul Jo Pippa and Holly went for lunch. We had a great time, apart from the dodgy eyed barmaid ripping me off. Basically we all had a nice meal a chat and that was great then Paul and Pippa left for Leamington, and Jo and Holly left ot go shed shopping. So Phil and I stayed for a few pints then some more pints then some more Opps I ended up being so pissed somehw I was chatting incoherently to Nick and becky its all a bit of a blur.
So anyway I am sat at work feeling totally lousey just about able to focus on the lastest project stuff, when I am quiet literally asked out of the blue to give out copies of our source code so the IS manager can assess how it works. Now given this is the guts of our system and tool Andrew Ian and Mike months to write there was no way I could just give it to him, but because I am only a lowly trainee I had to contact my superiours and make them aware, in case he figures out how to print it himself. I dont know whether he really needs to see it or whether he has deicided to hand it over to our competitors either way my boss thought he was out of order for even asking.
I dont know what will happen next

Radiohead

Last night Paul, Phil myself and Pauls Girlfriend Pippa went to see Radiohead at the Blackpool Empress Ballroom, it was a spectacular gig the band were on perfect form totally together and really into the music. I especially loved Thom dancing like a loon to idioteque and playing with the camera whilst on the piano.
Stand out tunes included the excellent nude aka Big Ideas dont get any, Street Spirit (my personal favourite) the new song were sounding good except for one instrumental one which didnt really seem to do anything. They played a lot of Kid A, and several songs off The Bends and OK Computer Concluding the show with Paranoid Android.
As usual for a Radiohead show the sound stage setup was phenomenal the quality of the audio was brilliant
Phil and I managed to get to four rows from the front it was unbelievable dancing like a maniac only a few feet from the band. The crowd were pretty wild not quiet as dangerous as the one at the Streets but I was battered around and had at least one beverage poured over me, despite all that its was a great gig the music was unbelievable.

Setlist: (from atease coulnt quiet remember myself)
01 Everything In Its Right Place
02 The National Anthem
03 2+2=5
04 15 Step
05 Morning Bell
06 Pyramid Song
07 Go Slowly
08 Bangers N Mash
09 Dollars And Cents
10 How To Disappear Completely
11 Nude
12 Karma Police
13 You And Whose Army?
14 Airbag
15 Spooks
16 Idioteque
17 There There

Encore 1:
18 Just
19 Four Minute Warning
20 The Bends
21 Street Spirit

Encore 2:
22 I Want None Of This
23 Paranoid Android

Two Films That Changed My Life

I was going to title this piece "the long slow death of my blog", but I dont want to kill it just yet. You might have noticed the number of posts has been steadily declining so some time, this is in part due to the fact ive been fairly busy but also with less feedback and less interesting to write about I feel that everything I have to say has been said elsewhere. I have also somewhat drifted apart from Lulu to a point where she is no longer an influence on making me want to write. Pity as I received lonely planet Shanghai travel guide this morning.

Tonight I watched two mega films both older the first was good will hunting somehow I never saw this when it came out I am a bit sad really its an excellent movie Robin Williams excels as a jaded psychologist and Matt Damon plays being a genius well. I think it spoke to me because I have some of the same attitudes as Damons character (not that I am a genius sadly) but I do always see plenty of obstacles which stop me from choosing certain paths in life.

The second film was the seventh seal a black and white Swedish film about death and faith, the whole film works on so many levels I dont want to discuss here. The whole film is a metaphor for the struggle between good and evil and between belief in god and the emptiness of doubt. Its an excellent film well worth a watch despite the foreign language and black and white.

Myth

More Myth fun this time it was Phils turn to try and build a box. Using Fedora Core 5 and with the help of myself (and an excellent internet guide)

This was my first chance to use Fedora Core 5 and I must say im impresed, it was faster prettier more simple to use and had better tools (check out the new lvm tool it actually works though still dosnt let you create filesystems other than ext2/3).

It took three nights to perfect one to install Fedora, one to install Myth and run mythfilldatabase, this took a long long time! Finally we got an output just need to sort out changing the channel on SKY which apparently isnt too hard with an IR emitter and job is a gooden!

The Streets

Tonight Bruce and myself went to see the streets at the Apollo Manchester. I quiet like the Streets though their new material is a bit more of the same the original album was great as was most of the second.
The Apollo is always a good venue I much prefer it to the likes of the MEN so I was looking forward to a great gig. The supporting act was some rapper he was ok got the crowd worked up made a rap about kazza being bizarre and wrong but I dont think ill be downloading or buying his album!

There was a long pause for the streets to set up, to be fair they had an amazing stage setup with really cool lighting lots of led animations and visual tricks.

Mike Skinner was either drunk or high he seemed to love the audience applause but couldnt remember the words to any of he songs to start with and could bearly string together a song, Leon was all too eager to carry the show and was really annoying me fortunately after drinking a couple of mugs of some liquid (it was in a tea cup but I dread to think what is was) his voiced picked up and doing some of the crowd pleasers like 'could well be in' and 'blinded by the lights' his voice improved and crowd went wild. To be fair to him once he warmed up he was great at stirring the crowd a little too much as some people started throwing beer about and Bruce and I took a direct hit.

All in all a decent night entertainment some excellent songs I wish I could have seen him a little more sober / less horse though.

---

Jon sent me an excellent funny site link of some Manchester rappers ;-) www.digitaltoast.co.uk/2006/03/27/kersal-massive/ I nearly died laughing after hearing the little one sing 'got on the bus wiv ma day-sa-va!'

Coal + Water = BADNESS!

Dispite all the work which had already been done on the house on corner of the living room the damp problem was refusing to shift we couldnt work out why. So the builder Paul proped the wall on arcos and a steel bar so he could take out some bricks. What we found was rather amusing, pre 1960 the house was modeled in a different way the bit underneath the stairs was a coal store, thought its not been used as that since then the remaining dust mixed with moisture to produce sulpuric acid which has been turning the bricks into sponge. You can see the discolouration of the brick its black.
Ever the chemist my dad rushed out bought bicarbonate of soda and threw it on sure enough it fizzed and bublled neutralising the acid. 

Diggin it

Today I ache really really ache I feel like my back is sore all over, why you might ask should I feel this way on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Manchester?

With he lan being cancelled Jo Bergers asked us to help him dig up his garden, I assumed rather naïvely this meant a little digging of topsoil and general gardening however it turned into a mammoth all day digging session removing about 9 tons of soil from his "garden". To put it into context Jo lives in a small Victorian terraced house in Levenshulme, his back garden was a little patch of grass it looked ugly and as he dosnt have a shed he dosnt want a lawn mower. Also the grass are was raised about 1.5 feet from the ground surrounded by a little wall.

A few things were far from optimal about the job the first skip was so small we filled it in an hour and a half (it holds 3 tons thats a quiet a bit of earth) the wheelbarrow was flimsy and started to fall to bits under the heavy load. To make matters worse a previous occupant or builder had modernised it but simply buried a lot of rubbish in the garden including the old window frames which had been burned and a whole load of bricks and rubble.
In all we worked from 11 - 5 with a few breaks in total we shifted a small skips worth (3-tons) and nearly filled a larger skip in total I think about 7-8 tons of soil. It was hard going fortunately Jos neighbour lent us a decent wheelbarrow.

The rewards was a curry and beer :-D Ian managed to avoid the hard work and turn up for beer a nice move think Ill try that next time. Hopefully the exertion makes up for the curry beer and breakfast at Jos thanks to drinking too much.

Leamington Spa

Just got back after spending a few days with Paul in Leamington Spa the origonal plan had been to go to London but things changed. Paul has quiet a nice little flat in Leamington since I was there last he has converted the spare room into a recording studio thouhg I think he spends more time on Myspace than recording. Though he did play me a few of his new songs which I must say I enjoyed. I also went with him to his dads studio complete with the sickest apple computer I was in my element playing with it chilling out listening to some of Pauls tracks. His dad is really easy going so it was quiet a chilled out afternoon.

Paul introduced me to magners an Irish cider drunk with ice, its pretty refreshing but I dont recomment drinking large volumes as Paul and I did. Howevr it you do choose to drink a lot there comes a pint when you can tolerate no more, I recomment fosters as the beverage of choice at this point.

During the time I was there he was sorting out some things currently he has a few options on the table for getting a recording deal, I really hope things work out for him.

It had a really good time chilling out listening to music and listening to stories from New York, its been too long since I last saw him. Shame I still havent met Pippa though. Paul seemed bored with Leamington and kept extoiling the virtues of London to me. Havent been to London serveral times I still fail to see why its so great, last time I was there sat on the tube surrounded by people all talking in different forign langagues I felt really weird, it was almost like being on the Hungarian underground. I also found London dirty busy and the people generally rude and unhelpful. I know Manchester isnt great but where I live is nice and given I dont lead the artistic lifestyle that enables me to sleep in late go out to bars and clubs everynight I can live without London for the time being anyway.

WTF

After a recent crash of one of the partner systems I receved a very very biarrare email explaining what went wrong

The problem occurs when a configuration diverges and sets common workflow pipe elements in different parallel flows, a situation can occur where the convergent activity fails to evaluate correctly. When this happens an overlay cache copy of the workflow pipe remains in the convergence cache, which ultimately builds up to a memory shortage. Because convergence is a new feature some of the existing configuration is causing some unexpected results.
Our suggestion to overcome this issue is to provide a timeout for the convergence cache to do a controlled garbage collection.

Clear as mud then! I think he is trying to say there is a timing issue when memory is short but I really cant say for sure.

Lan cancelled :-(

I spend most of today rebuilding reinstalling and copying data back onto my pc. I always forget how long its takes all the little utilities and programs I need.

On the plus side games like Counter strike are running really well. Its certainly a heck of a lot faster than my old XP2400 and the 7600 whilst cheap seems a perfectly capable graphics card. Unfortunatly howevr Martin, David and Kev have dropped out of the lan with Bruce having to go to a stag do it means there simply wont be enough people to make running a lan viable.

Jon Cotton begame the latest customer for the server, I think he will take me into the break even stage only a couple more and I might be able to start affording to expand and pay for a new server :-D He is working on sme interesting sites I hope to leanr some PHP and have a go at doing some customisation of them it could be a potencial source of revenue in a not too distant future hopefully.

This evening I went round to Philip's house with Bruce we coudlnt get my laptop to output to his tv so we ended up watching Bruces favorite film who dares wins. Its wasnt as bad as I feared especially after a few beers.

New PC

Over the last couple of weeks I have had problem after problem with my PC. I tried replacing the hard disks only for the motherboard fan to fail causing everything to overheat. I finally reached the end I needed to work on something in windows and I couldn't get my PC to stay on for more that 5 minutes so I have finally bitten the bullet and upgraded.

Scan were doing an offer for 2ghz processor motherboard and 1gb or ram for £209 which seems a pretty good deal and my dad was kind enough to go down and get it whilst I was at work. So I am now the proud owner of a 64bit computer, kind of strange really going back I used to run a 64bit Sun ultra 5 a few years ago its takes years for the x86 world to catch up. Once I get Windows running Ill be interested to find out how well Linux runs :-)

Work was pretty good today thanks to Easter weekend everyone was chilled out looking forward to a nice long weekend or in fact a week off for me I cant wait. I have arrange to go and see my friend Paul for a few days. I even went for a pint after work with the IT crowd a rare treat indeed.

Its Just Computers

I was woken up this morning way too early by a phone call from David, due to my lack hangover from the comedy night it took me a long time to work out who in the heck I was talking too, eventually the penny dropped. David is the father of the ex owner of Woodford post office he occasionally calls on me to fix up his pc, this time he was having issues with security updates and wanted some help. As I try and never turn down work despite the fact my own computer is in bits spread across my room and I have a raging cold I offered to sort it out and did only took and hour.

This evening went out to see Sandbox at the academy and was chatting to Emily about her job in London and life with a mouse (thats a whole other blog entirely). She asked me what I had been upto and nothing much really sprang to mind, despite the fact I feel like every minute is filled with something or other I dont seem to have done anything worth talking about in years (unless your the sort of person interested in my chatting about the Samba server I configured as a windows PDC today?) Somehow although each day seems to drag an eternity the weeks and months seem to fly by at a rapid rate. Before I know it I have spoke to people for weeks and our lives have moved that bit further apart. I really need to start making more of an effort to keep in touch with people.

Anyway I thought Sandbox were really good though Andy didnt seem too pleased I guess he is just being perfectionist about the whole thing. The roadhouse seem to have put in a new mega powerful PA system it was nearly blowing my ears out and the American band was really rather dull but I enjoyed myself.

Cube World

I spent virtually the entire day trying to get my dads pc rebuilt with XP after replacing his hard disk in between loaders going back to look at my PC which seems to not want to play ball regardless of what I do. My so called quiet case well isnt, its not helped by the fact that one of the fans is going whining bearings sounds very knarly.

My room is a complete tip bits of computer spread all over the place and my mac has decided to go weird key chain no longer works all the passwords have disappeared and my mail store is corrupt (fortunately most of my email is on imap).

Tonight went to the comedy night, it wasnt as well attended as the last couple, Martin got the dates mixed up and when I texted him to ask if he were coming he replied yes, I then texted him in the first act to which he replied shit I thought you meant next week. It had some great comics the scouse compare was on top form taking the mick out of everyone Bruce got well attacked as did Becky.

Phil got back just before the comedy night and turned up for about an hour until jet lag got the better of him. Sounded like he had an ace time in Japan, he brought back some pretty cool toys for Bruce and myself these little cube toys which you can plug together and little stick men interact. I was well impressed with the animations going to take them into work for my desk.

Lulus having to work this weekend it only seem five minutes since we were chatting on skype but its already a week ago, I hope it wasnt too bad for her, she sounded stressed out last time we spoke. A little like I was feeling a month ago, my advice is try not to take it too seriously and make sure you arent taken for granted, I try and live by that myself, its not always easy though.

Recommendation of the week

Its a rainy dull Thursday evening and I am feeling especially tired, had an arguement with my dad before, I see him make all the same mistakes again and in a way it highlights the bad things in my own life the feelings of underachievement. I just wish I could do something, but in the end I can only help myself I cant make him buck his ideas up.

In one of lifes subtle ironys way this arguement was kind of given a new slant by the excellent film I watched this evening called Goodbye Lenin. Ostensibly the film is about the end of the communist era in East Germany but it plays out in a beautiful way. After being deserted by his father as a child Alex<'>s mother devotes her life to the socialist ideal. Years later in 1990 after a shock Alex mother if in a coma during the fall of the wall, when she awakes afraid that the shock the new capitalist era will be the death of her Alex maintinas the socialist republic or at least a idealist bubble of it. The direction is excellent though you can believe Alex not only need to hold onto the past for his mother but also its becomes imperative for Alex to hold onto the past for himself the lie becomes snowballs and becomes the truth.