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The actual process of updating this blog is too complicated. It involves too many pages and manual uploading and all that Cretan jazz. So I've decided to go legit and get a Livejournal account. I've tried it - it's so much easier. And that means you'll get MORE OF ME~! So from now on, head to http://vervoid.livejournal.com/ for MORE OF ME~!
27th March 2010 I don't miss the old weekly update very often and last week wasn't really my fault. Yes, I caused it but it wasn't my fault. Not really. Elsewhere in this update I praise Comodo's excellent backup program - and it really is very good - but it was another of their products which is to blame here. Having been impressed by the backup program I installed "Time Machine" which promised it would tick away behind the scenes and let me restore my computer to a previous point in time should I ever need to. A few weeks ago I had issues where Windows Media Centre and the Xbox configuration messed up the permissions for my media folders and I - sole user and ruler of this little digital empire - was no longer the owner of My Music and My Pictures. That took a while to unravel. If only I could've clicked a mouse and wound my machine back to yesterday. So Time Machine seemed ideal. I installed it late on Saturday and everything seemed ok. I worked on the update as usual on Sunday morning before going out on a fruitless mission to buy an HDMI lead (how absurd is it that 4 stores - Tesco, PC World, Currys and Comet - didn't have an HDMI lead for less than £15 when I can get a highly rated one from Amazon Marketplace for £2?) I got home - not at my best - and things started going wrong. Messages about disk space running out, an inability to uninstall any programs, warnings that I needed to run disk check to correct some errors in my system (but disk check wouldn't run) and so on. The weird bit was that I would delete or move lots of files to create space, set disk check to run after a reboot and switch the computer off. When it restarted, disk check didn't run and the free space had gone. Essentially, when I rebooted it wound my computer back to where it was the last time I booted it up. It wasn't supposed to do that. I was stuck in a loop. The morning's work had long since gone, the virus updates didn't work because they couldn't access the [bree] system files [/bree] and I was getting error and warning messages every few minutes. Anything I did was undone by a reboot or simply wouldn't work. Dialogue boxes were increasingly blank - save for the OK button - which isn't a good sign. The only thing to do - and we were well into the evening by now - was try to uninstall Time Machine as that seemed to be the source of the problems. I got the same blank dialogue box after choosing the option to wind back to how the system was when it was installed the night before. I took a stab in the dark, clicked the OK even though it could've been telling me absolutely anything and the computer switched off. It didn't look like it had worked but when I switched on, Time Machine had gone, the virus update worked, I could uninstall programs and I didn't get any more error messages. A success but only if you consider losing an entire day a success. But it would've been nice to have been able to rewind the whole world and erase Sunday rather than limiting it to my computer. It wasn't a good day. Yes, there was a glorious victory on the football pitch when a Korean with Romulan hair headed the good guys on their way to a 2-1 win. But mostly it was frustration and misery all the way. And only about stupid little things. For example, why do so many things these days come with those stupid over-sized plugs? The ones which overhang and stop you plugging anything in opposite it. I've got an 8 plug extension like this one -
- and plugs which stick out at the top mean I lose two plug sockets. It was ruddy annoying. I was trying to set up a USB hub and get my WD media player (which I don't think I've ever mentioned but it is fantastic and I really should review it properly one day) access to multiple external hard drives but this lack of plugs drove me mad. The silly thing is that now I've seen that photo I've realised the two bottom ones swivel and the problem is solved. This is me realising something before your very eyes. I may have wasted a hysterical overreaction on something that could easily have been fixed. Excellent. Other irritations involved the lack of camembert at the pub (how middle class is that?) and my little nephew troubling me by wandering round the playground trying to start fights with everyone. One boy dared to suggest that Banana was "small" and this made him a marked man. Worse, because lil' nephew kept banging on about it, Banana became upset about being called small. She stuck her bottom lip out and started telling anyone that would listen that the boy in the red top called her small. Things were getting out of hand. The playground - once the focal point of their running, jumping and climbing - was now just the backdrop for their little soap opera. Carnage was avoided this time but lil' nephew has already been up before the beak for fighting at school and I have a feeling it's going to get worse.
21st February 2010 My sidekick and I have a new daddy. Our old daddy - who has been in absentia for the last couple of years in finance - has finally accepted that he's going to remain in finance forever more and that we need a new daddy to look after us. Enter our new daddy - a thoroughly nice chap who does things differently but now we're used to it, his way is fine. One of our first jobs was to get together with new daddy to rewrite our role profile. We've had the same job description for five years and it is hopelessly out of date. It was written to capture what we did back in the happy days of the project office downstairs in the bowels of the building. Back when ShirtGuy and AussieGuy were still around and the magnificent five rode into battle. We've moved on a bit since then - them more than us perhaps as one has a new career and the other has a new continent - and it seemed right that what we do now is officially what we do as opposed to what we did then being what we do now. Plus, it should mean HR give us a decent pay rise. But one thing we struggled over was the job title. I don't know if you've ever tried to come up with a job title but it isn't as easy as it sounds. For a start, it is very easy to end up not taking it seriously and before you know where you are you have fifteen words of pomposity and a sentence on your name badge that no human being on Earth would understand. Then you have to be wary of words that actually do mean something that you don't intend. Words like "consultant" and "engineer" mean different things in different companies. Where we are, they are two of the lower job terms but elsewhere in the world they are the high earners and the fast livers. Not that we're any of those things but they were two examples that sprang to mind. Eventually it becomes the world's smallest Lego set - half a dozen bricks that you put together in endless combinations that never look like anything even vaguely useful. And even when we had something we both sort of liked (and, more importantly, neither of us disliked too badly) there is no guarantee HR will go for it. My sidekick had a look online to see if the title we'd created was a real one. It is and they get paid a lot more than we do. Which then reminded me of something that was a comic staple in the 1980s and 90s - the puffed up bin man who is a "domestic refuse categorisation and resolution engineer" or the car park attendant who styles himself a "transport inertia management consultant". It was the way of things - probably still is - to award people a fancy job title instead of a pay rise. People go away pleased to be a consultant or an engineer despite being the same lowly paid phone monkey or public hate figure they were before. My sidekick thinks we'll get stiffed when HR do come to look over our good words and our new daddy's representations. They'll make encouraging nods and decide "the market" would pay us a tenner more than we're currently getting but only if we had another three years' experience. But then again, my sidekick has been known to stand in the Molyneux stadium singing - without tangible irony - that Wolverhampton are "by far the greatest team the world has ever seen" so his naivety/cynicism compass may be a little out of whack. ~~~~~ This is a little public service announcement that may help someone one day. On Friday I discovered that my V+ box hadn't recorded anything for four days. Every recording was marked as "Failed" and I couldn't even record what was currently on by pressing the Record button. Reboots did nothing, deleting planned recordings and series links and setting them up anew did nothing. Eventually I found the solution - right at the end of my recordings list were several "Unknown" recordings marked as "Recovered". My guess is that these erroneous files were taking up all the space on my hard drive and thus preventing any new recordings. Deleting them - which was a pain and required at least one reboot - made the problem go away and my V+ is working again. It's a much better outcome than either having to reformat the hard drive (losing everything on it) or getting an engineer out to replace the box (losing everything on it).
7th February 2010 It was the first annual SPAC Night on Friday. Whether this becomes an annual Spaceballs, Port and Cheese night or each theme is governed by the initials has yet to be decided by the committee. A Superman, Pizza and Chips night sounds rather wonderful to me and I'm sure Star Wars, Poker and Call of Duty would get votes from the IT fellows. But Spaceballs, port and cheese it was for 2010 at a secret location near the park. Given that it was a five minute drive and I know four of those five minutes (because it's the way to the park) I felt brave enough not to use the old sat nav. And, to my credit, I found my way there without a problem. I just didn't know that was where I wanted to be so I drove past it, turned round and ended up in the golf club car park using Google Maps on my iPhone to try and work out where the heck I went wrong. My second attempt would've been equally unsuccessful had I not seen a fellow SPACer getting out of his car in front of a house with - as I'd been briefed - white double garage doors. Hooray. Good luck triumphs over actual ability yet again. Everyone brought a selection of cheeses with them. The oddest has to be the wholesome striped cheese with layers of cheddar, red Leicester and (probably) Cheshire on top of each other like traffic lights. Most popular were probably the smoked cheeses. Someone actually brought cheese with bits of pickled onion in it. Definitely one to be avoided. The cheese not the person who brought it. Mainly because I don't know who it was. Sitting in a fairy-light-lit conservatory, eating a staggering range of different cheeses, listening to the Star Wars soundtrack and being surrounded by people talking about their new wiki was certainly a novel way to spend a Friday evening. But the kitchen counter was not just for bits of cheese. Oh no. It was also for bits of light sabre. Out host had spent much of December tracking down some seriously top of the range light sabre toys for his boys. They go far beyond your average Toys R Us light sabres. They have removable crystals which let you mix your own colour of beam, they have different handles so you can confuse experts by having an evil base but a heroic shaft and even after two fully functional light sabres had been put together, there were enough bits left behind to sew the seed in ones mind that there might be a third light sabre to be built here if only someone is brave enough to do a Jesus and make three light sabres out of two light sabres. While the boys played with their light sabres and I lurked awkwardly in a corner in the way that I generally do when there are other people around, it fell to the lone girlfriend to take the proffered cheeses and turn them into a functional cheese board. Had she not been there I fear there would've been twenty plastic wrapped portions of cheese being stared at for the entire evening while we less practical peeps just nibbled easily opened biscuits. The movie was great. We watched it on a CRT TV (remember those?) using an XBox as the DVD player. I didn't know you could put XBoxes on their sides - the curves distracted me as is often the way - which is good to know as I'd struggle to find a home for a vertical XBox but could easily find space for a horizontal one. The DVD - not the special edition, tut - seemed to be letterboxed widescreen in a 4:3 window which is a shameful relic of the olden days. It had to be stretched up and across which was noticeable for all of two minutes before eyes got used to it. Which is all HD does really - two minutes of awe followed by getting used to it and not noticing anything different. There should be a review of the film elsewhere on this footling website next week. Suffice it to say it was fantastic. I should watch films with other people more often. After the film - and more cheese - came the choice between another movie and a quick round of Call of Duty (whatever the latest one is called). Since no one could agree which film should come next, the game won. I'd been curious to see what it is like - not because I want it, even if I do get an XBox but because the chaps bang on about it ALL THE TIME and that sort of 24/7 enthusing about care packages, kill ratios and claymores will pique even the most hard bitten curiosity. It was exactly what I thought it would be - it was a run around and shoot people game. The sort that has been around for decades now. Yes, it was a bit sharper and smoother and yes, it was a twist to play against real drunken IT professionals and 16 year old boys instead of relying on the computer to pretend to be a drunken IT professional or a 16 year old boy but in essence it was no different from anything else produced over the last 20 years. But they all enjoyed it - shouting at the person with the controller in their own jargonny language - and there are worse ways to spend half an hour. It was better than Quantum of Solace anyway. At least Call of Duty knows it is just a video game. With no consensus - still - on the next film, someone shouted "Poker". Out host got out the poker gear and I tapped out for the night. It was painkiller time and the old nerve was letting me know it. I sort of understand sort of how to sort of play poker thanks to Victoria Coren's book but only in theory. Someone who knew which was better, a flush or a straight, was always going to have the beating of me. Especially if they also knew how betting worked. So that was the first annual SPAC Night. I didn't have any of the port so I can only say the SAC was good. Amusing cheeses, a good selection of movie and an insight into the world of Call of Duty and XBox Live. I'm still not playing though.
9th January 2010 There was a joke – possibly
in “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” – which went something like this.
W-E-T-T-H-E-A-R-E. Pause. “And that’s the worst spell of weather I’ve ever
known.” That just about sums up the last couple of weeks. But I’m not here
to moan in general terms – that’s what the news is for. I’m here because
this past Tuesday was the worst morning I have seen in my decade or so of
useful employment (don’t do the maths – I know it doesn’t add up). After a
long time sat in a queue of traffic that only moved forwards when someone
in front turned round and went in the opposite direction, I had to make a
decision. On the one hand, I was barely half a mile from home, stood no
chance of getting to work until well into the next Conservative
government, was short of petrol anyway and was only metres away from a
hill that was causing competent drivers no end of trouble and would
utterly defeat me. On the other hand I am British and the British always
fight until the bitter end. Then a car very similar to my own skidded,
spluttered and stalled her way up the recently plugged hill and I knew
that was it. I turned round and went home. It was now or never – go down
that hill and I would never get up it again. Certainly not in this
lifetime. Maybe one day, when the world has changed and the roads are
black again, but not today. Besides I’ve got firepass access and being at
home is like being at work but with a widescreen monitor and no one to
talk to. Not that there would be anyone to talk to at work (I guessed). I
got home, felt sorry for myself for a moment, switched the computer on,
logged in (an irritating process involving Firefox 2.0 because anything
later – and I’ve tried the latest versions of the four main browsers –
simply doesn’t work) and sent off a couple of emails to people saying I
wouldn’t be there. They both replied in time to say that’s ok – they
weren’t there either. A text to AngryDave found that his BMW had managed
40 yards before chaos ensued and he had eventually bitten the proverbial
b. as well. Only my sidekick was immune and that’s because he was in
Sweden at the time, scoffing at our mild weather and marvelling at a race
of people that simply get on with life in the most appalling conditions.
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A Lifeless Ordinary