Mark’s blog

Sadly Lowcostdedi is closing its doors - its been a wonderful host for my VPS for the last year and a half (I cannot believe its been that long, time certainly flies). Well done to Berkeley IT for a  reasonable, stable service

Thankfully, sir-millar has come to my rescue and offered me a VPS on his new server, which I am very grateful for - I’ve migrated most of my stuff already onto a nice shiny ubuntu 8.04 server, with little pain. Hopefully I can build on what I did with my old server and run more things on it.

More blog posts to follow!

mmm, its been a while since I’ve blogged
Lots of things have changed since I’ve last blogged as well. First of a couple of updates -

Work:

The company I work for has seen a downturn in trade, like other retailers over the last year, as people are trying not to spend too much etc etc. It got so bad at our company that we’d actually stopped paying our suppliers, and it wasn’t looking good. We were very very close of going into administration in January, but luckly we were saved by one of our suppliers. An internal reorganisation was planned, relocating people in the offices. A position in the IT team was created, and I was offered the job of IT support assistant. However, sales were (obviously) still down and 250 shops were too much to handle, so it was decided by the management to downsize to a much more manageable size, done so by putting the company into administration and buying back the good half of the shops. Even the BBC news published a small article on their website! We were told that head office would be moving to where he owns his other businesses in Kentish Town, and so lots of people have left already, unable to commute to London from Watford (most people lived locally). For myself, living very close to the Metropolitan line in Rickmansworth, I decided to give it a go, and I have started commuting to the new head offices in Kentish Town, albeit only once or twice a week to start setting the IT stuff up, as I am now the main IT administrator as our previous one was unable to commute from where he lives, and so handed his notice in, and left the company on Friday. I cannot wait until we do the big move hopefully at the end of the month, as the new offices are *awesome* and are heaven compared to our Watford premises. I am now responsible for the support of 70 desktops, 20 or so laptops and 4 servers \o/

Sigh. I don’t know why I put up with it anymore.

Latest episode;

Today my younger brother James (who is 16 and is supposed to be looking for a job) went off with his friend, and my younger sister to Queen Mary Sailing Club for an annual event called the “Bloody Mary” Pursuit Race, where they sailed in his Laser 5000. My dad took them and the boat there, only to be blocked in by cars because of the shoddy car parking marshals. So, he phoned me up asking for a lift home as he was supposed to come back and do some tidying in our study.  I’ve never been there before, so he said, take the m25 to junction 13, and stay in the left hand lane when you get to a big roundabout. Ok, I open up google maps on my desktop and have a quick look. Looks fine, easy enough to get to. How bloody wrong was I. Got on the m25 at junction 17, and came off at junction 13. Took the first left onto a dual carriageway. 5 mins down the road I got to the weird road system he briefly told me about. Looking at the signs, left took you to Colnbrook and the south perimeter road of Heathrow. I decided to carry straight on, as I thought that was the right way. Nope, just going closer to London and no sign of any reservoirs on the right hand side. Turn around at the next roundabout. Eventually (after a good 30 mins) I’d gone down all the roads off this weird roundabout and several phone calls from my dad, asking where was I, and I responded with at least 2 f words in each sentence. I was ready to give and go home as he cleverly had his sat nav with him, when I got out my new mobile phone and went onto the google mobile map website, and downloaded the app. Found where I was, and where I needed to, back down one of the roads that I had tried, but followed the road ahead at the roundabout. Only signs for the club were practically outside the club, and not on any of the approach roads. Fantastic road planning!

Because I knew that my dad won’t listen and act when I talk to him when I’m in a fucking bad mood, I drove home with the radio on, ignoring what my dad was saying / asking me.

Two hours after I’d left home, I’m back home, my morning wasted driving 50 miles.

Then I had to take my dad back to the sailing club, so he could help my brother and sister de-rig their boats and put them on the trailer.

My dad was wondering wtf is wrong as usual. Well if he’d noticed, I’ve had to drive him around. He hasn’t even offered me some petrol money, just says thanks several times which doesn’t make up for spending part of my day driving just over a hundred miles.

I am fed up of my parents not harassing my brother to get a job, as he wants to work for one of the big sailing holiday companies (Sunsail, etc) as a sailing dinghy instructor, but they aren’t getting him to register with local recruitment agencies so he can do some temp work and get some money coming in before the summer like they got me to when I was looking for work. They are letting him get away with fucking murder :s They are quite happy to let him spend money (as he added the laser 5000 to his collection of boats, which now stands at 3), do events and go into town to meet friends. I can’t do anything, as they’ll say, oh yea he will get a job, but they don’t actually do anything or say no to him when he wants to go to events.

</rant>

I downloaded the EVE-Online client this morning to try out the game, and to see what all the fuss is about. Its a pretty good game, I’ve played freelancer before (just in single player) so I’m no stranger to this genre of game. I picked things up pretty quick via the starting tutorial, and now I’m half way through my second set of missions so far. One tiny little thing that I miss, is better control of your ship whilst you are out in space. In Freelancer, you had much much more control of its direction and speed so you could maneuver your vessel to avoid enemies quickly. In EVE, its a point and click interface,  that, if I continue to play past my trial period and start paying for the game, I might just get used to and like it.

*tries not to get addicted*

So, as a small surprise present from my parents, I get this this wonderful* alarm clock with fm radio (no surprises there, I have trouble waking up of a morning, my parents have to wake me up as I often sleep through my phone and watch alarms), great, I’ve set the alarm time, but how the bloody hell do you set the time on it? The operation manual included is a small sheet of paper tells you how to change the modes from clock to fm radio, and how to set the alarm time, but no bloody way on setting the actual time on it. FM radio on it only picks up a handful of radio stations, all ones that I don’t listen to. Great!

* a small cheap & cheerful one from a Superdrug store.

I shall be adding an ipod speaker w/ alarm clock onto my shopping list for use with my ipod touch

Merry Christmas all

Congratulations to Bjorn on the birth of his daughter Julia.

Disclaimer: Not representative of the whole US population.

22:44:57 < Davis> who here uses BushTools v 2.0 if anyone?
22:45:26 < Davis> I’m trying to sync my time because its always way off
22:45:35 < BlackWolf> I use ultimate welshies exel calculater from round… hmm like 10
22:45:35 < Davis> and like every day it gets behind by another min
22:45:50 < Davis> BlackWolf im talking about the IRC client
22:45:54 < BlackWolf> ohh
22:45:57 < Davis> 22:46:13 < BlackWolf> Isnt it connected to your comp clock?
22:46:14 < Tim> I really dislike anything other than standard mIRC with my own custom settings
22:46:30 < BlackWolf> Tim: thats cause you have not used ircn
22:46:51 <@Darryl> ircn :/
22:47:02 < Davis> It has a Sync clock feature that i like but it says this “Enter region date format, Default: mm/dd/yy” and im not sure exactly what im soposed to be putting in
22:47:13 < Tim> Looks like it’s an add-on for mirc
22:47:28 <@Darryl> Davis, it’s the format of how you want the date
22:47:29 < BlackWolf> it poons
22:47:42 <@Darryl> i.e., dd/mm/yy, or mm/dd/yy
22:47:56 <@Darryl> 14/12/07, or 12/14/07
22:47:58 < Davis> Darryl so i don’t put anything in for the region or anything it just figures out where to sync from on its own
22:48:07 < Davis> i was thinking i had to put like USA/Ohio or something
22:48:07 <@Darryl> Just put whichever you prefer..
22:48:23 <@Darryl> No, just put mm/dd/yy, I think that’s the standard for Merkins

About time too!

One online game I play has already switched to it from phpBB2.x, just waiting for a few other sites to upgrade.

I shall probably install it on my server in the next day or two to try out the admin side of things, but the features seem to be good.

Don’t really like the initial “prosilver” theme, it’ll get some getting used to, as the avatar and user profile part of a post is on the right hand side. I’m sure there is an updated version of the 2.x included theme available to download. Just need to convince the game owner to install it.

Update: back to subsilver2 already, someone asked for it \o/

Right, I’m going to try and blog actively from now on (I think I’ve said that before!) when ever something interests me or I just feel like writing