The postman delivered a nice new 38T chainring from 24seven today, so tomorrows job is to fettle bikes. Unless I stay in bed all day which is an appealing prospect at the moment. Apart from the fact I’d run out of food, I don’t have to leave the house until Monday evening unless I want to. I’ve got plenty of DVD’s to catch up on including 16-odd hours of The Prisoner, so it looks like it will be a nice relaxing weekend.
It’s payday today which can only mean one thing. It’s St Beer Gardens Day, or rather St Beer Gardens Evening. And as it’s still only February and looks like it’s about to rain, it’ll be relocated into the inside of the Hop Pole. So basically it’s pub time (nearly)
I can now state that is it actually possible to eat an entire bag of crisps without once closing your mouth completely. It is not a nice thing to witness. Earplugs are a necessity, time to order some I think.
Maybe I’d actually get a reward instead of a prison sentence?
She’s just bought a second bag of crisps. Surely no sane person would convict me?
..do I have to share an office with the worlds noisiest crisp eater? She also insists on trying to break the record for making the most noise with a bag of crisps at least once per day. Is this grounds for justifiable homicide?
Pipex ADSL is b0rken again which means I’m missing out on the wit and repartee of ss-l. I might have do some work instead.
Just ordered a new 38T chainring to go on the 3-piece cranks. I may or may not re-fit the chaindevice at the same time.
New bike parts are ace, even if they are “previously enjoyed”. I’ve just collected some fishbone 3-piece cranks, and a front E4 (minus the fluid). The cranks are to go onto the Jack Flash to replace the Deore ones, and the E4 is for the Inbred. I might also build up a mutant/singlespeed/commuting/hack bike to use up some of the pile of spares.
Over the last few days three couples have announce that they’ve got engaged/are getting married, so congratulations (in no particular order) to Marc & Vicky, Julie & Dave, and Barbara & Jamie.
Everything seems to have survived the power outage, well everything I’ve checked so-far seems fine.
Hmm, there seems to have been a power cut at home over lunchtime today, two of the computers don’t appear to have come back to life. Hopefully they just need a gentle kicking and it isn’t anything more terminal than that.
Hopefully I can go and collect a bag of bike parts tonight to give me something to fettle if I get bored.
We won our skittles match 5-2 in the end.
Busy day at work today as usual. Off for a relaxing game of skittles this evening.
Removed a load of pics from the gallery as someone had a quick look and didn’t like the fact they were in a few of them, but wouldn’t say which, so I deleted all of them.
Spent a quiet day pottering around the house. I scanned a load of photos for the gallery and resurrected an old copy of philpix as well. I also did some general tidyup up, the road bike was relocated into the cellar to leave a bit more room for storing the rest of the bikes. Two now hang off the wall (Jack Flash and Inbred), and one is on the floor (Stiffee). The cellar contains one complete bike (Schwinn Fastback) and enough parts to build three more. Maybe it’s time to get rid of some bike parts?
Oh, and England beat Wales 26-9 in the Six-Nations.
Ooh, pictures.
A large national organisation decides to implement a new national email system available to all new and existing staff members who have an entry in the national directory.
In order to make the registration as easy as possible they pre-feed the directory with nearly 700000 names and email addresses of existing staff.
Now in order to register for your account, you go to the website and search on surname and the first few letters of your first name, this produces a list of all the matching accounts from the directory which have not yet been registered for the new mail system. Once you have found your entry, you select it, check a few details are correct, then click on a link to confirm that you are who you say you are. Then it’s on to set passwords and suchlike.
Guess how many checks are in place to ensure that you can only register in your own name, and to stop other people registering as you?
None whatsoever.
The entire registration system relies on honesty, which as has been proven many many times, is something a lot of people lack. There is absolutely nothing stopping someone registering as any one of nearly 700000 people. The only way to stop someone registering as you is to register yourself first.
Which people are the least likely to use a PC and register for their account? The Chief Executive and Director level users who would be the most likely users to target if you wanted to cause mischief.
Whoever thought up that security model needs taking out and shooting. I can’t believe anyone is naive or stupid enough to think that it would work. However this system went live yesterday morning.
I give up, I really do.
…there is a herd of elephants upstairs doing DIY whilst standing on skateboards, and hence falling off occasionally. It’s very disconcerting.
I seem to have ended up going shopping for bike bits today. Some Planet-X 3-piece cranks from Matt, a front E4 from Marc, and some t-shirts from PinkBike.
Damn my weak-willed nature.
…..and it looked shite.
The BBC have updated their news site. Compared with the previous version, it’s much harder to glean any useful information from it. News items sort of disappear into the background.The old version may have required more vertical scrolling, but it gave you easy to read, useful information.
Interestingly the “text-only” version contains three graphics. This must be some new meaning of the phrase “text-only” of which I was previously unaware.
I see Andy is plugging his Todmorden Porn fetish again. Greedily, he occupies the top two placings in a Google search for Todmorden Porn. This posting is a blatent attempt to improve my currently rather poor 10th place.
A quote from a recent news story on Ananova:
“On occasions fireworks were thrown. As police attempted to disperse the crowd they were attacked with missiles - stones, bottles and other items. Predominantly it appears to be bottles and occasionally vegetables - onions and bananas.”
Maybe Monty Python got it right all those years ago.
I got almost all the way through a lengthly update, then lost it. I’ll try to recreate most of it for your enjoyment/torture.
The early part of this evening was spent at a “family supper” for the scout group I assist at, it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds. I spent most of the evening in my usual role of barman, dishing out (soft) drinks to all and sundry. Once that finished, at a reasonably respectable hour, it was time to head home again. I gave the new center speaker a good workout with Donnie Darko on DVD, and then it was time to re-acquaint myself with the joys of TiVo by catching up on CSI: Miami from earlier on in the evening.
The hours between my trip into bandit country and the “family supper” were spent watching England giving France a moderately good beating, or was that Jonny Wilkinson giving France a beating, seeing as he scored 20 of out the 25 points (1 conversion, 5 penalties, 1 drop-goal). Italy managed to beat Wales reasonably convincingly. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. As an England supporter, it’s good. As someone of part-welsh ancestry, it’s bad. I’ll reserve judgement until the end of the Six Nations though.
I’ve got another two full weeks at work, then I’ve got almost two whole weeks off. I say almost, as I owe them 1 day from having to wait for my TiVo to be delivered. I should be able to make that up by popping in for a couple of meetings, and doing the usual phone support. The two weeks sprung out of having booked a day off to go to the Outdoors Show, and needing to use up my remaining holiday allocation which runs out at the end of March.
I headed over the border into bandit country today and picked up a second-hand Mission M7C2 speaker to replace my current M7C1. Fantastic weather out, except for being fairly cold. Would have been good riding weather if I’d had the time today. I might hopefully take the Stiffee out for a few hours tomorrow.
TiVo number 3 has arrived, and looks promising so far.
So far this year, I’ve had 3 TV’s and as of Friday, 3 Tivo’s.
The first TV was written off due to an unrepairable long-standing fault. The second was faulty when delivered, the third is fine at the moment.
The first TiVo died after 7 months use, the second was also faulty when delivered, I don’t hold much hope of the third being any better. Given that there are no new TiVo units being manufactured for the UK market, this doesn’t bode well for existing users getting working warranty replacements. I have a suspicion that we are now down to a core of faulty machines doing the rounds of warranty replacement. If the third unit also proves to be faulty I’ll be requesting a refund and getting Sky+. Sky+ is inferior to TiVo but has the distinct advantage at the moment of actually still being in production and therefore there is a readily available supply of replacement units.
TiVo’s future in the UK seems almost non-existant. Thomson stopped manufacturing units last year and there is still no sign of a new manufacturer. TiVo was never marketed properly and hence demand was never there really. Sky+ may be inferior, but at least it’s heavily pushed by Sky and therefore people acutually know it exists.
Sorry TiVo, you’ve lost the battle. Sky+ won. The war is over.
On a bike related note, all three proper bikes are in fully working order. The Jack Flash was fixed this afternoon by removing, cleaning, and refitting the non-drive side crank arm, which was creaking very badly.
The replacement TiVo is also faulty. Very bad MPEG artifacts even on the menus. This is not good.
The replacement TiVo has just arrived, it’s a bit cold so I’m going to let it warm up for an hour or so before I plug it in.
So far this morning, postie no.1 (complete with van) has delivered me a new RaceFace jacket and two DVD’s, and postie no.2 (leg powered) provided a new credit card and some junk mail.
No TiVo though, or the third of the DVD’s which were posted together.
Whilst waiting, I’m playing around with MusicBrainz tagger, except they seem to have been /.ed already.
They are theoreticaly coming to replace my TiVo tomorrow. Life will be back to normal hopefully.
The van is still parked outside my window. At least it means that I can’t see the rain.
Some inconsiderate fool decided to park a transit van outside my office window this morning leaving me with nothing but a view of the side of a white van. It’s not even a particularly clean van.
Must chase them tomorrow to find out whats happening.
Had a busy day at work trying to tweak LDAP queries to ease our monthly reporting, then play skittles where we managed to win 5-1, then ordered a new RaceFace jacket from Chainreaction for commuting to save the wear and tear on my lightweight jacket caused by my Timbuk2.
NTL have announced a “cap” of 1GB per day on their broadband offerings. Some people are kicking up a real fuss over this, yet as far as I can work out, it’s difficult to manage to download 1GB or legal files per day, everyday. The only real way would be by using streaming audio all-day everyday. People have to realise that broadband is not a cheap way to get a leased-line, not at the sort of prices those users will pay anyway. If people insist on downloading large amounts of data day-in and day-out, then they need to be prepared to pay for it.
A few months ago I decicded to subscribe to the Stereophile Guide to Home Theater magazine, which is American, but quite well recommended. So I duly filled in the online subscription form on their webiste giving my credit card details. The receipt said that I should get my first issue in 6-8 weeks, which is usual for US-based magazines.
Now, nearly two months later, I get a postcard from them, shipped via the Philippines, saying that they need my credit card details again as they were a bit slow in processing the subscription, so could I please fill out the card and post it back to them. Except there is no address on the card as they have carefully blocked it out with black marker pen. Obviously they don’t actually want any subscribers, so I’ll save them the bother by throwing the card in the bin.
My TiVo has died.
How will I cope?
A manically busy week work wise, nothing else interesting going on really. Although I have reached £13.5 million on Celebdaq.
Phil Spector has been charged with murder
At least it’s provided the Ramones with the most coverage they’ve had since Dee Dee Ramone died.
Another mad day at work today. Is this going to turn into a “night of the long knives”?