Friday, May 23, 2008

Errkkk, what a disastrous weekend. Jessica's slide into teenager-dom continues. She is becoming extremely difficult to live with. To cut to the end of the story, Deb and I agreed that Alex hasn't changed (except that he's bigger and faster than he used to be), and that we are no better or worse at handling things than we were. What has changed is Jessica - and specifically her ability to cope with Alex.

I think I've blanked out most of the rows and other such. The culmination however was losing Alex in Chester Zoo. This was the most dramatic one since IKEA a short while ago. He was about 5 metres in front of me when I turned back to see where Deb and Jessica were. When I turned back he'd gone. We were on our way out of the zoo at the time, and the reason we'd gone there was because we reckoned we had a reasonable chance of guessing where he'd go if he did disappear. The theory worked, but only just. After checking the shop and toilets, we did our usual routine in these circumstances. Deb grabbed a member of staff while I continued to search, checking the car park and car. We didn't think he'd go back into the zoo. By this time, Deb had mobilised the staff who were searching around.

Deb finally thought that the next most likely place for him to go was a land rover set up for the kids to play on by the Rhinos. A security guard was dispatched, and there he was playing as happy as anything.

It hit us both pretty hard, particularly coming so soon after the incident in IKEA. He's just to big and fast now. He was literally gone in the blink of an eye, and found a quarter of mile away on the other side of the zoo.

School finishes soon for half term, so I've taken some time off and we're hoping to recuperate a little. Let's see how we go.

Friday, May 16, 2008

The season's first cricket test between England and New Zealand is now underway. This leads me to reflect again on the decision couple of years ago by the ECB to sell the exclusive rights for live coverage to Sky. This effectively excludes me from being able to watch live cricket, and years on I'm still livid about it.

It just seems like such a short sighted decision by ECB. Lots of people who would otherwise watch cricket are now unable to. I won't pay for Sky (over my dead body), not even for cricket. What's more, on Sky it will only ever be a niche sport - whereas Channel 5 were actually doing quite a good job of providing modern coverage. And because it was pretty much the only sport they covered, it received pretty good treatment.

I read something a while ago which suggested that viewing figures since Sky took over the contract had plummeted. I can't help thinking it will be a disaster for cricket - as well as meaning I may never watch test cricket again :-(

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Feeling rather chuffed today, having upgraded my laptop. It's a bottom of the range Dell Inspiron 1300. That said, it's an OK piece of kit - although perhaps a little bulky for really portable use.

Anyway, it came with 256MB of RAM. I turned down the salesman's insistence that I include more for about 30 quid because I knew I'd be running FreeBSD rather than Windows. Still, more memory always comes in handy.

After umming and ahhing about the memory on Ebuyer (would it be the right speed, would there be strange compatibility problems) I though of checking the Crucial website. I input my system details and it presented a number of compatible memory options. I chose the cheapest 512MB option, and got it with free delivery for half the price of the memory on Ebuyer. Installed and working without difficulty.

Encouraged, I then went looking for wireless cards. Again, I didn't include this when I ordered the machine from Dell because it was expensive, and probably Broadcom and therefore not supported by FreeBSD. Looking around, I found an Intel 2200bg chipset mini-pci card on Ebay for £15 which was stated as working on the Inspiron 1300. Installed that last night and was up and running in literally 5 minutes.

As an aside, it just goes to show that Unix isn't always as difficult for this stuff as it's cracked up to be. I had previously used a USB wireless device under the ural driver. My new mini-pci card is covered by the iwi driver. All I had to do to get it working was read the iwi man page and copy 6 lines into /boot/loader.conf (see the man page for details) and change the line in /etc/rc.conf which read "ifconfig_ural0" to read "ifconfig_iwi0". Everything just worked. I'm dreading having to install the drivers on the Windows XP partition, it'll be much harder. The moral of the story is, when looking for hardware to run on FreeBSD, make sure you buy something that's supported.

So all in all, an easy upgrade. In fact working inside the laptop was easier than working in many desktops (and particularly the small form factor ones I'm trying to turn into FreeNAS boxes - but that's another story)

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Do I need to blog any more about my situation with Virgin Media? I switched ISP to them around November last, and I've had nothing but trouble since. They are dreadful.

My line speeds are dog slow - at peak times much slower than the 1MB line I used to have with Tiscali, although it's supposed to be an 8MB line. I've complained until I'm blue in the face. One of their engineers confirmed to me that the line is fine, the slow speed is caused by the contention ratios at Virgin. In short, they are cheapskates, meaning that all their customers are contending for too little bandwidth and the whole thing slows down.

I normally get less than 384K on a line tested as capable of functioning at 7660K.

The final straw now, they've throttled my access to dialup speed because they say I'm a heavy user.

I'm livid, as hopefully the letter I posted conveys. This is a modern broadband ISP folks, and to complain I have to write to them. Not call, email, or fax, but write. I'll post again when I hear back from them.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Had a hoot on Sunday at the Philharmonic seeing a live show called "Fanfare Ciocarlia, Gypsy Kings and Queens". Can't refer you to anywhere on the web about them as I haven't found a web address. But if you search Youtube there are a number of brief clips of their live shows.

To cut a long story short, it was a fascinating mix of eastern and southern European folk-ish style music, mostly claiming to have some sort of Gypsy background. It really managed to maintain a kind of carnival atmosphere, with different performers joining and leaving stage for different numbers throughout. This included spanish guitar; almost jazz style trumpet; gypsy-peasant brass; saxophone; and various singers from Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Macedonia. Oh, and belly-dancing style dancers.

It all made for a very lively and entertaining show. Bit odd though. If you'd told me beforehand that I was about to see a dozen pudgy balding middle-aged men mucking around on stage, well...

It was still great fun though.