Motorcycle madness

Is it a rise in temperature or humidity, the phase of the moon, or just the time of year - I don't know, but something seems to have gotten into motorcyclists today. Normally, I have no problem with them, but today they all seem to have been acting as though they own the road and that everyone else on the road is invisible. Overtaking on blind bends, double white lines and under-taking stationary traffic at a crossroad - I saw it all today. Complete eejits.

I come to avenge my Shaolin master!

There is something awesomely satisfying about watching any form of kung-fu/martial arts film. I can't explain it, but I seem to be able to enjoy any type - from the blurry, wonky-sound films they show on the Overload channel, complete with bad dubbing, right through to the nicely polished Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or the more humourous Iron Monkey. I guess the whole Kung-fu style - I use Kung-fu loosely throughout, btw - is the main reason I also like films such as Star Wars and the Matrix. A most enjoyable evening :)

My Doom

Well, it certainly has a Microsoft-ish name, and it certainly behaves like a Microsoft product (ie it takes over your system, slows it down, uses systems resources for its own purposes and hides any functionality away), but the latest variation of the mydoom virus has been moderately irritating - in the space of about 24 hours, some workstations in the office managed to get infected. I actually received an emergency DAT update notification from Network Associates, our Antivirus software provider, at 17:24 yesterday evening; however while I don't believe they may have been particularly quick off the mark, and that the virus was only on a "Medium" alert, the incredible lack of antivirus management within the office is getting very frustrating.

It is only in the last 2 weeks that at work the use of the ePolicy Orchestrator software has been going on, however it is currently only configured for machines on the domain, and the policies in place are somewhat lacking. Ideally, one of our managers whill get infected with numerous virii, at which point we'll be told "something has to be done". Hopefully, at that point, we'll be able to get hold of some decent antivirus management software, that doesn't use netbios, AND will support operating systems other than Microsoft - not because these other OSes get infected, but because they host files which get used by Microsoft operating systems.

Oh, and it's corporate poilicy to use Outlook. Brilliant idea, that one - you can tell THAT was a management decision...

Cream crackered

I am tired. Last week I was working early and late shifts - if I don't get in early, then parking is a pain in the proverbial. I'm also doing early and late shifts for most of this week too; and today I had to do more work due to not having enough time to do it today, and it had to be done ready for first thing tomorrow morning. Ah well...

Freedom for horses

I get really quite annoyed that a select few people who have more money than sense use horses merely for the "sport" of horse racing. The racecourse at Bath has really poor access, so every time there is a race, it takes twice as long to get home after work, because of people leaving the race track.

I really see no point whatsoever for horse racing, or forthat matter, horse riding in general. In this day an age where we place so much value in the care of animals, why are horses treated in this manner? We no longer need them for transport, and we don't eat them (at least, not in the UK) - the way people use horses for racing and riding to my mind seems like cruelty. Having a metal bar in your mouth and being whipped doesn't sound like my idea of enjoyment.

bzip-iddy-doo-dah

A tricky little problem at work (on a Windows server - no suprise there!) was that none of the archival programs that we had access to, such as Winzip for example, would support files larger than 2GB. The one which did, produced a corrupted file when it decompressed the archive.

One download later (a whole 72kb) for bzip2 - a fairly common compression utility on most Linux distributions, it managed to compress the 7GB SQL backup file to 327MB. All in all, a really impressive utility which can handle those large files on Windows or Unix(like) systems!

Hippogriff lessons...

I spent friday evening and saturday morning playing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - very enjoyable, and I managed to finish it, with the exception of about 10 wizard cards. Saturday evening I ended up playing Europa 1600 at my friends house - a 4 player lan game. It's an excellent game.

Saddle-sore

I rode my bicycle last night, for the first time in a couple of years. While I lived to tell the tale, and on the whole, enjoyed my venture into the Outside, the bicycle seat is, however, not as comfortable as I remember...

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?...

Yes - it was a plane; or rather, lots of planes. Some in the sky, and lots on the ground. Yesterday afternoon was spent at a small airshow at Kemble airfield in the company of one of my friends and his two-and-a-half year old son, who loves aeroplanes. Being rather facinated by a "dancing daisy" flower, which when connected to the hose wriggles about spraying water everywhere, meant of course that my friend had to buy one - on the pretense of it being for his son. Lots of aeroplanes, and a nice chilled out afternoon - quality!

TFI Friday

The last couple of days have been a complete nightmare at work. We have received only a few days notice from our SSL certificate authority that a lot of the certificates which we host need to be re-issued due to something to do with the Microsoft SGC expiring. It won't affect the vast majority of people, but on the off chance that it does, we weretold that we have to generate new SSL keys, and use those keys to generate new CSRs. Upons receipt of the re-issued certificates, instead where there was one, there is now two, so we also have to reconfigure the web servers to accept the SGC certificates. Five days to request and re-issue the certificates, test them, and get them up onto the live web servers. Not exactly ideal - and it has to be done as it will all go pear shaped on the 16th...

Original Games

Looking around for an online game to play, it seems that, while there are a few which are currently up and running, and a few in development, there is nothing that seems like an original game; with the possible exception of City of Heroes, but even that is based heavily on pre-existing ideas and concepts.

While nice graphics and 3D sounds in games are very nice, at the end of the day, if the game is boring, tedious, repetative, or doesn't have anything new, then I won't be playing it. It's time for the big studio developers out there to innovate and do something new; and while a revolution is better than evolution in this case, either would be preferable to the same cloned games that exist now, where the only thing different is the graphics and the names of the monsters you have to fight...

Common sense 0 - Stupidity 1

I've just read this article which goes on to report that some advertising for the band Outkast has been branded as "irrisponsible" by the advertising watchdog, because the image shows one of the band members holding a gun - a pink one at that. It seems to me that it is incredulous that something like this should be slammed in this way, when there are far, far more offensive things in the media and in the consumer market which glorify gun use; the example in the news article being that of James Bond.

What was once common sense, now seems to be rather uncommon sense.

A new desktop

In the interests of trying something new (and partly from boredom) I've managed to get rid of Windows Explorer from my home PC. Using Litestep as a replacement "shell" means I get an altogether different look and feel, with the added bonus that I also get a total of three virtual desktops. I guess really theres nothing wrong with using Windows Explorer as the shell, but litestep has more options for customisation and optional plugins. The only thing they need to do now is get a decent installer sorted out for it.

At work, I've installed Xfce which is a lightwight and very fast desktop environment for X windows. I installed it from RPM's for Fedora Core 2, and on startup it took approximately 3 seconds to load, compared to 30-40 seconds for either gnome or KDE. It is a lot more basic than KDE and Gnome, but seeing as I rarely using the functionality of either KDE or Gnome to their maximum potential, I figured Xfce would actually be better suited for what I need.

And so it begins...

... for the sixth time! The title for the sixth Harry Potter book has been confirmed as "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" over at the Harry Potter News Aggregator. It's getting to the point now where I don't care what the titles are, I just want to read the next book... and see the next film, and get Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on DVD. I guess it's getting to be an obsession, and is only offset by the enthusiasm for the Lord of the Rings books and films (extended directors editions, of course) and all things related to Frank Herbert's Dune books, including the film by David Lynch, and the two mini-series on the Sci-Fi channel...

totallypointless.com

An article over at the inquirer shows just how totally pointless (and possibly stupid) people can be. While listening to an audio stream of life in the Shannon estuary may keep my attention for a couple of minutes, surely the technology could be used to link up people who cannot currently get interweb access - remote villages in Africa, in ships or aeroplanes, from tops of mountains, or even nic's house...

Continuing on with the theme, work now have a designated period each Tuesday, for which we now have an "Internal Scheduled Maintenance Notice". This is in the name of progress and to improve customer satisfaction, however, it's far easier to remember it's old name - "at-risk" - and instead of the customer being able to request work to be done up to lunch-time on the day before the at-risk period, now they will have to wait a week before it can be done...

Rants R Us

Well, nic has been ranting away for a while now, and Rich has started to rant too, so I figured that it was about time to start ranting for myself. Or just posting whatever I feel like.

Anyway - at work this afternoon, there was an email conversation that went like this...

N: In an attempt to resolve recent car "issues", I will be working from home tomorrow. Please do contact me via email/phone if you need to.

I replied: Why don't you cycle in?! - which resulted in this sarcastic reply...

N: As per the email Jones, I'm attempting to resolve current issues. Travel to/from work is no issue due to A/S/donkey/jet pack/bicycle. However, I would really like to be able to use my lovely new motor for this purpose, and in its current state this is not achievable.

Now, as this was a mail directed at our team at work, one of my cow-orkers must have been having some funny thoughts regarding N's reference to a donkey...

V: So you feed your donkey the cam belt?

This is the point where I reply with a suitable comment - Unfortunately, his donkey is off the road too - see the attached.... - and a rather interesting image...




Well, both myself and the rest of the team thought it was amusing!