Sleepypete's Pillow

Getting some extreme weather over here in Blighty 🙂

We’re getting away with it a bit where I live but that still means we have a couple of inches of snow lying on the ground. The snow started on Tuesday and came down heavily that evening. I had a severe dose of Cabin Fever, which ended up in me heading out to our local Mall.

That reminds me … I bought a few cookies while I was there and one has survived. Not for long 🙂

Had a good rummage up there, the Mall was far too crowded last week (I like being around people but overcrowding gets me nervous) for a comfortable peek. As well as the cookies, I brought back copies of Batman Begins and Dark Knight on Blu-Ray. Both excellent movies, although the Joker’s insanity is not the most comfortable viewing.

Bah – I digress 🙂 (as usual !)

Headed out of the Mall as it was just starting to get dark. The footing was fairly ok, there didn’t seem to be much ice. At least I didn’t notice until I started driving 🙂 Wheelspin … wheelspin and a bit more wheelspin. My current car is 170bhp driving the front two wheels, so it’s not the easiest of things to keep traction with. I’m gaining a lot of appreciation for the electronic toys it has though 🙂

Toy 1 – Snowflake light. Yellow snowflake means BRR, put gloves on (ice warning, temp’s between 1 and 5 degrees C). Red snowflake means it’s … … freezing (below 1 degree C)
Toy 2 – Anti-lock brakes. Seriously, I will not buy another car unless it comes with anti-lock brakes. They’re the difference between hitting something and stopping short. There’s a technique called Cadence Braking, where you pulse your foot on the brake pedal to get the wheels turning again so they can do useful braking. I’ve actually used it too. However, it’s far better to leave it to an onboard computer as it’s much more effective than a slow human.

Toy 3 – Traction Control. This is the biggie, I don’t think I’d have gotten into work yesterday if it wasn’t as effective. In my last car, this worked by touching the brakes on if a wheel was spinning. In my Focus, it works by limiting the power produced by the engine.

Huh ? What dat meen ?

It means that when I pulled away yesterday morning on a road coated with snow packed down smooth, the car accelerates gently away instead of going nowhere as spinning wheels polish the ice even more. True, there’s wheelspin but then the brainz inside the car takes over to make the car push forward slowly. This is wheelspin on treated roads coming in second gear too …

I mentioned above that I got away with the conditions a bit here, the cul-de-sac I live on is ungritted but is flat enough to be passable. You just have to take it very slowly and expect to slide. As I did when coming back in the evening, needing to drive around someone coming the other way. 4 wheel slidey time … The rest of the urban roads are fine but we’re anticipating major problems as the freezing cold conditions turn the snow to ice.

It’s very dangerous out there, even with just a couple of inches. I’m seeing some amazing pictures on Sky news at the moment – telly’s muted as I’m listening to iTunes. Cars upside down where they’ve slid over wall terraces, motorways that are car parks. I only have 5 miles to go to get to work and only 200 yards of that is ungritted.

How many people got into work ? Yesterday was my first day back after Xmas and we had about 1 in 7 people in, probably less. I’m picking 1 in 7 as my number cos the Newsies said that’s how many didn’t get into work. I reckon it was probably the other way around yesterday. A lot more made it in today and the roads were far busier.

Back in tomorrow – can’t miss out on my first bacon sarnie for a fortnight.

Oh – last thing for this post. When I hit Tescos tonight I was doing a MutterMutterMutter while finding a car park spot … People had left trolleys in the roadways, they’d just dumped them after putting their stuff in the car. This drew the inevitable “MUPPETS!” until I tried getting my shopping to the car. Let’s just say that I found it easier to carry my empty trolley to the trolley hut instead of wheeling it over there 🙂

Back to work for me on Wednesday. I’ll have had a longer than usual break, with it lasting 12 working days in total spanning 3 weeks. It usually takes me less than a week to get horribly bored when I’m away from work but there’s been enough going on to stop that happening this time 🙂

There’s been the excitement mentioned in the post below but I’m going to park that for now. I’ve not seen anything back from the Eve people yet to tell me if they take honest customers seriously. (Early days still)

Technology has been the key thing over this break 🙂 Starting with my old laptop choosing the first Sunday of the holiday to finally decide it also wanted time off. So that’s money spending thing No 1 🙂 The Acer is quite a decent laptop to be honest. I’ve seen 3 of them so far and the build quality is pretty good. Much better than my old HP, which felt a lot lighter (weaker) in its construction to the point of fit lines not matching up properly. I’d heavily criticise the touchpad on the Acer though, it’s not nearly as good as the HP’s touchpad.

I think it was the start of the break when I had to hide my wireless network’s identifier. The sound on the streaming music would break up and after 10-15 minutes (or shorter) the sound would stop entirely. I suspect someone around here has the virus that takes over a PC’s wifi, creating a “Free Public Wi-Fi” network which it then uses to spread. I’ve seen that a few times. What I think it was also doing was a brute force attempt to crack the encryption security on my own network. Hiding the identifier has made the problem go away.

Come to think of it – the “Free Public Wi-Fi” thing could be where the Nastie that stole my Eve account’s info came from. The techie stuff says that laptops will try and connect to this if they don’t have any better ideas, so it could be where the Nastie got in.

Hey ! Thought I’d parked that account stealing thing 🙂

Xmas was up at the parents with the family there. I got me an Ipod upgrade, with the Ipod having a few interesting toys attached … I now need an iPod sock to keep it unscratched. Had a few more bits of music appear in the library too – I’m now up to 3655 songs that would take 10.2 days to listen to. Of those, I’ve managed to listen to 1478 of them over the past 4 weeks. Will probably crack 1500 and maybe get close to 1600 by the time I go back to werk 🙂

While up there, I put up my nan’s new TV bracket, which has it attached to the wall. Not an experience I’m planning to repeat any time soon ! I don’t think I need to in my current room anyway, although I do still need to move things around in here.

28th was the Crazies Xmas Part-ay, with Secret Santa. Was good to see the gang all there 🙂 I managed to recruit the help of our BionicDwarf to get my old telly shifted off its stand. I put the telly there myself a few years ago but I reckon in the process I busted something in my side which has killed my bowling action. Was well appreciated having the assist 🙂 Crazie Party – we watched Ice Age, Moon and Dogma, all 3 of those being excellent films. Must watch Ice Age again soon, not got Dogma yet.

New telly ! This arrived on the Tuesday 29th. It’s a Samsung 32″ LCD with the 1080p extra pixel and detail goodness. With my old telly being on the floor, I had the added incentive of needing to kick myself out of bed early in order to have a telly to watch the cricket on. I also picked up a Blu-ray disc player from Sony (going cheap at £100).

The blu-ray player is a prime example of how I sometimes lose out by not following my instincts. The little Instinct Voices were telling me on Boxing Day that I should pick one up when we were in the retail places in Lincoln. I thought I’d better leave it for when I was back down south – the result ? None left in the retail places in Bristol’s Cribbs Causeway ! Cue a trip to Tesco Extra, which still had a few left. I reckon people scoured the Cribbs Mall and didn’t think of checking the Tesco Extra nearer to where I live.

So I pick up two of the parts of my future Telly & Movie set up 🙂 The 3rd and 4th will be new speakers and amp, looks like I’ll have to get those due to Trust Issues with the Blu-Ray player.

After enjoying the end of the 4th day in the cricket, it’s time to test out the new stuff 🙂 Star Trek was the dvd chosen. It wasn’t at its best at this point, as I had to wait until the next day for the better leads to arrive. Still looked pretty darn impressive though 🙂 The telly does a good job of filling in the gaps to turn standard definition into sharp higher definition.

Doh – there’s actually far more about this on my Techie blog, so I probably shouldn’t repeat it here. The first post (linked) is about the early bit of setup and introduces the PC stuff … The second post (linked) covers what happens with better leads. It doesn’t quite have the end of the story :

My MSN Messenger login uses the little status messages. I don’t change this too often (inspiration failure) but the latest is “Technology 1 Sleepypete 3”. Heh heh heh – the score at the moment is probably a tie …

I have everything hooked up to the telly 🙂 But I’m having to use 5 leads instead of 1 for the cable TV box. Sound isn’t as good as I’d like, I only get a stereo output on my current speakers. This is the Trust Issue with the Blu-Ray player, it can’t get the info from my speakers that would assure it there’s no copying going on so it just outputs in stereo. With my PC, stereo is an unexpected deficiency in the capability it offers. Still sounds very good and I don’t currently have the room set up for surround sound anyway.

Let’s say I’m not excited/disappointed about the sound enough to make me rush to Richer Sounds to get new amp & speakers 🙂

I’ve watched one movie off Blu-Ray so far, Outlander. My good friend Cyberkitten has written a little bit about this one, spookily on the morning before I watched it again 🙂 Was as impressive off blu-ray at home as it was in the cinema. I’m still waiting for Watchmen, Amazon said they dispatched this at the same time as they sent Outlander but it’s now 2 days later and it’s not arrived yet. I’ve been losing faith lately with Amazon’s ability to timely deliver. Ordered on Tuesday 29th with First Class postage, not seen it arrive yet. I’m possibly being a little optimistic seeing as it’s holiday season but Novatech managed a next morning delivery on 2 leads also ordered on the 29th. I think I’ll be checking out the competition when I next go dvd/music/blu-ray hunting.

We watched Avatar as well this week, that’s a cracking movie well recommended.

Had one short session of gaming on the telly – that first link above to the Techie blog has what I needed to do to achieve this 🙂 Mass Effect looked spectacular on the big screen. Not sure how much I’ll actually use the big screen for gaming though, as mouse & keyboard on lap on sofa doesn’t strike me as a comfy gaming position !

I’m settling down in front of the cricket at the moment. England have a fight on their hands in this game, South Africa have runs on the board and the pitch has become a lot more bowler friendly … Will be an intriguing game, looking forward to watching it over today and tomorrow 🙂

Yeah – you'd have thought so. 50,000 accounts online simultaneously is a lot for Eve but isn't that much for a MMO … You'd think they'd try to keep subscribers happy.

I'm going to give it a week to see if I get any contact from the petitions I've put in. Not sure if I will due to a Chicken & Egg situation with the petition and activity thing :

Won't reactivate until I know what's happened with the petition
Can't see the petition without the account being active

Fingers crossed the guys at CCP fix this. 🙁

I been hacked. It’s a strange feeling, kinda like being violated but it’s probably worse than that because I don’t know how far the hacking has gone. I know they’ve managed to get one username and password combination which means more have probably slipped out but I haven’t seen any signs of that yet.

So what’s actually happened ? Had a peek over at Evemon yesterday, it’s a tool that monitors your Eve online characters while you’re not actually in the game. Instead of the millions my character should have, it was reporting less than 1 million … Question – is Evemon glitching again ? So I check it out in game, to find that my in game cash has been transferred away and a decent number of my ships have been sold.

It’s not much fun playing Internet Spaceship Game if you have no ships to play with.

I’ve gone through the routine of scanning the machine, changing passwords, complaining to the people who run Eve. No joy yet, although I expect the Eve people are all off on weekends so I haven’t expected to see much. Another wrinkle is that I’ve now cancelled the Eve account but because yesterday was the last day of the subscription, I can’t track the progress of the complaint. Grr. Don’t think I’ll be back in Eve.

My other online stuff all looks to be fine but I’ve changed passwords to be sure. I came up with another fun one last night while trying to get to sleep. This one looks to have been a fairly well targeted attack, with only Eve being affected. My biggest suspicion is that a trojan was present on the out-of-the-box install of my new laptop, a couple of online forums concur with this.

Someone at work got an account hacked just before Xmas too (not Eve), I know she was upset about it as well. It’s strange – when you realise you’ve been hacked you feel violated. It kicks in the paranoia because you don’t know how far the attack has gone or how much information they’ve stolen. It’s just occurring to me now that I should contact one of the credit card companies because one of my cards may have been compromised.

So there’s the “how much has been compromised” paranoia, as well as “how did they get the username and password ?”

Hacking is something that is supposed to happen to other people 😉

I hope I do see something back from the Eve people, as it’ll mean they take each one of their customers seriously and value them in a way Blizzard have forgotten to. Mind you, saying that Blizzard are usually extremely good at getting hacked Warcraft characters back to how they should be. If anything, the Eve people should be very hot on it, they have far fewer people playing their game.

We shall see !

Last word on the hacking – if you have the slightest suspicion that something Nastie has gotten into your machine, try running MBAM. That stands for Malware Bytes Anti-Malware and it’s one of the better tools out there for cleaning up any mess that’s gotten through your security software. I’m still in a 60 day Trial period for McAfee, let’s just say that when the trial expires McAfee will be removed from the machine never to return. (I’m waiting because that’s when my Kaspersky licences run out and I’ll update them all as a trio)

In the meantime, I’m chilling out in front of the cricket when I should have been 3.5 hours into an 8 hour roleplay game session. However, I didn’t get any information on where I was supposed to go so I’ve not made the trip. I think the gamers tried to get me down there but attempting to pass on the information on the day is not really good enough, hence my mobile currently being OFF. We had a fiasco a couple of months ago where Plan A was to go to Place S, then we changed to go to Place P before finally heading to Place D. I’ve got no intention of repeating that … especially as I think the other guys forget that I’m the only one who travels a decent distance.

So – downer post today, which is something I hate to have at the top of the blog. I’ll knock it off tomorrow with something more about the technology stuff 🙂 But for today, I’m reflecting a crappy mood that needed an outlet. Pizza may be required tonight.

Back again now 🙂 I went back up to my parents’ house for the Xmas break, as per usual 🙂 It was a bit hairy making the decision of when to travel due to all the snow. Think my sister and I judged it about right, the roads were clear for us. Apart from slow people that is …

Perversely again, I appear to have lost a little weight up there despite eating everything in sight 🙂 Could be due to healthy eating but probably more to being disciplined with what and when I eat stuff. Will have to break that habit later in the week with another pizza but not tonight as I’d drown while collecting it.

What did we all get ? I have an iPod upgrade, it’s a 5th Gen iPod Nano so as well as holding all of my iTunes library (3650 songs of which 3350 are on the iPod) it also has curiosities of an FM radio, video camera, pedometer and a couple more features I’ll probably never use. My sister got a compact Nikon camera, will be very curious as to how she gets on with that 🙂 Nan got a bracket for her telly which is now on the wall and my parents will be switching to a rather special telly soon.

We downscaled Xmas this year, think we’ve kinda got tired of it. Plus we all have the habit of buying what we want instead of keeping things in reserve for Xmas & Birthday 🙂 Or the toys that we do want are a leetle too expensive for presents.

Great food as always, with me fixing the techie stuff along the way to get the great music too 🙂 (dodgy headphones connector needed a fix …) The telly bracket was “fun” to put up. We resorted to Power Tools. It should be a lot more stable now than it was on its stand, I nearly pushed it over a few times putting cables in …

Back on Sunday, which gave a bit of time before Crazie Xmas Part-a-y on Monday evening 🙂 All the gang were there, RCA, Craziequeen, Cyberkitten, Family Aginoth and BionicDwarf. We operate a Secret Santa nowadays (to keep the cost and complexity down), with me getting the dvds of Star Trek (new one), Moon and Demolition Man. I’ll be watching those sometime over this week while I’m away from work 🙂

And I have something new to watch them on ! Been spending a little too much money over the past week and a bit. New laptop to replace the old HP I wasn’t too happy with. Today saw the arrival of a Sony Blu-Ray player and a Samsung 32″ LCD telly. Early days for those, especially as I’m waiting for a couple of leads to come through the post. I won’t get the full benefit of the new stuff until the better leads arrive. I even have a bit of a cobbled together scroungy lead arrangement for the Blu-ray player. Looks good so far 🙂

Will wait until the good leads arrive until I watch the first HD thing I’ve recorded on my V+ cable TV box (Day Of The Triffids). In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying watching England well and truly get on top of South Africa in the cricket. Will be recording the coverage tomorrow in anticipation of a Big Win 🙂

Watching Avatar tomorrow with the Crazies, really looking forward to that 🙂

PS I have pictures of the Before, During and 1st stage After with the telly stuff, it’ll come on here at some stage 🙂 I have a bit more room rearrangement to do first though. As the LCD telly is much thinner, it gives me some good scope for moving things around a bit. I’m hoping it will let me put my 2 comfy chairs in usable positions 🙂

Additional – I just put an entry on the techie blog about today’s connecting up exploits 🙂

Merry Christmas kid, been thinking about you
Hugs

And perversely, it actually seems a degree or so warmer than it was last week.

I had the instincts telling me that it wouldn’t be worth me coming in to work this week, so I took a couple more days off. I reckon I know what they were getting at now 🙂 Instinct can be a very powerful thing, although it doesn’t often talk language that we’re likely to understand. With the moving around at work, I’m kinda in limbo too not wanting to really kick something off there before Xmas. I like to tie up all the loose ends before I move on from a place so I don’t get distracted too much and moving before Xmas would have meant too much rush to get away clean like that.

Saying that though, there’s a few amazing people in my project who I’d drop everything to help out if asked. I think they know who they are 🙂

It’s not much snow today, although at an inch or so settling it’s enough to snow in those people who usually jump at the chance of a freebie day out of work. Possibly enough to build a snowman, will have to see about that later 🙂 I have a couple of pictures from last night that I must get processed and put on here …

Which takes me to yesterday’s bit of excitement. Got up, put the cricket on the telly and started up the laptop. It was suspiciously quiet … My old laptop has been struggling for a few months now due to a failing cooling fan. Bit like the hamster wheel coming off its axle and making a racket. Well, I think the hamster itself gave up the ghost yesterday, so it was off to the local places to find another one.

Prices seem to have gone up since last year, although that could be due to me comparing with how little my old HP laptop cost me. Only £370 for a 17″ laptop … Think I know why now, HP used to be known for bombproof quality, as demonstrated by their printers and my more ancient laptop. That’s suffered in recent years though, while it wasn’t falling apart the build quality on the HP G70 left a lot to be desired. Aside from the fan, there were issues with how the laptop was put together. I also have one of their all in one printers, which has a faulty page feeder.

No more HP for me for a while …

So what did I get ? Acer’s Aspire 7540 was the new machine of choice. Bit more expensive than I’d have liked to commit too (especially with thoughts of new telly) but it felt like one of the better options in the shop. 17″ screen too 🙂 With PC’s, actual spec doesn’t matter much alongside ease of use. Bigger screen and keyboard (the two are tied together on laptops) are far more important than a cpu that takes 0.9secs instead of 1sec. That said, there’s always a minimum spec but you won’t go far wrong if there’s 2GB in a machine. It’s a heavier machine too, feels far more solid than the HP.

Not so sure about Windows 7 though. It feels a smoother OS than Vista, looks like it eats less memory too. The memory gadget says 50% of memory is being used at the moment and I have the usual round of apps loaded. That’d be Messenger, Outlook, a bunch of Firefox windows, iTunes and Evemon. On the old HP, that would take up 60%. Both machines have 3Gb of RAM. It looks a bit nicer and the taskbar has seen some improvements (better after I figured out how to deselect the grouping of windows option!). Aero is a pretty interface, although it seems geared towards letting you see your desktop picture more.

Multitouch and gestures …

Hmm. How to say this ? It’s a bit broken and gets in the way. That’s probably related to me getting used to them and how they are activated though. I’ll do better when I discover exactly what triggers them. At the moment though, I think the OS looking for trackpad gestures tends to make the machine ignore normal clicks.

Until we get a fully functional neural interface for our computers, any form of prediction is going to make wrong guesses and I think that’s what is happening with the Windows 7 gesture features. I’m quite close to turning it off, as keyboard commands are usually far more effective for things like Zoom and Pan. I get the feeling that a few Task Analysis Ergonomics “experts” have given people the wrong ideas on what features are actually used and useful.

It’ll probably come into its own for large touch screens but I’m definitely unconvinced as to its application on trackpads. As is usual for me and IT, it’ll have as long as it takes for me to either get used to it or get sick of it before it gets disabled. Put it in a table and get it working with a big TFT touch screen and it’ll be awesome for gaming.

Liking the laptop so far 🙂 Although it took a few reboots and cooldown periods to get the data (iTunes library is now 15GB!!!!) off the old laptop. I actually gave up copying the iTunes from the old laptop as it wouldn’t stay alive long enough, 3 cheers for “desktop backup”.

Right – iTunes is currently going through the Kill Bill soundtrack, this Wall of Text has gotten long enough and I’m resisting the urge to play Mass Effect through again (it’s waiting for new telly). So it’s time to sign off but not before wishing people :

MERRY XMAS !

Hope you get lots of cool stuff, good company and that any travel plans you have don’t get too badly disrupted by the white stuff outside.

Holiday season soon and it looks like it could be snow 🙂 .

I’ve been getting feelings of deja vu going back to the snow we had here at the start of 2009. I was almost heading off to sleep, reading a book while listening to the radio. The emerging story was covering what was happening on the main roads in Devon and Cornwall. It was late, the snow had just started coming down.

The reports started with news of vehicles that were struggling to get up a rather long hill. This had the effect of starting a cascade, where the stuck vehicles caused obstructions for the vehicles following. In the end, I think 50-60 got stuck, unable to move on the hill.

Here’s what thisiscornwall (link) made of it …

It was a weird feeling listening to it develop on the radio. Thoughts included a bit of an evil “nice n warm in here :-)” but it was mostly the strange feeling that I was listening to one of those disaster movies developing, except that it was real life and real people instead of just fiction. Bit like watching a movie like Armageddon and being able to go outside and look upwards to see the asteroid the heroes have gone to put a nuke in.

Strange feeling. I got a fair bit of book read while listening to that.

Kinda getting it again, with the reports of impending Snow. The weather people say it’ll be coming from the North Sea, which means the Eastern half of the country will get it worst. Where I live should get away with it, although it will be cold. Might be interesting driving across to my mum’s and dad’s place for Xmas though, as they live in the East. TrafficEngland says it’s snowing about 15 miles West of where they live too.

It won’t affect me getting into work, I’ll be in tomorrow but then away for a couple of weeks. Definitely need to get away to rest, recharge and regroup before switching job early in the new year. I can usually hide any signs of sufferring but I tend to slip a bit when really needing a break. Like now, when I’m more rude about certain people at work than I need to be 🙂 I mean, come on ! If something new doesn’t work, you should really read the information about New Thing before complaining …

Mutter mutter mutter. And a few new people who I can quite justifiably call MUPPETs! Wonderful word that, it’s completely innocent and can be used to describe all sorts of idiocy. And it’s not a swear word too so you can use it loudly and often without getting funny looks.

Yep – we have a new toy at work that affects the whole team and we’re already noticing certain issues with how its been implemented. We’ve got good people looking at it from our end, they’ll be getting their shotguns out to attack the problems.

And with that, I think I’ll be heading over to my desktop PC to start up another Settlers IV game. It won last night, which is a precedent that cannot be allowed to stand.

Xmas brings parties 🙂

Work lets us have one afternoon to head out to a place to let us celebrate one more year of managing to meet all those challenges that we get set. It also lets us see each other without the Work Hats on, people can be a little different when they get out of the office … Bit more relaxed.

Today was the turn of the Glass Boat in south central Bristol. Definite improvement over previous years 🙂 The Glass Boat is a permanently moored barge converted into a restuarant. Usually you don’t expect too much from an Xmas Munchie but we were very pleasantly surprised this time around. Decent portions and very tasty food. Although I think they got word from last year’s place to not put too many sprouts in play. Play being the operative word 😉

Excellent conversation too. I was lucky enough to be at the same end of the table as Ms Sunshine and Lady P, with a few of the fellas from work there too. Picked up a few things to think about, plus I got the impression that this blog entry will very quickly do the rounds at work tomorrow 🙂 I can get into a circle where I drag myself down. Kind words always help to pull me up again.

Talking to people always helps with issues, other people can see what’s going on in your head that you’d otherwise be blind to.

Hmm – current iTunes track : Sad Eyes by Bat For Lashes from the Fur and Gold album. Another spooky iTunes selection 🙂 Would love to be singing along to it but my bugs from last week are making me cough whenever any thought of Karaoke starts to strike … That also meant I didn’t stick around after the Glass Boat bit today, still not up to full strength after the bugs. Possibly a good thing too, as one of the ladies was saying how much she was looking forward to the dodgems … I wonder if everyone will make it back alive ?

PS Think I may have to be a little more cryptic with the codenames I use for people, as there’s another person at work who sees straight through them 🙂 I can still keep a few people guessing though 🙂
PS2 I reckon I now have a codename for the Beauty Before Age lady mentioned in last year’s Xmas Party post : Dodgem Demon 🙂