… you have to dump yourself. Yep, when they’re unable to tell you, and leave you to figure it out yourself. Always a real treat that.
And England lost at both Cricket and Rugby. Great start to the week.
Because I never get to say things like “Pass me the nightscope” or “Yes, Mr. President”. I’ve been watching Season 3 of 24 and it’s awesome, possibly the best yet, but then they’ve all been great. I really wish though they’d kill off Nina, though. When she came back in Season 2, I was a bit gutted, but to bring her out for 3 as well, it’s getting silly. I have Season 4 to watch when I’ve finished 3, and if she’s in that as well, well…
In other news, I’ve spent the weekend playing with two new toys: a Freecom FX-50 External DVD writer and a Lacie 250gb Ethernet Hard Disk.
The DVD writer has been flawless so far – I chose this particular model because it’s compatible with both Mac and Windows – it comes bundled with Roxio Toast (OSX) and Easy Media Creator (XP). It’s also Lightscribe enabled – which means you can “burn” an image directly on to compatible media. Additionally, it’s dual layer – so if you buy the unnecessarily expensive dual layer discs (about £17 for 5) you can burn up to 9gb of data to a single disc. Nevertheless, backing up all my digitial music, documents, videos, and other precious items to DVD was a pretty painless task. The only stipulation is that the bundled version of Toast (6 Lite) has limited functionality – it will only burn certain DVD discs, and it won’t burn Lightscribe images. So you either need to upgrade to the Titanium version (about £40) or use the Windows software. Burning DVD-Rs plays on my standalone DVD player (DVD+Rs don’t). The drive will do virtually every DVD drive format available, of which they’re seem to be a completely unnecessary number of.
The main reason for doing all this was to make way for the Ethernet drive – and to ease my fear that it might all go tits up. So I have DVD backups of everything important, before I started the arduous task of moving everything (over 20gb of music for starters) to the network drive. The point of the drive is that it sits on my home network, and any of the 5 computers on it have shared access to it. Primarily it means I have a central store for music which can be accessed at any time, without having to boot a particular machine. It has also meant I’ve been able to erase a lot of the junk off of two of my machines which are set aside specifically for University work. Now they’ve got the bare minimum on, freshly defragmented drives, and appear to be running a lot more happily.
I’d read many bad reviews of the many different network drives out there – mostly that they were all noisy, they kept crashing, speeds were slow and there was too much setup involved. Well, the setup was simple. Just plugged it in to my switch, the DHCP server gave it an IP, and then I could map to it. There is also a web based admin panel to set up further things. This seems a little buggy, but with patience, it’s easy enough to get it going. Speed – yes, it is a little slow but that’s mainly due to accessing it across a wireless connection to my network. For serious data movement, there’s also a USB 2.0 port which gives reasonable speeds for your initial moves. It isn’t silent, no, but it’s not accessive. I have it hidden away, and given that I’ve usually got music or the TV on, it’s not too noticeable. I’d say it’s about the same volume as my Mac when the fan spins up, though the fan on the network drive is permanently on. Having said that, there is a power button so you can power it down if you want. It’s basically a mini Linux computer, which you need to bear in mind.
Generally – it’s been hassle free. And a lot of fun. If it had a Firewire interface as well it would have been brilliant – the biggest trauma is really the initial copy across – the 20gb of music on USB took quite a few hours.
God damn it. In the time it took to write this post they’ve also brought back Sherry. She’s phenomenonly irritating.
I’m still going, and getting better with every day. The main issue now is the coughing – my lungs are obviously so confused by the lack of fresh tar in them that they’ve started rejecting the old tar in them, and started hacking out all the gunk that shouldn’t be there. So I’m spending most of each day coughing and spluttering. Which is nice.
Cycling to work today in the snow was fun. Especially as the snow was not the usual fluffy flaky stuff you’d get, but more giant snowy hailstones – very much like polystyrene packing balls. Most unusual.
I’ve picked up a nasty strain in the left side of my back. I’m not sure I can blame that on not smoking, but I think my disrupted sleep (as a result of needing a cigarette) is to blame, so indirectly it is. Fortunately, only one person in my immediate office smokes, so I get a craving every time I see him disappear down the fire escape… could be worse. According to The Big Quit today and tomorrow are going to be the worst days in terms of cravings. I actually disagree – when I’ve quit before, I’ve usually found the first week to be OK, because I’m still on a smug high about having given up. It’s always towards the end of the 2nd week where the complacency sets in and I start to think I’ll be OK if I just have one.
It’s hard to remember, but this time is definitely feeling harder than the last time I quit. Perseverance is the key. And to get rid of this cold so I can cycle to work – I think exercise is a real helper to this process.
Doing fine. Yesterday was simple enough. Cold has gotten worse, and I’m fairly confident the cough is a combination of both cough and lungs hacking out the gunk. Couldn’t cycle to work, so feeling a bit fat. I’ve decided to put a quid away for every day I don’t smoke and use that money for something nice. (Similar to the put the money you’d spend on cigarettes away thing, but since I haven’t actually bought any fags in about 6 months (I’ve had a seemingly endless supply of duty free tobacco) I figure a quid a day is a good enough start.
On Saturday night, I was in London in the audience for the filming of an episode of new(ish) comedy quiz show, Petrolheads. Neil Morrisey is host, with Chris Barrie and Richard Hammond as team captains. It’s aimed at being a “Have I Got News For You” style quiz show in a car perspective, but it’s really more “A Question of Sport” in a car perspective. Moderately funny, and entertaining to see filmed. The usual routine is that whilst the crew and celebs are getting ready, we get the pleasure of a warm-up chimp, the type of idiot you’d expect on the Friday night at Butlin’s. In our case, we were told to give a biiiiiiiiigggg round of applause for the “brilliant” Rayyyyyy Tuuuurrrnnnnerrrrrrrrrrrr (“!!!”). Our instant reaction was “Whooooooooo?” Google is no help in finding him, and even though he repeatedly told us about his 20 years on the circuit, he’s nowhere to be found. He was humorous… though repetitive, and to be honest, I preferred Mark Little (aka Joe Mangel) keeping me warm when I saw The Weakest Link get filmed.
The guests on the show were John Thompson and Ferne Cotton, who is as tidy in real life as she looks “on the telly”. Thompson had an aura about him that suggested he really couldn’t be bothered to be there, especially when some of his jokes didn’t arouse any laughter from the audience.
We saw the final in the series be filmed, so it’ll be on BBC2, Sunday, 10pm in about 3 weeks, I think. Try and listen for me and my mates making silly laughs and whooping during the credits and clappy bits as it was the only way to make our marque on the show.
P.S When you see a joke by Neil Morrisey about Mark Thatcher and a big cat and a joke about the Pope and not thrashing his bulletproof car (both of which are not funny), then he had to do each one at least 3 times, because he kept fucking it up. Was probably the funniest part of the show.