Y’arrgh! Here be a blog ..

Thought I might as well - didn’t do it last night (on day of release) as a) I was too lazy and b) wanted to get the general feel of other people’s experiences c/o Retropassion (a good measure of Xbox 360 gaming and its associations).

I’ve done my avatar but couldn’t get it to be as large as I am in real life (don’t think I’d fit on the TV!) so I’m plump, grey with a goatee and still as useless at games as I was before.

http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/Mug%20UK/avatar-body.png

Just copying Saints Row across to the h/drive - such a waste having 120Gigs propped on the side and only using 15Gigs of it for saved games and downloads from Xbox Live.

Not tried any of the other features out yet but I’m getting there

Will upload a mini report of the day once I’ve also uploaded the pictures - this placeholder is just a reminder to my lazy ar$e-self to get something done

Loads of stuff to sort out and bring (it’s all small stuff Slick, will only need a small box for it all) - so it’s going to be a busy night. Up early as well, so no lie-in’s at all this weekend.

Busy, busy … and busy!

… as per usual, it takes someone in work (usually one of the Internet Development team) to show me a Firefox add-on that smacks me in the mouth with a large rusty-nail encrusted baseball bat to announce, in dry sarcastic tones, “now you’ve found me, use me you idiot!”.

So I’ve set Speed Dial up as my default home page in all my machines - so, so much easier than just having the one homepage

Tune in next week when I realise what breathing in & out is useful for … d’oh!

After chatting with a bloke from work about graphics cards etc. I plumped for the following one (c/o Play.com and a few Nectar points in the bag too!):

Think having 1Gig of graphics card memory will suffice for Blu-Ray & HD playback

Another fantastic night from the big man.

The new single Zoe 25 was played along with the his tunes (new & old) from his own albums plus some Marillion classics - i.e. when they were good and fronted by Fish

Only ruiner for the whole night were three pissheads who, having paid £17.50 to see Fish, decided that it was better to try and have a “conversation” with him when everyone else in the audience was trying to listen to his monologues in-between each track. Even Fish got fed up with trying to barter with them and in the end they were chucked out in a totally democratically vote via a show of hands from the audience

Due to the above, the encore was cut short to one tune (it’d already overrun by 10 minutes) so no Incommunicado to whip everyone into a frenzy as per previous gigs. Hey ho .. still a damn good night. Pictures & some video clips already on my Facebook account but I’ll try and remember to upload them here too ……

Friday – Travelling to Germany & visiting Thorsten in Wiesbaden.

We were up early-ish and headed out the door via Gaz’s mate’s house to drop his house keys off as he was due a visit from the estate agents the following day. Queued up in the traffic to get onto the M6 and escaped Birmingham. Headed into the first services and I took this photo of a Salford Van Hire van parked oh so well in the car park. Didn’t realise until we were walking past the van, that the drivers were still in there, so I made up some cock & bull story that I always catalogue which services I visit .. ahem

A nice coffee was drunk and we headed back off down the M6, onto the A14 and then the M11 into one of Stanstead’s long-stay car-parks. Blue, K-17 - what a lovely address to have ..

Got onto a fairly empty bendy-bus that takes the passengers from the various car-parks to the main airport building. There was a bit of a kerfuffle at the last bus stop as a lady in a wheelchair was queuing up with the rest of her family to get on. 5 minutes later and the family and their luggage were crammed on, with the old lady holding onto a hand rail for the journey to the airport. No-one could get up to let her use a seat as the bus was that crammed full.

Got into the main building at Stanstead and headed towards the Ryanair signage - to see that there were flights direct (ish) to Karslruhe via Baden Baden airport. D’oh! Ah well, plans were made back in July that we would be staying at Thorsten’s in Wiesbaden so, after making a mental note to use that airport should we ever decide to return to Karlsruhe, we went through the usual customs checks and headed into the waiting area.

A fairly uneventful Ryanair flight to Frankfurt (Hahn) took place. We landed, rang Thorsten once to say we were there and he said we needed to get the bus to Mainz. Got some cash out to buy the tickets and then found out we’d missed the first coach by about 10 minutes and the next one wasn’t due for an hour. So, purely to kill the time, we decamped to ‘Gustos’ in the airport, rang Thorsten to explain the delay and waited for him to drive to the airport and pick us up. Meanwhile, we enjoyed the delights of Bettina serving us some nice wiezenbier and, as we were originally supposed to be joined by a few others, took photos of the afore-mentioned beers and sent them via a MMS message on our mobiles

After another beer and a chicken sandwich thingy (again, served up by the beautiful Bettina), we got a call from Thorsten to say he was getting near the airport so we decided to wait outside for him. After a 15-minute wait, another call from Thorsten asking us whereabouts we were as he couldn’t find us - turns out we were almost opposite him but blocked from his view by a van.
Travelling to Wiesbaden from the airport and my eyelids were getting a bit droopy, especially whilst Gaz and Thorsten talked the “international conversation starter” of football, football and a bit more football! We arrived at Wiesbaden after an hour or so and Thorsten suggested some local food in his favourite restaurant which was, handily, just across the street from where he’d parked the car.

And what damn fine food it was. The starter was a huge bowl of salad (yes, I do eat it from time to time!) with a nice dressing. Accompanying this was a glass of weizenbier - we’d asked for weißbier but apparently that’s the pronunciation on the other side of Germany and Thorsten had to explain the difference as the waitress was a little bit lost. The starter was followed up by gorgeous snitzel steak with French fries and the most wonderful gravy topping. Had to admit defeat towards the end as I couldn’t eat any more! A pattern that was to appear a few times over the course of this coming weekend .. to my shame.

We went back to Thorsten’s car to get our bags and walked down to his apartment. After settling down we had a good old chinwag about all the cups & trophies (some real, some plastic) for the competitions that he enters (across Europe) with the game Kick Off. He has a couple of Amiga machines set up which he practices on (they don’t use the Atari ST version in the competitions) and Gaz challenged him to a game. I’ve never seen so many fouls against so many players in a game of Kick Off before .. Gaz’s team should have been renamed the “leg choppers” for the amount of times they fouled one of Thorsten’s team. And, worse still, he got away with it time after time. Very few goals that Thorsten scored were courtesy of the penalty spot.

Later on I had a go at entering the current round of the STOT (ST Online Tournament) which was using the game Rainbow Islands. I suck at most games and having watched Thorsten clock up a massive score, my paltry 190000-odd was down to a very healthy bonus on one level boosting it up so high. But a score is a score and it was duly entered onto the Atari Forum thread where the scores are posted.

Crashed out on the sofas at Thorsten’s during the early hours of the morning - we’re not setting off for Karlsruhe too early tomorrow, so can get a bit of a lie-in.

(apologies for the late upload of this and the other pages .. but I’ve also uploaded the remainder of the Italian Jagfest bits too if that’ll make up for the delay?)

Thursday – getting to GazTee’s house

I’d booked Thursday off as a last minute thing due to an environmental survey that was required by law for all landlords. Not happy at having to use my last remaining day off that I’d not already planned a use for, but c’est la vie. Bloke turned up and did his measurements etc and then this left me with a few hours to kill before setting off to GazTee’s* in Birmingham….. so I crashed out for a few hours kip ….

*Gaz hereonin as I’m too lazy to keep typing in ‘GazTee’.

Woke up later than initially planned and headed for Warrington Bank Quay via a trip to Superdrug to stock up on the smellies that airlines allow you to carry these days – small 100ml spray-ons and a small toothbrush etc. Got to the station just in time to see the train I’d planned to catch had just left .. bugger. Next train was due at 16:53, so hung around and had a brew in the ‘new & improved’ Warrington Bank Quay platform cafe. All nice and swanky but still features the usual overpriced coffee which could do with a make-over next!

Train to Birmingham turned up, got on it and whiled away the 1.5 hours with a selection of Disturbed, Apocalyptica and (again) tried the new Metallica album out – it still doesn’t gel with me. It’s not as bad as St. Anger but it’s still not a par on Ride The Lightning.

Got to Birmingham and rang Gaz to see where he was – due to it being rush-hour, he suggested that I get another train to the University and he’d pick me up from there. Went upstairs and asked for a ticket off the nice inspector, who then asked (quite obviously) where I’d come from and could he have a look at my ticket. Fair enough, handing over my ticket in all honesty and not expecting the following statement: “This is for tomorrow – you shouldn’t have travelled today!”.

Bugger .. the woman who’d booked my ticket two days earlier at Warrington Central obviously didn’t understand the simple phrase “I’d like a ticket from Warrington Bank Quay to Birmingham this Thursday, please”. So she’d dated the travel down ticket for Friday instead of the Thursday. What a pillock! But, luckily for me, the inspector on the train had stamped the ticket (after ‘inspecting’ it!) with today’s date (the 9th) – phew! Guess I can thank National Rail’s policy of hiring stupid people … but I’m sure karma will, at some point, get its own back.

Got the train to the University and headed outside – passing a tall studentage person (with the requisite long hair and beard) and went outside. Rang Gaz and, just before he answered, this same student person asked me if I was ‘Patrick’ as he was meeting him and didn’t know what he looked like. I’m so looking forward to when I’m in a nursing home and people like this student are running the country…

Anyways, Gaz turned up and we want back to his place to get stuff sorted out – including getting the Ryanair check-ins done (saves you £4!) online. In between all of this, we went out for an Indian meal at Gaz’s favourite restaurant nearby. Damned nice Chicken Tikka Masala it was too!

Once back at Gaz’s, he set about thrashing me at a game – mainly because he’s used to losing at almost every game he’s ever challenged me to and that’s with me being *really* crap at most games too.

I don’t own a PS3 and the last time I played Wipeout was way back when in the mists of time and on a Playstation 1. Times have changed since – the game play is near enough the same, but the graphics are, as you’d expect, bucketloads better. I didn’t win a single race in the two leagues we played – not that Gaz won every race but he won more than enough. Think the only two times I was in front of Gaz was due to him making a mistake and crashing out on the course. It didn’t last –the old adage of being so high up that you get a nosebleed was proved on these occasions and I slipped back to my usual 5th or 6th place very quickly. But he got his trophy for playing x many races in co-op. Trophies are like the Xbox 360’s Achievements apparently.
As we were leaving around 9-ish tomorrow morning, I made sure I got an early night … and crashed out around 1am

Got a garbled message this morning en route to work about my bank card - didn’t confirm that it was ‘recovered’ or whether it was chewed to bits due to the signal continually dropping. So I popped back after work and picked up my card … and a moan from the clerk behind the counter about it being too bent to be used in their machines! Yet more karma working towards my thesis that National Rail hires some of the grumpiest, thickest people out there.

Do you have a chip on your shoulder? Can’t get a real job? Unable to read and/or understand plain English? Then join us at National Rail. We guarantee to give you a job where no-one will like you and will be able to see through your pathetic power trip within a second. (*)

(*) With apologies to the two people who have been damn useful with my bank card debacle - the rest of them have been utterly useless and incompetent

It started out so well too .. put my bank card into the ticket machine at Warrington Station due to the long queue and the next train was due in 5 minutes - as I’ve done many a time before.

But this time it rejected my card PIN, which I thought was odd and then it refused to give me my card back! Whoa! What’s going on here I thought, slightly panicking. So I joined the queue, whilst keeping a beady eye on the ticket machine in case it decided to spit my card out as an after thought .. no joy there

Bloke behind the counter was most helpful - especially after my previous description of all National Rail staff being incompetent due to them giving me the wrong ticket to Birmingham last month .. I’ll retract that accusation to “all National Rail staff bar this one guy!”. He first rebooted the PC that’s in the extra large box - stock Windows XP machine - and he went back to behind the counter. I watched it load .. and load .. and load and eventually, up comes the ticket dispenser screen. It tries to reject my card but fails. There goes Plan A

I join the queue again, and as before, keeping one beady eye on the damn machine as well as telling others behind me what it had done to my card - saves anyone else’s card getting swallowed up. Talk to the guy again and this time he rings up the ticket machine engineers (wherever they are based) and lets them know. So I wander back over to the machine and watch them remote into the machine and start to “End Task” as much as they can and then do another reboot. Ahem .. hasn’t this been tried once already? So it reboots and still no card handed back.

Back into the queue and this time the guy rings the same engineers who say that they’ll try something else .. so I wander back over to the machine and watch. Now I know they’re trying to be helpful but for (insert the name of your God, if you have one, here)’s sake - get someone who can bloody well spell!

They were going into CMB prompt .. then CND .. then eventually they remembered it’s CMD! Hurray .. or not

Next typo’s were because they couldn’t remember how to get into Program Files on C: .. they passed that hurdle eventually and went into the bowels of the ticket printing software’s folders to run a small Java applet. Well, it would have worked first time if the person doing the remoting in could spell “control” .. all this time I’m wondering why this person has been hired and reminding myself that they’re not exactly helping my view of employees of National Rail

Eventually the Java tool is run .. several parameters were passed: to reboot the machine, but no joy. To force an eject of a card .. no joy. The error returned was “the card is in the jaws but cannot be read” (or thereabouts) - I couldn’t exactly stand there and take a photo!

So after spending an hour there, missing two trains, I told the guy I’d be back later on and hopefully an engineer call out would have been out to the machine and rescued my card. So off I toddled to Irlam to get a lift to Bowlers.

Going to Bowlers with no money at all, is not a pleasant experience. Especially when I was supposed to be buying a HDMI graphics card for my media centre PC - the built in graphics card *cannot* handle Blu-Ray or HD-DVD playback. Looks OK but a bit wobbly but woe betide you if you try to fast-forward or skip a chapter .. half expect an old Atari ST demo effect of “Please Wait” to come on the screen

Anyways, post-Bowlers, I’m back on the train to Warrington station. I get downstairs to the ticket area, ask the lady and she knew who I was (not by name as I hadn’t left it before-hand) but because the other guy had let her know I’d be back I guess. The ticket machine now had a piece of paper over the card slot with “Cash Only” written on it so at least, hopefully, no-one else’s card was chomped up.

But the bad news was, no engineer at all. The lady said she finished at 8:30pm and took my number down and would ring me the moment the engineer got there. But no phone call came through .. so I’m sans bank card, which also means, sans money! Not a good day at all

Picked up a new set of speakers, including an SPDIF connector, so hopefully after I’ve wiped and reinstalled Vista on the Media Center PC, I can get it working properly with the Freeview card and use that to be my PVR. Also picked up a Blu-Ray writer / DVD writer / HD-DVD ROM combi-drive too. But will wait until everything’s working properly before I put that in. Blu-Ray discs are still stupid prices but could be a handy option to store those HD movie rips which don’t quite fit onto a normal dual-layer disc

As I said above, I was at Bowlers today - and I was working (kind of) on an atypical stall at Bowlers … selling sweets of all things! Mate was working the stall officially to help the stall holder out as they were at the Leicester Radio Rally - which is also where my parents and their gang of Radio Amateurs (affectionally known as “The Bucket List” as they’re all falling apart or in some kind of decay!) were picking up their first for first place in the amateur radio competition that they took part in earlier on this year. Anyway, I digress….

Selling sweets is easy enough - people want them and enjoy them. But if you sell them for £1 a tub with a pre-selected weight inside them, you have to make sure you’re making a profit. So that’s the raw materials (the sweets and the plastic tub) plus your time in filling and weighing each tub to ensure you’re not giving away too many or, worse still, trying to shaft the customer by under-weighing your wares.

Then there is the other costs - wages, petrol to/from Bowlers and the table hire. Mein Gott! Bowlers charges £80 per small table every Saturday! And, if you don’t have the same table the day after at the car boot, you have to *pay* for the table to be reserved for you, even if you’re not trading! So that’s another £27.50 for the Sunday.

I fail to understand how this particular trader makes any money - especially when the other traders expect freebies and/or discounted prices @ 50p a tub of sweets.

Glad I work for an employer and get a monthly stipend

Been that long since I uploaded some pics to the gallery - and it was an excuse to try out the software that is on the Gallery developer’s page - so I’ve been uploading the pictures from Holland. Including the ones that *aren’t* on Facebook - for obvious reasons, namely my niece & nephew are on Facebook!

And I found tons of spam comments .. so did a quick dig around for a spam blacklist (http://phpfi.com/279836), pasted it into the option in Gallery, ran it and deleted 500+ comments.

Slowly but surely backing up all my Facebook galleries onto here and maybe vice versa too. Silly not to really