I just watched the end of The 4400 on Sky One.

There goes another 6 hours of my life that I'm not getting back. Yes folks, it was that bad. Completely pointless, the story (or what passed for an excuse of a story) went nowhere. What promised so much in the first episode completely failed to deliver anything even mildly entertaining.

Sky are teasing us with the new series next year. If you want my opinion, buy a tin of paint and decorate you living room. Then watch it dry, it'll be more entertaining.

Is it just me, or does that stupid old bat in the elf costume from the ASDA commercial irritate the shit out of everyone?

Another reason to look forward to Christmas being over...

So much for a slow week! I'm not sure if its a good thing or a bad thing, but this week was anything but slow.

After the initial drag of Monday morning things picked up quit a bit and I ended up actually having to do stuff. It started with a new backup solution that needed designing and pricing up and ended up with a major mail outage on Wednesday. The backup solution wasn's all that difficult, just took a lot of time to get the correct info from our suppliers. Speaking of suppliers, HP's pre-sales support seems to be non-existant now, I've been waiting a week for someone to get back in touch with me. If it wasn't for the fact that the SAN this tape library is going to be attached to was a Compaq, I'd be using a different manufacturer. I'm really getting pissed with the run-around you get from HP these days.

The mail issues was just bloody frustrating. It's the same problem I had when I upgraded this system from NetMail 3.1 to 3.52. Netmail uses a btrieve database to store email-alias details and auto populate the internet email attribute in e-directory. This file gets re-generated once every 24 hours by default, and whenever the message system is loaded. For one reason or another, the process that does this generating wouldn't complete and left the mail system with no alias database. The upshot of this is that only email addressed to the actual user account would be delivered, everything else gets returned undeliverable! Took about 5 minutes to figure out the problem, another 6 and a half hours to fix. I'm still not entirely sure what the cause was. We did find some dodgy surname fields in e-directory and some duplicate aliases but having tried to duplicate the problem in the test lab without success, I'm none the wiser. I hate when that happens because the next time we get the same problem, I'm still not going to be able to fix it quickly.

Away from the computers, I eventually got around to upgrading my mobile phone. I decided in the end to go with the Sony-Ericsson K700i. Although it now looks like I'm going to have to upgrade my iPaq too because the Blue Tooth software on the K700i reports too many services for the iPaq to deal with and promptly GPFs the bluetooth manager application. True to form, Microsoft won't relase an update, their fix is to pay them more money and upgrade from PocketPc 2002 to Pocket PC 2003. I think I need to re-visit runing Linux on the iPaq!

I also got around to getting my ACARS decoder up and running. If you don't know what ACARS is and you really want to know (its not that interesting, honestly), you can read about it at http://www.acarsonline.co.uk/aclink/alabout.htm. Since I fired it up its received and decoded about 2500 transmissions. I managed to get it to log to a MySQL database so I should be able to get some semi-live data on to a webpage in the near future.

Speaking of web pages, I'm found some time to do a bit more work on this site. I'm nearly ready to put out the new reading section which is done on the same sort of lines as the DVD section. Hompefully this will mean its easier to keep up to date and I can add comments on the books I'm currently reading in real time. I should be able to get it moved over some time in the next couple of weeks, at least it will keep my mind of Christmas. Those of you who know me, will know that I don't really like this time of year and the resons why. Don't expect to see too many entires here.

If you read the messages on the front page you'll know I've been having some problems with my DSL connection lately. I'm not sure WTF is going on with it but I've now tried just about everything I can think off to figure out what the problem is.

The problem started last Thursday morning. The router isn't just dropping the DSL line, its actually locking up completely to the point where I can even access the web administration console. Power cycle the box and everything is fine for a period of time. The period of time seems to vary from one lock up to another. Sometimes after a reboot the thing will be ok for hours, sometimes only for minutes. I've since replaced everything from the CAT5 cables to the DSL filters to the router itself. The problem hasn't occurred for the last day or so now so hopefully its fixed. The only thing I can think of is that pipex had some sort of problem with their local loop as I'm now back using all the original kit. So if anyone wants a DSL router (one lan, one wan port) let me know.

Away from the computers....

I managed to get away for the weekend again. If I keep this up, someone might accuse me of having a life! I spent the weekend in London with friends, well I say weekend. I arrived late Friday night and had to leave around lunchtime on Sunday so not quite a weekend. Got most of my Christmas shopping sorted out while I was down there, although shopping in London this time of year is an experience I don't want to repeat again any time soon. As for getting a meal at any half decent restaurant in Covent Garden, forget it unless you have a reservation. We ended up at an Angus Steakhouse, which was surprisingly good food and the service was pretty good too.

I'm back in London next weekend too, but I'm not planning on doing much in the way of shopping, I don't even want to think about how busy it will be then. I do need to go and get my phone upgraded at some point, but given the date I'm probably going to leave it until after Christmas.

And so it starts, the wind down to Christmas. I've got a feeling the next two weeks at work are going to be incredibly slow. We are now in the middle of a change freeze which means we can't do much until the middle of January other than play with stuff away from the live network. Hmmm, now where did I put that copy of Unreal Tournament...

So the Cubs re-signed Nomar and Todd Walker. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Todd walker is certainly a good addition but I'm not so sure about Nomar. He played well at the end of last season whilst he was fit, but he still seems to be carrying that hamstring injury. Lets not forget the way the Red Sox performance improved after they traded him, coincidence? I'm not so sure.

I'd love to see Nomar 100% next season and playing as well as he has in the past, whether he will or not remains to be seen.

Still on the subject of baseball, the whole Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi steroids thing is makin me laugh. Ok, so I'm not American but as far as I can see MLB had no drug testing before 2003 so proving it is gonna be hard. There's no way Bonds is gonna come out and admit he knowingly used them but just look at the photos! I think its bloody obvious he's used them, and as for not knowing about it, that's just crap. Oh well, we'll see how it plays out this season and see how the MLB organisation deals with it.

I finally got round to doing some more work on the website converting the old framed based layout to a CSS based one.

Now here comes a minor rant. I thought CSS was a standard. Apparently everyone but Microsoft seems to agree that it is. I managed to convert stuff over fairly quickly and it worked fine in Mozilla, Firefox, and opera. It then took me about three times longer to get it to display correctly using Internet Explorer 6. Most of you know my opinions on Microsoft already, but its things like this that really piss me off. I can see why a lot of web designers don’t bother to make websites cross browser compatible, it takes a lot of work. Maybe that will change when Microsoft loose more of their share of the browser market.

I’ve also been shopping for a new mobile this week. I’ve got the choice down to a couple of models but I’m still undecided. It’s looking like either the Sony K700i or the new Samsung D500. The upgrade price of the K700 is £30 but the D500 doesn’t seem to be available on Orange yet. I guess it depends on the upgrade price, if its not too much more then I think I’ll go for the D500, it looks like the better phone of the two.