Still no signs of my new car, but if all goes well I should be picking it up in a little under two weeks (7th July for those who can't be bothered to do the math). I'm starting to get a little impatient now, all this good weather I'm missing is driving me nuts. While I've been waiting, I had a quick look through the accessory catalog and I can see I'm going to have to throw it out soon. I've already ordered about 700 quids worth of accessories and that's only about half of the ones I want! I can see this could get expensive real fast!

Away from talk of cars, it seems that my electricity provider is having a few problems. My electricity seems to have been going on and off of its own accord lately. It would appear that during one of these on off sessions a power spike did some damage to one of my servers. Not just a little damage, but managed to fry two HDDs and wipe the RAID configuration from the controller card. The end result of this is my groupwise server is currently dead and I've had to revert to my Netmail setup with Thunderbird as a mail client (I did try outlook but that pile of faeces won't automatically purge deleted messages in IMAP mode). Thunderbird does have some features (or lack thereof) that annoy me too. Like the fact that it won't check all IMAP folders for new messages.

So once I finish getting the garden tidied up and the hedges cut - something else that needs to be done before the new car arrives as I don't want to be carrying garden waste in my new motor - I can see that I'm going to have to replace the toasted drives and rebuild the bloody server.

Enough ranting anyway, I'm off to watch the rest of the baseball game, or rather games as NASN have very nicely deviced to do 3 games back to back today. So that pretty much accounts for the rest of my Saturday.

Feeling : Annoyed

Car Update...

After finally getting my car ordered from the dealer and being given a delivery time of 2-3 weeks (the delivery date was June 9th), it seems the dealer was being a bit optimistic! It turns out that there aren't in fact plenty of these cars around, and the ones that are around are with other dealers that won't release them to my dealer. The upshot of this is that my car is finding its way to the dealership from Japan, and currently the sales guy is telling me to expect delivery around the 7th of July. The astute amongst you will have noticed that this is not 2-3 weeks but in fact 7 weeks, more than double the original waiting time. To say that this has annoyed me would be an understatement, completely pissed off would be a better way of putting it, especially considering how good the weather is looking at the moment.

I'm actually beginning to suspect some outside influence on the situation here. The dealership I'm buying the car from is located suspiciously close to an "ex-aquaintence". On the same day I make the deal for the new car, an email turns up in my inbox from someone pretending to be someone else (amazes me how many people still think the internet is anonymous). Now it may just be a coincidence, but then again I don't believe in coincidence. It all seems a little too convenient to me. I think maybe a call the the main dealers office might be in order to find out exactly what the problem is, because as of now I'm very close to cancelling the order and finding a dealer that actually wants to sell me a car!

Other Stuff...

I've been playing with the new distro of SuSE Linux 10.1. I'm quite impressed thus far, although when I first install the default system I wasn't impressed with what they'd done to gnome. It looked a bit cheap and tacky. When I enabled the desktop effects using XGL however, this was all forgotten. For those who don't know, the XGL desktop converts your workspace to a 3D rotating cube and adds a lot of neat features like better applications switching. You can see Novell's demo of this here (be warned, the full demo is 435Mb in size, so don't try it on dialup!)

I'm also playing around with some anti-spam/anti-virus/content filtering software for e-mail systems. Most people in the open source world will have heard of Spam Assassin and Clam Antivirus. Now there is a really neat web front end that lets you manage this set-up easily and off load a lot of the administration to your users. Interested? Take a look at Maia Mailguard. If you decide that this looks useful and you want to take it for a test drive (I know I have), an aquaintence of mine has written a very good step by step guide to setting up the server and the software. Take a look at Retrac Networking's web site and download the guide for free.

Well, that's enough rambling from me here for this morning. I need to go out and do some work in the garden. I've a hedge that needs trimming and a few borders that need the weeks removing. I just hope the weather holds out long enough to get most of it done. I can't see me being able to take very much to the tip once I have an MX-5 (if I actually ever take delivery of it), there's about enough room in the boot for a shoebox.