nothing

A little while ago, a pal of mine suggested a £10 investment challenge. You start with £10 and have to invest as you see fit to make it grow as much as possible.

Well, tonight, the £zero investment challenge was born. You must start with zero pounds, you are not allowed to sell any assets you already own. We will assume you are allowed a computer, phone, email connection etc. and calls are free (lucky you!)

You must account for every single penny you make/lose, preferably in an excel (or openoffice calc) spreadsheet.

You are not allowed to use any tools that you already own (if you do someone’s ironing, you must use their iron).

No borrowing from yourself or others.

Any driving must be charged to yourself at 40p per mile.

You have six months to make zero pounds grow as large as you can. The deadline is noon on 6th January 2011. At that point only cash assets will count, you must liquidise everything before that date.

Who’s in?

Artists Impression

As someone who is moderately observant and very much into writing systems, flags, symbols and the like, I noticed that the man* who came to the door to sell me broadband today had a teeny tiny little pin badge on his lapel with this “333″ on. I can’t, however, discover its meaning. I nearly asked him, but he bade a hasty farewell when I convinced him that however good his offer sounded, I don’t buy anything at the door.

But now it’s bugging me.

The only reference I can find is a joke “half-evil” thing. But it looks too much like a membership badge for that. Or maybe something related to the trinity?

Any ideas?

(*I say man… he looked about 12!)

An iPhone, Yesterday

Apple says a fault on its new iPhone 4 is causing it to incorrectly display the phone’s signal.

Ah… so holding the phone wrong isn’t causing the signal to drop? It’s just being displayed incorrectly?

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.

Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays two more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display four bars when we should be displaying as few as two bars.

(Full story here)

Now, I’m not known for my cynicism, but you don’t think that Apple were perhaps exaggerating their signal strengths as some kind of marketing offensive do you? And they got caught out?

No… that couldn’t be the case at all.

Whatever the cause, it’s a big knock for the Lord and Saviour™ of shiny consumer goods. That leads me to another thought… the atheists complain that those of faith defend their faiths even in the lack of evidence, or even counter-evidence. I wonder what the Apple fans’ response will be. I very much compare them to the ‘blind faithful’.

Glastonbudget is a local music festival, having mainly tribute acts and at a fraction of the size/cost of Glastonbury. I received word yesterday that tickets would be on sale from 8:00 this morning, starting at 99p. Wow! That’s great, I think.

So at 8:00 I go on the intermawebs and their site it down (funny, that – maybe it was rather well publicised). You have to name your ticket holders, so I typed my name, and the ticket went in the basket at £20.00. Uh? That’s not 99p. Oh well… maybe £20.00 isn’t too bad.

Then I typed H’s name and it went in at £25.00. Uh? It went up £5.00 while typing someone’s name?

Then I typed H’s new name (oops! you’d think I would have noticed that whole wedding business a couple of months ago!). £45.00. Eeeeehhhhh?

Up up up!

I guess it’s a good bit of ‘create a buzz’ marketing. But it’s a little bit of a let-down in my opinion. The funny thing is, the prices are going up and down the whole time. They’re now £30.00. Gah.

You know what? I can’t be bothered (and they’re not within the our current budget requirements if they’re more than 99p).

Update

You know what’s even weirder? I removed the £25.00 ticket and the £20.00 ticket turned into £30.00.

Huh?

Oh dear

Chinese is very easy, especially when you use Good Characters’ chinese alphabet (ironic name, no?)

Words truly fail me.

Or should I say…

山口尺力弓 七尺臼心了 下月工心 冊三

No. I shouldn’t say that.

A poem, by Stu aged 35.

Kick kick kick.
Oh dear.
It didn’t go in.
Or did it?
Still—
never mind,
we wouldn’t have won
anyway.

Some Moët, Yesterday

There I was, writing up our list of wedding gifts for posterity and I came to Moët & Chandon. Because I’m a bit of a stickler for the unnecessary, I’d never type ‘Moet’. It has to be ‘Moët’. So I switched to the Finnish keyboard layout because that allows you to type accents very easily – type the ¨ key then the e key and ë appears. However, this wasn’t the case. rather ¨¨e appeared. There was something amiss.

I installed the Swedish layout (same set of keys) and the same problem occurred. I tried US-International which has similar ‘dead key’ accents. It didn’t work. Every layout gave two of the accent key as soon as I pressed the ‘dead key’. (A ‘dead key’ is one that does nothing immediately, but modifies the next keypress).

Looked it up on the intermawebz, and guess what? It suggested that I may be the victim of a keylogger virus, and that I should use the ‘msconfig’ application to look in my startup scripts for anything that looked funny. There certainly was something funny – a program with a name like vpaouheft.exe in a folder clkjnsdvi in my own personal ‘Application Settings’ folder.

I opened the folder in explorer, right-clicked and AVG anti-virus said “Awooga! Danger, Will Robinson”. I’m not sure why it didn’t warn me earlier – except, I guess the offending program starts running before the anti-virus kicks in.

So with that disabled, deleted, burnt, thrown into the lake and stamped on my dead keys now work.

So now I can type Moët.

And go and change my passwords absolutely everywhere.

Cock.

Shhh!

For the first time in about eight years, I don’t have a server running in the attic.

The funny thing is, when I first installed it, I bought a super-duper, extra-quiet cooling system. Now, even with the two desktop PCs on, it’s much quieter than with just the super-quiet server. I guess cooling technology moves on like everything else.

And when the computers are off… silence. Apart from two-doors-down’s cock*.

It’s also very nice that when the intermawebs or server are down, I don’t have to panic and work out how to get my business site back up and running. It’s all handled by people who know how to do that sort of thing.

(*They’ve put a few chickens in the back garden in the last couple of days. The cock isn’t very vocal and does a sort of asthmatic lethargic half-crow thing occasionally.)

Warning! Technical ranting. Please move along… nothing to see here.

Fun With Command Lines

Well, that was a hassle. With a linux server with a hosed motherboard, one PC that H uses and one spare PC neither of which have Linux drivers for their network adapters (or they used to but are too old now for NVIDIA to support). In the end I figured I could put the linux drive in a PC running windows and copy everything that way. But something to do with attempting to use the network adapter from Linux meant that H’s PC no longer had a network adapter, so I had to transplant the hard drive and video card from H’s PC into the spare PC (pretty much the same spec).

Of course, that meant I had to reactivate windows due to their ‘Microsoft Genuine Advantage’ programme. Bastards. As if I didn’t have enough trouble already.

Then the linux drive wouldn’t mount. Three drivers later I found one which would mount the drive I’d created in Slackware (inode=256 for the techs out there… only ext2fsd would do it. And only then after head-scratching, reconfiguring and rebooting.

And after all that, I figured a database dump of the blog wouldn’t integrate with my ‘one database’ setup with my new hosting, so I had to go in and perform an export on wordpress. All from a computer with no GUI and no network card. (Rewrite hosts to point to itself, use ‘links’ to navigate to the export page). Then throw the drive (as a slave, not master) into the PC.

So it’s all back now, apart from the links. I’ll find a way to restore those in a bit, after a cup of tea. What a palaver!

My server went boom. I have wordpress installed offsite. Now I just need to work out how to get all the old stuff off the backup.