The garage have approximately 20mins to phone me like they said they would…

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind looks interesting…Anything written by Charlie Kaufman appeals to me.

Well, I went back to the garage to pick the car up. Jane took me in, and we went and sat in it for a while to see whether the problem was around today, since it apparently went away yesterday. After a minute or two it started shuddering as before, so I went and grabbed a mechanic. He didn’t appear to be very interested in the shaking and insisted on revving the engine a lot and feeling some component of the engine at high revs. I suppose he knew what he was doing! Anyway, he said that it was probably the spark plugs and that they’d replace them. They’re wear-and-tear objects, aren’t covered under the insurance, so it cost me £50! I’ve left the car with them; they’ll give me a call tomorrow. Thing is, when my Ford Garage clients had a look they said it was an electrical problem…I like to think they’d have said if it was the spark plugs, as presumably they could have changed those for me (?). We’ll see tomorrow, I’m hoping it’ll all be sorted.

I also sent an email to Egg asking what I should do about the two refunds. Just when I thought I was all done with O2!

The TiVo is all up and running, I’m happy to say. Quality is pretty good - not as high as digital tv, but that’d be pushing it. Pausing live tv is fun I’m probably going to upgrade the hard drive at some point - the standard 40gb drive can hold 12 hours at ‘Best’ quality, which, me being me, is the only one I’m happy with 120gb HDs can be had for £50-£60, which will certainly be worth it if the unit gets used enough.

Anyway I must be off, Astronomy beckons.

Two annoying things that have happened in the last 24 hours:

1. The garage can’t find anything wrong with my car
2. O2 have refunded me £200. Great, except that Egg already did that.

After reading the below comments I was going to stretch this out a bit, it’s just too much fun, but given that Simon got it I’d be being unfair…

“Confused divot lacks Kiki?”

Kiki Dee is a singer (most famous for her work with Elton John). As Simon surmised, ‘confused divot’ indicates an anagram, and ‘divot’ lacking ‘dee’ is ‘ivot’. Which rearranges as…

A TiVo! A refurbished model from Tivoland, since new models can’t be had for love nor money (and I’ve tried both). I ordered it last week but didn’t say anything as it was a surprise for Mum and Dad, who had previously agreed to go halves with me. I have, as you may have guessed, spent much of today playing, hence the toy comment.

I don’t know what ‘refurbished’ means, exactly, but it’s in excellent condition. All the manuals and cables were supplied, and the unit itself still has the pull-off sheet on the shiny front panel. As our lounge is currently in the midst of being redecorated, I’ve been forced to set it up using the tv in my room, where it will remain for the next couple of weeks. Damn The TiVo needs to dial in to an 0800 number every night to receive updated programme data, and also needs a connection when setting itself up. The supplied phone cable, astonishingly, reaches from the far corner of my bedroom all the way down the stairs and into the plug socket next to the front door. I estimate there to be about 1.5 angstroms in it, mind, and anybody walking through the hall currently has to duck under the taut cable or risk losing a limb.

Setting up the unit was fun, as the Telewest cable box is a bit of a pain. It uses high frequency infra-red codes (or something) so the TiVo needs a special adapter. This has an emitter which you have to tape to the top of the cable box so that it points at the IR receiver, preferably within a centimetre or two. This took a while as I couldn’t figure out where the receiver was I got it working finally, though. After plugging in everything else I ran the ‘guided setup’, which figures out your channels etc. Once this was done I phoned customer services to get it ‘activated’. It won’t download any programme data or allow you to record anything unless activated, which is either £10 / month or £200 for a ‘lifetime subscription’. It takes a good few hours to go through their system, however, so I haven’t had a chance to play with all the fun features yet.

This is the parcel that arrived this morning. Anyone care to guess what’s in it? It’s very exciting Think toys.

I tried to register a freeserve account earlier and got this:

Well, you can’t accuse them of discrimination! It turned out to be an Opera thing - Avant worked fine. Speaking of Opera, I tried the 7.5 beta yesterday. Ugh! It looked awful. To be fair, my Opera is fairly heavily customized, and I did install 7.5 afresh rather than upgrading, but nevertheless it wasn’t nice. It had more than a touch of the Mozilla look about it, which is a mistake imho. I’ll be interested to see what 7.5 final looks like.

I ripped some CDs to MP3 today and my Yamaha was grabbing data at 19x! I’ve never even approached this speed before…The drive only used to do about 9x. The only real difference is the new version of EAC, but I can’t believe it’s entirely down to that.

As a matter of interest, I discovered last week that you can get a 10-computer corporate license of the f-prot virus scanner for €40.72. That’s £27! Each additional license costs an extra €3.26. You can get a personal license for all non-commercial computers in a household for €23.62. While f-prot doesn’t do as much, it protects you against viruses perfectly well and if you don’t mind a bit of manual configuration it certainly compares favourably to certain other brands! Yes, you read that right, NAV is available online for £44.99 a copy. I don’t quite see why it costs more direct from them than from a shop…Middle-men don’t normally sell things at a loss I still recommend NAV to clients due to the emphasis on user-friendliness, but I’ll certainly be bearing f-prot in mind for people whose computers I look after.

My car is booked into the garage tomorrow. If I get it to them between 0800 and 0900 they’ll take a look at it during the day. The shuddering is pretty bad now, so I’ll be interested to know what’s causing it and whether it’s an easy fix. Hopefully it won’t be in for long; I feel bizarrely trapped without my car, which is odd considering how much I despise driving

Ben came over today and we managed to fix Max Payne! Going back a driver revision sorted it. I’ll try the 56.06(?)s once they come out, see if that makes any difference. We also managed to solve various other niggly problems my computer’s been having…Amazing how two minds work better than one (pah, it was Ben all the way, really ).

I know of no better bad-guy-death-scene than the finale of The Long Kiss Goodnight.

Ed has returned! Go pay his site a visit and test out the comments system. Given that uni is now over for a bit, will we also be seeing the return of Baguetter’s? I am hoping so…Also be sure to check out the Bonafide Blog Of Bagpuss, which I am assured will now be updated on a regular basis

I’m expecting this coming week to be a good one, as I’m awaiting various interesting parcels, as well as Kate coming home at the end. Whenever I say things like this events have a habit of not going as planned, so I may well have just put a jinx on myself. I don’t believe in jinxs, however, so that means there’s someone out there willfully causing me problems. Logically, the only people with the power to do such a thing would be MI6. That means I’m being groomed for the secret service. But I’ve just figured it out, and posted it on a public forum! So that’s screwed them. Does that mean I pass the test and the fact that I posted means it’ll seem even more unlikely I’m really a spy? Or will they just have to kill me? Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion. I now return you to tonight’s broadcast: Dogs and Their Knitting 3: Attack of the Titanium Killer 50-Metre Cross-Stitch.

One of my favourite TV shows of all time is coming to DVD! W00t Not to be greedy, but a New Adventures of Superman box set would be much appreciated too

Incidentally, I got a letter from O2 this morning telling me I have five days to pay them for the January invoice or they’ll take me to court. Sigh…

I’ve been having various graphics-related problems recently, and today has been my first real go at solving them. Basically, Max Payne 2 is unplayable. Parts of the image, including walls and and 3D objects (but not Max himself), flicker on and off very quickly. You can’t see what the hell’s going on. I get a similar problem in the UT2K4 demo, but nothing like so bad. Things disappear for a frame or two every so often, but the game is generally playable. I can see the same occasional flickering in the dxdiag rotating cube (only dx8 and upwards I think.) I’ve discovered that running Max in ’software t&l’ as opposed to hardware solves the problem, but I’m not happy with that. For a start, you can’t change the T&L settings in UT2K4, and I like to know what causes these things.

Using driver cleaner I’ve completely removed both the nForce and Detonator drivers, and reinstalled them from scratch. This hasn’t helped. I’ve checked all the driver versions in the control panel, and they’re all definitely the latest. I also reinstalled directx, but still nothing. I’ve tried a registry cleaner too. So I’m a bit stuck now.

It could conceivably be a hardware problem, but it seems unlikely. I see no problems in Half-Life, Prince of Persia or Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, but do in UT2K3. Has anybody got any ideas?

Anybody got any exciting plans for the weekend? Kate’s snowed under with work so I’m not going up to see her She’s back next weekend though. I hope all the Oxford people have a good trip back, I don’t know how the snow’s affecting the roads this evening but I doubt it’s very pleasant.

Anyway, I’m not feeling that great all of a sudden so am off to watch American Graffiti. Have a fun evening!

…sometimes

I spent much of yesterday trying to implement a command-line virus scanner at the level of my mail server, rather than require the workstations to do all the work. I couldn’t do it in the end, but in the process I asked Ben to email me a copy of the eicar.org virus test file. This is a standard file that all the major virus companies will pick up as a virus for test purposes, but in fact has no malicious code. His first attempt to email it to me failed, as the Oxford servers picked it up and bounced the mail back to him. We managed it eventually, but today Ben’s computer was blocked from the Oxford network due to the virus that had originated from it! Thankfully he didn’t need access today, but I imagine it must have been inconvenient, so many apologies! To make up for it, here’s a picture of me looking silly.

Having posted this picture, it seems extremely likely that many of you ladies will be wanting to contact me*. Well, my mobile number was transferred yesterday, so you don’t even need to find out any new info. How great is that!

Things that have caught my eye in the news recently include George Michael planning to release new music for free via the net…this is perhaps a very shrewd move when you read things like this. If you’re running Outlook 2002 you may want to get patched up, as may users of MSN Messenger. If you haven’t seen The Hubble Ultra Deep Field yet, you really should, it’s pretty amazing. The faintest light source on the image was coming in at the rate of 1 photon per minute!

Having seen the trailer, I have absoloutely no idea what to make of Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow. I’ve been meaning to catch the Starsky & Hutch trailer for a while…and now I have. Well, maybe it’ll surprise me. Not that I know anything about anything, but the Troy trailer doesn’t do much for me either. Which is annoying, as I’ve been looking forward to that one. The director’s Wolfgang Petersen, who also made In The Line Of Fire and Air Force One. I liked both of those, so hopefully the final film will be better.

*Disclaimer: I am a taken man, so any attempts to seduce me will be met with failure. Many have tried.

What’s extremely interesting and involves God, torture, black holes, romans and pigeon droppings? Nothing.

There was recently a 3 for 2 offer on at Waterstones, and I picked up A Devil’s Chaplain (superb, I’ll get round to reviewing it one day) and The Elegant Universe (which I haven’t read yet) straight away, as I’d been after them for a while. Looking around for something else, I spotted Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. The blurb looked interesting, so I added it to the pile. It turned out to be fascinating. As you may have guessed, it’s about the number 0. From being rejected by Pythagoras to abhorred by Aristotle to acceptance by Islam to holding back scientific progress for hundreds of years to illegal mathematical operations that solved problems to time travel to being at the cutting edge of modern physics, zero is way more interesting than you might have imagined.

I was constantly finding myself surprised as the story unfolded. Cool factual nuggets abound, such as Pythagoras’ hatred of beans that eventually brought about his own death. Or that the Greeks believed everything in the world could be expressed as a ratio of something else, hence the world ‘rational’. Or that the first guy to write a book on manipulating equations was called Al-Jabr. If you found those interesting, I can almost guarantee you’d enjoy this book. It’s aimed at the layman, but doesn’t shy away from equations, which I found refreshing. It’s also very well written, with a witty turn of phrase that had me laughing out loud on numerous occasions. To my mind it succeeds in evoking the excitement and interest inherent in mathematics but so often overshadowed by complexity and social fear. I don’t remember ever finding maths interesting at school. I could always do it, until I got to A-Level and started to doubt my own ability anyway, but it was always just something we were taught, never a larger concept than that. Now, however, it’s great! The power of calculus I find particularly extraordinary, and I’m trying to teach myself the basics when I get a spare moment. But I digress. I highly recommend this book, and if you’re stuck for a good read, or even just need a third tome to qualify for an offer, give it a shot.

My friend Ed was criticised, flamed and viciously insulted yesterday over a post on his site. I’ve known Ed for a long time, and I’m guessing this will have really got to him. Let me be clear: there is no basis for any of the statements made against him. Ed is, in all seriousness, one of the most thoughtful and considerate people I’ve ever come across. He would never dream of criticising something he knew nothing about, it’s just not in his nature. He did nothing wrong: the fault lies entirely with the other party (If you want to know the circumstances, see the posts here and here.) Ed, being the nice guy that he is, apologised and subsequently received a tawdry ‘we can be friends now’ reply. It should be Ed who receives the apology.

The guy who took exception to Ed’s comment, NekkidRadio owner ‘DJ Bouncer Dan’, has made himself look unpleasant, ill-informed, rude and arrogant. His behaviour was that of a child in a playground, and would not be acceptable in that situation. It is certainly not the way in which grown-ups should behave. I like to think that he was caught on an off day, but nevertheless I’ll certainly be avoiding his radio station if this is any indication of the ideas it is founded upon.

I just saw ten minutes of Crufts, and realised I have something wrong with my brain.

I’m not really sure where to start. I don’t understand it. Any of it. Why would you train your dog to lie perfectly still for ten minutes? Why would you want your dog to run around a set of poles? Why would you want a dog to go fetch a toy, give it to you, then run behind your legs and sit down? What? What? Why? Worst of all was the part where the owners run around with their dogs, and the judges then decide which is the best dog, by seeing which conforms the most to the breed specifications. Breed specifications? What. The. Hell. How do you define what a dog is supposed to look like? It’s like saying that Charlize Theron is the perfect female, and that we should have competitions where the woman who looks most like her is deemed ‘best woman’. It doesn’t make sense. How could you possibly choose a dog to base the specifications upon? Or maybe it’s a combination of features that look good, in which case that’s totally subjective. Abu? Whatchamagoobob?

[Andrew makes flabbergasted noises for a few more minutes, until he regains the ability to speak.]

Dogs are for loving and being generally happy, bouncy and cool. This is why dogs are good. This is also why dogs are Better Than Cats. Some dogs also have many applications in work, such as sheepdogs, tracker dogs and sniffer dogs. These are the things dogs do. They do not have to lie still for ten minutes for absoloutely no good reason. No. That’s weird. It’s demeaning. What you want from a dog is for it to do doggy-like stuff that it enjoys. Whether it’s a pedigree or a mongrel (whose existence the Kennel club don’t seem to acknowledge), dogs are great. Crufts is odd. I think you’ll find I’ve won the argument now.

Kate and I have reached an understanding that when we live together we’re going to definitely need a dog, but we’ll have to forego the cat. I think that’s what we decided anyway. Yeah, I’m sure that was it.