Oh wow do I want one of these! Maybe Firebox will have them in the near future

Twas a dark Wednesday evening, and inside a small Dorridge house I was watching Relocation Relocation.

Kirsty and Phil: This couple are looking for a country cottage, as well as a house in Birmingham. The latter needs easy access to the city centre, as well as heaps of character. They’ve got £70,000 to spend.

Me: Bwahahahaha. Not a hope.

Phil: So we’ve managed to find this lovely house with easy access to the city centre, bags of character too, and it’s on the market for £78,000 [Kirsty saved him £15k on the country cottage].

Me: [speechless]

Even I thought this house was nice, and I’m useless at stuff like that (just ask Kate.) How do they manage to find these places?! According to the website, ‘City Property 3′ was in Northfield. It’d probably help if I knew where that was. Nod, take note.

Caron Keating died last night, age 42. She’d apparently been suffering from breast cancer for many years. Age 42. God. She was one of the first Blue Peter presenters I can remember watching. I didn’t know much about her other than that, but it still feels like something of my past has gone.

You know, in my head the phrase ‘privacy campaigners’ is becoming synonymous with ‘anarchist psycho whining paranoid nutcases’ (similarly ‘civil liberties groups’.) This is probably grossly unfair, but when all the publicity surrounding such groups is like this, you feel like hacking into their computers and putting their data online for the world to see. May I suggest that if you don’t like the idea of Gmail, you don’t use it? Is this a complicated concept?

I’m alone in the house and I keep hearing people moving around upstairs. I’m really hoping it’s just next door having sex loudly or something. Well…I’m only kinda hoping that. In fact I take the whole thing back. Not that I want to be murdered by a mace-wielding psycho, you understand. Oh now I don’t know what I want…other than some Joosters.

I got two easter eggs today, and haven’t finished either of them! One of them is even a kit-kat chunky! That’s gotta be some kind of record. I should definitely win something. Awards, parties, ticker tape parades, Bob Dylan’s new friends…Did anybody get a Happy Easter card? I saw them in Clintons for the first time ever last week. Bit of a strange concept if you ask me, but hey, if people will buy them you can’t blame the manufacturers

I just got back from seeing The Passion. It certainly lived up to its violent reputation: at least one group left halfway through, and possibly there was another from behind us. To be honest, I found the whole film somewhat pointless. Not being of a religious persuasion, it was all a bit over the top. Obviously nobody should be treated the way this man was, but I’m not convinced somebody would have survived getting to the cross after that kind of prolonged brutality (and if you are religious, he cheated in the end too.) I’m not denying Jesus’ massive influence on the course of human history, and it seems certain there is a historical basis to the man himself, but the son of an all-powerful deity? You can’t discount the possiblity, but it’s way down there with him being the son of a time-travelling Elvis. Aaaanyway, it was an appropriate film to see this weekend, and I got to see the new Troy trailer, which looked substantially better than the last one!

Also appropriate to the religious overtones of the Easter break is The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (I’m not going to link to the Amazon page as the reviews will probably give away plot points.) Books Etc. etc. have it for about £4 in paperback, and I found it a fascinating and highly enjoyable adventure. Take a look at this image. It’s Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Pretty much the most famous religious painting ever created, it appears in all manner of historical and religious books. Now, both before and after first looking at this, I had a fairly good idea what supposedly went on at the last supper: Jesus plus thirteen disciples, washing feet, predicting betrayal, holy grail chalice, various other mumbo-jumbo. So take a look at the person to the left of Jesus (our left, not his). Notice anything odd? If you’re intrigued, I suggest you read the book rather than doing any further research on the Net. It’s just more fun that way The book is all based around historical fact, as well as being a great story. Recommended by me.

This is an AOL CD:

This is my car:

Bwahahahahahahahahahah.

Continue reading ‘It was the humane thing to do…’

Anybody know anything about this? NEC claim to have produced a cheap-to-manufacture battery that can be recharged in less than 30 seconds while providing more than 80 hours of life (in their example of a minidisc player). Sounds great…I should email battery guru Dan, really.

As Netweaver have a shiny new email server in place, I’ve re-enabled comments being emailed to me. Let me know if this causes significant slowdowns for you. Comment spamming is becoming a problem

The problem of the disconnecting email has returned today…I’m going to first see if it happens on my computer, then find the exact email and analyse the headers line by line. I really want to get this one sorted!

UPDATE: Ok, I can’t replicate it on my computer atm, but here is the entire message source:

Return-Path: <oleabaens@mail.zp.ua>
Received: from cm-24-196-163-013.ash.nc.charter.com (24.196.163.13) by mk-cpfrontend.uk.tiscali.com(7.0.024.3-1)
id 4059BFE801A267C6; Sat, 3 Apr 2004 11:42:01 +0000
Sender: oleabaens@mail.zp.ua (derived from envelope by postmaster@uk.tiscali.com)
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2004 11:42:01 +0000 (added by postmaster@uk.tiscali.com)
Message-ID: <4059BFE801A267C6@mk-cpfrontend-10.mail.uk.tiscali.com> (added by postmaster@uk.tiscali.com)
X-Message-Info: O[4

How the hell is this getting anywhere? Do you think it could be infected with a virus, which is then being stripped by Norton, but half the headers are getting removed too?

For those of you who’ve been panicking over my absence, fear not, for I have returned. Kate and I have been at Nod’s all weekend, and have just arrived home. I’m pretty tired, so am off to collapse.

Incidentally, we reckon you could fit 175 sombrero-clad Spaniards into Nod’s lounge.

I love April Fool’s Day I had so much fun this morning it was ridiculous. For evidence, see here and here. If I’m found dead in my room tonight it’ll be down to Lynsey. I always like trying to spot the many silly articles around the Net today. I’m not entirely sure about this one though…I can’t see Google claiming something like this then retracting it, but 1gb?! Also see the other languages supported…Nook-nekh!

Mum woke me up early this morning to say that a client of mine had phoned and would be calling around in half an hour’s time to talk to me. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t realise for a while. Radio 2 were reporting France and Germany’s announcement of their dropping the Euro and adopting Sterling. Funniest part were the old people writing in saying what a good idea this was and about time too. I’m tempted to go investigating the origins of April Fool’s Day, but it’d just be an excuse not to do my OU assignment, so I’d better sign off…

Oh yeah. lyric of the day, heard on an odd country song:

…and any one of those 1320 guitar pickers can play twice as better as I will.

I’m arguably not making myself look very good with this week’s posts, but I shall continue the trend nevertheless. Do you remember the Tale of Two Routers? Well, I had another attempt at fixing it today.

I first tried to get the ADSL modem to connect at all, a feat which had eluded me previously. This time I managed it; using lowercase for the username solved the problem, despite the documentation being in uppercase. Once I knew that it was at least possible I set up the (purple) Linksys router, plugging the ADSL modem into its ‘internet port’. Now, you could configure the ADSL modem to connect by itself then act as a router, or just have it pass everything on to something else. I wanted the latter as the Linksys has a load more features and is generally more robust and configurable.

This is the point I discovered I should have done my homework properly. The ADSL modem can connect to the internet via a variety of methods, including PPPoE and PPPoA. UK ADSL uses PPPoA. Now that the modem is passing info to another device, however, it relies on said device to do the logging in. The Linksys router doesn’t support PPPoA. And never will, it seems. I could have used the modem to do the routing, but I need port forwarding that’s vaguely configurable, which this wasn’t. So I’m going to have to get a new router that supports PPPoA. Ah well, a lesson learnt.