Life27/07/10 - 09:35Work is forever a pain in my butt recently. Lots of it, extended hours and the pay does suck. I keep telling myself its all worth it in the end for the experience, which is true enough, but its becoming more and more difficult to believe.
If im perfectly honest, life just seems to be getting harder and harder recently. Ive been thinking -alot- since I technically have a lot of time to think. Dont you find when you are doing a repetitive task that your mind just wonders? Well mine has been in overdrive. Basically just been thinking about my life over the past 4 years. Everything seems to have gone down hill rather steeply since April. For those of you who are close, you probably know why.
I really, really, really miss the old days where life was just simple. I do feel as though ive missed out on a lot of stuff and now its too late. Im not one for change in a way, I just wish that everything could have stayed as it was. My best friends have moved away from Bristol and now have fantastic lives of their own. Dont get me wrong, they are still epic but it just doesnt feel the same being left behind and I dont want to intrude on any of that.
Im fairly confident no one actually reads this, so its more just a diary for me later on I guess. Ive been through this sort of thing before several years back - just find it hard to smile about anything. At the end of the day, im sure ill pull through, I just wish it would be sooner rather than later however this seems unlikely.
Work work work, GAMES05/07/10 - 21:38Time for another update I think ^^ It got a bit busy towards the end of last week since I was once again sent up to the
Masterpiece site in London to help de-rig.
Etherlive have a trailer which we use to basically stash a load of server equipment so that it can be towed to an event and deployed. This meant we had to move the damn thing so that it could be hitched up to be towed back of which I never really expected it to weigh as much as it does - it was not easy trying to push it in the full on hot sun. However, its finally done and I dont believe I need to go back to London for a while now thank god.
Next event now is
WOMAD which im really looking forward to. Ive been put in charge of a new RFID system for the Crew Catering which means kicking our developers ass to do some work (as he was behind schedule) and making sure we actually manage to find a supplier for all the cards we need. Its going well so far and it seems as though we've covered most aspects of the system. Mind you, this entire thing has to go live on Sunday which is only 6 days away.
Seagate have finally got back to me as well. Turns out we were infact right and one of the old Maxtor drives had packed up so thanks to Manufacture Warranty we have a new one being sent back to us for free ^^ Only downside means I need to spend another couple of hours re-installing and configuring
CentOS for our NAS based system (its not actually a NAS, just an old PC essentially turnt in to one). Cheaper initially since no upfront cost, but the long term running costs are likely to be much higher.
PJ keeps on about the whole fact that a proper NAS does use a lot less power and will infact save you between £100 - £200 per year on electricity alone. Im still quite tempted on getting a NAS, but at £300 for decent 4-bay, its seems totally overpriced for what it actually is. I should probably note that that doesnt even cover the cost of buying the Hard Drives to stick in it anyways.
Ive noticed that im managing to talk about work a fair bit, which I dont really want the aim of this blog to be about, though it could do me a lot of favours towards my reports that I need to write for the Placements guys at
UWE. They managed to contact me the other day and it looks as though ill be able to go ahead and actually do the proper Placement course and have my course as a Sandwhich course. Obviously this means that ill probably finish with
Etherlive around December then bum around for almost 9 months untill I start my 4th year of
Uni ^^
The weekend was actually pretty good as well. I went to Cardiff and spent some time with
Tom and Christel for a mock-up LAN. Wasnt exactly the setup we've had in the past, but it was still good fun even due to the complete lack of any internet. Its strange how much you end up having the tendancy to go "Hmm, I dont know, Ill Google that....ah crap" when you dont have internet access :P
Congratulations to all those who have managed to survive reading through what im sure isnt exactly the most thrilling of blogs. Untill next time, enjoy the sun.
Summer 201029/06/10 - 20:43So its summer at long last and its been stupendously hot outside over the past 4-6 weeks. For once since 2006 it does feel like a proper summer however.
Ive started my placement this year for a company called
Etherlive who are "IT and Event Specialists". Basically, they turn up at an event (be it a festival like
WOMAD or an arts and antiques fair like
Masterpiece) and deploy a whole load of pretty amazing IT kit. I have actually been working on the
Masterpiece site getting everything setup and it has been very hard work. Its been classed as a construction site for the most part so its been high-vis jackets, hard hats and steel toe-cap boots. We were required to provide a WiFi network plus VoIP to most of the stands in the fair which turnt out to be one the largest jobs the company has done. This isnt too surprising since 10-12 -Kilometers- worth of Cat5 Ethernet cable were layed by hand - yes my hands. Needless to say, I am starting to fall to pieces (literally).
In any case,
Masterpiece is now over and we are pulling out which means another one and a half journey on the train to London (I -hate- trains) and then grabbing all our gear and bringing it back to base just outside of Swindon. When im not at
Masterpiece however, the job is a little easier in terms of manual labour. Not so much carrying but a lot more thinking. Ive been thrown in at the deep end with all sorts of projects with terminology that ive never heard of before. Thankfully I think ive done pretty damn well considering and I really do enjoy the challenge if im perfectly honest.
This week its been a case of attempting to repair a rack server, which didnt happen so its now mine (minus the processors damnit). Then we managed to salvage some old desktop PC and stuff some HDDs in it which we then found out are terrible, old and on the edge of death. They have a life-span of 17,000 hours online and were made over 5 years ago, which is what we attribute to the utterly crap 2 MB/s write speed. I should probably mention that they are 2x Western Digital 250 GB drives each with a 16 MB cache. Being so old, this is pretty terrible to start with and then we stuffed them in to a Software RAID 1 group controlled by
CentOS 5.5. I have nothing against
CentOS and should mention that it is definitely not the cause of the problems. In fact I really do like it and its probably my favourite distribution of Linux.
In any case, this is the largest update to my blog ever before and certainly I hope not the last for a while. I do intend to update this as much as possibly over the comming months with all the crazy antics that I get up to. So untill the next update, I bid you faithful reader a due.
Blog Update29/06/10 - 19:45Hello world and welcome to another blog update by yours truely. Hopefully this sort of thing will persist and last and go on forever. I do however need to think of a lot to write really :P Im hoping to integrate a lot of stuff in to this site such as a Java updater to make my life easier but also include updates via Twitter which would be pretty damn cool to be honest ^^
University Work04/03/09 - 23:38Ugh, im up at 23.34 atm trying to complete my
Uni Assignments for tomorrow. Only 14 hours left to complete two assignments; this could be interesting. Hopefully ill get it all done, but im getting pestered by people online and am typing to them more than i am working including this Blog post :p
I got reminded of our Blog sites and then couldnt stop thinking about making a new Blog post, so here i am making a new Blog Post :p
As for my New PC, plans are still going ahead with that. The price mark hasnt changed too much tbf which kinda sucks but is hardly surprising. Ive unfortunately become a lot more confused in regards to getting a new Monitor. Ive been looking at so many candidates and there seems to be something wrong with everyone I consider. Most monitors that actually dont have something wrong with them, dont have HDMI which i would really like to have since im considering getting an Xbox 360. Ah well, we shall see, if any one has any input, give me a shout at imperial [at] imperial [-] empire [-] se [dot] com
Monies23/01/09 - 21:19Ugh, money is such a pain when you have none. My plans are still based on my previous Blog Post - to build a Core i7 machine. Unfortunately,
University costs a lot of money. Having said that, my Car Insurance is why I have no money. I finally passed my test and was able to get insurance 4 days later, so ive been driving around for about 6 weeks now. No accidents or incidents etc so its all going well.
In any case, my new PC is looking to cost me around £2,000. Which is £2,000 which i dont have. Spec wise im after the top of the range CPU, the Core i7-965. Probably gonna go for an ASUS Mobo and DDR3 RAM. Along with that im considering moving to ATI for graphics, but im unsure as to whether their Catalyst drivers have improved that much. nVidia have always been really good for graphics cards and supporting them, but unfortunately this means they are very costly and tha ATI can provide the same performance for a significantly lower cost. Since this is probably going to be a build from the ground up, im also considering a Blueray Writer and at least 1TB of storage. Oh and ill finally get rid of my CRT and replace it with around a 22" Dell. I usually dont like Dell as a company, but their Monitors are pretty much first class coupled with the 3 Year Warranty for dead pixels.
OMG OMG OMG11/11/08 - 18:53Ive just been reading over the specs and reviews for Intels newest processor release - the Core i7. All I can say is OMFG!!! Im sooo damn excited. My next system is DEFINATELY going to be based around this; it does mean a complete overhaul of everything i currently have, but im not too worried about that tbh. I was going to do that anyway and upgrade to a Core 2 Quad (maybe the extreme series).
However, after reading alot of info it seems like they are the Worlds fastest commercial processors to be released. They've smashed all records previously recorded by PC Pro. The slowest in the initial series (Core i7-920 at 2.66GHz) beats the QX9770 easily and thats without Overclocking. This was almost mentioned; overclocking appears to be incredibly easy on these chips and allows them to operate blisteringly fast. There fastest (multiplier unlocked) chip, the Core i7-965 operates almost 30% faster when overclocked.
All I can say is that I really CANT wait to get my hands on this new system. Im planning on saving up everything I can after christmas to get hold of all the parts. Ill post up more information along the way including benchmark stats :)
Finalising05/11/08 - 20:48Well, the site is almost finished. The admin system hasnt taken as long as previous attempts have been (on other projects). The first two (of four) sections were completed easily without any hassle. Then the Blog system was improved with new features, so thats cool. But yeah, the Gallery system hasnt been started yet. The code for it exists on a previous blog site, so ill port that across when I get a chance. Other than that its just the CMS system that needs to be completed. Ive been talking with Alan (my host) to try and get issues resolved since permissions are messed up when dealing with data being written to files by PHP. Its kind of annoying, but we're getting somewhere i guess. At the moment, CMS Add works fine, however CMS Edit is another story. It wont allow you to overwrite the file with the new content. What im going to hope is that i can delete files. If so, ill adjust the Edit script so that it deletes the existing file and replaces it with a new file with the same name, but with the adjusted content. If it works, then the site should be operational very soon, however it probably wont. Even if it does work, its not exactly the best solution and i guess it isnt exactly server friendly. Never mind, at least the site will be fully functional in that respect :)