Yeah another watch that is hard to tell the time on, My new Storm Circuit http://www.stormwatches.com/watches/limited-edition/product-details/Circuit/10605

Due to the tube strike yesterday I had to stay at a friends as it wasn't worth getting home and all the hassle that it was bound to be getting back to East London. So I got the No. 8 buses in this morning to work in Soho. Well that was until I got to Holborn and the traffic started to crawl and I mean crawl. I got off the bus and started walking and strolled a lot faster than any bus up to the top of New Oxford Street and this was the view that greeted me, it buses backed up all down the road. 

It wasn't till I got to the top of the queue of buses there was about another 5 or six all lined up that I could see the cause of the monumental tailback all down New Oxford Street into Holborn which had held traffic up for about twenty minutes and what had made this massive queue of traffic. The picture below is what greeted me. Oh joy a inconsiderate flat bed truck driver from Stanmore Quality Surfacing. The driver had just pulled out over the box juncation and tried to bully his way in, turn on his flashing amber lights to try and get traffic to move, I think they better get their drivers to read up on they Highway Code and not inflict more misery of the general public while the system is already understrain from the tube strike. Thank for making me incredibly late for work I hope you had a great start to the day too.

150: Box junctions. These have criss-cross yellow lines painted on the road (see Other road markings section). You MUST NOT enter the box until your exit road or lane is clear. However, you may enter the box and wait when you want to turn right, and are only stopped from doing so by oncoming traffic, or by other vehicles waiting to turn right. At signalled roundabouts you MUST NOT enter the box unless you can cross over it completely without stopping.
Law TSRGD regs 10(1) & 29(2)

I recently bouught the HD-DVD player for my XBOX360 along with a few HD DVD's Hot Fuzz, Warriors and V for Vendetta.

I hadn't really watched a movie on it just used it to play games through till this evening when I came to watch Hot Fuzz I bought in the US. I finished playing Bioshock and popped the HD-DVD in the drive. it opened up got the lovely universal HD DVD logo and then BANG the dashboard popped up with an error COULD NOT PLAY CONTENT Error C667000A. First I thought it must be the disc or region encoding so I googled the error with not much luck. Then I came across the answer on this page.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/x/xbox360hddvdplayer/download.htm

Basically there was a dashboard update for the HD DVD player in May 07 and this fixes the problem. The reason I had not recieved the update is that you have to start the HD DVD with no other disks in the XBOX drive so it doesn't switch to a game in my case Bioshock first. Once I removed the game, made sure i was connected to Xbox Live I pressed play on the HD DVD and the dashboard update popped up and downloaded...and Eureka the disk restarts and plays fine.

If you don't connect you XBOX to Live then you can download the update from the page above.

For many years I had a girlfriend who self harmed. Self harm is a complicated subject and there are many reasons why people do it and I've never quite understood it. I always told her it was silly and stupid that she would cut herself over something which could be emotionally understood and rational..

Tonight for the first time I think understand why she used to do it. People set people off in different ways but its is the burning that you feel inside because what they have done is all wrong and the only way you can get rid of the anger is to cut it out of your skin and in the incision they is a release. Nothing is going to help, no emotional talk through no sit down and a cup of tea and we can make it alright its only that razor against your skin. Never suicidal but just enough to let the pain away.

To her I say sorry I now see you pain, hope your happier now.Love kev

Well this could be a intresting stand to see at IBC

On its joint stand with NuMedia Technology, the BBC is set to show the latest addition to the Dirac family of open source video compression codecs. The Pro 270 application of Dirac allows the transmission of HDTV signals using the cable and infrastructure already used for standard definition TV. Which is quite sexy if I say so myself....

This requires more compression of HDTV signals than Dirac Pro 1.5, but the new Dirac Pro has the flexibility to achieve this with very little loss of quality. Broadcasters that employ the Pro 270 will have the ability to transform their programme output to HD quickly.

Other reasons to use it include the fact that 1080P50 HD islands can be connected between sites over existing links. And because Dirac is Open Source, the wider industry can use the technology, add to it, and develop other applications. This will be helped by the fact that Dirac is license free too.

1.588

Oh dear another battery manufacture has problems this time its not Sony and only 46 Million batteries this time....

http://www.nokia.com/batteryreplacement/en/

Nokia has identified that in very rare cases the affected batteries could potentially experience over heating initiated by a short circuit while charging, causing the battery to dislodge. Nokia is working closely with relevant local authorities to investigate this situation.

Nokia has several suppliers for BL-5C batteries that have collectively produced more than 300 million BL-5C batteries. This advisory applies only to the 46 million batteries manufactured by Matsushita between December 2005 and November 2006. There have been approximately 100 incidents of over heating reported globally.

Only in Texas...

Passing Side or Suicide, you decide!!!!

Sony the makers of the world famous exploding batteries have sent out another product recall. This time its the Cyber-shot DSC-T5, I posted back in Nov 06 about the LCD recall.

This time Sony has announced a recall of another 350,000 digital cameras. But there's no need to reach for your fire extinguisher, because this time the recall is focused on the metal casing of one model that has the potential to cut or scratch users.Someone used the wrong type of glue and they are falling apart at the seams.

The problems surround the Cyber-shot DSC-T5 camera with serial numbers between 3500001 and 3574100, which was released in 2005.

How to return you DSC-T5 to Sony is listed here:

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/ServiceArea/070802/

Does this remind you of anything Simon?

Lugh sent this to the LIST today, I just spent 5 hours swearing very loudly His message read as follows:

I Bet I Can Make You All Swear Loudly Several Times Today :-P ...

Don't believe me huh?

Ok then.  I can live with that but, you will swear, and swear loudly.
So loud in fact, that your neighbours may complain.
They might even call the cops.
Your cat or dog (if you have one) may meaow or yelp and bolt under the sofa.
Your budgie (if you have one) will run to the other end of its' perch and tremble with fear.
Hampsters and mice will definitely hide deep in their straw.  Terrified at the racket you're making.
The local preacher, priest or vicar may refuse to call by *ever again* when he hears you.

Still don't believe huh?
Right ya feckers!You've asked for it :-P ...
HA..!
http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/bloxorz/

 *(Runs) ...*
Lugh ;-) ...

Jon Stewart introduces a nice exposition of the blatant lies of the neo-cons.

Mark Reed popped this up on this blog so I thought I'd copy him and do it too

Iris - Lands of Fire (from the album Wrath)

Probably the nicest and that's not a bad thing, band i've ever met. Really cool guys writing great goth/emo. Hailing from Austin Texas they remind me of a lost weekend in Gothenburg at Sama. Prictures on link. Regan Jones and Andrew Sega and of course Brian

 
Apoptygma Berzerk - Kathy Song (c64 mix ) Single

Apop was my first look into future pop/darkwave as it is now. I was lent a cd by an ex girlfriend and it all went from there. Contrary to popular opinion "i'm not a goth" and was always indie dance boy.

 
Patrick Jones - There Life in Their Hands  (from album  Commemoration and Ammesia)

Six form poets of the world unite. Particks work resinate in the soul speaking from a perspective of honesty. Seeing Patrick at Water Rats Theatre in Kings Cross when the album came out was a great experience.  The music on this album is  great from Super Furries to the Manics and Julian Cope.

 
Body Count - D Roc (RIP) (from the album Murder 4Hire)

Ah my rock roots comes out, BC, BC, BC...what does this say well...Graham, Riverside Studios club, Friday night. A pillar, My nose work the rest out for yourself. Great. Oh to be young and stupid. When you look back and see that  a lot of the  orgianl  memebers of  Body Count are now dead.

 
The Derek Trucks Band - Sahib Teri Bandi - Maki Madni (from the album Songlines)

I got introduced to this by my boss. This track completely rocks all 9.53 amazing guitar. Done by the same guy who played on the track used on the top gear theme tune. The break at about 2mins40 is sublime.  Put it on turn it up and  space out.

 
Nine Inch Nails - Wish (live) (from the album  And All That Could Have Been)

Trying not to be a teenager to this song is impossible. Everything comes flooding back, the copperidge on the quayside, riverside, bulletpoof dodgy old goths. hairspray  and thursday nights of  fun at 70p a pint.

365main one the San Fransisco's biggest facilities, had their PR monkeys issued a press release celebrating the site's "two years of 100-percent uptime at 365 Main's San Francisco facility." Oops.

Not wanting to tempt fate this morning/last night their facility shut down due to a power outage losing Craglist, and Livejournal as well as other big names. The area has been seeing power problems all day but it seems the backup supply didn't kick in.

Reminds me of a story about a nameless facility that had generators on the roof to run the technical mains in case of power loss then on winters night when the snow was heavy on the ground. The facility lost power and the generators kicked in, after about 15 minutes the generator started to set off the alarms for low fuel. Its seemed that whoever wired the generator into the building wired the fuel pump into the house mains rather than the technical so the pump was not working. So some poor engineer had to spend all night hand filling the generators till the morning came and the power came back on.

Storage vendor Isilon Systems has hopped aboard the thin-provisioning express that's chugging through the industry, adding the sought-after technology to its clustered storage products as a part of today's hardware and software revamp.

The new software, called SmartQuotas, combines quota management and thin provisioning into one software application. Isilon reckons its the first in the industry to combine the two for clustered storage. SmartQuotas allows users to partition a single, scalable, shared pool of storage (up to 1.6 petabytes) and assign limits on how much storage a particular user or group can access.

-----

Oh so I can have workspaces in my Isilon oh it starting to sound like could be used to editing storage tool rather than your big SAN solution.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/23/isilon_smartquotas_iq_9000/

 never touch your eyes after you've been cutting chillis

Stanley living it up at Blanch House on Brighton www.blanchhouse.co.uk/

Saw this one Simon's blog and thought I better post a link to it

Stag night pranks:

One of the guys here at work just came back from a 4 day stag do.....

The rest can be read at http://blogger.gtvone.com/2007/07/smurf.html

Oh does the url give it away?

What happens if you have your ear to the ground and have your finger on the pulse at the same time?

I've recently updated my Linked In profile if anyone of you want to link up then add my profile on the link below

i've mentioned on my blog about beta drivers for netgear W111T drivers for microsoft vista well there are some release drivers out and you can download them from the link below

http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/n101649.asp#vista_wirelessadapter

well if you can see this it means my blog is back up again...it's been off since Mon 02/07/07 it seems that somewhere between the company that supplies my blog and interweb is going wrong at a very regular interval. Its been dropping off line since March when i first reported the problem. Well lets see how long its up for?

Stockholm at night

View from the sky bar at the radison royal viking

Today was a day for a bit of culture, Gaudi supplied it in droves. What an amazing building I'm never seen a church on this scale being built you normally see them 100 of years after they were finished. Lovely building.

photos are on flickr click on the picture and you can access the set.

Stanley makes himself at home in Barcelona

Currently in Madrid, Spain for a few days...turned on the television last night to see can you guess? Yes, Bull fighting and there was me thinking animal cruelty as entertainment was a thing of the past ho hum....

There is nothing like a photograph and nothing brings back memories than standing there seeing the place again,  While I was in Central Park, New York I popped down to the lake and tried to recreate one of my favorite photos. It was taken in 2002 when I was in New York with friends
.

Its now 2007 and I've gone digital, over film and colour over black and white...i made it a mission to take the shot again.

Yesterday my blog was flodded by a bot called ID-Search bot with the useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; IDBot/1.0; +http:// www.id-search.org/bot.html). Within a few minutes it requested around 1,386 pages and came from the IP 66.90.101.75 raping about 50MB of band width in the process...you've got to love those Russian spy bots

Is this a spam-bot or a serious project? Three things which make we wonder

1.) The bot does not (yet) support robots.txt. A quote from their FAQ

Does IDBot accept the directives from robots.txt file?
IDBot can recognize the directives from robots.txt files only partially, which is the result of the scantiness of our resources. Full support of robots.txt will be launched soon.

2.) They are not willing to release their IP addresses. Quote:

Can I learn the IP addresses, which IDBot comes from?
Unfortunately, You can’t since it is against the rules of our company.

3.) They flood servers. According to their FAQ you can write an email to tech support if the bot is causing problems. IMHO this is not a workable solution.

A New Yorker in Battery Park

It feels like I haven't been away, its been nearly a year since I was back in Manhattan, how much fun and a boy have in the City?

While distracting Rupert from asking more embarrassing questions about MPEG muxing and I showed him Microsoft Surface. While we were on the site he asked me to see if it was built in Silverlight,  so I right click and look what I saw...Oh so even Microsoft aren't using Silverlight for their main production websites yet. (click on image for large)

This an existential psychological play was named "The Man in the Cube" and was written and produced by Jim Hensen (prior to his Muppets productions). It was broadcast on NBC's "Experiments in Television" series in 1969. It stars actor Richard Schaal, father of actress Wendy Schaal and one-time husband of Valerie Harper.This kind of explains why Sesame Street is so dark in places.



It very much like the Twilight Zone epsiode were the people are in the create and trying to get out, only to find they are toys in a toy box. Also like the film The Cube

In my time in tech support land and being a bit of a techie bloke you get some some of the strangest requests and some of the funniest from around the office because you know about technology they think you can fix anything, as I'm not there so often these days I do miss them. Today for instance someone in the office asked me if I could get their ActivSync working as their mobile phone would not sync with their email. Ok I'll have a look, I walked over to the mobile picked it up and noticed the black screen. I didn't want to say "Have you turned it on?" but it just slipped out.I pressed the power button and as if by magic it all started syncing! If only they were all that simple.

This was a classic blond moment if I've seen one.

looks like someone else is having one too http://www.gtvone.com/blogger/2007/06/is-it-turned-on.html