Back in Black

This just in from our New Zealand correspondant, Tavish Fraser:
So, in an attempt to get some glory by association with the All Blacks, other NZ sports teams have tried to incorporate “Black” into their name somehow… softball has the Black Sox, hockey has the Black Sticks, and so forth. The badminton team has also been thinking about the same sort of thing. What do you use in badminton? A shuttlecock. So what do you call your national badminton team?

I like my mobile phone

It’s small, as it was one of the models that came out before phones had to have cameras, internet connections, your entire life stored on them; it’s a clamshell style phone, so no worries about comedy “forgot to engage the keylock” moments; but most of all, I like the voice notes. Most of my voice notes are of me tunelessly singing melody ideas for songs or beatboxing exciting rhythm ideas. Usually these little snippets of creativity are still born, as once the idea is translated from biological to digital storage I forget I ever had it, which makes it all the funnier when I do go back and listen to them. Good god there’s some shit in there

King Kong

Well well, the new King Kong trailer looks pretty good, a mix of dinosaurs, giant apes and Jack Black. Still, will it be better than Meet the Feebles, Jackson’s masterwork? I doubt it.

GlastoBlog

Easy winner for quote of the week, from someone who’s moblogging Glasto: [we] are taking turns to suck the huge pear drop. Nuff said. Though the next entry isn’t so great:

We have sunken, unuseable portaloos and the contents are mingling with the rivers of mud. Stewards are telling people not to walk through it, as it is raw sewage and are asking people to go and wash(!).

I have never been to Glastonbury, but I’d like to. Despite the rivers of shit.

I can see my house!

Google maps have now added satellite imagery for the UK. The London Eye looks weird. Sadly they don’t have high res coverage of stonehenge or Hadrian’s wall. Nor Sellafield or Aldermaston, strangely

Fun with the BBC’s RSS

Backstage.bbc.co.uk is a site promoting clever use of the BBC’s numerous RSS feeds. Of particular note is the combination of the beeb’s traffic news feed with google maps, e.g. gtraffic. How handeh.

A bit of vituperation

I enjoy rudeness for rudeness’ sake, and these two links make a nice pair.

• One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately
• Mr Agreeable

Computer woes

Recently, computers have been annoying me. OK, more than usual. My home machine (PC running XP) had been crashing on an increasingly frequent basis; fairly terminal hangs as well, no blue screen, the system would simply freeze. Worryingly it would occasionally do this before Windows even started, just after verifying the DMI data, which would indicate that there was an issue with the hardware rather than just the normal Windows crappery. Hardware issues are often either the RAM, the hard drive, or the power supply unit. I found a nice little app to test the RAM called memtest, and ran that for several passes: nothing. Defragged the hard disc, ran check disc: again, nada. Contemplated the futility of life, backed up the contents of the hard disc, formatted it and reinstalled XP. Everything is now back and working fine, but for one very important problem: I’d backed up my Half Life 2 game using Steam’s “Back up game files” options. Despite the name, this option doesn’t actually back up your saved games, it makes a DVD’s worth of data that will reinstall Half Life 2. I was nearly at the end of the game, and now I’ve slid down the snake back to the start. Great. Still, the computer hasn’t crashed for more than a week now so there is a silver lining, however I have yet to install the meeeeellion different programs I normally have on there, so this smooth operation may well be a transient feature.
I was also having trouble with a machine I was sorting out for my mum. Calling my mum clueless about computers would be generous, so I wanted to give her a machine that could look after itself, i.e. Win XP SP2 and AVG antivirus, both set to auto-update. The machine had previously been running Win ‘98, and though I’d heard about people having issues when upgrading to XP SP2, I’d not seen any problems myself. I have now. The install went smoothly, but the onboard sound didn’t work. The machine has a Giga-byte motherboard with onboard Realtek AC97 sound, but Windows insisted on identifying it as a C-Media chip and installing drivers for that. Funnily enough, they didn’t work. Uninstalling them and trying to install the Realtek drivers caused the machine to reset itself. Hunting around on the web, I eventually found this solution. Did the registery hacking, got Windows to stop desperately trying to use C-Media drivers, tried installing the Realtek drivers…
Black screen, machine resets. Said bollocks to it, nipped out and bought a Soundblaster live, installed that and hey presto, working sound. Which just goes to show, if you’ve got a problem, throw money at it until it goes away. If you run out of problems before you run out of money, you’ve won. If not… you lose.

A busy weekend

I think I drove through about 14 different counties this weekend; I was visiting various scions of my family, including my Dad’s new place down in Cornwall. He’s bought a place with plenty of land that he’s working on turning into a farm, or at least a small holding, and has bought some chickens, ducks and sheep. There’s a few young lambs around, which Kyla and I helped out by feeding. We also had a play with Dad’s scythe; there’s plenty of neglected pasture that needs cutting down to size. The scythe in question was made in Austria – apparently all the best scythes are. I had been wondering what the purpose of Austria was (beyond Viennese Whirls, Mozart, and the First World War), and I guess this must be it. It was while out on one scything session that we spotted the enormous swarm of bees that you can see in the photo. Dad’s wife Lorna is keeping bees, and so had to try and get the swarm out of the tree and into an empty hive. This turned out to be a fairly aggressive manouvre that involved holding a cardboard box under the swarm then shaking the branch until swarm dropped off. I’d decided not to find out whether I was allergic to bee stings and retreated to a safe distance, which is why none of these photos are close-ups.
On the way back Kyla and I decided to stop off at Stonehenge; it’s not like we were passing, but hey why not. Well, becuase it was the hottest day of the year so far and hence was rubbish for car travel, that’s why not. But we did it anyway. Stonehenge turns out to be a lot smaller than I’d thought it was going to be; I’d imagined monolithic slabs dominating the skyline of the Salisbury Plain, but they’re only three or four times the height of a person. It’s not exactly the Pyramids. Not that I’ve visited them, so maybe they’re tiny too. It’s like the bit at the end of Casablanca, which was filmed with a small scale plane and midget actors just so there was sufficient perspective in the shot but the scene fitted in the filming lot. It was still very impressive, though we were a day early to catch the solstice celebrations. I shall make up for it by hugging a tree at home

The very model of a modern labour minister

A new animation over at eclectech which is a tribute to charles clarke and his id cards. Warning: contains pianist puppies.