I’m sure I touched on this subject before, but I have once again, been getting a slew of emails to my two gmail addresses, thinking I’m someone else. I suppose it’s one of the bad things about signing up to a “new” serice when it first launches. Many of my friends sent me invites. I’m *that* popular.

Unfortunately, as gmail (or googlemail in some parts of the world) grew, other people began to create some similar email addresses to mine, and wouldn’t you know it, they would occasionally get theirs wrong, and I’d end up with an email fromsomeone who I’ve never heard of.

This allowed me to have some fun. Well, I thought it was fun.

Back in November, I got an email from someone called Marie, inviting me to view somebody’s thanksgiving photos on Picasa. I thought I’d inform Marie that I was not the intended recipient.

Marie,
I think you’ll see
That I’m not the addressee
You thought it would be.

I thought that’d be the end of it. No. Two weeks later, another Picasa request, this time inviting me to view photos of a snowstorm. Joy. I declined, but it at least gave me a second chance to be creative…

Marie,
Could This Be
The Second Time I see
A Picasa Request From Thee
And I have to write a rhyme-ee
to Tell you I am not he
Coincidentally, the weather here is snow-ee.
And now I’ll…. drink some tea
As I clearly am running out of rhymes for Marie.

Several days later, I received an apology email, and thankfully, I wouldn’t have to resort to a third set of crap rhyming.

Things went quiet for a few months (apart from instructions on how to “wire” money to, or from someone… couldn’t tell), then I received an email, asking if I knew the directions to a ministry school, and what to expect on the first day…

My response?

Nope.

I never heard back from that one.

Someone called John Percival had given my email address in relation to (if I remember correctly) some type of accident. It was asking for details of “my” accident, and “my” physical condition. I remember going into a full-scale description about accidentally burning toast, using the last two slices of bread, my physical condition about being gutted at the incinerated toast, now slightly hungry, and to top it all off, banging my funny-bone on the door handle on my way back up the stairs.

It was a work of art. Unfortunately, I bottled it, and just replied with a “You have the wrong email address” message, and didn’t think of copying, pasting and saving something which I literally spent an hour on. Grrrrr.

I received one entirely in Spanish, with 2Mb worth of PDFs attached. Clearly not for me. I replied back with “El wrongo email adddresso”. Yes, I really did make that 3D’s typo. Bohh.

Occasionally, they do backfire, when I try to be funny, and the joke is totally lost on the recipient.

I received some more PDFs from someone else that were probably meant to be translated from German to English. My reply was…

I have fed them into the translator. The response was “WTF IS THIS SHITE?”

Admittedly, I was rat-arsed when I sent that. My childish humour backfired when I received an email back saying “Thanks, but what does shite mean?”. I backed out of that one with my tail between my legs, and deleted his email. No response as of yet. He probably didn’t realise he’d got the wrong person, and now thinks someone else is a complete arse. Whoopsy.

Now, the whole reason I came to this subject was an email I received some someone else tonight. For the past few weeks, I’ve been receiving jokes from someone in New Zealand. Now, l originally told the person that they’ve got the wrong person, but the jokes are actually funny, and I don’t mind reading them, so Iwasn’t overly offended when I kept receiving them.

Occasionally, you’d get the odd bit of complete arse…

GUARDIAN ANGEL

Please try to send it to at least 7 of your friends

I don’t *have* 7 friends, but what is odd, is that tomorrow will be Saturday. I’m working nights, so I will be coming back through the gates of MV Towers at approximately 8:23.

Clearly, the last few days haven’t been very exciting, though I did get my hair cut today. It’s gone up from £6 to £6.50.

This is probably going to be one of those posts that get buried at the bottom of my drafts folder, as it really doesn’t mean a lot to anyone but me, but I’ll continue typing it anyway in the vain hope that I will one day, be able to make use of it. It will consist of me just rambling on about nothing for the next several paragraphs.

By the title of the posting, you’ll probably be thinking that I’ve just bought a new sofa, or something. No, for you see, I have for the first time in 8 years connected my zip drive up to my computer. It’s wonderfully obsolete.

The story began in approximately 1999. I can’t remember the exact date, or even the exact year, but the data on the disk that I found would suggest either late 1998, or early 1999.

I remember Daddykins had gone to Currys on the marina to have a look at something. Possibly a new TV, or video. I would have been on the dole at this point.

My computer setup was using a 10Gb drive, which would often become full. With the only external storage available at the time being the humble floppy disk, I would find myself just deleting stuff because I needed the space. Whilst in Currys, I spied the zip drive, which would allow me to move a whole 10% of my drive onto removable media in one go. Considering I was a child of the Job Centre, the investment was immense. £100, plus a bit more. It definitely broke three figures anyway.

I had first became acquainted with Zip drives in 1998, when I was doing skivvy IT work at the accountants on Victoria road, and had used zip drives to move old data from an old Win 3.1 machine to a Win95 machine. I accomplished this using DOS. God, those were the days.

Anyway, I purchased it (or rather, Daddykins purchased it for me, and I would pay him the money back over a period of time. this was often the arrangement for hardware I purchased befire I got a proper job.

After the initial setup, and ripping off the paper mache moulded sides that the drive was held into, I connected it, and installed it as you’d expect. It’s a parallel port device, so it needed drivers. I believe these were included on a floppy disk. I definitely know you could create a “guest” disk, allowing the drive to be recognised on any machine temporarily.

I absolutely adored it. I only had one 100Mb disk for it at the time, but still, the 10% free disk space was an absolute dream. I didn’t have a full connection to the internet at that point, so 10% of hard drive space would take a while to fill. This means that if I needed a new disk, I could plan for it well in advance. This I did. I probably used Scan to buy them, at what would now be an extortionate price.

Disaster was about to strike, and ironically, thanks to the data on the disk (which I’ll come to in a minute, or an hour the way I’m typing). It was March 1999. I had ordered a few things for my machine, such as a new CDROM drive, and amongst this, was an extra 100Mb disk. For some reason, I’d set my computer up downstairs. I presume it was so I could easily work on the machine when the new parts came, without having to fit everything on what would have been a very untidy desk.

And, this is the disaster. Within minutes of inserting that new ZIP disk, I stood up to do something. My foot trailed along the zip drive’s power lead, and “Bang Crash, RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”… The drive had fallen to the floor, and the “RAAA” was coming from the fact that the impact had ripped the disk surface while it was spinning, and the drive heads were now completely out of alignment. I was the owner of one completely fucked zip drive, only a few months old.

It was one of those moments that just made me want to cry.

Daddykins suggested taking it back to Currys, and suggesting that it was faulty. Luckily, I’d read something about a “click of death”, where the heads in the zip drive would click twice, and not mount the disk. This was exactly what mine had been doing.

Off we went to Currys, my hands clammy, clasping the casualty. I went up to the desk, mumbled something like “Oh, it’s got the click of death”. The guy looked at me slightly strangely, but without further hesitation, nipped into the back office, and came out with a nice, shiny new boxed drive. I was beyond happy.

I vowed to never make that mistake again, and make sure that its footing is secure, and that I don’t have wires trailing all over the shop. The zip drive still had regular usage, and even received a mention on 8th February 2001. This was technically the day that my beloved zip drive moved into the realms of obseletion, as Daddykins had purchased a CDRW drive to go into his computer. We didn’t have a network at this point, so the 5 zip disks I had accumulated were put to use simply transferring the data between the two machines, so I was able to write whatever I wanted to CD, and it would be accessible on any computer I had, either then, or in the future. No need to lug about huge drives, and even less need to install drivers.

Shortly after finding out just how convenient the whole CD writing thing was, I went out and bought my very own CD drive, possibly from Scan again. It was at this point, that the Zip drive was disconnected for the final time, and its path into obseletion had been completed. The data that was on the disks at the time is probably still on them, but unfortunately at the time of typing this, I can only find one disk, and it would just happen to be the most important one of the lot. It was my old website backup disk!

Amongst the several folders on the disk is a little zip file, entitled “WebsiteNOV200.zip”. What’s even better, is that the files included, are actually from December 1999. It includes the very first incarnation of the blog. Back then, I’d called it a diary. I had to type it out in plain HTML, as blogging hadn’t been invented, certainly not in the automated sense anyway.

EDIT: 100Mb of a 10gig drive isn’t 10%, it’s 1%… this will be why NASA turned down my job application. Maybe.

I appear to have broken the server that scribcam.co.uk resides in. That’s an annoyance.

Oddly, it’s still “up”, as it responds to pings, and some functionality such as being able to access the files, is working. The webserver itself is also up, as can be seen by the siles I hosted for Wayne the other day. I used that example because of the largeish video files hosted on there, which download perfectly.

It would appear that anything that takes the slightest bit of processing power, such as the webcam, is not working. The webcam, which normally takes a photo every 15 seconds, has taken six pictures since midnight (it’s now 3AM). PHP generated pages do not work, and I can’t connect to MySQL.

VNC doesn’t work either, so I can’t actually see what’s wrong with it. The machine doesn’t have a monitor connected. VNC takes at least 2-3 minutes to login or even ask for a password prompt. Eventually once it goes in, it just shows black, but the mouse pointer is there.

A morning of fun ensues. Sigh.

UPDATE:

It’s the morning. Predictably, I have the computer all set up on the desk, and guess what? It’s working like a charm. The annoying little bastard. I’m editing this particular post on said machine to prove it.

I rebooted it twice this morning. Each time, it worked for a short amount of time, maybe 10 seconds. I was able to open up VNC Viewer, and connect to it, but seconds later, the connection would hand, and I couldn’t reconnect.

I tried a few things which I thought may have been an issue. I restarted the web and database server, thinking that may have caused it to hang, as there’s a particularly large database on there at the moment. Nope. The webserver started instantly, and the database server was up in ~20 seconds.

Now that I have a monitor and keyboard connected, I might take this opportunity to overhaul it, reinstall later versions of the server software, etc. It depends whether I can get connected now that I know the machine is actually functioning as it should.

UPDATE THE SECOND

I’ve gone a bit further with the “upgrade” than originally planned. And I think I need counselling.

After installing the SATA drivers for this machine, I received messages that there was no SATA drive connected. How could this be? I heard it spin up. I couldn’t think of ANY reason why the drive wouldn’t be connected.

The SATA cable was dangling in front of the monitor, not plugged into the motherboard. I’m going senile.

UPDATE THE TURD

This is my last update on this post, and I can confirm a few things. Firstly, my senility thankfully wasn’t as bad as I made out. It turns out that even though the drive was disconnected from the motherboard, it didn’t actually power up anyway. The drive is fine, as I’d taken it from Beastbits. It was the only SATA drive I had to hand with a molex connector. I have yet to test whether it’s a fault with the drive as I just use the SATA power connector on here. It could explain why I had issues in the past with SATA drives on that machine, thinking it was just a Win2000 thing. I never actually thought to check to see if the machines were detected in the BIOS. Whoops.

Secondly, the machine is back up and running completely, and sadly, it’s one of those things which will never be solved. As expected, after its trip onto “the bench”, everything worked like a dream. I’ll just catalogue the bollocks I tried just in case it makes a difference.

Updated TightVNC server to the latest version. I doubt this helped, as the machine has been running for four years with the same version with no issue.

DROPped several backup databases, including one with a ~1Gb table in it. I doubt this was causing an actual problem, however, as I manually start the SQL server whever I reboot the machine. I can’t think of a reason why this would cause a problem during bootup.

Defragged. Come on, this never fixed anything, but I did it anyway. Expecially on a machine with 5Gb used out of 60Gb. Admittedly, this went down to 3.something after I dropped those databases.

Basically, I can only put it down to the fact that the machine wanted a change of scenery. There was no logical reason I can think of for its temporary failure.

This is one of those things that will bug me. It’s one of those annoying problems that surfaced for no reason, and will eventually resurface ONLY while I’m pissed. You know, the only reason this problem originally surfaced was because I rebooted the machine after 16 days uptime. OK, it’s not much for a server, but I reboot it every so often because Conquercam stops recording images after 42 days.

Nobody who reads this blog will have constructive feedback on this posting, or any logical ideas of what happened.

It’s taken what seems like an eternity, but finally, parts of the UK are now available in Google Street View. For me, this is truly, and unbelievably awesome. Unfortunately, not everywhere has been mapped as of yet, but I can only assume that other places will be available in the future… Here’s a quick overview of where is currently available…

Unfortunately, Hartlepool has not been mapped yet, but I can only assume that an update will appear shortly. A possible sighting of the Google Maps car was spotted by the security guard at work about 18 months ago.

I’ve already spotted two great shots. the first is a view of a second GM car in Edinburgh.. If you follow the footage along the road, you’ll see that the GM car pulls out, and follows the first one along the road. This particular street ends up at a church, with a gift shop next to it called “Thistle Do Nicely”. Groan.

The second is some random kid doing a wheelie somewhere in Newcastle. Good timing.

Also in Newcastle, I located the Street View version of my favourite broken streetlight, but I didn’t bother taking a grab of that. Unfortunately, it does suffer from some of the faults that the other countries have. Road coverage ends for apparently no reason, and to advance, you have to pick up your little yellow man and move him manually across the map. It also occasionally maps car parks as part of the roads, again for no apparent reason.

London, and the surrounding boroughs are mapped also, so I was able to find the little bedsit on Oldfield Lane in Greenford where I spent two days.

For a streetlight spotter, however, this update is outstanding. I’m glad to see that the GEC Z5590 is alive and well in York.

I’d like to have a good play with it, but I’m at *that* place tonight, so unfortunately, I can’t. Oh well. Off to bed I go!

Yesterday was Saturday, and instead of treading the carpets in the vast halls of Mercuryvapour Towers, I decided to go on a hastily arranged trip to Durham, with Chris. On Friday, we had a few beers whilst ficking through the TV channels, doing our best to avoid anything even slightly “Comic Relief” related.

On Saturday morning, whilst I was enjoying my weekly viewing of Saturday Kitchen, the phone rang. It was Chris, sounding rather confused…

“Jamie, was I pissed lat night?”

“I replied negatively, as he seemed OK to me. Mind you, I’d been on the Stellas, so my judgement may have been slightly clouded by this fact. He explained how he’d tried to phone someone, and couldn’t remember who. Apparently, whoever it was, had been trying to phone him all morning, on a withheld number, and he couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed and answer it. Ah well.

As I settled back down to catch the end of the afore mentioned early weekend cookery programme, the phone rang again. It was Chris again, asking if I fancied a run out to Durham. Well, the weather was nice, and my camera needed an airing, so I wholeheartedly agreed.

To stretch my legs, I decided to meet him half way, and then we’d walk back up to mine. Great stuff. Daddykins wanted some pie, so I stopped off at the bakers on the way back and got him some mince pies, at the extortionate price of 95p each. I also bought the local rag newspaper, which seemed even more devoid of interesting news than usual.

After returning back here, I had a quick shave and wash, and we left, with me clutching my camera. The first stop was an uneventful walk to the cash machine at the Shell garage. This is on the way to the bus stop, so we lost nothing by talking this short detour. And I’ve probably lost a couple of readers by statiing that totally unnecessary fact.

We arrived and checked the bus timetables. According to the timetable, we’d just missed the bus to Durham, so we whiled away the time reading the graffiti adorning the bus stop and the wooden fence to the back of it. As far as I know, Hartlepool is the only place in the world that has such badly spelled graffiti. For example “CARL IS A FUKEN RARF”. A “rarf”, is purely a Hartlepudlian expression, meaning a gentleman/lady of small mental capacity, and I’m not even sure if it has an official spelling.

Luckily, it turns out that the Durham bus was incredibly, incredibly late, so we managed to get that a few minutes after we arrived at the bus stop. Bimler.

Up we went to the top deck, only to find that the prime positions at the very front of the bus had been taken by someone else. This meant, that while I’d normally be snapping away, taking photos of everything out of the windows, I had to hold off, until the fuken rarfs left the bus. They did this at some point in Peterlee, which means we immediately grabbed the prominent position. I managed to get some shots of the now increasingly rare gear-in-head Eleco Goldenrays, which would have been installed at some point in the 70s. I won’t bore you with the pictures, as I haven’t put them on flickr and I can’t be arsed opening GIMP and resizing one.

The rest of the bus ride was particularly uncomfortable. The bus was a wreck. The side panel next to my seat was hanging off, and the bus had little/no shock absorbing capacity at all. And, considering the bus visited numerous ex-mining villages with terrible roads, it wasn’t a comfortable journey. “On the way to durham. Bouncy bus” was the way I described it via twitter.

After what felt like an eternity, we began to leave the uneven roads, and began to feel the smooth, smooth tarmac of Durham approaching. Awesome.

We arrived at the bus station, and in a repeat of the April 2008 trip, oddly blogged about in May, the first stop was to Peters the Bakery, in order to pick up one of their awesome pasties. I must admit, I prefer the Peters pasties over Greggs. The Greggs ones have gone really downhill recently.

The whole trip was simply an excuse for me to dust my camera off (more on the dust in a minute), so the first stop was to the cathedral. They still don’t allow you to take cameras in, so I had to satisfy my photo urge by taking exterior photos. This was one I was particularly proud of…

OK, so it’s had a bit of post-processing done to it, and normally that’s something I hate, but seeing as I always shoot in RAW format now, (2x16Gb cards = laaarvely) that’s something I’m more willing to experiment with now. And, onto the dust. You can’t really see it on the small size shown here, but in the very bottom left, you’ll notice a spherical object. It’s a dust speck on either the sensor or the mirror. Fark. The camera has its own dust deletion features, so I might go through that instead of resorting to cleaning the sensor. It’s not in an important place anyway.

After I’d taken photos of the grounds (and a pile of sick) we headed inside the cathedral. Now, back in my 2008 post, I mentioned about the chior and orchestra in there. Well, they were there again, and still as awesome as ever. I was walking around the place with the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.

This time, I abided (abode?) by the rules, and didn’t take one photo. My current camera is slightly less easier to hide.

We left the cathedral, and walked along the river. I wanted to get a shot of that cross from the reverse angle, only slight problem is that you can’t actually see it from the footpath, as the footpath is approximately 30 feet lower down, and there’s a wall in the way. Bugger.

We continued to walk along the footpath, as I’d never been along that way before, and I was interested to see what was there. I’ll tell you what’s there. A Thorn Gamma 6, mounted on an old Revo Moseley column, that’s what! Oh, OK. There’s a footbridge that takes you across the river. I broke out the camera again, as a…. boat thing went underneath… (mental block… these things have names, yes?)

We followed the path all the way along, to see what was at the end of it.

A roundabout and very little else. Oh.

We turned back and headed the way we came, but this time along the other side of the river. It gave me oppotunity to take more photos, naturally.

So, after that, we went into the city part itself. It’s not particularly big, but there’s a market square, where there was actually a market. Not the good type of market, however, this was your “fruit and veg” market. Sigh. Not a CD or record in sight. I ended up paying £1 for a small bag of cola bottles. Gah. We walked a little futher round, and stopped off at the same paper shop we’d been to 11 months before, in order to pick up a can of pop, or smoething to drink. All of this walking was dehydrating!

68p. That’s 68p for a can of 7-up. Sixty Eight New Pence. Still, I like 7-up, and it was a small (well, rather large) price to pay. We left the shop, and began to head in a randome direction, back towards the river. There’s a smail set of steps here, that you have to negotiate. And, despite my almost 30 years expereince in negotiating sets of steps, unfortunately, this time I’d forgotten how to manage them, and misjudged the fact that there was still a step to go.

Down I went, like a bag of shit. Not that I’ve actually ever seem a bag of shit fall, but I guess it would look something like what happened to me right about there. My knees made contact with the “ribbed” paving stones, which have raised sections, and let me tell you, those raised sections HURT, especially when certain body parts are scraping across them at a considerable speed. What’s even worse is that my 68p can of 7-up was now half empty, on the floor. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU…

The whole time, some random passer by was staring at me, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. I just nodded at her, in the best way possible to say “Show’s over, bitch”.

With my pride, and my articulatio genus dented, I hobbled away. We walked in a long circle in order to arrive back at the cathedral. The sun, at this point, was breaking through the cloud, and I was able to get a good shot of the cathedral…

I still keep meaning to go back here in the summer to get some summer pictures. The only ones I’ve managed so far have been early spring photos.

After I had sucessfully captured enough photos for a 700Mb flickr upload, we headed off back to the bus station. There was still a few minutes before the bus was turning up, so we headed into the shop to pick up much needed supplies for the jorney home. OK, it’s not that far, but when you’re sitting on a bus, staring out of the window at vast swathes of nothingness, something to chew on is essecntial. I opted for a bottle of water, and a bag of McCoys.

We boarded the bus, and headed once again to the top deck.

This turned out to be a mistake, as directly behind us, we got some type of family unit, consisting of three kids, who had clearly been injecting pure sugar into their veins, and their poor, flustered mother.

“OHLET’SPLAYCOUTHTHEBLACKCARS! BLACKCARS! ONETWOTHREESEVENTHRTEEN”…

I looked at Chris, and signed. This was going to be a long journey.

“Count The Cars” officially got boring to them approximately three minutes into the journey, and instead they began swapping football stickers.

“DOYOUWANTOWEN? HE’STHEFANSFAVOURITE! WHATTEAMDOESDAVISJAMESPLAYFOR? DOYOUWANTDAVIDJAMES?TOUGH!

There was a brief respite, when one of the kids began to feel carsick, and thankfully shut up. Unfortunately, this soon passed as we arrived into Peterlee bus station, slightly earlier than expected. The driver switched the engine off and left the bus at this point, for some unknown reason.

“THEDRIVERSGONE! HASHELEFTTHEKEYSIN? LETSGONICKTHEBUS LETSGONICKTHEBUS”

Joy. At least there was only a few miles to go. The parent, getting flustered, beings shouting at the kids, as the sugar rush failed to dissipate, and was still causing them to do 100-metre style sprints up and down the vehicle. Eventually, the driver boards again, and we leave the rolling vistas of Peterlee behind. The day was completed, with the parent calling one of the kids a “doyle”. It was a perfect ending. Start with “rarf”, and with “doyle”. That’s the reason I love Hartlepool. Two expressions that would make absolutely no sense anywhere else on the planet. It was truly Elish.