What can you do?

Another great game of snooker last night. It was our '6-man knockout' game against Greenlands A team. I wouldn't be exaggerating to say 30 people turned up from their club!

Anyway, top of the third division - unbeaten with only a handful of lost frames - it was going to be tough. Tough wasn't the word though!

I'm not the best snooker player on the team and I did make a slight mistake which then meant that my opponent went on to get a break of 55! What can you do when that happens? I battled on and managed to score another 20 points bringing the score to 80-23.

The other games were pretty uneventful (again, all losses) except for Lee's game where the opponent, for some unknown reason, decided he was going to play EVERY shot with the rest. There must have been a reason but we couldn't figure it out!

XenApp 5's Web Interface

So I upgraded to Citrix XenApp 5 last week at work... painless as ever although it was a bit more awkward than usual since it was purely the additional components that had been upgraded.

Not much has changed... except for the XenApp Web Interface. For years this has had the same look... a bit plain and boring. So as I'm finishing off setting up Secure Gateway, I navigate to the site and up pops this shiny blue loading graphic!

The new interface is black and shiny, with shiny blue graphs and lots of Web 2.0 stuff such as drop-down menus and messages. A great improvement!

Only problem now is that I need to find some nicer icons for my applications... the current ones just aren't shiny enough!

Peter Griffin in 'The Club'

How surprised was I to find Peter Griffin from Family Guy sat at the bar in my local?

Amazing!

Acer Aspire One

I recently took Currys of all places up on one of their special offers. I'd been thinking of buying an Acer Aspire One netbook and then I spotted the Currys offer - basically a VAT free One!

It's fantastic! I tought that the Asus EeePC was pretty great but I never liked the screen size on the 701 and the other models are way too expensive IMHO.

The One beats the Asus EeePC 701 hands down. The screen rocks (you can see full width web pages - see t gallery below for an example). I don't even mind the oddly-placed touchpad buttons - the Eee's 'rocker-style' buttons get rather annoying when you keep having to jab at it.

The keyboard on the One is OK to use too. I've typed this blog entry on it and my fingers hit every key - the Asus' miniature keys are just too small for my fingers. Considering the larger keyboard and screen, the pictures also show that the One is only marginally bigger - in fact closed it is actually thinner!

Anyway, I've pimped mine a little bit - installed some more apps, tweaked the menus, added teh 3D Compiz effects...

I'll probably publish some guidelines soon for further pimping. For now, enjoy the gallery ;-)

Acer Aspire One Gallery

Dragonfly by the canal

This is the only pic I managed to get of the dragonfly I saw the other day... there was some random clicking going on as it shot past!

Anyway, this thing was huge.... I'm talking almost 6" from head to tail and the wingspan was easily more than that. Tom got a book out when I got home - as only he could - so that I could identify it and apparantly it's one of Britain's largest species.

Chris and Chappy

So from what we just heard ... Chappy has been rubbing off on Chris and Chris is constantly pulling Chappy!

You learn something new every day in The Club!!!

The Ploughmans Challenge

So we ended up having a drink and Wayne announces that he has some crzy hot chillies and chilli powder. Out it comes and he loads up a 'ploughmans lunch' bar snack with a load. Every credit to Blakey for doing it!



After Chappy suggests that it's far too hard to do, I foolishly agree to have a go. I really should have known that Wayne would try to do me and I probably ended up with about three timesa as much of the hot stuff... and boy was it hot?!?



Anyway, I managed it... stealing Blakey's crown from him with ease :-D

More YouTube Entertainment

Here's another clip of the fun that Sambo and Blakey got up to over the weekend.

2009 A True Story

On my travels about the Internet, I stumbled across a series of short films on YouTube.

2009 A True Story can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/2009atruestory and it chronicles the events after some kind of terrorist attack. It's pretty dark but all the better for it!

Pimping the EeePC

I have been loaned an Asus EeePC 4G (boosted to 1GB RAM) so that I can experiment with it to aid in the deployment of a load of them for a Lancashire schools project.

I have also added some ideas for ways to 'pimp' the EeePC... my idea being that you could teach kids to hack the configs and generally 'geek it up'.

In keeping with the open/free nature of these I decided to share some of my findings on the EduGeek Wiki too. Check it out at http://www.edugeek.net/wiki/index.php/EeePC_-_Linux_OS - I cannot take credit for it all mind.

Mobile Google Mail

This is probably nothing new but I've just discovered the wonders of mobile gMail. :-)

I have an LG Secret on Vodafone and all I did was go to http://m.google.com/mail and it took me to a page where I could download a little J2ME gubbin. Once installed (in the Games folder by default for some reason) this gives an even quicker way of managing your gMail account than through the standard mobile interface!

I now just need to find a way of making my gMail-hosted EduGeek email work as easily ;-)

Handy iGoogle gubbin

Just found a handy widgetty-thing for iGoogle that allows you to quickly post a blog entry (e.g. this one).

Sam has a dance in the Windmill

Unfortunately I wasn't there to see this - too busy selling Dave a 'puter. Anyway, Ollie sent me a video of the night's events for your viewing please ;-)

BTW - Ollie has a rubbish phone so sorry about the quality ;-)

Dancing in the dark in Salwick Club

Sorry about the poor quality but it was dark! It is still pretty funny though :-D

The things that people do at 11.30pm eh?

Blakey's Colar

No running away now Blakey!

EduGeek North '08 Conference Pictures

A selection of my pictures can now be found in my EduGeek.net albums at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/members/ric_-albums-edugeek-north-conference-2008.html - a few notes will be added soon (along with comments for the pics).

See if you can see Jenny the Horse too ;-)

Jenny the Horse on her travels again

This weekend, Jenny the Horse went on her travels again... this time for a walk along the Lancaster Canal. This picture was taken as she stopped off for a quick drink of water out of the canal. :-D

A wildlife walk (trialing Google Docs)

I took another walk today to photograph some of the local wildlife.

My camera had decided to go off on one when on Aperture Priority mode which was a pain... everything was under exposed! :-(

Anyway, the wonders of shooting in RAW allowed me to rescue some images and I got some good ones later by switching to manual and keeping a better eye on the shutter speed.

I have decided to add a selection of images using a Google Docs presentation. Here goes ;-)

Jenny the Horse

Named after Jenny at Document Express, Jenny the Horse was taken on a walk today. I thought it only fitting that a horse should have its picture taken in a field ;-)

Sorry Vista... It's turned out well now

It turns out that Vista hadn't shafted my PC after all... the rubbish Western Digital hard disk (that I had previously stolen from a Dell) had died in a major fashion. Being the system disk, this prevented any OS booting :-(

The only upside from doing this is that it forced me to buy a NAS - I got a bargain 750GB Lacie NAS (rackmount) for £160!!! I have put the Samsung Spinpoint from my external caddy into the media centre and installed MCE 2005 (yeas I finally found the disk).

I haven't quite finished re-instlaling eerything but it seems to be working like new again. The lack of Vista bloatedness is making it fly too!