The EduGeek Conference North 2006

OK... I got back this morning from my outing to Rochdale for the much talked about EduGeek Conference North 2006. So what was it like? I'll start at the beginning...

On Tuesday afternoon I finished work at 4pm as usual, grabbing a couple of terminals and some CDs as I walked out the door - these would later allow me to do my talk. I sat in the car, fired up TomTom and stuck in the address for Rochdale CLC and off I went.

The journey was going great - not too much traffic, used the correct lanes on the motorway, etc. - and here I was in sunny Rochdale. The lovely woman in TomTom then politely asked me to turn left, then right and then turn around - all within the space of about 3 seconds! At this point I knew that I was going to end up VERY lost.

I soon gave up and after 2 phone calls, lots of directions and a couple of laps of the block I eventually arrived at the CLC. Upon my arrival I found out that one of the PCs for my talk (a 'RM One') contains some wonderful new Intel network card which does not have drivers for Server 2003! This meant a VERY QUICK re-think! VMWare to the rescue again!

So I left Server 2003 installing as Tony turned up (8 hours after he was expected!). We then made our merry way to the Moorcock Inn. Upon our arrival, Tony announced that he had not booked a room! Russ and I explained that when we both told him to 'book the room,' what we actually meant was 'pick up the phone, ring the hotel and book your room NOW!'
Anyway, I very kindly allowed him to use the spare bed in my twin room... how generous am I?

So, Tuesday evening we had a lovely meal at the Moorcock and a few beers before Beeswax, Nathan and Mark left us.

Wednesday morning we were up nice and early and downstairs for breakfast at 7am. A very nice breakfast in fact - full english! Then off to the CLC for just after 8am to continue with the set up and welcome people. Of course a lot of people were late due to problems finding the place! Other than that all the talks went well (mine ran smoothly!) and reviews, etc. can be found at www.edugeek.net and www.edugeekconference.net. The food was good and people were able to do lots of networking - plus everybody went away with a prize (even if it was just a Netgear wifi sniffer). The biggest problem of the day was when I went to get a cup of water and crashed the water cooler! A swift powercycle seemed to fix it though ;-)

Following the conference, we all (well some of us) piled down to a local curry house and had a great meal. A great time was had by all and Oliis very kindly took care of the bill. Russ and I then went back to the Moorcock and had many more beverages.

A good night's sleep followed and another great breakfast before Russ and I popped back to the CLC to help Beeswax with the tidying up.

All in all I had a very good time and had a good chat with a few people and learnt a bit too. Now I just need to fill in the expense form for the hotel.

Time for an update

I thought, since it's my birthday, it would be a good time to update my neglected blog!

A lot has happened since the last post. Not least, the replacement of my old system for a new Dell Dimension 9100. I know I hat Dells but this was too good to miss for the money - Pentium-D 3GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard disk and nVidia GeForce 9700 GTX!!!

The new machine works brilliantly and Doom 3 looks fantastic on it! I'm also able to run several virtual machines simultaneously too using VMWare.

I have also upgraded and added to my camera equipment. I now have an awesome Canon 75-300mm lens with an image stabiliser. This has allowed me to take some brilliant wildlife pictures (which I will soon post). Another upgrade is the Speedlite 420ex flash. This flash is great and has lots of switches, lights, tilting and swivelling bits, etc. I'll no doubt never use it to its full capacity but it should allow me to take some great pictures since it works with the camera to work out the flash timing.

I'll post more soon about what's been going on - along with the pictures of the frogs!!!

I can see clearly now...

OK! On Friday I picked up my new specs and bought a new monitor (NEC Multisync 2080UX+ TFT). My new Gigabyte Geforce 6600 also arrived on Friday to complete my visual treat.

Since then, I've been mostly enjoying having the ability to see (after wearing no glasses for a month or so due to one pair breaking and me misplacing the others) and playing Doom 3. I say that I have been playing Doom 3, more precisely, I've been playing Last Man Standing which is an awesome co-op multiplayer mod for Doom 3.

My new graphics card and monitor really do make playing LMS a treat. The performance is truly amazing and I now just need a bit more RAM and a faster CPU to bump the performance another couple of notches :-)

Bundled with the card was also a game called Thief - Deadly Shadows but I'm yet to install that. I'll update on that and Earth 2160 (when it arrives) as soon as I've had chance to 'test' them.

The new graphics card

My shiny new graphics card with possibly the biggest heatsink I've ever seen - it's mounted on both sides of the card with a heatpipe between the two halves!

The League of Gentlemen - Live!

On Wednesday, we went to the Apollo again - this time for the League of Gentlemen. A very good (and rather funny) show.

The first half of the show was open auditions for the 'Communitivity' that the Legs Akimbo Theatre Company were to perofrm. The idea was that members of the Royston Vasey community would perform in a nativity play.

The second half was a pantomime featuring all the characters that hadn't featured so far.

It was great how they managed to get all the characters in and I would definately recommend it if you like the TV show.

A fun-filled weekend!

Well a busy and enjoyable weekend was had.

On Friday I went to watch the quarter-finals of the snooker at the Guild Hall. We watched Steven Hendry play David Gray - Hendry won - and we could clearly be seen on the TV. :-)

On Saturday I then went to the Apollo in Manchester to watch the Kaiser Chiefs. Not a bad gig. Supporting were the Cribs (appauling!) and Maximo Parks (not bad - although Caoline thought that they were rubbish). The Kaiser Chiefs performed well though - since I'm not a huge fan I didn't enjoy it as much as Caroline but they were good.

I was a little dubious about the parking, however. We parked down some street where we paid a guy in a yellow jacket £5 to look after the car. Sounds even more dodgy than it seemed at the time - if that's possible. At least my car was still there and unharmed when we got back to it so all was good. Caroline's a little concerned about leaving her car there on Wednesday when we go to see the League of Gentlemen (more about that after the event).

Sunday was then spent at home stripping wallpaper in my bedroom. I now have 4 walls and a window so the end is nearly in sight - there is a lot still to do before the house will be finished though.

The keyboard & mouse arrived!

Well the keyboard and mouse arrived a couple of weeks ago now and they're are brilliant - at least the mouse is. I'm not sure that the keyboard is wirth it but the bundle only coat £10 more than just buying the mouse and a cordless keyboard may come in handy at some point.

I'm yet to really test the kit since Doom 3 has been playing up - I keep getting jittery graphics. This could be due to only having a GeForce FX 5200 but it has worked fine in the past so it must be somthing I've done recently - I've been playing about with Omega drivers and they may have cocked something up.

The proper test can wait until I get a new machine - I'm just biding my time until I can get a cheap dual Xeon workstation. I'll then do a fresh install and see what happens. :-)

The singles pool tournament

I participated in my singles pool match at the Queens arms in Kirkham on Wenesday. As I feared I didn't make it past the first round. I made several silly mistakes - one costing me the second match. In fairness, my opponent was rather good and went on to win the second round aginst an excellent young player from the Wrea Green Institute.

Vikki faired better on Thursday at the Huntsman in Kirkham. She won 2-1 in the first round and then lost 2-1 in the second round. She was rather unforunate but played impressively.

My uneventful life

Well... other than ordering (and not receiving) my new mouse, I haven't really been up to a great deal.

Things are slowly getting better at work and the light at the end of the tunnel can now be seen - hope it's not a train ;-) My server room is nearly finished too so I'll soon be able to move them into their very own air-conditioned room which will be nice.

I'm off to uni on Thursday too - should give me a rest from the nagging.

Will it ever arrive?

I decided over a week ago to take the plunge and splash out on a new keyboard and mouse since I've never spent any money on either for many years. I decided that I may as well get one of the best available and plumped for the Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 3100 Laser.

Anyway, Ebuyer have totally pissed about with my order and I am still waiting. :-( How upset am I? Very!

I was hoping to have had a good play with it by now to let the world know whether it was worth the £65 but alas we shall all have to wait.

Another Ebay Bargain

I have received my new camera lens - another Ebay bargain. For £45 I have bought a 70-210mm AF lens (not a Canon one unfortunately but still quite good).

I will just need to go somewhere to take a couple of pics with it so that I can show off its splendar. Check back soon for an update.

Some good news!

I've finally started to receive good news about my network migration...

I today received several boxes of second-user thin client terminals (Compaq T20s) to replace all the machines in the sixth form ILC which simply refused to boot Thinstation (I think it's some wiered implementation of the embedded i810 graphics). I will also liberally scatter these around some of the other rooms.

Tomorrow, I should be receiving 30 brand spanking HP thin client terminals to replace the room of machines that refuse to allow Etherboot to run from the hard disk (God knows why this is!).

I've also heard good news about my new power supplies to the temporary and new server rooms so I will soon have a 50A supply for my UPS and I will be able to turn everything on!!! :)

To round things off nicely, I have found that my problem receiving email may not be at my end and Chris is going to be working with me next week to help me tweak and fine tune some stuff so that all will be completed! (Now I just have to get out of making Nedap cards)

The Saga Continues...

Well the network migration is continuing to go wrong. I still have no server room, although a temporary space has been found next door to where the server room will eventually end up. Unfortunately, there is not enough power to turn all my equipment on and I need a 50A feed for my UPS!

Incoming email is screwed - I can�t see any reason for this being the case and can only assume that something is going wrong upstream. Outlook Web Access and IIS in general on that server is also screwed though so hey ho!

Once I get the new server room and build my final 2 Citrix servers things should start to look up. Then I�ll just need to tweak the Citrix servers to iron out the remaining problems, retrieve the old shared areas from the old servers and fix Exchange.

Anyhoo - it does look pretty cool already!

Southport Airshow

Yesterday I went to the Southport Airshow with Caroline. I was a little reluctant at first, due to the ridiculously early hour that I had to rise (8am no less!). I�m glad that I went though because it gave me a chance to try out my new camera.

There was lots to see � including helicopters, model planes (look at the size of some of them!) and the Red Arrows. I think you can agree that some of the pictures look superb.

There was one slight drawback, however, in that we forgot to take any sun screen and I now look like a lobster (after it has been boiled to the end of time!).

Not a bad pic, eh?

My New Toy

I’ve finally found myself a new camera to help me take up my new hobby of photography.

I decided that it might be quite fun to get some gear that will let me do something more artistic than my Canon IXUS 700 (a damn good camera in its own right!) could manage.

Just in case I didn’t like the hobby as much as I thought, I decided to go for a 2nd hand Canon EOS 300D – a digital SLR. I found one for an incredibly good price on Ebay, complete with the 18-55mm lens kit, a 2GB compact flash card and a little bag to keep it in.

I’m rather impressed. Stay tuned to see some of the shots that it produces.

Blackpool Illuminations

The obligatory Illuminations walk had to be performed at some point.

As always, it was just a bunch of lights above the prom. Due to my laziness we missed the fireworks which were set off from a barge between Central Pier and North Pier but we did see hundreds of biker-types on Goldwings with flashing lights and crazy horns and the like.

We also had a quick walk along the beach in the dark. I do not recommend this - particularly since the tide came in ridiculously quickly just after we came off the beach! All in all, not a bad night out and all this walking must be doing me some good! :-)

A sensible set of signs...

I spotted this on the walk back from Povpool. Remind me what you use to play bowls. :D

The Bank Holiday Weekend

In order to take advantage of the bank holiday weekend, Caroline came 'round last night. We had a fun-filled evening watching some more episodes of Most Haunted - a genius show, with Derek Accura cracking us up more and more with every word he uttered!

Anyway, one of the places that the Most Haunted team visited was Blackpool Pleasure beach - the Ghost Train to be exact. Caroline had the great idea that we should go to the Pleasure Beach today and for some bizzarre reason I agreed - the Pleasure Beach is somewhere I would never normally go!

Anyway, we had quite a fun day with a ride on the tram down to the Pleasure Beach and not reasonable lunch in Yates' - I have a pie-type thing and Caroline had pasta. We paid an extortionate amount of money at the Pleasure Beach and went on several rides including the Big One (which wasn't all that it was cracked up to be IMHO), the Grand National (that thing is unsafe) and another roller coaster which didn't even have safety bars (a good job that we were wedged into the tiny carriages cos that thing was insane!).

Incidentally, we didn't see the ghost of 'Cloggy' which Derek was rabbiting on about, or any other ghosts for that matter!

As can be seen, I managed to get Caroline lovely and wet ;)

The Wonderful World of Driving

I took my car for its MOT today - £40 well spent!

Due to the LPG-ness of the car there is no emissions test so the test was done in double quick time. We then had to wait half an hour before the stupid computer system would accept the results from the test. I mean... the mechanic had enough time to make a phone call, have brew and perform half of the MOT checks on another car (including the emissions test).

Anyway all was well cos the car passed with flying colours - just need to spend £100-odd on tax plus get the cam-belt changed and a service done.

As if all this wawsn't bad enough, i received my new license today. The stupid medical boffins at the DVLA have now decided that a 3-year license wasn't short enough. Despite the fact that I haven't had any epilepsy-related problems for over 7-years, I now have to have a review of my license after a year!