Wii Fun on New Year's Day

Lots of fun was had with the Wii on New Year's Day... the Raki (ridiculuous Turkish vewrsion of Ouzo) definitely gave an incentive to do well (with the losers having the opportunity to down a shot!).

We had the Salwick Club Bouncer...

Some hoola-hoop fun...

And don't forget the ski jumping...

Guitar Hero World Tour

I've neve played Guitar Hero before, but tmy brother ended up with a copy of Guitar Hero World Tour for Christmas and I decided to have a go.

How addictive is that game? OMG... 3 hours I must have played for!!!

Some of the music is pretty amazing which helps matters but I have beaten the fingers on my left hand into submission and my left-middle finger had a bruise on the end! :'(

Finding Fiji

I managed to find a download of Fiji (aka the Microsoft Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 - or whatever it is called this week!). Why did I go looking for this?

Without this pack, Vista Media Center doesn't 'do' interactive ('Red Button') content on digital channels and this is a feature I happened to want at the time so that I could watch the snooker. Associated with this is teletext support.

I'm not sure if the other features will be of much use (different file format for TV recordings and DVB-S support) but the updated guide looks a little nicer - although they have annoying moved the clock but I'll get used to that - and it takes less clicks to set up the tuners.

The Citrix XenServer 5 Upgrade

Ever since the release day of XenServer 5, I have been trying to upgrade my two hosts. This should have been a painless task taking less than an hour.

My first problem was that the documented uprade method was wrong... rather than putting a host into maintenance mode, all the VMs had to be moved to a pool member from the pool master and then the pool master had to be upgraded first.

The problem I then hit was that one of my storage repositories (SRs) would not reconnect. The full account is documented here but basically, the XenServer hosts decided that the LUN was wrong.

I have now got that fixed and it's all running smoothly. I activated the new HA features - how easy? Clickity click and it was done!

The new performance monitoring is amazing and everything seems good.

Time to virtualise some more servers I think ;-)

Jinnette on Fonejacker

So Jinnette, the old deputy steward of Salwick Club was on Fonejacker the other night. Rather funny, even if they did chop it down by about 25 minutes!

For some reason Chennel 4 won't let me embed the vid so you will have to follow the link instead... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xLID8JQaEzU

The EduGeek marketing trip

On Tuesday I embarked on a trip for EduGeek with the aim of drumming up a little sponsorship for BETT 2009.

The trip began by travelling down to Brockenhurst in the New Forest to visit Navaho (the makers of the excellent Mediacat digital signage solution).

The hotel that Navaho booked me into was called The Watersplash... it should have been called Fawlty Towers... it was AMAZING. I was greeted by a lovely french girl who spoke english OK but really struggled to understand english. When she showed me to my room she was extremely apologetic about the single cobweb that she had missed cleaning earlier and the proceeded to try and grab it - however she struggled since she was rather short!

I then went down to the bar for a drink... where I couldn't pay because the french lass didn't have a key for the till (I did pay the next day!). A couple (I believe the only other guests at that point) came down for their evening meal. A table had been set in the corner and in typical Fawlty Towers style the couple complained that it was a bit chilly in front of the window... the girl simply smiled, agreed and laughed. After a few seconds she realised that the couple wasn't too amused and asked, "what is chilly?" and they explained that they were a bit cold. "Not a problem!" she exclaimed... and proceeded to drag the table nearer to the fire!!! You couldn't teach it!

Anyway... James and Chris then appeared and we went out for a nice curry followed by a couple of pints in a local pub. The genius that is the New Forest meant that on my way back from the pub I had to walk through a small heard of cattle with disturbingly large horns!

The next day I had another chat with the lovely french girl - she probably still has no idea what I said - and a nice breakfast. I checked out of the hotel and drove 1 minute down the road to the Navaho offices where we had an extremely productive meeting discussing how we could help each other at BETT and how I was using the Mediacat in a school environment.

After the Navaho meeting I did the trek to Reading where I met up with Mandy and Nathan from Westwood Associates for lunch followed by a trip to an academy in Reading for a brief meeting about how we could help each other at BETT. Again, quite productive.

Then the epic trip home to try and get back for snooker in the evening... it didn't happen :-(

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?