How full?

So we all had a good feed at The Fusion Room for Caroline's birthday. I think some people are starting to feel the affects though ;-)

The Windmill does take-out

2 pint cartons for taking your beer home! Genius!

The instructions are maybe a little much though... You don't deserve to drink if you think holding the carton upside down is a good idea!!!

Straight from the 80s

It's like Gav knew that we were going to be going to the 80s bar and he dressed appropriately!

The EduGeek giant and his wine

Shaun (the EduGeek giant) struggled to drink his red wine out of a normal large wine glass

More Success at The Windmill Quiz

Whilst I'm waiting in the pub for Chris I thought I'd blog about Tuesday's quiz...

This week the team comprised four and the questions were a lot easier than last week - last week was particularly difficult!

Although we almost came joint first (a re-count was called) we ended up second by one point :-( All was not lost though as this achievment won us a round of drinks :-)

All in all not bad then, eh?!?

So Tom had chicken

We eventually got seated and had some food. The food was rather nice... Tom expected a little more medat on his chicken though ;)

Eating out for Dad's birthday

We decided to go out for a meal since it is Dad's birthday and Will suggested 'The Bobbin Mill' at Buckshaw.

After getting lost we're all here now but we aren' allowed to sit down and eat because there's no tables (see picture!)

Anyway... Only another 30 mins to wait.

Blogtastic Birthday Gift

Caroline and Gary gave me a lovely birthday present that was crying out to be blogged! :-D

Picasa and Picasa Web Albums

I decided last night (whilst we performed miserably in the pub quiz) that I would post a few of my photographs to the web for all to admire.

The easiest way to do this was to use Picasa (which I already use to organise my pictures) which allows easy upload to Picasa Web Albums. After a few clicks, the job was done.

I've even added a couple of albums on the right hand side for you to enjoy if you can't be bothered bowsing all the way to http://picasaweb.google.com/ric.charlton.

Blakey had an accident!

Lol!

Quizzing

Well the quiz team returned from their holidays last week and we resumed our greatness on Tuesday!

The picture round was easier than usual for us - all Disney characters ;-)

Anyways... we won! Not bad eh? 61 points! So a free round of drinks was ours.

Now we just need to win the higher and lower game... it's up to about £150 now :-)

Finally!

Tom, my brother, has finally found himself a job.. It's taken ages!!!

He's going to be an environment officer working for the Environment Agency in Penrith on a decent salary too.

Playing with HDR

I've seen a few examples of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography lately and it looked pretty wicked... so I thought I'd have a bash.

I found a tutorial on Instructables that explained the process using the GIMP. This was the result using photos of some snowdrops in the dark.

Touching the music

As some might be aware, my local recently closed - we're still not 100% sure why. For this reason, I've had to find another and I had a choice of two - The Windill Tavern near Clifton and The Hand and Dagger near Treales. I chose the Windmill because it's easier to get to while the weather is a bit rubbish.

The Windmill is about a mile from my house and it takes me roughly 15 minutes to walk there :-( This is about 14.5 minutes longer than it took to get to the club!

To make my walk slightly more bearable, I decided I would listen to some music. The obvious choice was to use my phone. I have a 1GB microSD card which I chuck a load of albums onto in MP3 and WMA format. The sound quality is OK. The only problem was that the earphones that come with the Touch Pro are pathetic to say the least. If you imagine a pair of headphones without the headband, you wouldn't be far off the earphones - they're huge and don't even fit in my ears!!!

The Toouch Pro only has a slightly mangled mini-USB connector or everything to plug in to so the first thing I needed was an adapter. Flea-bay to the rescue and £2.50 (inc. postage) later and I could now plug a 3.5mm jack into my phone. Bargain!

Then to choose the earphones. Only one choice really... the Sennheiser CX-range. Unbelievably I managed to find a set of CX-500 earphones for a meagre £17.50 delivered (another Flea-bay bargain - new and in the box!). Considering these earphones are £60 at Richer Sounds it's amazing!

I've been using the combination of the adapter and earphones for about a week now. It's brilliant. The earphones produce excellent sound... nice and basey and excellent top too. Background noise is irradicated too - possibly not a good thing when you're walking but as long as you're careful....

Falling into the mobile Internet trap

Lately I have been increasingly using my phone for mobile Internet goodness.... it was just getting to be a pain using my LG Secret.

I spotted a bargain-priced HTC Touch Pro on flea-bay and decided to have a punt... £250 later I had a nearly new Touch Pro with car kit and a PAYT SIM (which I have no use for).

The first thing I did was use the new Google Mobile Sync Beta to get all my contact details on my phone. This was dead easy and my phone was soon set up to sync the contacts and calendar!

Next came email... very important! Again, this was super easy to setup and I was soon sending and receiving mail.

Next for mobile blogging. I use Blogger (another great Google App!) and decided to use the Mail2Blogger function rather than the 'other' way of working Blogger simply because it made the most sense to me. An example is the post of my tidy office below ;-)

The next thing I needed was an IM client but I needed it to be compatible with XMPP (for the EduGeek.net chat server) and MSN. Ideally I wanted Pidgin for Windows Mobile but this doesn't exist :'( After some Googling and seeing some rubbish apps, I stumbled across Palringo which seems to do the trick quite nicely. My only criticism is the random noise it makes when it receives a message - although this is probably configurable if I really looked into it!

Finally... a few important favourites for Opera Mobile... my work email uses Zimbra which has a mobile web interface and of course EduGeek.net has a mobile interface which can be easily accessed through http://edugeek.mobi.

My 'tidy' office

A pic of my 'tidy' office (before the new shelving)... Sent from my mobile.

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 ;-)