Show update
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Well it’s taken me a day or two to catch up but here ’tis. The show was awesome fun – we got there at 10 am just as the gates opened, and we didn’t arrive home until 1930, so it was a big day. B managed to stay awake in the car all the way home until about 30 seconds from the driveway, at which point he passed out and we couldn’t wake him up so we put him to bed 
Started the day with a ride on the dodgem cars – I filmed it as until my back is fixed dodgems are not the safest mode of transport for me! Incidentally – LOVE the new video camera. Have I mentioned the cameras yet? If not I’ll do that shortly… B had a ball and we watched the footage last night which was really cool. It’s pretty special to be able to have moments like that preserved so we can watch them whenever. After that it was on to the giant slide – a source of terror for him last year, but this year he loved it. Got some great footage of he and R coming down the slide together holding hands. Another go on it at the end of the day saw him use up all four tickets (you get four for 3 bucks I think it is) and loving it – cackling away to himself as he got to the bottom.
We wandered around a bit – R and I got fake tattos airbrushed on. I got a chinese character on my inner left wrist (the character for Eternity) and R got a cool phoenix on her shoulder blade, which looked sexy. B got bored so we went to have a look at the inflatable shark – this massive slide which involved the kids climbing up to the back of a “wave” and sliding down the charks gullet to be spewed out onto the remnants of an inflatable boat the shark was supposed to be eating. Quite an impressive thing actually – and B enjoyed it.
One of the most fun things was the aero jump, a ride where the little ones bounced on a trampoline while attached to a harness with big bungees so they went really high. There was a nice young guy standing on the tramp B went onto (there was a helper kid on each one), and he looked after him. B went pretty damn high and loved it – chortling and yelling “yikes!” all the time. Again, more great footage and some nice still shots
We had lunch, meandered about a bit and went to a few different places. We wandered through some of the arts and crafts displays – there was an awesome selection of calligraphy to look at. Some of it was pretty amazing, and a fair number of pieces were in gaelic, which was interesting. Then we discovered the book city hall – book city had a massive sale there, most books 50% off, and 30% off the whole purchase So I picked up about 70 dollars worth of books for $14.60 which I was quite pleased with. Next time I think we’ll do two show runs – one for the normal rides etc and one with just R and myself on the last day to pick up as many books as we can – that way we don’t have to carry em about while we’re at the show, and they’ll be pushing to move them cheaper on the last day 
After that we went moseying again and looked at some showbags, B had a pony ride and we went to see the shrek show. Unfortunately the queue was incredible, so we skipped it and went into the pets place instead. There was a case full of beautiful bengali kittens, which a guy was having fun with getting them to chase a feather thingy. Loads of gorgeous cats about the place, and then B got to hold a rabbit and look at some snakes and lizards. He seems fascinated with lizards – maybe I’ll get him one as a pet one day I’d love to have an iguana just loose about the house. Especially for the fright factor of having a house guest sitting on the armchair, casually look upward and have the daylights scared out of them seeing an enormous lizard perched atop the bookcase staring at them >:)
We played some of the carnival games – I won B a little monkey on the darts, and he had a go at a couple of things. The carnies were really sweet and helped him out, ensuring he got a prize but the best was a young irish guy. R was wearing my Celtics cap and he saw it straight away and mentioned that we’d probably be lucky because we’re Celtic supporters – as was he So he helped B get the balls into the bucket by continually passing him one back and finally catching the last one and dumping it in there! So B picked an enormous white tiger to carry off home and was well chuffed with himself. I scored myself a Kermit on the darts so I was very happy – wanted to get something for R but she was being all sensible hehe. Next time I’ll just do it anyways.
We bought showbags, and an inflatable superbat for the little one. He got a Shrek showbag, which included a woolly hat with shrek ears on it which he immediately stuck on his head for the rest of the day! After we were done with everything we caught a cab round the corner to see ‘Big Michael’ and Sian which was nice. R and I were completely exhausted – as was B but he wasn’t going to admit to it.
Finally we went home and counted our goodies, then eventually R and I collapsed into bed. All in all a wonderful day – I had a brilliant time and I’m looking forward to doing it again
One more sleep
Only one more sleep till the show! I’ve never actually been this excited about going to the show before – now that I’m going with R & B I’m really looking forward to it. See the animals, go on some dodgem cars, few rides, eat rubbish, buy crap. Sounds like a wunnerful day to me! I’m determined to come home with at least one creature for my collection at work, and I want to try and win something for B – probably on the shooting galleries as they’re the only ones you seem to have any kind of chance on hehe.Anyways it should be fun – and we’ll get to use the new cameras! (more to come on the cameras…)
Noisy gits
[Rant Begins]
I catch the train to work early in the morning. I get out of bed at 0500 (or 0510-0520 depending on how long I need to argue with myself) and get myself down to the train station by 0600 so I can go to the gym every morning at work. It’s all going farily well, except there’s one particular burr under my proverbial saddle (and when you have a saddle as big as mine, that is a real problem).
Every morning, a couple of stations after I get on – three people get on the train, always in the same carriage. I get in the front carriage of the train because it’s the only one I’m pretty sure of being able to get myself a seating section of my own, which I prefer. They always get into the front carriage too. The trio consist of a large lady, her medium sized husband and a thinner older guy – in themselves, innocuous enough, feasibly harmless. But once they’ve seated themselves (occasionally even as they board the train) they begin rabbiting in a steady stream of italian at the very top of their voices, and don’t let up even for breath all the way into the city. I have noise excluding ear buds on my mp3 player and I still can’t drown them out. IT’S SIX O’CLOCK IN THE BLOODY MORNING PEOPLE, HAVE SOME GODDAMN CONSIDERATION AND SHUT THE HELL UP!
Or at least lower your voices…. please. No really, it gets me all emotional and everything. Being awake and on public transport at that time of the am is traumatic enough without that kind of volume…
[Rant ends]
Alas poor weekend, I knew him, Horatio…
Weekend is over. All over. No more weekend. I spent the whole damn thing fixing my machine 
On the up side it’s now completely back up to scratch (except for a postgresql install which I only remembered this morning). I would have had a partition image made and burned by now too if ntfs wasn’t such a royal pain in the arse. I’m now working on resizing my winblows partition so I can create a couple of extras for dumping my images on (I can only mount ntfs readonly from the rescuecd – the captive ntfs filesystem doesn’t work >:()
Started the personal power cds this morning – they’re pretty interesting. I’m quite excited about doing the program so I’m looking forward to the next one – done half of my assignment already, the rest (finally doing the damn dishes!) will get done this evening. With luck I’ll end up with a few moments to myself this evening to play Kotor again – I’m very much enjoying it Great storyline – good enough to distract me from the fact that I’m playing a party based game, although I must say the system is very good. There are a number of little features in the game such as the “Rapid Transit System” that make it a lot more playable than many similar games. The RTS for instance lets you “Return to Hideout” whenever you’re out and about, and from the hideout you can “Transit Back” which will take you straight back to the place you “Returned” from. Makes it a lot more tolerable than having to walk some ponderous distance every time you need to report back to base.
Same thing goes for party selection – whenever you’re out and about you can just change your party selection and the relevant people appear/disappear – obviously the game skips the bit where you’d go back and get them or whatever, and for me that makes it much more enjoyable. On top of all that the inventory is shared – no matter who picks something up anyone can equip it, which makes soooo much more sense! And there’s a veritable shiteload of the game left to play! Happiness… well, true happiness would entail me getting another gig of ram and a brand new video card to play Thief III, but beggars can’t be choosers….
The Straight and Narrow
Sigh. I’ve reinstalled SuSe 9.1, and all available updates, which is nice. It’s running happily now, and I’m busily downloading the kde 3.3 rpms as well as a rescue cd iso, which contains a program called partimage. Partimage [partimate.org], as it turns out is a Ghost style clone for linux – and of course it’s free This time I’m taking no chances. I’ll get the rescue cd burnt, then when I have everything installed I’ll make an burn an image of my root partition. And from now on before I do anything drastic to my poor machine I’ll take a fresh partition image BEFOREHAND so if I cock it up yet again then I’ll at least be able to recover quicly and not lose anything. This weekend will also see the setting up of rotating rsync snapshots – more on that shortly.
Bits and pieces
Bah. I spent a grueling number of hours last night trying to get back my data from the buggered partitions. All in all I ended up with several hundred numbered directories in the lost+found dir, and had to wade through the lot trying to find something I recognized.
I managed to surface a lot of my crap – the majority of my mail etc, although I can see that some dirs have gone missing. Got my docs back and downloads, plus the majority of Scruff’s flatmate’s data although I don’t know if it’s all there either. Man I feel stupid. I have, however discovered a very nice howto on setting up incremental backups using rsync, so I’ll be setting that up on the fileserver over the weekend to make 3-4 hourly backups and daily snapshots, keeping the last three daily’s and the last four hourly’s, so that should keep me nice and safe – I’ll add the same for R’s box and for the important info on the Lyricist server I think. It’s going to be a boring weekend….
Britney Spears Flashbacks
Well bugger me, I did it again. I came, I saw….. I couldn’t help myself – I screwed up my machine again I was trying to test a distribution of linux called Yoper [yoper.org] as it’s supposed to be very stable and fast, and looked like something that might make life easier for R, but I stupidly used parted before backing up. Turns out reiserfs isn’t too happy about being resized, and it shat itself. Woe! Now I have to see if I can resurrect it…. if not then it’s goodbye data. What a moron.
Second Best
Sigh. Well neither Thief III or Deus Ex II are going to work for me at the moment, so I resorted to installing KOTOR instead. I hadn’t gotten around to playing this one yet, but now that I’ve given it a bit of a whirl I’m quite enjoying it. It’s an RPG basically, with a slightly odd control system but it’s easy enough to get the hang of. The most annoying thing is probably the party system – but then I just hate parties in games – I’d rather do it all myself The other complication is that the universe feels very much like that of Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, but you’re not controlling the character in the same way – you don’t get to jump about and control the lightsaber etc etc, which is a shame. That said though, I’m enjoying it – it’s a nice world to look at and there’s plenty to do in terms of subquests and the like. Lots of storyline gradually unfolding, so I’m happy. Still grumbling inwardly about thief and deus ex though – god I need an upgrade.
That reminds me – turned out I was wrong about the number of spyware thingies that had managed to attach themselves to the winblows install in under 20 minutes – the final total was 30. Yup, “SpyBot Search and Destroy” found thirty of the little buggers. What a nightmare. However I now have firefox setup on it so I no longer have to deal with IE, and my gateway’s firewall protects me from most of the nastier worms that don’t need human intervention. Besides, I’ve booted back to linux and am sitting happily in my swanky enlightenment desktop waiting for an email from Scruff so I can get on with some work. Much nicer Hrm I should post a screenshot….
Insecure
Wow. After managing to pull myself together and stop flagellating myself for my installation based sins, I jumped on the net to grab a couple of things. I had windows 2K running for about 20 minutes, and by the end of that 20 minutes, IE had been infected with no less than 7 different kinds of spy/adware and solidly refused to actually browse to anything. My god how do windows users survive?!?!?! I was cursing at the screen constantly – now I’ve managed to download firefox and things actually work Time to get a copy of spybot search and destroy to clean some of the shite off this box….