Well, even though I didn’t get to bed ’til gone midnight last night I was awake at about 7am with a mild sinus attack. So, while waiting for the anadin to take effect I decided to start the process of installing the recommended patches for Solaris 8 on my SPARCstation 4.

After a false start or two I got it going.. by which time it was 9am and time for Broadcasting House on Radio 4. It wasn’t worth going back to bed, so I went downstairs and made myself a cumberland chipolata(sp?) sarnie for breakfast. I’d cooked the sausages last night as I needed to cook the whole lot in one go and could only eat 5 of them.

Anyway, after Broadcasting house I put my mind to using the good weather to do the “big” washing, that is larger items which are best dried outside. Hence, I put the towels in the washing machine and discovered that I’d very little washing liquid left. Oh well.. I’ll have to go out again today.

In the meantime, while the patching was in process and the washing was being washed, I looked into installing the SCSI CDROM drive I’d bought from Scan for £12. I opened the SPARCstation 4 and discovered that I needed an internal SCSI cable and a mounting kit.. so I turned to the SS5 next to it. I hardly turn this on anymore so I decided to pillage it for parts. It’s an older SS5 so has the slimline CDROM drive, unlike the later SS4’s. Anyway, after slight modification of the mounting kit and transplanting the SCSI cable the CDROM was alive.

I had thought the drive bezel looked suspiciously like the colour for a Sun Blade 1000 when it arrived yesterday.. Well, probe-scsi confirmed my suspicions giving in part of the product info string “SUNX32”. Hmmm… Maybe Sun or Toshiba are dumping their excess CDROM stock.

So, a trip out to get washing liquid and failing to find anywhere to buy Blutac and a wash of the bed clothes later, along with watching telly and having dinner I find myself at the end of the day waiting for my skillet to soak so that I can finish cleaning that.

I’ve now two last tasks to do tonight. Firstly to put the rubbish out and lastly to make the bed.

Work again tomorrow. Hey-ho.

Well, the entrails have been transferred from one case to the other now. I’ve still got to replace the motherboard chipset fan with one which isn’t out of ballance so as to stop that buzzing and I’ve as usual connected the LED plugs for the hard disk and power lights the wrong way around.

I still need to check out the ZIP drive as I think I might have pulled its IDE cable out.

As for the case itself, wiring all those fans was a bit of a nightmare. I need to build a proper wiring loom as some point so that the wrens nest can be cleaned up. Also, the tool-less PCI card system is a bit of a no-hoper. I needed to use screws in the end due to PCI cards having their PCBs higher than the top of the metal shield, preventing the clips on the securing mechanism from moving into position.

I’ve got the USB and firewire ports on the top of the case wired up. However, I have no way of testing the IEEE port. Oh well.

(Reminder to self… stop trying to make puns for Subject line.)

Well, let’s see. What unexciting things have I been up to this week?

Well, work’s mostly involved dull and boring things purely getting things ready for the new term such as spending 2 days trying to get quotes for consumables. Yes, it took 2 days to get proper prices out of 3 firms, all because they wanted to beat the others on price. Maybe it is a good idea to find the cheapest supplier, but I could have saved a whole load of time, and hence to the department almost as much money they’ve been paying me for that time, as I saved on cheaper prices by merely going to the first supplier.

Oh, and the rest of the week was spent creating new accounts and updating software. On that front I’ve still got KDE to update in the next week.

Other than this, I’ve had a couple of nights of extremely poor sleep patterns and met Kat and her boyfriend Stu in the King’s Arms last night.

Yesterday, I finally decided that I needed to replace my current PC case with one which is better at removing heat and is quieter. So, in the afternoon I went onto the Scan web site where I’d seen the Thermaltake Xaser III models which had had good reviews. Amongst other things they have a front panel with a temperature read-out and fan speed control knobs. As always, I looked on the “Today Only” page and saw that they were selling off SCSI CDROM drives stupidly cheap. eg. The Toshiba 32x one I went for was £11.16 (yes, that’s not a typo!).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, ‘cos I couldn’t find a way to get special delivery (to get Saturday delivery) on the items using the web interface I phoned them up and ordered those two items and 256MB of PC100 memory for the iMac.

At 8:15am this morning the whole lot arrived in a yellow and green Initial City Link van. Pretty good service, I’d say. Still, I did pay £15 extra for the priviledge.

My first impressions of the PC case are as follows:-

Good points

• Looks pretty good.
• Has lots of fans which are controllable.
• IDE cable management buit in.
• Nifty no-screw PCI card fixings.
• Nice, screwless drive fixing mounts.

Bad points

• The aluminium is rather thin and flimsy. I’d have expected sturdier stuff from an expensive case.
• The fans are fitted but each has a big power connector on their cables and all the connections are left dangling so that the purchaser has to do all the wiring up. I’d have thought that Thermaltake would have kitted the case out with a wiring loom with all the fans attached to their fan control front panel. It wouldn’t have taken much to do.
• The side panel is a sod to get off. There’s been no real thought in the engineering concerning this.

In Thermaltake’s defence, the basic chassis is one they’ve bought in and modified. Still, for such an expensive case, £111, I would have thought they would have at least connected up all the equipment they put into it rather than leaving all the wires dangling horribly. I’m going to have to get some cable tie pads to stick around the thing. I may even get some sound deadening matterials for the sides and top so as to stop the thin aluminium from drumming.

On the doors of the contractor’s safety barriers we currently have over our
lift doors at work we have the following notice:-

KONE

DANGER DO NOT ENTER

THIS LIFT IS BEING MODERNISED FOR
YOUR SAFETY AND COMFORT.
WE APPOLOGISE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE
CAUSED WHILE WORK IS IN PROGRESS.

Why do I have this urge to place an addition to this at the bottom?:-

SHARE AND ENJOY

Strange isn’t it?

PS. This was also posted to Bullet’s GENERAL folder, but who cares?

This afternoon i decided to go to the Harcourt Arboritum at Sutton Courtney. This was mainly as I’ve never been and partly because I wanted a nice quiet walk away from people and their noise.

Well, other than the £2 parking fee, which I feel is a bit steep for what is mainly a research facility and partly a public park, it was a nice enough place to spend an afternoon, if it were not for the constant din of internal combustion engines.

OK, I should have known that as the place was near a pretty busy road that there should be some road noise. However, this road seems also to be used as a raceway by a gathering of motorcyclists who love to produce the wail of high RPM motorcycle engines when riding. Add to this the pretty well constant drone of light aircraft overhead and the hiss of tyre upon tarmac and you come to realise that you can’t actually hear anything which isn’t man-made.

I walked as far as I could away from the road and lay behind the curtain of meadow grass and finally found at least semblance of quiet where I could here the jackdoors cacking, the pheasant croaking and maybe, just maybe, the call of a raptor of somekind. Even so, I only managed at most a 30 second break where I couldn’t here the drone of an aero engine.

Oxfordshire is such a crowded place, it’s impossible to get any peace.

On another front, I noticed when I got home that my car’s odometer now shows 20012.. ie. I’ve now driven precisely 20000 miles since I picked the car up from the dealer on the afternoon of the 9th November, 2000.

Just now I have been watching a flock of birds feeding in my garden. This is a rather unusual sight as the most I usually get are 4-5 starlings, maybe a single sparrow or a couple of blue tits passing by or a marauding magpie.

This morning it was different, a whole host of birds arrived all at once. They were mostly sparrows (which itself is unusual here) but in the host was at least one robin and a couple of birds I can’t identify. Alec, you may be able help out here:-

Size: Approximately the same as a sparrow.
Colour: Slightly countershaded light grey, darker on top.
Shape: Slight. Rather more streamlined than a sparrow with a sharply pointed head and a thin beak.

All the birds enjoyed searching through my honeysuckle for spiders and insects, along with my budlea(sp?) which has large number of old flower spikes which are now brown and probably full of insects.

OK. so, it’s been a week.

Actually, there’s been little point in updating the journal as pretty well nothing’s happened in the intervening time other than work and that’s been nothing to write home about, or even write about in a journal. Basically it’s been lots of little things which have not mounted up into anything which can be shown to have been done.

Happy Hour at work last night was the only social event. I was feeling too tired to go off to find food with the rest of them afterwards. Even so I wasn’t home ’til 9pm-ish.

Today I thought I’d treat myself to a hedonistic pleasure. Well, sometimes you have to do this sort of thing you know.. So, I went down to the cinema and watched Terminator 3. I even ate a very over priced small tub of strawberry ice cream. As you can see, I was being very wicked and totally over the top.

I’m currently sitting here on the sofa with the laptop on my, erm, lap, typing away with the light and the telly switched off, watching cotton wool clouds wander by in the dimming blue sky. All I can hear is the ticking of a clock and the very slight hiss of the hard disk drive.

Quark — You are subtle and mysterious and people
know very little about you. You like hanging
out with small groups of friends (usually 3)
who you are very close to. You are usually
friends with other quarks like yourself.

What kind of subatomic particle are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Now, what exciting things have I been up to this weekend, chaps and chapesses?

Well, other than getting series 1 & 2 of Coupling and watching most of series 1 last night and the “extras” on the second disc of series 2 tonight, I’ve mostly been fighting off a bad sinus attack and losing.

Last night I tried hard to not take Anadin tablets as they upset my stomach but unfortunately they seem to be the only pain killers which have any effect on the sinuses.. At 9:15 I gave in and took a couple and went straight to bed. Almost immediately I fell asleep, which was a good thing.

This mornign I thought that I’d got lucky and didn’t have the standard 2nd day of sinus headache, but during the day the tell-tale signs of pressure behind the nose started to appear and tonight I’ve again had to settle for Anadin for any relief.

That’s really been my weekend.

Still, it has meant that with the early night I’ve caught up on the sleep I lost last week from the strange dreams.

And now, it’s time to go to bed, ready for another week at the office. I don’t know why I bother sometimes. Life can be such a grind.

Just in case any of those out there who do happen across this journal want to know, Virgin Megastore in Oxford are currently selling series 1 and 2 of Coupling as part of their 3 for £25 promotion. The only problem is finding another DVD that you haven’t already got, that’s watchable and is worth the £8.33 it will effectively cost you.