Paul Nicholls

Came accross two superb bookmarkable sites this weekend…

Firstly, http://objectiveministries.org/kidz/, which i hope for everybody’s sake is a joke. I won’t say too much about the site (partially at risk of offending anyone who might take it seriously, partially because its just best left unsaid).. but do play dress up lamby the Christian lamb!

Secondly, a vaguely more serious site, http://www.myheritage.com/ it invites you to upload a photo of your face, matches it against a database of celebrity faces and tells you who you look like!

My results were somewhat disturbing…

• Mick Jagger : 61% Likeness
• Zhang Ziyi : 58% Likeness
• Christopher Lambert : 54% Likeness

Fed up of my crumbling CMS, and too busy (ok.. lazy…) to rebuild I figured I’d let someone else do the hard work, and migrate to blogger. Apart from a painful few hours trying to get the style to look vaguely like my main site the transition was fairly easy, just a bit of copying and pasting. I think I’ve got everything worthwhile from the old blog, if not, its not lost - just forgotten.

You might notice the blog isn’t hosted on my regular server, saps2.mine.nu, thats because I’m beginning to move all my “stuff” from saps2 (which is my home server, low bandwidth and generally slow and ugly) to saph.co.uk, which is a shiney high bandwidth host I pay for. In the short term the site will jump between the two hosts, but eventually saps2 should end up purely for dev work and odds and ends.

I’m hoping this move to blogger might stimulate me to blog more - and about more interesting things, as site updates will remain on the “home” page, and the “blog” has been seperated as a different entity.

Hah, I said I wasn’t going to talk about site updates, but I think I’ll just mention some of the exciting stuff we’re working on with iTunes2MSN at the moment (yes… “we”! There is now a team!) On the one hand I’ve got automated uploads sorted, so now your images can be popped straight onto the internet (hosted on this server) with no fuss, ready to use on blogs, forums, etc. On the other side, Ben’s making major breakthroughs with Windows Media Player. The current plan is for a complete rebuild (which will be under a new name, since iTunes2MSN isn’t really appropriate anymore..) due out in “The Summer”.

“The Summer” … I think I need to start making a list of things I’ve said I’ll do over The Summer. I keep putting everything non-essential off until then, “Oh there’ll be plenty of the time in the summer, what with not being at school any more…”. I seem to be forgetting when doing this that I’m supposed to be working over the summer (thrice, with 3 different jobs).. and having a holiday .. and visiting all sorts of places, and rebuilding my CMS, and migrating to the hi-bandwidth server, and working in the garden, and fitting central locking to the car, and rebuilding iTunes2MSN, and having a social life, not to mention everything else I’ve already forgotten.

So at work we’ve had a Dell machine gradually dying, it randomly locks up whenever it feels like taking the video display with it - leaving us with a blank screen and unresponsive machine. This has been getting gradually worse over the last two months until finally this week it gave up completely and won’t stay on long enough to log in.

Googling for generic symptoms got us nowhere, and on the verge of re-installing windows we tried googling the Dell model number … and lo! People with our problem exactly on the Dell Community forums. So I’m sceptical, bulging capacitors?… never heard of it… But, open up the case (after fighting the stupid buttons to make it upon, damn GX270s..) and sure enough, all of our “X” headed capacitors are bulging and leaking!

Feeling somewhat proud we’d figured out what was wrong, and justifying the money we’d just spent buying a replacement machine we left it at that. The Dell machine was committed to The Great Spares Pile to be awarded a new mobo next time we happened to be at the suppliers.

With the excitement of yesterdays capacitors long forgotten, today’s work including trying to fix a machine which was experiencing trouble with random reboots of ever increasing frequency (now at the stage we rarely make it past the POST). Its not the hard drive, its not the memory, or the chip … so it looks like a mobo issue. Off chance I happened to notice the capacitors… they were bulging too.

A quick look on Farnell, and some tips from badcaps.net and it looks like we’ll be attacking it with a soldering iron after Easter Note to self, perhaps revise some more on capacitance for forthcoming Physics exam?

Due to popular demand, yes I’ll do my revision sheet thingys again this year and publish them here… Hopefully starting next week when I’m off work. Happy now Manpreet?

What A Night!
Weeks of preperation (and lack thereof) came to climax on Friday March 3rd for the Rainham Mark Battle Of The Bands 2006.

After numerous disasters during the day (amps dying, mixer dying, emergency trips to maplins etc) we botched the sound system together in a way that it vageuly worked, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.

OK so the sound wasn’t perfect, (everything was routed through a lesser amp, with the main one seemingley dead) but it was still a superb evening.

The Long Weekend were amazing, even if they did trash our nice stage layout And with numerous bands from the medway Towns playing the quality of music from some of the groups was overwhelming. Of course I should mention The Space Peacocks who won the evening, as judged by our panel of experts including KMFM; but also The Scopes, Old No. Eight, Something Like Serenity… and how can I forget The Unknown, bless their little cotton socks. (As well as many other fantastic groups… I won’t mention them all.)

All in all a brilliant evening, and over a hundred pounds was rasied for charity. The soundtrack and DVD will be released shortly, we’ve just got to sort out copyright issues with The Long Weekend, since they went and got themselves signed!

Cited from my journal at last.fm.