I wish Apple would just stop it. They keep bringing out gorgeous bits of hardware. 4th generation iPods are iPods as I want them to be. Airport Express does cool things, iBook is pokey enough by far and small and cute as a laptop. You'd think that was enough but no, they went and and revamped the iMac into something I'm lusting over. No longer the ugly angle-poise thing, but a thing of beauty as well as function. And they start at a reasonable price! OK, you could get a Dell desktop with a 17" CRT for £400, but these G5 iMacs are more powerful and start with a 17" LCD, as well as being much much much smaller and better looking.
Having got about 4.5 hours sleep last night, between 01:30 and 06:00, due to being on call at the moment, I've been faffing most of today and slobbing in front of the telly. And drinking tea. And thinking, "Spamassassin is getting better at picking up spam." Which it is. And the recurrence of, "I turned down a job paying almost £63,000 per year." And I'm very very glad I did; even 'though it is quite a lot of salary really. I've spoken to a few people about what happened and the contract I received from the company (and no, I won't name the company) and the general consensus is that it was the right decision, especially given how much happier I am now that it isn't hanging over me any more. It was a learning experience and I got to talk with some good people in that company. I think the job itself was a good one, but it was just not the right company for me. That learning experience is still fresh and I can't help running over it once or twice a day.
Bring on the Olympics closing ceremony and then holiday not long after that. Ho! Li! Day!
Now I don't normally do memes, but...
I just love the idea of some of that.
More mail from Komplett:-
RMA 7000xxxxx: Returned product is tested OK with reference to the error message (no errors found). Will be returned. Started without any problems, tested with 3DMark 2001, 3DMark 2003 and BurnInTest (42 hours+ 20 hours).HOT cpu tester pro , PCMark04.
Burnintest was running while testing with pc mark04 and 3dmark03 (150 x) this is done for pushing the cpu to its limits. Tested on 2 different test benches. See enclosed test reports.
Nooooo! So, it isn't the CPU, mobo, RAM (I ran memtest on all of the RAM for hours and hours) or PSU (with both the old and new one, the symptoms are the same). I don't get it. Maybe it really _is_ a Windows problem. But that's illogical!
...but I think I have Spamassassin playing nicely with fetchmail and procmail. Certainly to the point where I'm happy to let it loose on my personal mail rather than just a test account.
If it behaves overnight and over the next few days, I'll write up how to make it work for the benefit of others.
Oh, and I made the second most difficult career choice in my life today and turned down an extremely well paid job. The circumstances were complicated and it was definitely the best decision for them as well as me.
From Komplett after I sent them an email to ask if they had received my CPU and mobo wot I posted off on Tuesday last week:-
Dear Sir,
We have not logged this as received yet but we’ll give it some time. The address you sent it to is a forwarding address and from there it gets shipped twice a week to our warehouse in Holland where it is tested by our technical department. Once we have tested it, appropriate measures will be taken.
If you haven’t heard anything after 10 working days from the day you sent it, please contact us and we can start a claim procedure with the couriers.
Best regards,
Komplett
*whimper*
One of the many many things I love about my iBook is the way that it Just Does Things Right. Thursday morning I thought; "Hmmm. I have here this Bluetooth USB dongle and a Bluetooth phone. I wonder..." So I plugged the Bluetooth USB dongle into my iBook and, well, up popped the "Internet Connection" setup box, on the Bluetooth tab. So all I had to do was type in the ISP phone number, username and password (optional) and click "Connect" (with Bluetooth enabled on my phone and the two devices paired) and it just worked. OK, at 9600, but hey. Here I am, updating my journal, reading the news and picking up all my spam.
Of course, the mobile coverage in the hotel is pretty patchy to say the least, so, er. Ah well.
So, it took from 12:20 to 17:00 to drive to Sainsburys in Cobham, buy some teabags etc., then up as far as Toddington Services (which has an M&S Simply Food!) then to Hinkley. Because it was raining. Well, OK, the M25 really wasn't playing ball either, but still. Beh. I really hope the traffic is less horrid on Monday. Anyway. There appear to be a few people here (at the Con) who are actually "normal"ish and have social graces and don't just randomly hug strangers. These would be the people I come to see as I'm really not here for the guests or events, much as the Convention is very well organised and jam-packed with exciting things for those who are.
Off for a nap now, as I was woken up far too early by people being noisy outside my (palatial) room from 08:00 to 09:45 when I finally gave up and went for a shower. Mmmsleep.
So there was this girl on the tube this morning. Quite trendy. With a nose stud. The problem was that it wasn't obvious that it was a nose stud because it was tiny and white. So, it looked almost exactly like a quite large, pus-filled spot. Ew.
I got loads done on Friday:
- New tyre on the front offside of the car; a nice Pirelli to match the other side.
- Bought expensive cat crunchies from the vet and booked them in for boosters before I go on holiday.
- Popped in to PC World to check out prices of USB things. They were more than twice the price of the same thing I can get online.
- Packed up and posted off the stuff I ordered from Komplett that was the wrong stuff.
- And packed up and posted the shiny, new, aluminium case from Overclockers which has a duff power switch. Bah.
- Went out for an early dinner before an evening at the Hat and Stick.
Hm. Why do I bother with a journal? It's just so turgid, isn't it?
Felicitations and all that shiny stuff.
The goodness of birthdays seems to have rubbed off a little after finding out that I'd ordered the wrong stuff from Komplett when it arrived yesterday. This morning, having argued with them yesterday a bit, Komplett have agreed to take back my CPU and motherboard for testing. Which is nice. But, of course, that leaves me mainboxless for over a week. Still if it turns out that it was either component I get a new one and if it isn't, then I try a new tack. The two sets of Komplett things are totally unrelated to each other, too. Confused? I am.
This summer is causing oddness with work. As there are only 4 of us on the on-call rota at the moment and I've booked a bit of holiday for 4 days in August and 2 weeks in September, I have only 9 days in the office in the next 9 weeks! (and I still have 8 days holiday to take before the end of the year on top of that.)
...and ordered a new case and PSU. I'm pretty convinced that my current PSU isn't delivering power well any more, given the random dips in fan speed and the whole thing just turning off randomly. Yes, these are not a cheap solution but they should stand me in good stead for my current hardware and the next upgrade I eventually make. Plus, they're quiet. The case and PSU I have at the moment are around 2 years old and the PSU really isn't a particularly high quality one. Me? Trying to convince myself I've done the right thing? ;o)
Oh and I ruled out memory being a (remotely) possible cause by running memtest a couple of times.
I'm now coming to the conclusion that it may well be not just a cooling problem, but something else. Maybe a power problem, or maybe a CPU problem. Neither of which is going to be easy to diagnose as I don't have a spare PSU of the correct type or a compatible motherboard to try the CPU in. This is obviously not ideal. The PC just powers itself off, seemingly at random times and the last time wasn't even at 100% CPU load like before. Thankfully, I have 2 other machines I can use, but neither of those are capable of or in a state where I can play games. Given that I've not played games in a while now, I really would like to be able to, especially with a week on call at the moment.
So, do I get a nice new case with good cooling and a better made power supply, or wait to see how the new CPU cooling works out? I really don't want to end up with an unusable gaming box for the whole week, so I'm kinda being pushed towards the new case choice so I can rebuild the machine on Tuesday. But if it turns out to be the CPU, then I've got a brand new (and not cheap) case when I didn't need it.
It's been pretty humid all week and ranged from murky, through fantastic thunderstorms to today's beautiful sunn[y|i]ness. This morning, crossing Blackfriars bridge (something I rarely get to do since the office move), the view East down to St. Pauls, The Gherkin, Canary Wharf and the Millenium Bridge (mmm, bridges) was beautiful; pinky-blue and gently hazy.
Had a lovely lunch in Cafe Rouge on Wellington Street and slept on the train on the way home (early to get back in time to be on call). And it looks like my desk fan is going to be able to do the job of cooling my poor, overheating PC until the new CPU fan arrives some time next week. On setting number 2 (of 3) it dropped the temperature from 73° to 62°.
Here's to hoping the weather does what it's supposed to and stays nice through the weekend so I can have a barbecue on Sunday with all the lovely food that Sainsburys will be delivering to me. Yum.
Spam Assassin really needs tweaking. It's correctly identifying about 30% of the spam I'm getting, but that's just not good enough. I'll fiddle with it during the week methinks.
Spamassassin is installed and running for a single user, not site-wide yet (if ever). I think it may be set too fierce. but we'll see how it goes overnight.
I've also integrated some old photos into my main photo album. Sadly, they are pretty bad quality scans of 4"x6" prints. Maybe some day, when I'm feeling rich, I'll get a bunch of my old negatives scanned properly and dumped to CD. But I do have over 100 rolls of film, so it would potentially be rather expensive.
Ooh! So, after getting home through the floods last night I was greeted by a letter from the Inland Revenue. *shudder* _But_. It said I don't have to do self-assessment any more. Yay!
Of course, when I installed the new instance of Horde on the Debian box, I entirely forgot about making sure that outgoing mail worked. *cough* Anyway, the exim, she now works. I was wondering why I wasn't getting responses to emails I'd sent.
Fabulous weekend away. Very much so. Lots of relaxing and eating and drinking with a bit of swimming and snoozing on the grass. Good food, good wine, good people.
Frogs and butterflies too!