T O T K a t - 2 0 0 6

Not impressed

Red Bee Media Ltd.

Not exactly inspiring, is it?

Wheee!

I drove down Oxford Street yesterday. That was fun.

Birthday looming... and the new name/brand of our company was going to be revealed on my birthday, accompanied by champagne etc. But that's been brought forward to Wednesday instead. Bah. Still... Sainsburys had 2x Freixenet black for £8 in the petrol station on Saturday so I'll have some of that instead :o)

Oo. Mobile cheaperness.

Finally, Orange have realised the importance of retaining existing customers to the point of creating incentives to stay. About bloody time!

So anyone on pay monthly contract with Orange should go look at what the offers are.

Not useful, thanks very much

You don't really expect to have to act out what is your request to a member of transport staff because they don't understand English and then have them pretty much ignore you, drag a rubbish bag across your feet and walk off without a single word or gesture, just a blank look. And there's nothing that any bleeding-heart liberal can say to change my viewpoint on this. English should be spoken by people working in England. Even if they aren't public-facing. How can they function in society without a word of the language? And where does it leave me in this encounter? With a wet rubbish bag trailed across my foot and my request not understood, acknowledged or even a polite smile and a shrug. And I'm sure that if they had been deaf or hard of hearing they might have at least made an attempt to indicate that after it was clear that I wanted to engage their attention for some reason.

Job vacancy

Once again, my team needs a new engineer:-

Job

- Installing, maintaining and managing servers (Linux, Solaris and Windows on SUN and Intel hardware)
- Installing, maintaining and managing databases (MySQL, Oracle and Postgres to a basic/intermediate level)
- Installing, maintaining and automating delivery of Interactive Television applications and services, including content production systems, user entry systems, synchronisation engines etc.
- Installing, maintaining and advising with web content production systems
- Backups and systems monitoring
- Consulting to and advising developers/architects/producers/project managers
- 24x7 support of systems on a rota basis (with additional pay)
- Troubleshooting and fixing systems to SLA standard
- Pro-actively enhancing, improving and automating systems/procedures to improve service resiliance and reliability
- Liaising with clients and 3rd parties

Skills/experience

- UNIX (Linux and Solaris)
- Databases (MySQL, Oracle and Postgres)
- Scripting (shell and perl)
- Web technologies (web servers, application servers, scripting, protocols)
- 24x7 availability environments
- >= 2 years experience administering/supporting IT or broadcast services.
- Both independent and team working.
(- Windows 2000 and 2003 server)
(- DVB standards)
(- Interactive television platforms)

If you, or anyone you know, might be interested feel free to ask me any questions. Application form and full job specification here.

MORE!

More4 looms...

Subject: A lineup change has occurred
From: The TiVo Service
Date: Mon 10th Oct 2005
Expire: Mon 24th Oct 2005
The TiVo Service has detected a change in your lineup.

Added:
162 LIFESH
165 MORE4
285 BABYCH

If any channels have moved, the scheduled recordings on those channels have already been moved to the new channel for you. If any channels were removed, the scheduled recordings on those channels have been deleted. To browse your new channel lineup (and check "on" the new channels if you receive them), go to "Messages and Setup", then "My Preferences", and then "Customise Channels", and then "Channels You Receive".

Thank you for using the TiVo Service!

--The TiVo Team

Tooooooooys

So the graphics card has a ma-hou-sive heat sink on it. Really enormous and heavy. And it goes a bit quicker than the old(!) Radeon 6800 did. The whole machine is zippier, except for being totally disk-bound now. And it's cool. As in doesn't overheat. At all. It really is cool; I've not managed to push the CPU over 36° and that was overclocking by 8% (overclocking by 10% maked the thing hang when I tried it). The graphics card VPU gets to around 46° and I've not actually tried overclocking that yet.

And the hilarious thing about the mobo, is that you can ask it to talk to you at boot time. As in, it'll speak about any POST errors or to say that everything is fine and it's booting the OS now. Cheesey. Turned off now than you very much.

Still, DAoC goes like poop off a scoop now, so I'm happy.

*dribble*

Toys arrived. And they're _heavy_. The graphics card has rather a monster of a pair of heat sinks; one on each side.

OhpleaselettherebenoDOAparts! 3 hours of meetings to sit through this afternoon before I can go home and play. *fidget*

New toys

Where are they, dammit? I ordered them yesterday morning and everything! (*cough*)

Given that my PC's CPU has been overheating even after a new fan was fitted and then I under-clocked the damned thing... I had to fix it somehow. The fact that to closely replace the existing component(s) would cost a lot of money, I decided to make it all a bit more upgradable in the future for a little extra money on top.

Goods Ordered
-------------
x 1 - Sanyo-Denki 120mm Fan - 3 Pin (FG-002-SY)
x 1 - AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3000BPBOX) (CP-117-AM)
x 1 - Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-087-AS)
x 1 - Sapphire ATI Radeon X800 GTO Ultimate 256MB DDR3 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-096-SP)

Givf! Now! So I can play games over the weekend for the first time in _months_!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-chaaaanges

At times I almost enjoy my job. Scary. I'm certainly very busy these days.

Anyway, the new name for BBC Broadcast will be announced (and the accompanying rebrand launch will happen) in a few weeks and we're champing at the bit to find out what it will be. How lame could it be? Only time will tell. It's all being kept very secret and 1st November we'll be told, along with the rest of the world. It might even be a good name, but good company names are hard tocome by these days... all the good ones have already gone.