I'm in Wales, on Holiday. GPRS on my mobile is great, although I'm actually meant to be using it for "Work". On a "Sunday".

Sun, sea, sand here. Actually, not much of the sun, but that's getting better.

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Well, it's Wales, so it wouldn't be the same if it didn't rain. If you're wondering, it did - this morning, and quite hard.

Taking the cue from the charactaristic summery weather, I did the only thing I could do. I went shoe shopping. Not only that, I also bought shoes! I'm excited, but mainly because I don't have to do any more shoe shopping for another 3 years at least.

Oh well, never mind.

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I'm now back in England, that place which is next to Wales. I had an eventful journey back: After planning to catch the 4pm from Stockport yesterday, I (and everyone else sitting on the train waiting to leave) discovered that it had been cancelled as they couldn't get anyone from Manchester to work the train. Something about a bomb threat. Anyway, the 14 million of us standing on the platform were told to board this small 2 coach thing to Crewe and change there. Watching as about half of the 14 million people attempted to board this and mostly failed, I decided I'd wait for the 5pm. The 5pm turned up, and I got on along with the other 7 million people who weren't currently somewhere else. Virgin do this cool thing where they only charge £15 to sit in first class at the weekend, so I asked if they were still doing that. The nice person who seemed to be in charge said that today the upgrade was free because of all the problems they were having. There are 8 coaches on one of these trains, and 3 of them are first class. There were about 5 other people sensible enough to take the free upgrade and share 3 coaches between them, and 7 million people who were stupid enough not to take the upgrade and therefore shared 5 coaches between them. For once, I had a rather happy journey in my own personal carriage. Oh well. :) The only problem I had was that Vodafone doesn't seem to have been invented in the midlands, so internet access was patchy. Annoying, but unavoidable unless some sort of technological revolution were to happen. In the midlands.

After fighting my way across London, I managed to do a 2 things this weekend:

1. Laundry
2. Make some of the music soundtrack for some show which is going to Edinburgh

...Ok, I know they won't let me get away with that.

APOCALYPSE THE MUSICAL

It's amazing! It's wonderful! It's fab! It's got dancing cows, prostitutes and nuns! It's coming soon to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (at the C Venues), and it runs the whole of August! It even has a website! Here! Come see it! I'll give you a discount* because I'm part of it! Yay!

*May not actually be true

There we go.

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Well, it was always going to happen to me one day. A little while back, I bought a Maxtor 300Gb hard disk so that I could put things on it. Everything was lovely, and I kept all the files for this cd I'm making on it. Anyway, yesterday, working on the cd, and I go to save something when it hangs. Then it says it can't get at the network drive. So I think the server's turned itself off or something, and ssh in to check that it's alive. It is alive, it's just that samba has stopped, and the log is saying nasty things like "I CAN'T WRITE TO IT!!!! OH NO!!!!! IT'S DYING!!!!!!!!!". This is bad. After rebooting the server a few times and have it not detect the disk, I am then resigned to the fact that I am actually going to have to do all this work again. (In the midst of this, I break my laptop and spend 3 hours fixing it again).

So the next day, I start to work on the cd from scratch again, but check the disk anyway just in case it was tired and needed some sleep. To my (only mild) surprise, it's detected and seems to work. So I copy as much stuff of it as I possible can whilst the log is saying "YOU SHOULDN'T BE DOING THIS!!! I'M GOING TO DIE AGAIN!!!!!" and manage to get pretty much everything off before it dies again. So now all I have to do is RMA a disk to Maxtor, and get a new one. I might also buy another one as a backup just in case this happens again. It's some sort of conspiracy to get money out of me, I can tell....

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Well, I'm sat here ready to RMA my disk (see below), when I need to run the maxtor diagnostic program on it to get a "status code" or something.

I plug it into one of the office machines, run the diagnostic, and it tells me the drive is perfect. And then I find out that the linux kernel has a bug in it which with certain controllers makes it look like the drive isn't readable at some points. Feeling very very very very annoyed now, I buy a new controller. An expensive one. But it should solve my problems, along with doing fancy things at the same time. Pah.

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I should say something, but not a lot has been going on.

I wrote an RSS ticker, for work. Work seems happy with it.

I'm going to Edinburgh on Monday, by train, to start the show. Should be fun, although I did have to put £816 worth of hire stuff on my credit card which I'm therefore owed. That did get me a whole £4 in cashback though. Bonus!I'm shooting things tomorrow. With a shotgun.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm......

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