I'M ON A BOAT MOTHERFUCKER!

Over the last week or so I have discovered the visionary and hugely important works of The Lonely Island. Their back catalogue is expansive, and I have yet to download their album, however a few of my favorite videos of theirs are below.

New Gadgetry

I just got a new phone, on a disgustingly high tariff. But the phone... Oh it makes it so worth it. The HTC Touch Diamond 2, a thing of true beauty. Anyone who's looked into buying a Smartphone in the last 9 months will know of two products, the Apple iPhone and HTC Touch Diamond, both of which are considered the cream of the Smartphone market. The Touch Diamond 2 is essentially the same as the original, it still has more or less the same features and still runs on Windows Mobile 6.1, but with a number of improvements. The screen is larger and runs at a higher resolution, it has a 5mp camera, an improved AGPS receiver, longer battery life, uses a revamped version of HTC's Touchflo3D over the top of the windows OS and has a microSD slot instead of the 4gb built in storage the original had. Having no internal storage doesn't seem like an improvement initially, but considering you can get an 8gb SD card from EBay for about £10 this is a definite step forward in my eyes. Also, the outer design of the phone is a lot nicer; The buttons on the lower front have been downsized and set in brushed metal as opposed to shiny black plastic, and the tacky looking uneven back from which the original took its name is now flat. The overall size of the phone is slightly larger, but also flatter and sits nicely in the pocket, and it's surprisingly light even with the battery in.















I'll take this over an iPhone any day, despite the fact that it isn't included in the whole appworld hype. Windows Mobile OS seems a lot more flexible than the Apple software and the whole thing is a little more compact and (in my opinion) better looking. It also connects nicely to your Windows PC with no driver installs, so long as you have Activesync, for transferring files or using
as a modem to get online.

Other news... not much. Beach party tomorrow night, should be fun.

Terrathorn

Wow, for once I have something of interest to post about, or at least of interest to me. There's a local band where I'm from called Terrathorn. They have been around quite a while; I remember the first time I saw them live was at a charity concert at a town hall supporting a Ska punk band. For a pretty brutal thrash outfit this struck me as unusual, and I was very young at the time (still in school) so they blew my mind all over the walls. Terrible mess.

Anyway, I've seen them at regular intervals ever since and gotten to know them quite well. That is, until about 8 months ago when they seemed to just disappear. Turns out they were recording an album, and I caught they're first show back last night. It was the most violent local gig I’ve been to in a long time, and they're new material sounded amazing, although they didn't neglect to play the old classics Unit and Jane. None of their new stuffs up, but you can check them out at their MySpace.

Anyway, here's a video of them live. I can't listen to it as I'm at work and this PC has no sound, but the quality's probably terrible and it doesn't look like one of their more lively shows anyway.

More random videos

Once again I've no idea what to post about. My Bro's arriving from Dubai on Sunday with his wife and my Nephew, so that should be a laugh. Generally when me, my Bro and Nephew get together we indulge in innocently boyish pleasures - When I was in Dubai it was quad bikes, but in the more confined habitat of British Suburbia we'll have to think a bit smaller. Fortunately I have at my disposal two descent remote control cars, one electric one petrol, and a remote control hovercraft, so we should have a laugh.

To make up for this post's lack of bulk, I'll fill it out with some videos.

At a loss again

Not sure what to post about, but work's fairly quiet so I have nothing better to do. I just found out technical support where I work is moving to a different office miles away. While that sucks for everyone else here, it's actually quite lucky for me for two reasons. Firstly, the final date that support down in this office will officially cease to exist is the day I leave. Secondly, we have a couple of guys down here this week getting trained up to take over the incoming calls as of Monday, which means I’ll be able to kick back, relax and wait for my notice to be up. Good times.

That's... about all I have to report.

Neglection

Well now I feel bad, neglecting the blog for almost a whole week. Fact is, I've not had much to post about. There isn't much interesting crap left that I can think of, and I'm trying to avoid making this one of those disgustingly self indulgent diary blogs where people write down what they did today and how it makes them feel under the pretense that someone, somewhere gives a flying fuck about what they ate for lunch.

With that in mind, I'll keep to the juicy bits. The girl I went to the fair with, mentioned in a previous post, came out with me on Friday and we went back to my place afterwards. Suffice to say that it was a very fun evening, and morning after, and I have some epic scratches on my back to prove it. I'll be seeing this one again.

I've handed in my notice at work, so I’m officially finishing on the 5th of June. There’s no turning back now, and that's only a month and a half away. I need to get my flights and first few nights accommodation booked for the EVT, the sooner the cheaper, so I'll probably do it at the weekend as Friday's payday.

Band of the moment is Die Apokalyptischen Reiter. They used to be a lot heavier than they are now, but I still like them.

FFFFFU

This morning I walked into a world of shit. As previously mentioned, I work for an ISP, and it looks like last night our radius servers committed suicide. This means NONE of our DSL connections work. That's over 11,000 very irritated users trying to call a helpdesk manned by only two people, all at once. I'm typing this while some inbred retard from the Isle of White yells down the phone at me about how his business is suffering because his internet connection has been down for an hour or so. There are a number of reasons why I hate people like this, the most prominent of these being:

1) Getting shitty with me personally or anyone at this company will not help their situation, and only serves to make them look petty and unprofessional. If you want to throw your toys out the pram, do it on your own time. Mine is valuable.

2) They're universally ignorant. Even when a company has hired an "IT Professional" to give them support on their network and talk to us on their behalf, the complete lack of knowledge is staggering. Stay away from anyone who has "IT Professional", or anything equally ambiguous, on their business card - This is a synonym for "Poisonous retard". Generally speaking, if they don't have a CCNA, they don't know shit.

3) Because of their lack of knowledge, they don't understand what "Service level agreement" means. In the UK, the only two providers offering independent services are BT and Tiscali. All other ISPs just buy connections from either of these two and resell them to end users and other resellers. So, all connections conform to the same two service level agreement contracts, as both BT and Tiscali offer the same ones: Standard Care, and Enhanced Care. Enhanced care is a 20 hour fix. Standard care has no time constraint at all and generally takes about 2 weeks to get fixed. Most people just get standard care because it’s a little bit cheaper, then go apeshit when their connection goes down and i tell them it's going to take forever to fix.

4) As another knock on effect of their stupidity, they don't understand what "demarcation point" means. There are a number of people who continually call in with dumbass problems with software and hardware not supported by us. When we provide an internet connection, if the router can connect, that is all we care about. If you can't get your laptop connected wirelessly, that's your problem. If you're server isn't working properly, that's your problem. If you can't configure MS Outlook, talk to Microsoft. If you can't configure wifi on your iPhone, talk to Apple.

5) They often get annoyed when they're expected to do something. Even things as trivial as rebooting the router can cause an uproar of complaints and stupid questions. "Why can't you do this remotely?", "Why can't you send an engineer to do it for me?", "Why should i have to find this out?” They don't seem to understand that it's their responsibility to provide us with any info we need, or that if they don't, we can do shit all to fix their faults.

At least the weekend was entertaining. Didn't go to the fair when I was planning to, as it was raining, so we went to IKEA instead. Fun. Went yesterday instead when it was sunny, was fun. House party was... crazy. I don't remember most of it, but I’m told there was excessive drunkenness, nudity and making out with minors. Curse my lack of sexual inhibitions while drunk.