One step closer to victory! The current state of play now is that I’ve removed the original filter but left the housing and have the kit attached to the end of the housing:

The next step now is to wait for the correct pipes to come down so I can remove the original housing and run the induction kit down the back, making the engine bay look a lot neater and, well, cooler. The sound it makes now is very nice, a lovely deep whoosh sound when you accelerate!

Stay tuned for part 3 (most likely after Christmas though!).

My hosting company is Dreamhost; the last fora I used to help admin used them extensively and they seemed fast enough, plus I got a free domain via a promotional code. Upon sign up I was given the promising words of, “99.9% uptime!” and “reliable hosting!” so it seemed like a sure thing.

The past week or so however theres been a few spots of downtime and when I woke up this morning and noticed the site was down I decided to see if I could find any info on it. I googled “dreamhost down” (as the main dreamhost site was down as well) and found a status page for Dreamhost, hosted by Dreamhost presumably on a different server – http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

Well, this lovely site details every issue they encounter and their resolution with the added bonus of timestamps and the ability to comment. Clicking on the comments were amazing though, for example:

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

How can you bill for December with a straight face after all this mess?

C’mon dreamhost, i know its cheap hosting with you guys but this is beyond a joke now! 

Oh wait, did I mention these comments appeared between 2 and 5 minutes after the service went down? The reason behind the issue was an issue with the core router and the service was down for a total of about 1/2 hour. Thats 1/2 hour to get an on-call cisco engineer into the office and resolve the issue at what was 11:30pm. I dont know about you, but thats a pretty rapid response time.

It does make me wonder about all the people complaining though. Yes, we’re paying for a service and yes we expect that service all the time if possible but problems do happen, especially incidents like this which arent directly Dreamhost’s fault. I was amazed at how many people were demanding a month’s free hosting because of some downtime, or announcing that they were going to move to a fresh hosting company as soon as they could, and part of me couldnt help but feel that if another issue happens next month I’ll see the same people complaining with the same style of comments.

As some of my friends know, Ive from time to time made a delve into the world of literature as a writer. I breezed through both my Standard Grade and Higher English at school relying on creative writing pieces to flesh out my marks and I won a free book from Waterstones for gaining first place in a regional creative writing competition.
However I lack motivation and ideally need someone to constantly pressure me into writing. Ideally, if I had someone say “I will give you money to complete this book.” I would pull out all the stops and complete a book. Thats most likely not going to happen.
I recently signed up to a writers website based in the UK, filled with writers all in the same boat (though admittedly with significantly more drive than me). They also offer courses on how to write correctly, something that Im considering taking – years of reading Robert Rankin and Terry Pratchett has given me bad habits when it comes to writing so I could do with a swift refresher on how I should be writing.
Anyway, I’ve started writing a new short story which has no title yet – heres a snippet from the intro (only done 2000 words so far though):

Jack stared blankly at the desk in front of him, trying to recall the chain of events that had led him to his current state. His current state being that of one tied to a chair in a basement covered in horse blood and feeling rather sorry for himself. The evening rays of sunshine struggled to push through a grimy window, the only source of light in a cramped basement though serving little more than to illuminate Jack and a few dancing dust motes.
Suddenly, a hand slapped down on the table in front of Jack, upsetting a collection of tools and scrap metal, not to mention severely upsetting Jack who was feeling rather hard done by as well as sorry for himself. The owner of the hand leaned forward into the dull pool of light, revealing a heavily bearded face wearing a very angry expression.
“You’re in a lot of trouble kid; you owe me 20 kilos of Orc Dust, a horse and a sum of cash yet to be decided by my esteemed co-workers.” A couple of sniggers from behind Jack suggested that the co-workers were, although esteemed, not feeling too charitable. “So what do you have to say for yourself?”
Jack looked up blearily with red-rimmed eyes, “Do you accept credit card?”
The hand previously used for table-slapping became one used for Jack-punching. As the room spun around him and began to fade, Jack became acutely aware that today was probably not the luckiest day he’d ever had.

What is it about barmaids that drive men to perv over them regardless of how they look? More research must be done into this strange power barmaids can summon over drunk men!

I’m in the local pub at the moment and just had to witness some drunk idiot try and speak French to a barmaid who was presumably French. It was painful to say the least, especially considering I had to wait for him to finish his attempt at woeing her before I could get served.

So with all the recent dev blog posts over at needforspeed.com and general hype building created by the beta sign up page being discovered, it seemed that a closed beta was imminent. However in a podcast tonight with John Doyle, the senior producer for WO, it was revealed that this was not the case and that the beta would not begin till into the new year, possibly as late as March. One of the devs, VancouverBlade (Andrew Collins), confirmed that the beta sign up page had been up for testing and was not an legitimate sign up page.

So yes, extra all around! A lot of questions were answered though (including some of my own): I asked if the same customisation options found in NFS:U2 would be found in WO and also how the payment model would pan out, like if we were going to have to pay for cars or just the parts for example. The responses were that we can expect to see the customisation options found in the likes of Carbon (so pretty much inbetween Undercover and NFS:U2 quite neatly!) and that the payment model hadn’t been decided yet. Now, I dont know if this means there is still a chance the game could become pay per month – I personally hope this does happen as even a small token payment monthly and then car part purchase on top for example would still be acceptable and make me feel like I can rely on the games future more – but we’ll have to wait and see.

Awesome point though – turns out a good recently accquired online friend of mine, Kaizeras (who was responsible for some of the best WO sneak preview youtube videos), shunted one of the dev’s unknowingly in one of his videos. That be a pretty decent claim to fame right there in the NFS world!

My christmas present from my lovely other half this year is an induction kit for my 1.2 8V Punto Sport. The power gains will be barely noticeable but it will have a nice throaty sound and generally make me feel happier. Anyway, as we’ll be away for Christmas this year, we decided to swap gifts early so it was with great excitement that I prepared to fit it. It was a quiet afternoon at work and although there was a light drizzle we (myself and a co-worker) decided it would take 5 minutes to do it. 

Can you imagine my sadness when it didnt fit straight on first time round? After standing in the now pouring rain in the car park trying to remove the existing factory fitted air filter, we established that a) the kit would never fit the way the manufacture intended as the engine bay was too small where the carburetor sits and b) the aluminium pipe they sent as a cold air feed would be ideal to change where the kit could sit except they sent a plastic one instead (which we cant risk sitting on a nice hot engine…).

It was also discovered that the kit didn’t allow space for a breather pipe to fit in so I have to order a filter to go on it as well as try and persuade the manufacturer to send me the correct part! Looks like this little bit of fun will have to wait till next weekend now.

Seriously, old people should not be allowed to drive. I just watched an old lady try to park behind me on an open road only to decide she didnt want to park their anymore and pulled out right in front of an Audi (which honked it’s horn unsurprisingly).

A quick test to see how well my Twitter-esque on-the-go iPhone posting works out.

My monthly mobile phone bill is stupid. To give you a run down, I have a Blackberry 9500 and an iPhone 3G: the Blackberry is on a £20 “Corporate Blackberry” contract (needed to have it connect to my works Blackberry Enterprise Server) and a £30 contract on top of that to give me so many minutes and text messages and to allow me to have recieved the 9500 for free. The iPhone is on a £50 contract which gives it so many minutes and text messages with an additional £10 ‘booster’ pack which gives it unlimited data bandwidth.

So, every month Im paying Sure (Cable & Wireless) £110 – thats even if I dont use my phones – for the luxury of having a phone for work which gives me my emails instantly and the ability to text and call friends/family without worrying about running out of credit. Paying such a price though, I expect a decent quality of service and till a few months back thats exactly what I got.

The first harbringer of doom was a text that came through to both phones from Sure offering me free text messages on new pay-as-you-go deals. Fantastic but Im already on a contract with two phones, so such a message has no use to me. Since then, every week (roughly) I’d recieve a similar text offering some amazing deal of which either I couldn’t use, didnt care about or didnt affect me remotely (like offering me unlimited data when I already have it).

Today was the last straw though. As I received two messages both saying I could text from abroad without incurring charges I pulled up the Sure support website and searched on how to stop these annoying spam messages. Unsurprisingly, I found no information so I decided to email their support:

Good morning,

 

Is there anyway to opt out of receiving the spam text messages from Sure please? Although they aren’t exactly causing me any issues, they are a bit of a nuisiance and generally they relate to things that I cant get the benefit of anyway!

About 5 mintes later (seriously! cant fault the response time) I received this:

Cute. I liked the replacement of the word spam for “promotional”. Anyway, I quickly sent the word stop to 101 and I received a lovely text back informing me that I had done this silly thing of opting out of recieving promotional messages but should I wish to recieve them again in future I just had to call a number!

I think Ill risk not knowing what offers you can get on pay-as-you-go in exchange for not being disturbed randomly on my phones. The thing about this whole event is that the texts werent exactly ruining my life but they were something I should never have really got in the first place. After you buy a car for example, you dont expect the dealership to call you once a week with new offers and in that same concept I dont expect to be badgered constantly about new offers from my phone compay. I can read the website and the adverts that are everywhere for them, and at present Im happy with my service. If they wanted to give me the service for cheaper, they’d mail me about it so why do they even bother texting me about services that I cant use? It reminds me of the Bill Bailey joke, loosely quoted:

I used to be a door-to-door salesman selling doors… that was a tough gig, “Ding-Dong, do you want to buy a do- oh, you already have one, never mind.”