I just drifted out of green street it was bloody awesome! Cars had to get pushed out but the guy was like ‘if you think you can get enough speed up go for it’ – so I did! Think the punto side sliding round the corner cleared most the snow!

Jack ran round the corner into the office, desperately waving a cordless telephone and breathing heavily, to find his boss looming over him and grinning maniacally while holding a heavy ring binder.
Before Jack could cry out, the ring binder cracked down and sent a galaxy of stars into orbit around Jack’s head. With a slow almost cartoonish effect he folded up into a heap as his boss leapt over his prone form and darted back out the office. Jack collected himself and ran after him once more.
After a few more minutes of chasing, he eventually had his boss, Ricky, cornered in one end of the office, “Please, Ricky, you need to take this call!”. Outside the window behind Ricky the sun was shining through a clear sky and birds spiralled in the lovely breeze but inside the building the atmosphere was tense and stuffy.
With theatrical grace, Ricky raised his arms and crowed, “You cannot conference what you cannot see!” before casting his arms down sharply. A loud bang exploded into life and the room quickly filled up with smoke, blinding Jack’s vision with thick black clouds.
As Jack fanned the smoke away with his free hand he moved forward to find Ricky was no longer in the room but a quick look out the now open window showed him to be madly dashing towards his car in the distance.
With a sigh, Jack raised the phone back to his ear, “I’m sorry John, can we reschedule the conference call for later please?”

For those of you who haven’t already been passed it via email or read about it on one of the many sites this link has appeared on:

http://lilysussman.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/im-sorry-but-we-blew-up-your-laptop-welcome-to-israel/

Essentially, for those who tl;dr it, a lady went to Israel and got stopped by the border patrol police who then, after heavy questioning, decided to fire 3 shots into her Mac laptop under the belief that it may have been a bomb. To the rest of the civilised world we are all well aware that this isn’t exactly normal practice – even if it was a bomb, firing 3 shots into it is certainly not the way to establish whether it will go bang or not.

However, reading through the comments its interesting to see the different points of view. 90% agree that its retarded, 10% believe that the border patrol acted perfectly rationally. I posted a response to one such idiot and instantly realised how stupid I was being – if these people think shooting laptops will solve problems, what chance do I have of convincing him otherwise? Even if there was a bomb inside the laptop, firing 3 bullets at random isn’t a surefire way to detonate it!

Anyway, the blogger is still travelling through Israel and promises to update with her compensation claim on the laptop and anymore run its with the might of Israel.

A quick test post to see if my twitter link up thing works. If it doesnt first time, Im giving up (for serious).

Rebuilding an ISA server on a DL140 G3 – thank you very much Alexis for having created a packaged win2k3 iso with all the drivers and the license key preloaded, it’s made my morning a lot smoother!

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!