jcm's blog

[ from the ``we-were-in-London...'' dept. ]

Escaped for a few hours this evening to London. Went to Tottenham Court Road (TCR), Computer Exchange, and ended up meeting a friend by chance in the Costa within Paperchase. That’s a cool Coffee house because they have mains on tap and the coffee is reasonable too. Read more…

I used to like Computer Exchange. Now I think I am starting to think differently – I mean, 70 quid for a wireless card! Nothing particularly reasonable either. Oh well, I did at least get an internal SCSI cable for one of the IPCs. Did I mention I picked up another IPC last week? Well, I did, it used to serve an interesting function but became a paperweight so I managed to get it and now it will be yet anothet pointless Debian box in my room

Wagamama was fantastic tonight, number 42 as per my usual. It was truly the best one I have had – I ended up thanking the staff individually for making it! Great stuff. I got a train back from St. Pancras at 20:55 and I am now curled up in bed with the Powerbook beside me – the wonder of laptops in bed. Yummy.

Go out and see 28 Days Later if you have not seen it already. If you do not like this kind of film – see it anyway New Star Trek film is out on January 2nd/3rd btw.

Jon.

[ from the get-a-move-on-jcm dept. ]

On route to Reading for the remainder of the weekend. I need to get my review and article finished today/tonight. I am writing a review of Debian on Powerbooks and a largeish article on W2K Active Directory to Samba migration. Read more…

The penguin costume (pictures soon) went down quite well. I have collected quite a bit already but those who promised sponsorship should get in touch soon because I will be sending off the donations this week. Rumours that I will wear such a costume to the next OxLUG cannot be completely dismissed.

So I am on the way to London and to Computer Exchange for browsing, before a quick coffee in Starbucks and perhaps some Wagamama as I go through Covent Garden. Then from Paddington I can catch a Virgin train now on the newly introduced service and use a mains point on the train to charge.

I think I may well upgrade the Powerbook to a 1GHz model soon as it is now continually bothering me. While they continue to make it better, I will have to upgrade. I must have the best of the best of the best Did you know that the Church Of Satan have an ongoing dispute with Apple over claims they are damaging Apple’s good name? It’s worth a look at their pages detailing what Apple is trying to do to them.

Jon.

[ from the continuous-upgrades-please dept. ]

You will think I am crazy (or alternatively you already think that I am) however I am planning how I would sell and upgrade the Powerbook to a 1GHz model. Plan of attack goes something like selling the old one for 1700pounds and then buying a new one at a cost of 400 pounds more. In the process I acquire a gain in Power, better graphics, double hard disk, internal wireless and double the system memory. Did I mention a slot loading DVD writer? Not a hugely bad deal really.

I will never be truely satisfied

Jon.

[ from the weeeeeee-fun dept. ]

I went Karting again last night, Hussein took some pictures. Motorola won, and had some funky team names – one called “Furia Fliers” (which got spelt as “Furia Friers” by mistake) amused me the most, was it a pun on what they do best?

Jon.

[ from the penguins-are-everywhere dept. ]

Children In Need 2002 takes place on Friday 15th November (tomorrow). I will be wearing a penguin suit all day in support of this event. Please consider a donation.

Jon.

[ from the home-sweet-home dept. ]

Meanwhile, back home on the ranch, jcm has fireworks and a lazy weekend interspaced with bits of work. I’m off out to do some more network admin tonight but first I need some food and a quiet nap. Hopefully I will be back in Nottingham by tomorrow.

I took Vodaphone up on their offer of a Nokia 6310i, cash back, and half my line rental for the next 6 months. I have an old Nokia 3330 for sale.

Jon.

[ from the solder-fumes-are-nice dept. ]

After a bit of hassle, I managed to repair a couple of IPC NVRAMs with Hussein. So his IPC is now working correctly, whereas mine appears to be dead. It’s not worth any more hassle so I will be getting another one either through ebay or a friend. I am tracking some SPARCstations at the moment anyway, because they’re cheap.

Hopefully I can upload some pictures of the NVRAM mod performed on both chips – but the gist is that they now have 2xAA battery holders soldered on via a removable clip so as to make the setup similar in concept to that on old PCs with AA battery backed BIOS data. MACs containing “dead” and “f00f” are not terribly interesting you might say – nor is a hostid of “c0ffee”…but it’s still fun.

Jon.