Trent Speaks Out
Pete Fairhurst of Castle Mania sent me this interesting interview with Trent Reznor.
In The Burning Heat
Some of you may know that I have been having problems with my wireless network, namely the connection between the computers to the outside world. The router is a Belkin Wireless G Plus. Sometimes it would last for hours others it would be crapping out (technical term) every couple of minutes.
One thing I have noticed is that it gets very hot. So tonight after making an omelette for my tea I decided to MacGyver a stand from the egg carton. It seems to be working: There has been no crashes so far this evening and the temperature is a good 15 degrees (using the touch test) cooler.
Why companies don’t provide little feet to raise it off the surface to get decent airflow under it in case it causes crashes – like mine obviously did – beats me. Having my router crash doesn’t really want me to recommend it to my mates, does it?
Tacky But Fun Hunting Man Flu
To celebrate my new job, me and my fiancee decided last weekend to jump on a bus tour to Blackpool and Knowsley Safari Park. Unfortunately for us the weather looked like it was going to be rain with occasional rain followed by more rain. However despite rain for a good portion of the way there (through the beautiful Lake District), travelling to our overnight hotel and to the Safari Park, both Blackpool and Knowsley was blessed by small patches of sun.
Blackpool was gloriously tacky. We went up the tower, strolled around the aquarium, took a quick visit to the pleasure beach (though I never got to ride the Pepsi Max Big One), saw the circus and got to do what Mrs Bear has wanted to do for ages: Take afternoon tea in the Ballroom in front of the Wurlitzer and watch the dancers waltz and trot around the dance floor. She now wants to take lessons so when we next visit we can take to the floor like Fred and Ginger!
The Safari Park ride was a mixed-bag. Now I know that the animals will have a safe life free from poachers, but they are locked behind fences. My idea is that if they removed all the fencing and allowed the animals to roam and hunt as they do naturally – there are just a handful of lions, and one tiger as compared to hundreds of dear and carabose – then the park would be a lot more interesting. The lions and tigers will only kill what they needed and population numbers could be controlled a lot easier than they are now. Also it would remove that look that caged predatory animals have. Also the kids might learn something about the wild.
Anyway, the kids who were there enjoyed it, as well as the baboons who had a good attempt at dismantling the bus (the two top indicator lights were ripped out). But now both me and Mrs Bear have snotty “man flu”.
The great big Snowy Pink Ears bear adventure
We let one of our cats on the loose a couple of weekends ago (yes I am lax with the posts). He’s been pawing at the door and mewling for a while so we bought him a little body harness and a lead.
At first he was a bit apprehensive about it but after a quick wander around the garden sniffing everything he was quite calm and didn’t struggle as much the second time we took him out. Hopefully he will struggle less and less with time. As an added bonus he also cries less.
We still haven’t got the courage to let him out on his own though. Living in ‘Boro I saw a lot of dead cats/kittens and I couldn’t bear to have Snowy – and his big cuddles – gone.
Blog bounty
If you have my old blog, pre-crash in your cache then I will give you £2 (roughly 4 dollars) per post via pay-pal. It is payable on a first -come first-served basis. Send them (and your paypal details) here.
Missing Posts
You might notice that there appears to be lots of missing posts.
That is, and also isn’t, my fault. On Tuesday my friend sent me this rather blunt IM:
“Your website’s borked btw; WP is moaning about databases and its config file.”
So I contact my host and they told me I need to update my nameservers. That I duly did and the post from April 2nd was the last post saved. I contacted my hosts again and they told me to re-upload my database.
There’s a problem with that: I don’t have a copy of the database – I have never needed to back up my db as before this month I never really had that many posts. Besides a company specialising in hosting wouldn’t want to lose a single byte of their customers data would they? They’d have RAID-5 on their servers with daily diffs wouldn’t they?
Well they don’t exactly specify what they have on their systems but with all that kit (backup generators, UPS) you’d think they’d have RAI-5 and back-ups wouldn’t you?
Not happy about it but they say they don’t have a later version to restore from and I don’t have my own copy so I have lost essentially 1 month worth of posts. I’ve now automated daily backups but all I have done is locked the gate after the horse has bolted.
What did you miss? Well I had a reviews of Piranha! and NIN’s Year Zero. Had a rant about bus web sites using PDF for their timetables – which is useless on your mobile phone. A restaurant review, a book review, and a little bit about my Sea Monkeys.