graham.reeds/

Aching shoulders

I’m currently feeling it now.  Went Karting with work last night to F1K in Newcastle. Being an indoor arena I didn’t hold out much hope: My experience of indoor tracks are usually narrow with under performing karts. This is different.  The track width is about the same as that as an outdoor track, and while it is shorter than an outdoor track the karts are quick. If you are good you will be able to get under 30 sec per lap (I managed 30.8).

Final result: 2nd place and I had lapped everyone except the eventual winner who lapped me. Twice.

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HTPC Keyboard

Got myself a small wireless laptop like keyboard for my htpc as a remote control doesn’t always cut it.  I’ve been using it for a better part of a week now and here are my thought’s on it.

Firstly it is a KeySonic ACK-540 RF from Amazon.  At £30 it is hard to go wrong.  So what is like?

Lets start with the good: Firstly it is plug and play, and it doesn’t come with any CD’s. In and away you go. The trackpad is sensitive. It’s light and you can easily hold it in your left hand while operating it with your right.

The bad: The trackpad could of done with a little ridge between the scrolly pad and the actual motion pad just so you know where you are. The wake up time between it going to sleep and it responding is way too long for my liking.

I can’t comment on battery life as the 4-AAA batteries have lasted a week so far.

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Lost phone

…but thankfully it was been found at Carlisle station who were gracious to mail it back to me (after I sent them a SAE for £2).

So if you tried to ring me between Tuesday and today then you will probably got told that the phone was out of service as the first thing I did when I found it was missing was to get orange to lock it for me.

Now it is back alive and waiting for your call!

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RIP Damage

One of Middlesbrough’s more colourful denizens passed away earlier in the week.

You will be missed but never forgotten.

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Sorry for the lack of updates

…but normal service will hopefully resume.

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Worst service ever

We went out for a New Year meal with friends. They picked the venue, based on the rave reviews that people gave it. The place was the Happy Valley chinese restaurant in Norton. The service was bad. It was worse than the Akbar Dynasty. We were seated at about 9.00pm at the correct time, which was the only thing they got right all evening. This is a blow by blow account of that evening.

As a table of 9, we were probably the largest table in the restaurant, and we weren’t exactly sat there in silence. But after an hour no one had come to ask if we would like drinks, or even given us menus. So we went up and ordered them ourselves; a couple of bottles of wine, a few beers, bottles, etc. They told us they would bring it to our table. But nothing arrived, we went and asked and they told us they lost the order. We reordered. They bought a bottle and then went around serving every other table before finally bring us the rest of the drinks (as you will see this is action repeated).

At some point in here we got our menus. Essentially there was a choice of 6 main courses. So it was fairly simple, one of each and 3 extra of what seemed to be the most popular. Took about 30 seconds to decide. Pity it took them at least half hour to actually ask us.

So, just to recap: We got there at 9pm and we haven’t had anything to eat till 10:30pm.

First course: Soup. Chicken, ham, peas, mushrooms, and gelatine. Yes big lumps of gloopy jelly at the bottom of the soup bowls.  Not must appetising.  Then there was a massive wait until…

Second course: Prawn Toast, Spring Rolls, Kebabs in Satay Sauce, Salted Chicken and Crispy Seaweed. About as good as what you would get from Iceland.

Third course (Part 1): Strips of cucumber, carrot and spring roll, Hosin sauce and a 10 minute wait.

Third course (Part 2): Crispy fried duck and a 5 minute wait.

Third course (Part 3): Pancakes! By this time Mrs Bear was so hungry she even ate the duck, which still feels guilty about.

Fourth course (Part 1): A plate of pork slices and a 5 minute wait.

Fourth course (Part 2): All the other meals, and the plate that had held the pork was taken away.

Fourth course (Part 3): Two bowls of rice. By this time we had gorged ourselves on the other courses.

As you can see there wasn’t much happiness in the Happy Valley from our table. Seeing tables that we seated a long while after us (even it was just a couple) get served before us was wholly wrong. If they were understaffed, then that is their problem to sort out – they knew how busy it was going to be. The only thing that stopped the evening from being a complete loss was the company we had and we spent most of the night laughing – probably because we got drunk on empty stomachs.

As for midnight, we only realised about 30 seconds to go (or two minutes depending on whose watch you used). No count down or anything from the staff. We did the count down for the entire room.  We did get a bottle of Asda Asti for the table though.

• Service: 2/10 (The only way it could get worse was to not serve us at all).
• Atmosphere: 9/10 (We bought our own atmosphere).
• Food: 7/10 (It wasn’t bad, but we were so hungry it could of been dog food).
• Price: £35
• Overall: 4/10
  

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Happy New Year!

And a Happier New Decade!

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Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Everyone

I hope you didn’t get too many cups/mugs!

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Back To The Future

Well I have uninstalled Windows 7 and gone back to Windows XP MCE 2005.

There were too many problems with it from the lack of response to the remote control, the frequent and unidentifiable pauses while browsing menus in Mediaportal and my inability to get DXVA working.

The developers blog notes that MP isn’t supported on Win7 and now I can see why. Give it a few months and I am sure they will have it working smoothly – probably with 1.1RCx which is a long while overdue (the reason?).

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Resize a VirtualPC disk

My 10GB disk on my VirtualPC was nearly full to overflowing so I went looking on how to resize the virtual disk. There’s a free product that does this for you, but to quote an old song “I waved that thing all over the place, my boomrang won’t come back”. In fact I was using the app correctly but not understanding what the app actually did. This guide showed me the way.

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