Cricalix.Net

Well, Christmas has come and gone, and I’m apparently officially a year older (and perhaps wiser) as of yesterday. Spent Christmas at my grandparents in Devon, and had a very good time. We played 4 rounds of Settlers of Catan (recommended to me by one of UberCon’s boardgame directors), of which I won 2 :) Brilliant game, lots of fun and so much room for strategy - well worth playing if you can.

My house has a tiled floor in the kitchen, and to say that it is cool would be a major understatement. I now own a pair of sheepskin/wool slippers, thanks to a Christmas gift from my grandparents, and my feet are nice and warm. All in all, a good 4 day break, with good food and good company. Onwards and upwards into 2006 now I guess. Drop a few more pounds, eat a bit more healthily, stress less about work - if I can accomplish those three items, I’ll be a very happy camper.

I’ve been playing with the Dynax 5D (also called Alpha or Maxxum) that I bought for myself, and actually got around to reading the manual last night - it’s quite an incredible camera when you stop and look at what it can do. At least one review remarked that the menus are complex, but I really don’t find them that hard to use. Bonus point for me so far is that powering the camera up automatically puts the focus on infinity, so that combined with aperature mode shooting should give me some very large dof pictures. Well, in theory at least. The light hasn’t been good enough for me to prove that yet - brilliant frost on the trees today, but not enough light to get a good photograph :(

The mail provider for $work uses IMail to provide POP3/IMAP/Webmail access to our mail boxes. Unfortunately, when it’s faced with an inbox of 5000 e-mails (a script burped), it doesn’t seem to remember that I asked it to delete them, and when I check mail 20 minutes later, I get the same 5000 again. IMail’s web interface is, in a word, horrible. No toggle all, no search, nothing really useful.

So I pulled out the Squirrelmail gun, and pointed it at the IMAP port of our mail server. Told Squirrelmail that the server was type ‘other’, and let it rip.

ERROR : Bad or malformed request.
Query: SORT (ARRIVAL) ISO-8859-1 ALL
Server responded: UID Invalid Syntax

Wonderful. Turn off all server side sorting capabilities and suddenly it likes me. Well, half likes me. The sheer quantity of mail seems to upset the PHP script limits, so I tried cranking the script limits to 150 seconds runtime (default is 30). Still didn’t work.

Ended up creating another IMAP account in KMail and deleting from there. 5 minutes later, when I tried retrieving mail via POP3, all 5000 wanted to download again! Blasted IMail. 20 minutes later life was good - 15 messages to download.

I’ve been looking at dSLRs for a few months now, trying to find one that’s affordable yet has enough features and upgrade capacity to keep me occupied for a while. I’ve considered the Canon 300D, 350D (Rebel XT), 20D and the Nikon D70, D70s and D50. When I finally got a chance to hold a 350D and a D50, it was clear to me that the 350D was just too small for my hands to hold comfortably.

I was back in Jessops yesterday, getting a 10×15 print of one of my photos, and happened to mention that I was looking for a D70s to handle to the salesman. He didn’t have one in stock, but pointed me to the Konica-Minolta Dynax (Maxxum) 5D instead. Less than 500 quid for the kit, decently heavy, and best of all, comfortable in my large paws. A brief pondering overnight (and ~15 - 20 websites and reviews read), and some urging from my father, and I’m now the owner of a Dynax 5D with kit lens and a Hoya UV filter.

So far I like it - I’m going to need to upgrade my software (c’mon Digikam folks, write faster! :), but that’s about it. One heck of a mirror-slap too, quite audible. I like it.

On the good-news front, I now have 6 downlights (IP 65 rated) in my bathroom, with the ones over the bath being on a dimmer switch. The nice and quiet 32 dBa extractor vent is installed, the loft has a light, the 10 mm cable for the shower is laid in and the computer/storage room is wired for power and light.

On the bad-news front, British Gas called me on Monday to tell me that the installer had to take his wife to hospital, and that they’d be rescheduling my installation. Said installation is now scheduled for the 17th of January, 2006. Yay. It gives me more time to ponder the work to be done to the kitchen though, which I won’t complain about much. They did say that if a slot opens up before then, they’d let me know (though it really isn’t that long until the 17th).

Well, the bits for the central heating have been delivered. One new foam-lagged hot tank, one new boiler, one new radiator, a few miles of copper pipe and some other odds and ends. The inventory sheet is four pages long, though in fairness, only about 1/3 of the page is the inventory, the other 2/3s are addresses etc. The tank is upstairs already, and I’ve put the boiler and the radiator in the kitchen, where they’ll be getting installed.

My friendly electrician who was putting power and lights into one of my closets (with the intent of making it a combination computer room and storage space) has come down with tonsilitis, so I have several floor boards up, holes in walls and 3 half-wired sockets. Hopefully he’ll be better by the weekend, and we can get cracking with the wiring. I’d like the wiring in before the contractors for the central heating arrive on Monday, but if he’s sick, I can only hope.
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The computer that serves up this site, handles my mail and acts as my workstation at home is a fairly decent box - Athlon 64, 1 GB RAM and something approximating 300 GB of disk. Not too shabby as a personal server really.

Recently, the sound level from it has been irritating me, as it’s been loud enough to penetrate into my bedroom. I grew up with a computer in the room, and all of my college days I had at least 1 computer (often more) in the room when I was sleeping. This was a different kind of sound though, the sound of a fan that’s had too much dust to eat and is out to make my life painful. It was succeeding.

So, how to solve this problem? A Scythe Ninja of course! Oh, and some rubber mounts for the fans. I sourced all of the parts from Quiet PC (UK) - decent prices and very fast shipping.
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Dave, you scoundrel, you beat me by 1 %.

I suppose the fact I can’t program in assembly contributed to my downfall.