The better half and I headed up to see Korpora and Purple Chaos (there is something odd about using LJ names in Wordpress…) this weekend. The drive up was quite horrible, but I guess thats what you expect from the M5/M6 these days. Nevermind, the company up north more than made it worth it. Once again though, after playing with toys at other people’s houses I just had to buy my own, so I now have a Wii. Wii Sports, Wii Play… it’s not just me, right?
My mate Colin has a new helmet. Its rather spangly 
He’s not seen it yet, so for him, heree’s Bob modeling it for you.
Having disliked E-bay’s new search so much, I am pleased to see that things seem to have gone back to the old ways. Not completely, but enough that things are usable again Well done E-bay for admitting when they messed up and sorting it.
Not sure when it went ‘live’ but I see today that E-bay has a new search. God its terrible! I search for “6001 bearing” and it only shows me results from “Car and Vehicle”, listing 4 results. It has a link to another group, “pocketbikes”
with another result, but thats it. I know damn well there are more than 5 results within E-bay for my search, I’m watching 8 auctions with “6001 bearing” in the title! I tried a few other searches and it appears that it is all just as bad. So bad that to me E-bay is really now not usable. How can such big site make such a big cock-up?
I upgraded Apache from 2.0 to 2.2 on Morgins this morning. Gentoo seem to try and make this process as difficult as possible 
The script on the upgrade page, which makes the APACHE_OPTIONS line for make.conf, cocks up and puts dashes instead of underscores, and also misses some basic options you will want, like auth_basic. In the end I got it sorted, though not after spending a good 15 mins wondering why all pages produced an error 403… seems I needed a <Directory /> Allow from all</Directory> directive that I had never had. Why this is needed in 2.2 and not in 2.0 I know not. Odd.
All seems to be working fine now, but if you see anything odd/wrong, please let me know.
So, in the US an AppleTV got its price cut from 299USD to 229USD. With your new AppleTV you can, in the US, rent movies and such. Here in the UK though we don’t get movie rentals and nor do we get a price cut, an AppleTV still costs 199GBP. Rip-off. Thanks Apple.
I had not seen any real world power consumption figures for the new Dell R200 1U servers, so as I have a paid sat behind me I thought I’d stick a power meter on and see what they draw.
Power factor 0.90, Voltage 247V.
(Spec: Quad core Xeon X3220 @ 2.4GHz, 4×1GB RAM, 2×146GB SAS)
Credit where credit is due as they say. So I’d like to give some credit to Dear Auntie Beeb for releasing a Mac/Linux compatible version of their iPlayer. I knew I was going to miss Buzzcocks this evening so I aquired a DVI->HDMI cable and hooked my MacBook up to the tele. It worked better than I thought it would - most watchable. Shame DVI doesn’t do sound though…
Happy New Year. It is indeed 2008 already. I hope you had a good 2007 and here’s to a better yet 2008. That said, if you are 1and1 Internet, may you have a thoroughly miserable 2008. For some unknown reason 1and1 have delisted ’southerndownhill.com’ from their systems. The domain is registered ’til April, there are no outstanding invoices on the account and there has been no email from 1and1 to say anything. Of course, its new years day now and they are not answering the phones. Joy. I think I’ll have a transfer auth code please!
So how was your Christmas? Did you get all you wanted? I’m not sure that flu was on the list of my better half and kids, but they got it anyway. I seem to have missed out for the most part, just a head cold mainly. 3 days in bed seems to have helped the others, just in time to go back to work… Hmmm.
My sister made her flight and spent Christmas day in the air. I cooked for 6 and I’m told it was good (I liked it!). I do wish children would read instructions, as getting all stroppy when you can’t do something is a bit silly when the piece of paper you discarded tells you how it all works.
I got a nice pen from my parents and a funky looking desk toy from the other half.
The 32″ from the boxing day sales was a present from myself to me 
Hope you all had a nice Christmas. Time to rest a little before New Years