Stuart Herbert

With being away from home this week, I really wanted to travel light. That meant no laptop (wasn’t likely to have wi-fi access anyway), no laptop charger / accessories, and nothing else that I could leave behind.

My old iPod only manages about five hours battery life, and hapilly runs down even when it’s switched off, so I thought “Sod it,” and picked up a 4GB iPod Nano before leaving town. It was still going strong when I returned from my trip. That’s one less charger I need to pack next time

I had a lovely surprise the other day. The bosses @ Box UK bought me and a colleage a 19″ TFT monitor for home, as a thank-you for extra hours we’ve been putting in at short notice. How nice is that? Pretty damn nice, I’d say.

… until I returned home from today’s treatment with blurred vision. The obvious things like email, IRC and blogging are hard work, quickly bringing on a headache from peering too hard at the computer screen. But trying to watch TV’s not much better; try using Sky+ when you can’t really make out the words on the screen!

Gave up in the end, and retreated to a nice darkened bedroom with good old Radio 5 Live from the BBC. Here’s hoping things improve tomorrow.

A colleague at work pointed me to this spoof advert for the Volkswagon Polo. It’s far from politically correct, but it’s just too funny to pass on.

It was freezing cold inside the Millenium Stadium yesterday, but the Tsunami Relief Concert was well worth it

Yes, this is a shameless plug, but it’s what friends do for friends

Easy-Cap have just started importing and selling the Mecrom Easy-Cap replacement petrol cap into the UK. I wish I’d had one of these back when I owned a diesel car. I used to hate it when I got diesel on my hands accidentally; the paper towels you find on the forecourt just don’t do the job of getting the stuff off.

Anyway, the whole point of these new fuel tank caps is that there is nothing to unscrew and remove. The cap is a spring-loaded trap; stick the nozzle in, fill ‘er up, and that’s it. They’re easy to fit, and they fit most cars on the road today.

You should be hearing a lot about these over the coming year.

Swapped out the dead hardware for the new amd64 components, and the machine booted first time. The only problem I had was that my old kernel didn’t have SATA support enabled. One (very quick) recompile later, and I can see the replacement drive too.

I’m still trying to decide which is nicer … having a nice high-performance amd64 box, or (thanks to a video card upgrade) that I can now use the latest nvidia drivers. Mmm.

… another broken login scheme, and another evening when I have to repair the front page.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a great fan of Wordpress, and would dearly love to see it

1. separate out the UI using a templating system such as Smarty, so that upgrades can be done without having to edit files post-upgrade
2. fix the login problems once and for all
3. integrate one of the open WYSIWYG editors into the posting page

With those features added, I’d be a very content Wordpress blogger.

… and as a result, I’ve now had to make it so that all comments on here require moderator approval first

… because I’ve been having too much fun playing with the v2 firmware upgrade for Line 6’s excellent Pod XT. I also picked up the additional amp packs, giving me 72 different amp models to enjoy. I picked up the songbook to St Anger this lunchtime (never been very good at learning music by ear), which gives me a nice excuse to crank up the volume over the weekend.

The Behringer DEQ unit I bought a couple of months back has been retired for the moment, until I find which machine the Delta/66 card has ended up in. I’ll have to make do with recording off the XT’s USB port for now, until I can hook the EQ unit up to the Delta/66’s A2D.

At some point, I really should make the time to record something. The last sizable bout of recording I did was back in 97. There again, the last gig I did was in May 92, and the less said about that the better.

All I want now is to upgrade my aging Roland GR-30, get an S/S/81 set of pickups for the Fat Strat (and maybe another set for the Charvel), and I’m in hog heaven.

Rob H - if you’re reading this - you still owe me that demo (Btw, he has a genuine Gibson SG, which I’m very jealous about)