samuri.co.uk

I get home after working a full day and driving over 150 miles and find that the home computer has been bust since a certain someone turned it off before it had shut down properly. So within seconds of me arriving at home I’m prexsented with the following.

1. Fix the computer
2. Make sure all the important documents are restored
3. Make sure office, all the solitaire games, google architect?, all bookmarks and everything else work fine.

O….K…. Not happening, the main hard drive is screwed. Looks like some nasty physical contact has occurred.EDven booting to live linux and attempting a format results inmany errors. That disk is goosed. Luckily, I have a 160G disk lying around (plus the 1 Terrabyte data disk in the computer), so after lots of very low level messing around with teh screwed disk I have everythging I need to start again.

Windows 7 here we come. It installs in about 30minutes and is up and working on the internet in 10 more. WOW! It’s great. So fast and easy and quick and clear. Love it!

Still sorting things out but it’s on here and working very well now.

Swim
Distance:  1 mile

Picture the scene.

You’re a slightly overweight, not hugely fit gentleman who is stopping in a hotel and who quite fancies a swim. You don your trunks, suck in your tummy (you will need to maintain this pose now for the entire 30 minutes that you’re in public view) and admire your amazing physique in the mirror for a few seconds and then head to the pool. For a hotel pool it’s not bad at all, almost 25 metres (although they claim a full 25 metres), with three wide lanes for swimmers all helpfully marked with directional arrows to make sure you go the right way round. The slow lane has about three fat ladies in all sort of floating there. The middle lane has nobody in it and the fast lane has a skinny bloke caning up and down it at warp speed. Do you…

 a. get in the slow lane (and if truth were to be told, this is your correct speed rating)?
b. Get in the middle lane, you’re not actually fast enough to be in hear but it’s empty so what the hell?
c. Ignore the slow and middle lanes as an afront to you masculinity, jump into the fast lane because you’re a SWIMMING GOD (you’ve had to walk past both these lanes to get to the fast one) and then move your opulent carcass up and down the lane at a speed not insignificantly different from ‘dead fucking halt’. You will futhermore ignore any direction arrows, a skinny bloke cannoning into you because you’re going the WRONG FUCKING WAY, any subsequent suggestions that you’re in the wrong lane or indeed any of the 19 obvious signs that someone is trying to get past you, you fat arrogant twat!!!!?

Answers on a massive pair of calf length trunks please.

After he had got out I had the lane to myself for a while again and then these two muscley young lads came out of the steam room for a swim. They stood at the end surveying the lanes and debating which one they should go in. After much discussion (I only heard it all because I’d stopped for a rest), they decided that they couldn’t be arsed going in the fast lane??? and got into the middle lane where for two apparently fit and strong young men they really did show that they couldn’t be arsed. In long distance mode I was passing one of them every half lap and the other every full lap, and I’d consider myself ‘not that quick to be honest.’ Anyway, I did 2k again, still struggling to get myself to the speed where I can do 3k in an hour and thence two miles.

In other news I was rather incensed, (to put it mildly) to find my first expenses claim has been rejected. The reason? No home to office deduction. So lets get this straight, not only do I have to travel much further than everybody else to get to my permanent place of work (a 90 mile round trip), but then when I work away from home, I get victmized even further by having to remove the costs of travelling this greater distance from my expense claim? Yeah, that’s fair. That’s the most arse about face thing I’ve ever come across. Ranty email time I think, dear me, it’s not the first since I started here.

Bike: Pimpino
Distance: 45 miles

That’s better! Now I’m starting to feel like riding my bike again which is good. This was a great ride, really enjoyed it. And felt reasonably fit too. I stuck loads of offroad in too even if it was a bit flat. Pretty much rode road over to Manchester and then picked up the TPT to Warrington, Sankey Valley trail from there and then local paths back to our house, probably more offroad than on.

As I was riding along up the Sankey Valley trail rummaging around in my pocket for the last few jelly babies, I realised how much I’d enjoyed the ride and more importantly, just how chilled out and relaxed I was feeling. I reckon crayons was right on another post, maybe this weirdness I’ve been feeling over the last week has been down to my body having to do a reset on itself to cope with all the relaxedness it’s going through. Driving up to Newcastle every week and stopping in hotels  may be a pretty shit way to earn a living but it’s certainly 8 million times better than working like a crazy lunatic constantly with very few breaks. I’m sleeping a whole lot better now too, I’ve got in at least 2 days in the last week when I’ve not been so totally screwed by early afternoon that i’ve had to take a nap to try and catch up.

Bike: pimpino
Distance: 29 miles

Great ride. I was fecked at the end of it too. Proper fast riding for a fixie ride plus I’m still not rid of this virus thingy or whatever it is, lung cancer… blish. Went out and rode quickly, charged through a big group of lads smoking pot in the woods in Hulton, a few shouted shit after me, yeah, fucking hey. Over to Haigh Hall, blast through there and then offroad all the way home, nice and fun.

My lungs were killing me and I felt really tired out on the ride but hopefully I’ll be getting a lot more in now from here on in. I’m going to try and take my bike up to Newcastle with me next week, see how that goes.

I got home and was totally fucked. Had a shower, then a nap and then sat on the couch for twenty minutes doing nothing just waiting for my breath to come back. BP is 125 over 86 which for a 42 year old bloke is actually very good. I’m drinking more beer now, just to make sure I’ve killed it all.

In other news.

Driving up to Newcastle all the time is very rapidly becoming very shit indeed. Plus it’s (as I’ve stated before), bonkers in public sector.  Here’s a scenario for you to digress.

“Oh look, this proposal from one of our suppliers is complete and total bollocks, they’re taking the piss and spending all our money”

Now in private sector there would be a very rapid arse kicking during which the price would halve and the solution would double in value. In public sector every one just shrugs their shoulders and says ‘oh well, that’s the way it is round here’

That’s *your* tax money by the way. Crazy.

Oh, and since I’m driving a lot of hire cars at the moment, I may well start a car review page, just for fun.

Swim
Distance: 1 mile

I felt like shit but really, wasting away in my hotel room sounds like a nightmare. So I went for a swim. Started off really badly, splashing around all over the place, choked on loads of water a couple of times. There was me, a girl and two blokes in the fast lane. The girl was stinky quick fast although she alternated between crawl and breaststroke so I caught her on each alternate length. She was easily as fast as me at crawl and no doubt had a better technique. I got to a mile and still felt fine so decided to go for two miles. About a lap later I felt all funny.

Got out, got changed, walked up to my room on the secnd floor and almost passed out on the bed, I was totally shagged for about 15 minutes. Something wrong, a vrius I expect. I googled dizziness and it is related to high blood pressure or infections pretty much. I checked my pressure when I got home and it’s 127 over 89 which might sound high to normnal people but for me is low.

My ears do feel very weird, I reckon it’s an infection. I’m drinking beer now to kill it. Sorted. My waist is thickening. I need to get back to whipcord thin time like at the end of summer last year. More cycling please.

What
The
Fuck
Was
That!!!?

Blimey. I just lost a whole load of my day. I’ll tell you the bits I can remember.

Get up at 5:00, set off at 5:30 up to Newcastle, I’ve been given a Passat which compared to the crazy pile of bollocks they gave me last week (a peugeot), is an amazing car. Right so I drive up North, pass the gates of our office at 9:30, bang on schedule. Drive to the nearest Metro stsation, no parking, drive to the next metro station with parking, wait 30 minutes on a feezing cold platform with a crazy jordie bloek staring at me, get the train back to our office and finally find myself walking to the office with the very lovely girl who works for my boss.

That’s where it all start5s to go a bit funny. Burning with cold I suspect my body never really recovered and enters some sort of hibernation state, I get an eye peircing headache and start to feelhungry, oops, left my butties in the car. No money neither so I;ve effectively eaten nothing all day. Do plenty of work. About 16:30 I start to feel real funlny, decide it’s time to retire to my hotel so reverse my path. Walk a mile to the train station, get on train, ride to car park ed train station, go to stainsburies for some food. Aah, this sainsburies doesn;t do paste or anything like that so I buy a bottle of wine, some crisps, some grapes and a big chcolately croissant.

Now I start to lose it a bit,. I remember checking in, although I don’t remember drivinjg here. I remember getting intio my room and unpacking all my stuff and I’ve  been quite good because my shirts are hanging up, as is my suit and I’m dressed but that’s probably about it. My laptop and phone are on charge so I did that bit, I’ve clearly had a sleep because the bed is all ruffled and it looks like I was going to go and have a swim as my trunks and goggle are out.

Now the nasty bit, There’s signs of a poo in the toilet (I’m assuming it’s mine) although I’ve clearly tried to flush at some point, there’s a newd box of ibuprofen on the table with 3 tablets gone and it looks like I;ve had a shower. I woke up slumped in a chair with my laptop playing, ironically, ‘The hangover’. The bottle of wine is nearly empty, the graoes are gone, the croissant is gone, the bag of crisps is half empty. Oh, and there’s an half empty6 bottle of irun bru in the bathrrom.

My  headache has gone but I feel completekly shagged and I’m, sweating like a pig.

what the hell is going on?

After a HUGE amount of shopping around, I finally chose a notebook for myself. The decision was accelerated by the amount of time I’m spending in hotel rooms at the moment with not much to do so I pumped up my options, did some final checks and went for this. An AcerAspire One from Acer Direct .

This one is a refurbished unit Grade A2 (which means it’s effectively brand new with some damage to the box – The box is a bit tatty, nothing more – the laptop itself looks pristine.). It has a 16G SSD hard drive and 1Gig of RAM. I went for the small SSD drive because I realised I’d not need a huge amount of space for what I’m going to do with it (web/writing/email/photo editing/videos/music). Yes, music, photo’s and videos take up a lot of space but they’re very transient. Load them up, do stuff with them, remove them (with music being the possible exception).  Videos I’ll just watch once or twice and then delete, photos will be there only prior to sticking on the internet or back to my home PC terrabyte drive so space isn’t a big issue. Plus I have three USB drives. One 16G that I’ll use for videos (I typically accumulate videos on my home desktop and then move them onto this USB for watching), an 8G one that I use for general file transfer and a 4G encrypted stick that I use for very special things. I also have a 16G ipod which I wish could share it’s files when it’s connected but sadly not.

The other issue with the disk was that while SSD is much faster than a spinning platter and far more fault tolerant, it’s not nearly as quick as I wanted it to be. The online comunity suggests the way forwards is to replace the original SSD with a compact flash card and adaptor. Which I may do for a laugh.

Anyway. I can live with the space issue, (and there are many options available for internal expansion) . Battery life was a bit disappointing, 2.5 hours with the wireless enabled. I’m hoping this improves over time, it might need to go through a few discharge/recharge cycles before it reaches optimum performance.

The software was completely pants. The device came with Linpus Linux installed which I hated fromthe very start. Clearly desigend to allow idiots to use it it was far too restrictive for my geek fingers so I almost immediately downloaded an Ubuntu notebook remix image and dropped that on. Ten times better! It needed a bit of tweaking when it came to codecs for the video player but apart fromthat it worked fine. Sound, video, wireless, all the things that linux is typically slated for, all worked great!

It is brilliant! Battery life aside it’s very easy to carry around and while the keyboard is quite small for my engineer rapid fingers, I soon got used to keeping it tight. Well recommended.  140 quid from the link above. Get one.