I just can't stop watching this...

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:58 pm By BigLig , In

I mean, it's just... I think it... oh for goodness sake, just watch the bloomin' thing, will you?



They didn't rehearse the bit near the end where they jump over each other down the staircase: they just knew what they wanted, and did it.

2 Comments

Why modern life is fantastic.

Sunday, September 27, 2009 11:27 pm By BigLig , In

While I'm very proud to be a geek, there is one minor issue.


You see, I happen to be a - mostly lapsed - member of the special category known as the "Math Geek". Now, it's irritating enough that this uses outrageously American spelling, but the worst of it is that we are all supposed to like Bach. Yes, yes, he used numerical sequences in his work. Heard of rhythm? It's maths, and they all bloomin' well used it, but as part of their art.

And you know what takes the biscuit in all this? I do like Bach.

So, why modern life is fantastic: Herbert von Karjaran. Conducting Bach's Mass in B Minor. With the Vienna Philharmonic - who had to use the beautiful assumed name "Orchester der Gesellshaft der Musikfreunde in Wien" because of office politics! Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the Soprano. It's even recorded in Abbey Road!

Surely such an exquisite recording costs a King's ransom? Or could it be just £3.16 on Amazon MP3? I paid the money before starting this post, and the music will be on my iPod before I finish it.

Fantastic.

2 Comments

Celebrity

Friday, September 25, 2009 6:25 pm By BigLig , In

I thought it might be interesting to share a list of ten "famous" people I've seen over the years, and what they were up to at the time.

I think it only fair not to include people who I saw just because they were working, so Her Majesty the Queen, Mayor Boris Johnson, Elvira, and Baron Bingham of Cornhill, KG, PC, QC, FBA are sadly missing from this list.
  • Jo Brand, who was ordering a curry.
  • Paul Daniels, who was trying to run me over in his car.
  • Geoffrey Howe, who was eating dinner.
  • Michael Jackson, who was behind me in the queue in WH Smiths. I have long since become accustomed to the fact that no-one will ever believe this, or even consider it plausible.
  • Ben Kingsley, who was going to Venice on the train.
  • Michael Portillo, who was trying to run me over in his official ministerial car. Actually, as a taxpayer, technically he was trying to run me over in MY car.
  • Phillip Schofeld, who was trying to run me over in his car. It says much about his qualities that he alone, upon realising he had missed, took the time to reverse and try again.
  • Shaun Scott, who was having a pint. He was in the Bill! Yes, I know everyone's been in the Bill, but he was an Inspector and everything.
  • Antony Worrall-Thompson, who was evaluating carrots in Waitrose.
  • Paula Yates, who was buying shoes.
I also saw an incredibly famous footballer once, having a jewellery store closed, but despite who he was being explained to me for at least 20 minutes I still haven't the faintest idea which one it was.

1 Comment

Rebuilding my Asus eeePC

Wednesday, September 23, 2009 4:36 pm By BigLig , In ,

My tiny blue Asus eeePc has been sadly neglected lately, but I recently decided to start making better use of it, because my 17" Macbook Pro is rather bulky to keep carrying from the kitchen table, to my office, to bed.

However, the copy of Ubuntu NBR I'd installed before was a bit out of date, and using a bit too much disk space to update itself, and having a networking issue that my Linux skills aren't up to solving, so I thought I'd switch to XP.
First, I replaced the 512Mb memory with 1Gb, so as to be sure the machine wouldn't be sluggish.
Next, I copied a Windows XP CD to my Windows 7 laptop, and ran nLite over it. This impressive software takes the XP install media and alters it in many ways. In this case, I was stripping everything I don't need out. There's only a 4Gb SSD in the eeePC, so no room to leave the Hungarian keyboard settings file around "just in case".
nLite did an impressive job - even after adding in all the Asus drivers (another cool feature of nLite), the resulting XP installer was about half the regular size. I burnt this to a CD-R, popped it into a USB CD-ROM drive, went into the eeePC BIOS and told it to install an OS, and boot from the CD) and started it going.
After a couple of false starts (which turned out to be a bad USB CD-ROM drive!!) I was able to install XP. Very plain looking (I have all the eye candy either removed or turned off) but perfectly functional, fast, and with plenty of space left on the SSD hard drive for some software. The main use of this device will be Web Browsing, and I decided to install Chrome on it. Google are eyeing up the Netbook market for Chrome OS, so the Chrome browser is heavily optimised for these devices, and indeed it runs a treat. Very fast, and the maximised and full screen settings make good use of the tiny 800x480 screen on the EEEPC.
What else? Rocketdock and Launchy put a little bit of eye candy back, mostly to make it easier to launch applications with the Start menu hidden to save space. As usual, Evernote, Spotify, and DropBox clients give me access to (and local copies of) my data from the cloud. Picassa so I can upload photos when travelling using the built-in card reader.
A new thing I'm trying is a copy of AbiWord in case I want to write some blog posts etc. while offline. My local Starbucks doesn't have WiFi, darn it. I don't need a full office suite, and I remember I liked AbiWord back in the early days of dabbling in Linux, so I thought I'd give it a go. I might put VPN software and Office communicator on so I can make work calls from it in an emergency. And I suppose a couple of games might end up on there too.
On the whole, I'm pretty pleased so far with how this rebuild has turned out. Now to stress test it and see how useful I find it.

0 Comments

Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 2

Saturday, September 19, 2009 9:02 am By BigLig

Well, that was simple enough, although the Erase and Install option was a little obscure. (Boot rom the DVD, Utilities menu, start Disk Utility, Erase, then install as usual.)


I have Safari, Mail, Textedit, Evernote, Tweetdeck, and iPhoto working. (The other app I use a lot, calibre, is not updated for Snow Leopard quite yet, but I can live without it for a while.)

The rest I'll put back slowly as I need it - that way I make sure I don't have a lot of stuff I don't really use.

0 Comments

Moving to Snow Leopard Part 1 - Backup

Friday, September 18, 2009 1:27 pm By BigLig , In , , ,

So, I got my shiny new Snow Leopard DVD last weekend, and now it's time to upgrade.
First Cardinal Virtue of the sysadmin being Paranoia, I begin with some backups.

Backup #1
I already have Time Machine backing me up to one half of my 512Gb External USB hard disk, so I make sure that is up to date.
Backup #2
I use the essential Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Mac's Hard drive to the other half of my 512Gb USB disk. This has the advantage of being bootable, so in the event of any trouble I can just boot my Mac with the apple key held down and I'm back to Leopard with everything in place.
Backup #3
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a second clone of my Mac to a Disk Image saved on my other external USB hard disk, the mostly empty 1Tb I'm planning to use to store Media backups on.
Backup #4
I copy my User folder to the 1Tb disk as well. Since I plan to build a new clean Snow Leopard install, rather than upgrade in place, this will be where I go and get my data from to copy it back.
Backup #5
More a theoretical backup than an actual action, but all my really critical data (apart from media) has copies in the cloud, via Google, Evernote, and DropBox.

I'm pausing now to think if there's any way I can make a sixth backup. What can I say - I'm very virtuous.

0 Comments

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)