We will rock you and tepid cod

First, let me set the scene. I’ve just come out the bath and done half a bottle of a very nice ‘Liz Richardson’ Sauvignon Blanc. I’m now sat down with the rest of the bottle, my netbook and the Bahrain GP qualifier.

Sarah I’ve just added the second lot of finings to the Pinot, so I reckon it will clear by about mid-week and I can bottle about Thursday, I reckon it’ll yield about twenty eight bottles.

Okay so this morning started far earlier than I would have liked, this was mainly due to me having an early night last night (I was in bed at midnight). So I woke up like a shot at 4AM and couldn’t get back to sleep again. Jamie was eating up most of the bed, not because he was on my side, but because he’s quite large.

SO had breakfast and coffee, thankfully this fired up my bowels, which was useful as I had a lot of travelling and sitting to do today and I’d had a rather fiery pizza last night.

Jamie was demanding him I bang him harder than the start of the universe. Unfortunately I had to go to Tesco’s, so sex was out. He then apparently fapped so hard there was a bit of a ‘Something about Mary’ incident. I came back from shopping, he had washed his hair but was still out with the dog. I unloaded the shopping, made myself look like a chav and then he turned up. Dog didn’t have a shit, she’ll regret that.

We got to Parkway station in time, the battle with the ticket machine was fairly painless. Train was on time. Journey was uneventful, except for a moment in Swindon where we were delayed for a couple of minutes due to ‘a gentleman who refused to get off the train’. The gentleman was a chav from Bristol, there was no shortage of people who help to remove the ‘gentleman’ from the train. On to the underground and we arrived at the theatre in good time.

This was the Dominion theatre right on Piccadilly Circus. We were here to see Queen’s and Ben Eltons ‘We Will Rock You’. Incidentally this trip was a present from Jamie for my birthday, although delayed by a couple of weeks.

No I had no expectations of this show whatsoever. I hadn’t looked anything up, read any of the reviews or anything. I had a vague recollection of the story after seeing something perhaps on some chat show years ago. After wall this production was in it’s eleventh year. We had perfectly nice seats at the front of the upper circle. Good view of the bulk of stage, probably missing a couple of feet at the front right. House wasn’t packed, this was a matinee performance, I’d say upstairs was only about 50% full, I can’t comment on downstairs. Now regarding the show itself, I was pleasantly surprised. As I said I had no pre-conceptions. I know it was written by Ben Elton, but he had written a musical with ALW years ago about football that lasted 5 minutes, but I wasn’t really expecting the humour that was in this production. I didn’t recognise any of the actors, but apparently the chap who played ‘Pop’ was ‘Curly Watts’ in Coronation Street. I’m not going to tell you the story, go see it for yourself, it’s well worth it. Yes there were some very tenuous links into some of the Queen songs, you could really feel Elton squirm thinking ‘shit I need to incorporate this in here somehow’. But I know the show has been updated on a regular basis to keep it contemporary, but Elton did a bloody good job of predicting the future as regards social media and about how everybody will just live ‘on-line’. There are some fantastic references, ‘GlobalSoft’ and the ‘iPlanet’. I must admit act two seemed somewhat rushed and you did get the feeling that Elton wanted to put on his shiny suit and get on stage and do some ‘Thatch gags’ rather than write an ending which was a complete rip of ‘Sword in the Stone’. There were some great gags, some great Queen songs of course, all sung beautifully from a great cast. ‘Pop’ incidentally stole the show on a number of occasions, mainly with the gag, ‘I’m a groupy, shall I show you my tits?’. Also it wasn’t the case of which of the ensemble cast I’d shag, more of in which order. At the end of it, on one of the many large screens came up with, ‘So do you want Bohemian Rhapsody then?’, ‘Oh alright’. And they pulled off a good version, the band, give them credit also did a great job. It must be very very difficult to pull this off eight shows a week for eleven years and still keep it fresh and put in huge amounts of enthusiasm. I do something new almost everyday of the week, yet I hardly get excited at all. But that’s mainly because I’m a bitter and twisted old queen.

We left the Dominion and headed to Imano, which is described as a ‘Oriental Interactive fusion restaurant’. With a title like that it had a hell of a lot to live up to. We had booked a table, so there was no faffing about. The toilets were stunning, I could have gone for a swim in the sink. When seated, as I was an ‘Imano’ virgin I was taught by a Polish lady how to use the mouse. Well actually it’s all a bit strange, let me describe…you are sat at a table, above it, there is a projector, this projects images directly on your table. You have a little circular touch pad. So you can select the menu directly on your table, as if you were using a normal touch screen type thing. Indeed on a number of occasions I forgot about the touch pad and tried to use the table as a touch screen, this failed. I managed to order water, which arrived pretty promptly. We then started with squid dim-sum, this was nice, but did set a precedent for the rest of the meal, it’s temperature, it was tepid. I then ordered the cod and some rice. The cod apparently was their most popular dish. Jamie ordered some Sushi, I had a bit, it tasted like a used tampon, I’m not a Sushi fan. He also ordered some ‘mini-ribs’, there was more meat on Victoria Beckham. My cod arrived, I must admit it was beautifully cooked, but I just wish they had heated it up a bit, it was ‘vaguely warm’, in the same way that ‘Cold Play’ are vaguely tolerable. It was also bloody pricey. What was basically a frozen Tesco cod fillet served on a piece of turf was 17 quid. Now Jamie had the duck. This was stunning. Okay it was also tepid. But there was way more fat on Jamie. It was lean, beautifully cooked (and then obviously left for ten minutes to cool down), the only ood thing was the crispy pancakes, normally it’s crispy duck, this time it was the pancakes that were crispy, very odd. Anyway, we finished off, the rice incidentally you could have welded bricks together with, yes it was ‘sticky rice’, but it stuck like shit to a blanket. We ordered desert, are time was beginning to run out as you are only allocated 90 minutes. Obviously after that time the food goes from ‘Tepid’ to ‘fucking frozen’. I ordered the selection of sorbets, Jamie went for the selection of ice-creams. When it arrived it was identical, the only difference was the time it spent in the microwave, the sorbet was slightly more icy than the ice-cream. We settled the bill, which was just short of eighty quid. It really was style over substance.

We then had a bit of a run back to Paddington station. The train left at 19:45 and it was 19:28. We missed the first tube by seconds. It was now 19:33 and we had six stops to do. We got to Paddington at 19:42, we had to do a bit of a ‘Rocky’ running up eight flights of stairs. We got the train.

The journey back was again uneventful. I do love the London train back to Parkway as it goes on to Swansea. This means it’s usually full of pissed Welshmen, this train was no exception. There were a number of rather excited Welsh women in our carriage. The highlight being one women shreaking, ‘Oh yes, not only irons his pyjamas but his underpants as well’.

We got home. I let the dog out. She was happy. I got into bed. The dog was going ape-shit, Jamie went for a pooh. I then realised why the dog was going ape-shit, she hadn’t been fed, that was rectified. The dog then crawled under the bed. I then re-created the conception of the universe, this time however it was the pillow that suffered the fall-out. I got in the bath.

And there we have it. I’ve finished off the second glass, and we are all up to date. And Nico Rosberg is on poll.

Then the Vigor 120 packed up again

So this morning started with packet loss. After checking the gateways the Zen line was showing about 20% packet loss. So that Vigor 120 has died again. I’ve replaced it with the TP-Link which seems to be the most reliable, but also is the worst on the line. Actually accessing it by the CLI and looking at the stats there, the HEC errors are very low, so not sure why it caused the SNR margin to increase. Time will tell, meantime I have to find the receipt for the Draytek.

Finished off unit 7 and the bonus for it. They mailed me back and said I’ll get the next course free, this is due to me sending them about ten emails with mistakes on their site. This just proves that being a completely annoying c**t can pay off.

Walked the dog. Was a nice day today, which of course meant that it pissed down half way through the walk.

Did BodyPump, apparently the gym are going to drop the LesMills classes, if that’s the case then I’m going to drop that gym.

Some fun work stuff next week possibly. Busy weekend ahead.

Dynamic DNS and the joys of ‘Youtube’

So started off working on some stuff to do with points on a circular path. Not the most exciting thing on the planet but again something that had to be solved. After a couple of hours it was. Took a break and did a bit more Japanese. Then the Vigor 110 decided it had enough of being synced for two days, so re-synced and then pfSense wouldn’t start PPP. So I took the opportunity to go back to the Vigor 120. This synced fine, I’m still at 12db margin, but it’s only dropped down to 11db after eight hours with 6 CRC’s so hopefully if it stays synced it will drop. If not I’ll need to kick someone at Zen.

Went for a run, had lunch. Did multiple other line, radius things throughout the day. Ended up with a video of what I was working on. TRying to upload it to the works forum, failed every time. Ended up putting it on ftp, then one of the guys put a link to it on the forum using Youtube. After some chatting I now know how to upload videos to Youtube and embed them on the forum. Very useful.

Anyway, I was looking into perhaps using the Virgin line as a backdoor to the firewall, so if the Zen line hangs I can still contact the pfSense box and give it a kick. Problem is the Virgin line uses a dynamic DNS. This means it’s IP address changes on a regular basis. This is a pain. However, pfSense supports about ten different dynamic DNS providers. One of which just happens to be EasyDNS, my DNS provider. The account I have with EasyDNS gives me access to dynamic DNS. Now I though this isn’t going to work as I want all my domain names to be on a static DNS, however it allows multiple sub-domains to be dynamic. So I added a sub-domain (mind your own business) and set it to dynamic. I then produce a token. Back in pfSense I selected dynamic DNS, added an entry for EasyDNS and filled in all the required fields. I then clicked save and expected it to crash as normal. However it went back to the status page and said it had updated the IP records. Back on EasyDNS and I checked, it now had an IP address against the sub-domain. I was amazed. Something actually worked first time. After a bit of piddling about with firewall rules I now have by alternative access to pfSense.

Did a bit more Japanese. It’s torture porn night, I was going to avoid wine all week, but as I’ve had quite a long day then I’m going to forget that. So shower, salad, and then some god awful film no doubt.

“Don’t touch the duck pate, Bishop – it’s very fattening.”

Took the dog to daycare.

Then started off trying to work out a perpendicular rotation, which  turned out not to be an Euler angle as claimed but was in fact just a normal.

Also put the Baroness Thatcher funeral on in the background. I was expecting certainly a lot more pomp, but I thought it was carried out with huge dignity. There were a few boo’s and hisses along the way, but I think she would have appreciated that, always enjoyed a fight. There was a great quote during the sermon about the ‘duck pate’, she did indeed have a few comic moments. Now let’s just let the ‘Iron Lady’, ‘Rust in peace’.

The cleaners phoned and said when they were arriving. This was a bit of a first after not actually being prompted. They arrived on time and managed about an hour and a half but did do most of it properly this time without breaking anything and drowning the floors. I may pay for it this time round.

Went for a run, slightly shorter as I needed to pick the dog up.

Came back and did a load of work on splines, that’s mostly working now. Finished off and then did another Japanese lesson. It is getting pretty tricky now, not good when I’m trying to hammer through the last few bits of of it.

Feeling really tired. Must try and get some kind of early night.

Latest TripAdvisor reviews have been published. “Warner Bros Studio Tour” “Shendish Manor Hotel” “Shendish Manor Restaurant”

Press 1 for Jamie or 2 for Tim

Started this morning a bit backwards. I decided to do my Japanese lesson this morning rather than at the end of the day. This worked out quite well as the lesson was fairly complicated. Accompanied by a couple of cups of coffee I got through it.

Work wise just doing some mundane data related stuff, just a case of ploughing through it.

Went out for a run.

Finally plumbed in my new phone system. It combines both external phone lines into a PABX and then connects to three phone systems. Two our actually on top the server cabinet and one is in Jamie’s office connected via a DECT extender, so it’s basically on it’s own circuit. All three have answering machines. I’ve set it up in auto-attendant mode, so when either line rings it answers and gives a menu of options. It all works fine except for a couple of things, one is that the phones have to be answered in 25 seconds or it kills the line. This means the answer machines have to be set to four rings. The other rather annoying problem is that it doesn’t forward caller ID, this is a bit of a shame. Anyway, we will see how we get on with it.

I syphoned off the Pinot and added the stabilser, so just a stirring job over the next few days.

Summer must be coming, house has turned into a stomach and flu ward

Started off this morning rather slowly with it being a Monday. I was still feeling fairly tired even though I had an early night last night. Sorted out a few bits and pieces and then took a break and did TripAdvisor reviews for the hotel we stayed at as well as the restaurant and the Warner Brothers tour. Did a bit more and then took the dog out for a walk. It was raining and cold when we left so dressed for the Arctic. Within fifteen minutes it was boiling hot, so ended up carrying coats and hoodies. Anyway, she had a nice walk and slept all afternoon.

I cracked on and rewrote a load of threading stuff, pretty mundane but needed to be done.

Went to BodyCombat. It was packed. Sarah was there as well. Came back and did some more work, still ended up doing more hours than I should.

Did my first Japanese lesson on unit seven. All about family, older and younger brothers and sisters etc. Used up a load more flash cards. I’m on schedule to finish the course before we leave if I stick to it.

Ate salad.

Still watching the Japanese grand prix. Actually I’m still watching the qualifying.

There seems to be something odd happening in Boston, some explosions, still unfolding at the moment.

Spring must be in the air, Jamie sounds like he’s trying to cough up both lungs. How the hell it doesn’t kill his throat I’m not sure. May be it’s all the lubrication I give it.

Okay, so I mislade sixty grand

So this morning started off without a hangover, which wasn’t bad considering the amount of tequila I managed to get out of ‘Tim’ last night. We had breakfast, Jamie had the full English, I had the full bran flakes.

Reception desk was rather pleasing. We had been changed from bed and breakfast to this meal special thing. I think they wait for you to actually have a qualifying meal first. We did all right out of it really. We were only allowed £50 total but the meal came to over £60. I paid my £51 bar bill. Journey home was uneventful, but the sun was out which was nice.

Came back and had a coffee. Then just got stuck into the decorating again. Put yet more paint stripper on the patio door and did some cable burying around the door frame. Finished an hour later than I planned.

Went through the post and did the accounts. I found two pension statements for a company pension that I had completely forgotten about. Total was over £60K. That was a fairly pleasant surprise. So they are worth about £3K a year. So on that basis I need to save around another million and I’ll be sorted.

Played around a bit with my new PABX. More on than later no doubt. The Pinot is ready for clearing, I’ll get on with that at some point next week. Right, quick bath and then the Chinese grand prix.

Harry Potter and the philosiphising golf bores

Started by doing the shopping far too early. Jamie walked the dog. I then poured large amounts of petrol into the car from the garage. Picked up Megan from the station as she was dog sitting.

We set off for joyous Watford. Journey was uneventful, accept for the constant drizzling.We arrived at Shendish Manor, which turns out to be a fairly poncy hotel in the middle of the countryside. Well, the middle of Watford anyway. Unfortunately it’s also a golfing hotel. When we arrived there were huge amounts of suited wedding people, apparently an Egyption wedding. Anyway, we checked in. I’d paid for an inclusive half board rate, but we are only down as bed and breakfast, but will need to sort that out at reception shortly no doubt.

Had a quick cup of tea then we departed for the ‘Harry Potter’ making of exerience a few miles down the road. It continued to rain. The tour is housed in two of the existing sound stages at the studios. All eight films were made here and it’s all the original props and sets. We had the audio guide as well. It was all very interesting and well worth a visit. The scale model of the complete Hogwarts is very very impressive, it’s huge. We exited via the gift shop and bought a fridge magnet.

Came back via a reverse odd route due to the sat-nav pissing me off. We had about an hour before dinner, so as it was our anniversary it was time for sex and a shower (not combined). Jamie had asked me first thing ‘to go as my ass like a whack-a-mole’, but I had to do the shopping at Tesco’s. Now he wasn’t so much in the mood, but it didn’t take much effort. It ended in a standing ovation with the glitter cannon going off. We went down to dinner.

So I ordered a pint and a Smirnoff ice for bum boy. They’d run out of all draft lager. So ended up with a couple of bottles of Peroni. I had the quail egg scotch eggs for starter, Jamie had the squid. Very poncy. I had the grilled plaice for main, Jamie had what looked like raw lamb, but apparently it was very good. Washed down with a nice bottle of New Zealand. We had a break while it all went down. This consisted of updating facebook with pictures of salt and pepper pots and listening to four golf bores in the corner. “Mine on the fith was fantastic, it just missed that tree.”, “No you sliced it”. Sorry guys but if you were any fucking good you’d be on the tour not sat here drinking a cheap red while comparing Pringle jumpers. I had the cheeseboard, Jamie had the chocolate brownies. Suitable stuffed Jamie headed back to the room, I headed out to find a bar.

Lady in restaurant pointed me towards a private function and said use the bar down there. I arrived to be greated by a rather full on chappie called “Tim”, he kept thinking I was Austrailian and admired my haircut. I admired his ability to pay for every round. It was a 90th birthday party for his nan. I got introduced to the lady of honour, she was in very good nick. Two pints and a few Tequila shots later I went back to the room. I didn’t have any issue sleeping.

A box arrived marked ‘Keep out of direct sun light’, it’s either chocolate or Robert Pattinson

Woken up rudely twice, first by a courier delivering a mysterious box labeled ‘keep out of sunlight’, then five minutes later by the postman. Anyway, back to working on interpolation again today. After lots of messing about I’ve finally got it working pretty well. Needs a lot more work, but it’s good progress.

Managed to finish off the whole of unit six on my Japanese course. So four units to go. I do want to finish off before we set off, as I just know otherwise I will never come back to it and it cost quite a few quid.

Walked the dog. Went to pump. Did a home check for a dog.

Finished off work. Now busy day tomorrow, off to somewhere London ‘ish to go to the Warner Brother Studios ‘Harry Potter’ tour. Also staying in a posh hotel (any opportunity for a TripAdvisor review). Oh, why? Because it’s our anniversary.

Interpolation: The art of predicting things in the wrong place

So I spent the morning buggering around with springs and trying to balance them under various forces. Complex but interesting.

Went for a run. Not so interesting, it rained.

Then came back and worked on an interesting problem. If you have a process that needs to run quickly or at a high frequency and another process that requires that data result at a lower frequency then you have a bit of an issue. You have to bridge the data between the two processes. It’s all down to time stamps. So your high frequency process you store two lots of data results, the current time stamp and whatever was stored previous. You then just flip between updating these two lots of data. Basically you end up with two lots of data both with different time stamps. Then on your low frequency process you take the current time step. Now the fun bit. You take the biggest time stored and subtract the smallest time. This gives you the time interval between the two lots of data. You then subtract the smallest time stamp from the time stamp you want. You then divide the wanted time interval by the stored time interval. This then gives you the linear interpolation value. The art being to subtract the later data from the earlier data then multiply by the interpolation value then add the earlier data again. So what you are trying to do is generate a value of the data exactly between those two stored values. This usually works fine if the time stamp you want is between them. If it’s before or after then you need a crystal ball. You are taking the difference between data and then trying to predict the future. It’s an interesting task, but if you keep the update frequency high enough the results are pretty accurate. Incidentally, linear interpolation is usually fine. Rotation on the other hand is somewhat more tricky, you have two matrices, ignore the translation part that’s just linear. You need to convert the matrix to a quaternion. Once you have a pair of quaternions you can perform a thing called a ‘slerp’, which is a bit like a rotational ‘lerp’. Again, it can produce good results. Tomorrow I will try and predict the weekends lottery numbers using linear interpolation.

Did some more Japanese. Almost at the end of unit 6 now.

Ate salad.

It’s torture porn night, second part of Twilight Eclipse to get through.