Category Archives: Diary

Today I moved my life

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So started off with a call from plumber…lets call him No.3. He came round pretty much instantly, seems like a nice chap, friend of Sarah’s. Did mention that the boiler would need a permanent live as it will be switched from the time at the moment. It’s a very good point and it’s the first one to mention it. He also didn’t mind who I got to do it, hmm wonder who that will be.

Spent the day sorting out routing issues on the mobile game. Mainly an analysis and optimisation task. Appeared to be quite successful. I’ll see what Al says the performance is like on his iPhone4.

Took dog out for a walk, today we choose a new rather dull route around the industrial estate. Can’t see us doing it again. Pawstretchers called and Sasha is going to visit on Wednesday.

So tomorrow I have two plumbers, one in the morning, one early evening. So far none of them have been even vaguely attractive, let alone cute. How come in porn films the plumber is hot and has a tool like a tree trunk?

Went to gym. Did Body Combat, followed by half hour of running.

I do like my new coffee machine, almost got through a bag of beans in two days. But now does mean I won’t be able to sleep for a week.

Spent the evening moving my life, well moving MannMansion.com anyway, which contains this blog. It hasn’t moved far, about two and a half feet for the moment, but it’s now on the mini-itx box.

So the joys of moving a Ubuntu server from one machine to another. First install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server on to new machine. Had to do this via a USB stick as I forgot it only has a CD drive not a DVD drive. Once that’s installed, best to backup fstab as restoring a backup with a different UID isn’t pretty. It’s all going to go to cock anyway as grub will have bad entries but that can be fixed later. The other thing to do is backup the udev persistent files. This was the cause of my missing network connection, it was there but moved from eth0 to eth1. Then stop postfix and apache2 on old server. Back it up as normal and then copy the backup file to the USB external drive. Then plug that drive into the new server, mount it and restore the backup. Now copy the backup persistent files over the new versions and restore the old fstab. Then reboot and watch it all horribly go wrong. You’ll get no end of mount errors, but if you ignore them all it will actually boot correctly. So reboot and run Ubuntu recovery, when that’s loaded run the ‘repair packages’ option. This will update everything and most importantly rewrite the grub boot loader. When this is done reboot again and you’ll get an error about the file system not being properly unmounted, ignore this and let it do the file system check. It will then boot as normal. Next reboot will be error free.

So I connected up to the pfSense box DMZ and made it live. I’m surprised that my SSL certificates are still valid, but that all seems fine. Apache is working okay, imap appears to be okay. Weather it’s receiving mail or not I’m not sure of yet. I’ll give it a couple of minutes….Sending mail appears to be working….dum de dum….Oh I haven’t got the printers plugged back in yet or the UPS, but I’m not really expecting any issues with those. And receiving mail is working. So final job then is to move old server out of cabinet and install new server, which is actually the old proxy box, which needs to be changed as the PSU isn’t really up to the job. So I’ll sort out a new case and then look into the second project, changing the pfSense box to a machine that uses less power than the sun….

The butt cheek incident

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So this morning I got up a bit later than planned. No particular reason, not like we were having sex or anything. I had breakfast, the dog had breakfast, we both took a shit (different venues, same process). I then ventured out into the garden and got rid of the last of the soil, which was now very much mud and the knackered paddling pool. Also swept up all the leaves and bits. Need to get some new loppers.

Oh before that (chronology not a strong point as usual), I installed the new coffee maker, install being the correct word. If it was any bigger I’d have to take a wall out. Set it all up. It makes coffee. It actually makes very nice coffee. I look forward to trying out various different beans. It’s a posh one, bean to cup, Delonghi. It also produces frothy milk, so that’s 3 things in the house that can do that now.

Right, so had lunch. Sunday so boiled eggs. Then on to the next few jobs, which was a bit of painting and filling over old network panel holes, now that all the cables are in and also over some moved light fittings. Then cleaning out the bathroom cabinets. I’m sure those travel sickness pills with a sale by of 1997 are still serviceable, but in the bin they went. Then cleaned out the laundry room cupboards. I do not require three hundred different pots of shoe polish.

Then I went out and did a house check for a dog. Bit of a shame this one as the house isn’t directly connected to the garden, so I think I’m going to have to say no.

Then decided to swap the servers over. Now the new one does need a new case and PSU as the old one won’t power on properly from a mains on, also the switches are still a bit screwed. But backed up the old server to a USB external drive. Installed Ubuntu on the new machine and then restored the backup. Didn’t work. I’d named one file system MANNMANSION and the other one mannmansion. It got quite upset about this. It also then failed to initialise the network connection. So both things need to be looked into a bit more.

So now it’s a Sunday and time for a bath. And some wine. Followed by some dinner.

Oh, Sarah knows a boiler man, so I’ve added him to the list, that will be about seven in total. Still, one of them may actually be okay.

You never got to the bottom of this and really thought I was going to talk about that did you? Oh may be one day, when I’ve drunk too much perhaps…

You’ll need a gondola to get across that kitchen

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I think boiler man number one has given up now and probably will never hear from him again. May be I teased him a bit too much when I said that the boiler he recommended would require a pump overrun cable and a pump bypass.

So got up, relatively early for a Saturday, didn’t want to have a wanking incident with Keith Lemon again. Walked the dog, took her to the vets to get her worming tablets and flea stuff. Been trying to phone people for home checks and re-checks but no one wants to answer (may be my mothers contacted them and she’s going for some sort of quasi revenge). Reserved my new coffee machine at Curry’s. Did the shopping, which as usual was in two parts as Jamie didn’t give me his list in time. He wanted to blue tooth it to my phone, but forced him to write it down. He still has the ability to write, unlike me, but his writing is appalling at the best of times, but when scribbled with a green marker pen, it makes it even more of a challenge.

Had lunch. It was toast today, with cheese. Oh and half a sausage roll. The dog required the other half to take with her worming tablets. Well it’s not like you take a headache pill and have a glass of water chaser, she didn’t swallow them down then think what I really need now is a sausage roll to make it a square meal, I put the pills inside the roll…

Anyway, then drove up to Curry’s and picked up said coffee maker. At this point I realised just how big the bloody thing is, you can buy smaller cars…you can buy smaller houses. Anyway, then went to John Lewis to spend a tenner on a Dualit milk frothing jug. Need to go posh all the way, one day I’ll have granite work tops and a Dualit toaster, I’ve already made a start with the Brabantia bin… Came back and put coffee machine in lounge, where it will stay until I get a bigger kitchen, or move some shit about. I then did the cleaning, this is my ‘every other week’ clean as hopefully the new cleaners will start next week. So basically hoovered the dog hair off the carpets and cleaned the kitchen worktops, cooker and sink. Then cleaned the bathroom sink and loo. I also cleaned the old coffee maker out and de-scaled it. That’s going to be someone’s Christmas present…

Did the accounts, wrote this and now I think it’s time for a quick bath before I make the dinner.

During all the evening Sasha has been barking due to all the fireworks. I gave her a bone but she was too scared to eat it. After I calmed her down (her little heart was going flat out), she wouldn’t leave me alone. When I was cleaning the kitchen she lade on my feet, in the bathroom she was on the bath mat and then when I did the bills she was at the base of my chair. When Jamie came home she decided she had enough security so found where she left the bone and destroyed it in about ten minutes. Normal service has been resumed. I’ve left contact details with Pawstretchers doggy day care, so may take her there next week.

Anyway, time for that bath. Oh, the title? It was just something odd I read this morning which has stuck in my mind all day, a bit like butt cheeks.

Boilers, Bypasses and overruns

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Today I was rudely awaken by my mobile. It wasn’t my mother so I answered it. It was a boiler man who I emailed last night. So I actually started work at about 8:45 which is mostly unheard of. He turned up just after 9. Now this one is gas safe registered, asked all the right questions and actually looked in the airing cupboard. He gets a gold start for telling me it will need a pump overrun cable (which he said he’ll need to get an electrician to do, yawn, it’s about 8 feet, so if it’s any more than £20 quid he can piss off) and a pump bypass. And the dear old gas pipe upgrading to 22mm. All things that boiler man number one failed to grasp. Incidentally, boiler man number one has go back to me and said that he does all the work, then gets the gas safe man to connect the gas and check it all. I’m not sure I’m over keen on the work being done by someone who is not qualified, I wonder what the gas safe people have to say about that…..Anyway to appease him I sent a mail back saying that the boiler he is recommending is fine, but as I actually bothered to read the installation manual it will require a 22mm pipe, pump over run and bypass. The bypass you could possibly get away with as the mid-position valve will always free flow through at least one radiator as it’s possible the TRV’s will close down the others, but really for that to work 100% you would have to fit two lock shield valves to a small radiator, say a towel rail. I know sound like I know far too much about plumbing, well the same with anything in life, you can learn a hell of a lot from a book, after all that’s was education is mainly anyway, reading books. I’m not saying that you can learn anything in five minutes and become an expert, that takes years and then theirs experience to take into account. But I always think it’s wise on any type of job like this, just to do a bit of research. Don’t appear cocky or they’ll bump the price up, but don’t appear to be clueless or you will be royally fucked. Books these days of course have been replaced by Google, I don’t think I’ve come across a book titled ‘Now I’ve got a boiler’. Any way boiler man number three coming Tuesday evening and number four sometime next week. And then we have number five, my special one, British Gas. They phoned today from a nice call centre (the guy sounded about 12), just to make sure I was going to be in for the appointment so I can be bored to death by a salesman. I’m really quite looking forward to that one. I think in the end I just won’t bother and will wait for the bloody thing to go bang.

Work wise, spent the bulk of the day adding Android projects to our existing current apps. It’s quite a long process but got quite a bit of it done. Then fixed up a couple of issues on the mobile game.

Went to the gym, did Body Pump, followed by running for forty minutes. That then allows me to eat pizza, and drink beer.

Just trying to sort out an external USB drive for the server for backing up to when I change to the new unit. I found one which contains backups from 2006. I’m just consolidating them down and will archive them off, you never know when you want to look at a project you did six years ago….I’ve got backup CD’s here going back over twenty years…and no I’ve never bloody looked at them.

Need to do a home check tomorrow, it’s actually for one of the dogs that I did a check for before and now been returned…It’s an animal it has feelings, you didn’t buy it from QVC. Talking of which ours has finally settled down, she really doesn’t like fireworks.

Right, now it’s bath and wine time. Also time to phone my mother. There are advantages to doing this now, I can listen to the radio, read a magazine and get slowly pissed. She’s much easier to listen to after a few glasses of white. I’m not even going to mention the butt cheek incident (I mean on here, not to my mother, that’s just weird, we’ve never discussed bum sex either, I always thought of my Dad as a pure meat and two veg man, I’m sure kinky sex for him was taking his socks off).

Mann verses Android

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So today was back battling with VC2010 and Android. Got the asset copy working and it wasn’t too much of a job (a couple of script changes) to get the F5 run working. Decided to take another look at the GDB debugger. That has a number of interesting issues. The first being that it’s actually in two parts, you have the GDB client that runs on the host and then the GDB server which runs on the target. So first you need to copy the gdbserver bin over to your lib directory on the Android tree. Then create and deploy your package. Once it’s installed you run it. This will create a user under the package name. You then need to run the server under the same user name as the package and attach it to the running process. This needs to be done or you get into all sorts of permission problems. Then you start the client and connect to the host. Managed to get that all working but still no source level debugging yet, I may look at a graphical front end for GDB tomorrow. I also added release build configs and finally checked it all in.

Walked the dog. Jamie had one of his LBF’s (Little Blue Friends) round, it was really sweet, they were playing Sonic games and comparing toys. I was going to take them milk and cookies so they had enough energy for group fapping.

Had a quote back about the boiler. I did a gas safe trace on the bloke and came up with nothing. Had an email back to say he uses a number of contractors….that’s all a little odd, will see how that pans out.

Sent a mail to the cleaners about starting soon, no reply yet. Went to the gym, ran for seventy five minutes. Torture porn night, so still no time to write up the butt cheek incident.

Total trick or treater’s – zero. The Haribo is mine.

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So still trying to convince Android to build on VC2010. Solved the link error, it was caused by link ordering issues. I tried editing all the scripts to wrap -Wl,–start-group libs -Wl–end-group but this didn’t help, so ended up including some of the libs again using additional dependencies. So now it builds and deploys to my phone. Final couple of things to sort out are the copying of assets in the build script. And then may be some GDB support, but we never had any to start with, so doubt we will miss it much. It still works fine with logcat anyway.

New motherboard arrived, so had a play with that. Got the old Proxy server case out, that has a 60W external PSU but the internal connector is a plane ATX and the board required an extra PCie 4 pin 12V connector. Also needed was a SATA power connector, so it was out with the soldering iron. Twenty minutes later the PSU had been converted and the board was powering up. So I removed the old 2.5 hard disk and replaced with the spare SSD drive. All powered up and bios set, it then amusingly tried to load Windows 7 from an i7 Intel quad core. It failed, unsurprisingly, but did try and recover its self, it failed again. But that’s hardly the point, I need to install Ubuntu on it and then restore a backup from the this server. Job for another day, but so far so good.

Had another boiler quote, this one was a bit strange, invited the guy to have a look, he just said it was a fixed quote, I don’t think I’ll bother with him. Also was given a card from a friend, did a trace on the number, it goes to no less than five plumbing company names. Another one I won’t be bothering with.

Will give the new cleaning company a call tomorrow and try and get that arranged for next week.

Lots of new t-shirts have arrived. I may take them out of the bags at some point. Walked the dog. Went to the gym and ran for seventy four minutes. Ate salad.

On the good news front I may be getting the money back I’m owed from about 18 months ago and my salary restored back to it’s existing level. I’ll believe it when it’s in the bank, but something positive anyway. On the bad news front, Jamie is still fat. Oh yes, there’s still that butt cheek incident….but out of time tonight.

Am I using the internet to cruise porn? No, I’m looking at bathroom tiles

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So today I was looking at improving Android processes. Mainly trying to ditch Cygwin as it’s incredibly slow. Found something that does work quite well and allows me to compile for Android from VC2010. Sample projects work wine, our own projects now build but I’m getting some weird link errors. Also had a good blast at trying to get the source debugger to work, now that’s a real shit. Will probably do battle with it again tomorrow.

The boiler man came, well the plumber man. Looks like he knows his stuff. Will wait for his quote, he’s also going to quote me on the bathroom.

Dogs annoying me, three days following she’s pissed on the floor over night.

Went to gym, ran for seventy two minutes. Now looking at sinks….may be some porn later. Oh yes, must write about that butt cheek incident soon…

And todays post is being typed using Ubuntu Desktop edition

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It’s on here as it’s switched on and I can’t be arsed to fire up the main machine again.

Ok, so cleaning man came round this morning to give me a cleaning quote, walked round with a clipboard, that’s one step away from wearing a hi-viz. Ooo, firefox doesn’t seem to have a spell checker built in…ah it does, it just wasn’t set to the right language. Anyway, he came up with 2.3 hours and two cleaners (they always work in pairs, a bit like breasts). With the price they can do it once a fortnight and it better be bloody good.

Work wise, playing around with more Android stuff. Getting it set up on the Ubuntu box, there’s also a solution I’m looking into for dev studio as well.

Managed to find a reasonable Mini-ITX board that was display stock, so got it for £50. It’s dual core and apparently only needs about 20 watts. Hopefully it will fit and work in the old proxy case. I think I may have found another board also that would be good for pfSense, but one thing at a time.

Went to gym, did combat, ran for twenty seven minutes afterwards. Now I’m going to eat salad and watch the Indian Grand Prix. Man coming tomorrow to give me a quote for new boiler and doing the bathroom.

Time to say goodbye….

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You’ve been with me for a long time. Many years. I think since I was about twenty. I’m sure you once belonged to my sister, until I stole you for my own. There was one before you, but that was taken from me (actually by the friend who turned up in yesterdays dream, not Keith Lemon, the other one, may be it was a omen). We’ve been together for twenty years, every morning you’ve been faithfully there, only once or twice have I ever forgotten you, but you’ve never complained. You’ve seen bits of me that I’ve never even seen. But the years have rolled on and age has finally taken it’s toll. Your once vibrant colour has faded and replaced by blackness, where you were once a perfect round you’re now just a strange shaped blob. There will be no funeral, no big send off, no flowers. Even after all this time together your fate is to be cast out to a great landfill site where you will continue to rot to nothing more. I therefore give you one final solute and bid you goodbye forever, I will miss you little red sponge.

Actually on yesterdays entry I was somewhat incorrect. During dinner Jamie did consume a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, now he handles alcohol as well as Jimmy Savile handles a twelve year old, so after being in bed for an hour catching up with the X-Factor we had a bit of a session which was nice. Anyway woke up this morning, let the dog out for a piss (she already decided during the night that she needed one and probably failed to wake us so there was a nice puddle by the kitchen bin). Had breakfast. Then I was still feeling rather horny. I tried pressing various buttons and prodding things but I think I would have got more response from a British Gas customer care line. Now dear reader you’re going to have to start commenting on posts if you want to know more, it’s all a bit silent in here.

So I got up and continued with my cleaning quest. I spent the next five hours cleaning the on-suite and the bedroom window. It’s sparkling. I even got the brown stuff (unknown) out of the bathroom carpet. We then went to the Toby Carvery, which was fine except the service was abysmally slow. I then came back and cleaned the kitchen, hoovered all of downstairs again and washed the floor. Jamie’s now taken the dog out for a walk, so when he comes back he can wash the floor again. I’m going to have a bath, it is a Sunday after all.

Got some results in from the electric power meter thing. Basically, servers are bloody expensive so need to replace them with much lower power machines. Yearly costs: Beer fridge £17.52, Wine fridge £26.07, Server £122.68, pfSense £131.89. So that’s £250 a year to keep mannmansion.com, thetorturepornmovieblog.com and all my email and internet connections flowing. I reckon that’s about £200 quid too much. So I think it’s time to build some ITX boxes to cut that down to something sensible.

And then the ‘Keith Lemon’ lookalike shoved a spunk covered tissue into my ear

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So woke up far too early, let the dog out for a piss then went back to bed. Jamie is on earlies so he buggered off. Got up again, fed dog and had breakfast, still didn’t feel like getting up so went back to sleep. Now what normally happens when I do this is that I enter REM sleep in about 3 seconds. This is what happened.

So I’m in a club in Shinjuku in Japan. I’m with an old friend of mine who’s in a wheel chair (he’s always been in a wheel chair, he didn’t go para just for a bit of artistic license by my mind). Also I’m with this guy who I can only describe as a ‘Keith Lemon’ lookalike. No idea who the hell he was. Anyway for some reason we are all in a bed (in the side of a club, I know, stick with it). He’s having a tamper with this middle aged women who has no hair on her minge. He keeps playing with his willy and moaning to me about it’s his age that he can no longer get hard. Mean while I have a stiffy just to annoy him. This women then goes down on him under the covers. I look over to my left and my disabled friend is giving his misses one. Next thing I know is Keith is then shoving a spunk filled tissue into my ear. Then suddenly we are all sitting now at the back of this club, and ‘Girls Aloud’ turn up and sit on a table in the corner. The ginger one comes up to me and starts talking about breasts. I then say that ‘mine jangle as well, but it’s ok as I have my new bra on’. She then tells me that I’m a nice guy and then they all bugger off. I’m now sat alone at the back of the club with my trousers round my ankles, I roll then up to find they are on backwards. I wake up. I take the dog out for a walk. Now Dr. Ruth Westheimer, good bless her little communist sole would say of course ‘It’s lack of sex’. She’s probably right.

Came back and did the shopping. Jamie hadn’t given me his shopping list, which is good for two reasons, one it was only thity seven quid and two he won’t get fat(er).

I walked into town, with it being close to Halloween it was covered in the undead. Now I’ve lived and worked in Bristol for forty years, a man walking round with no head and blood squirting from his neck is really nothing out of the ordinary here. The most hideous sight I saw was a teenager with long greasy hair and horrendous acne, he wasn’t dressed up for Halloween, he was just fucking ugly.

Came back. Jamie was asleep on the bed. I asked him to change the bed, which now at ten fifteen he still hasn’t done. I spent two hours hoovering and cleaning the kitchen, I then did all the accounts and shortly I will cook dinner. Then I will go to bed and fail to have sex.