Category Archives: Personal

Fucking Hotels

Personal, Travels

I have just discovered that the hotel we were going to stay at in a couple of weeks’ time (Malmaison in Edinburgh) doesn’t include breakfast in its rates. This is despite the fact that we’re paying not an insignificant amount of money per night.

This seems to be a growing trend with hotels. Why on earth should they make you spend £20 a head on breakfast – which consists of a few stale rolls, some cheese and incipid coffee – when you’re spending £200 a night.

To be honest, I wouldn’t normally be so annoyed, however in this case Malmaison don’t make it obvious that their prices are "rooms only". If they did, then I certainly wouldn’t have booked with them.

Now it’s too late to cancel and find another room (especially as it’s festival time), we’ll just go out and buy some milk and cereal and take liberties with the tea & coffee making facilities.

Utter, utter cunts.

New phone

Personal, Photography, Tech

I have a new phone, a sony ericsson W810 :)

sony-ericsson-w810i.jpg

So far, it’s pretty much identical to my old K750 (it was free), however the worst thing about it so far is the ratherodd USB interface. It has two modes – one that emulates a USB mass storage device and another that uses drivers to talk to it (so you can sync to it etc.). This is wierd in itself, but if you choose the USB mass storage mode (say, if you want to copy MP3s onto it) it disables the radio (no calls!) and reboots the phone into some odd mode where you can’t do anything.

On the plus side, I’m really loving the ambient light sensor which dims the screen and brightens the keypad dependant on the brightness. It’s quite spooky and quite fun :)

The walkman application is a bit rubbish – you can’t order by MP3 track ID for example, but it’s enough for me and my occasional music listening. Oh, the phone has a flight mode as well, but if you were flight crew, could you tell the difference?

Server move completed

Personal, Tech

That’s all of Apache, MySQL and the FTP stuff moved now. The old box has been decomissioned and the new server promoted to the name of purple :)

There’s still some administrative stuff to do (like reinstall Munin) but all the user facing stuff should now be done. I’m sure there’ll be some teething troubles, but I guess I’m only going to know about those when they happen.

Now then, time to look for some proper server hosting!