Some pictures from today’s marathon for you:
Update: I forgot to mention that I’ve tagged all the photos as much as possible, including with the runner’s number (if I could see them) and obviousl running clubs. So, you can search for yourself with your number. I have higher res photos too, so if you find yourself and want a big pic, let me know.
Well, ok, there are only six of them…
So, it’s just over two weeks since our wedding civil partnership. We spent the week before mostly cooking as we were doing all the catering ourselves. Everyone seems to have liked what we did (catering for 50 is tough!) so I guess we did something right :)
We had a few hicups – a last minute champagne substitution and a marquee that was distinctly not watertight (thankfully it didn’t rain) but luckily the weather was great on the day.
We were both petrified beforehand but the ceremony went well at Southwark Registry Office and the "celibrant" was really good. Afterwards we had a pretty good party back at our house and although it was a little packed everyone enjoyed it.
So, some pictures :)
I’ve been really sceptical about all the naysayers that claim that Vista’s inbuilt DRM is somehow going to destroy the fabric of the universe. Or something.
But, when I come to try and watch a DVD on my new Vista Ultimate box in Media Center or Media Player I am greeted with the informative message that:
"Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder and video card. Try installing an updated driver for your Video card."
After quite a lot of digging it transpires that my LiteOn DVD drive (which is quite old) has RPC1 region free firmware, which is unacceptable to Vista. I have now had to take a retrograde step and enforce my DVD drive to obey regions just to get a legit DVD to play. Yes, obviously, I could use VLC or some other player but I don’t really see the point in spending money on Vista Ultimate if I can’t use all its features.
On top of this, my Casino Royale DVD subjected me to minutes of adverts and PIRACY IS WRONG messages that I couldn’t skip. I just bought the DVD, why am I getting lectured at! Why would anyone want to do things "the right way" I don’t know…
Bah.
Well, we’re just back from a couple of weeks in Curacao for our honeymoon (a post about the wedding to follow) and you can see the pictures up in the gallery.
I’m going to write a travel guide for Curacao in the near future but to summarise it: nice weather, nice people, nice landscape, crap taxi drivers, poor food.
I’m on the beta of home server, which is supposed to act as a central media storage hub that grows with you, gives remote access and stuff – perfect.
I’ve just been through the setup and despite the fact that it has a Vista-esque backdrop to start with it soon turns into the familiar server 2003 setup GUI. Then it rebooted into DOS text mode setup titled "windows 2003 small business server". Make your mind up!
Installation did take a fair while and I lost track of the number of times it restarted, but it did eventually get there.
All in all it’s pretty decent and I love the remote access stuff. It certainly needs some polishing, but the community seems good so I hope it’ll be a good product in the end.
I now need to decide whether to carry on running it – if I do, then I need to get some new cooling kit for my PC as it all sounds like a jet engine at the moment…
Pearl Izumi have released quite a nice Lycra cycling bib (sort of combined cycling shorts and, er, "suspenders") which combines my love of gadgetry with my lycra sports kit fetish.
I give you the cycling shorts with integrated MP3 player!
At $500 I think I’d just get myself some regular lycra gear and a Nano…
[http://www.pearlizumi.com/product.php?mode=view&product_id=758231]
I’ve written before about how Vista’s new power management sucks. Since then I’ve found that getting it to go to sleep (even with the modifications to the advanced settings) is a bit flakey at the best of times. I think I’ve tracked it down to uTorrent – if it’s running (or even has been running) then Vista will refuse to go to sleep.
So, assuming that I even get it to go to sleep I’ve been finding that Vsta is waking itself up at 4am each night (and not going back to sleep even though the inactivity timeout is set to 1 hour). I’ve eventually tracked this down to Media Centre’s automatic listings update feature. Turn this off and it won’t wake itself up – not a great workaround for those that use it a lot :(
At the moment I make use of Exim’s sender verification callout feature which tries to work out whether the (supposed) sender’s email address given in the HELO is legitimate or not. For this is connects to the remote mail server and tried to do a RCPT TO for that email address. If it can’t find a mail server or gets rebuffed then the email address is rubbish and Exim rejects the mail even before it gets accepted. This cuts down on a huge volume of mail and also stops the "drive by" spamming of innocent third parties that might get an NDR.
The problem with this is that people are idiots. Most often an automated system (typically shopping carts it seems) try to send as apache@domain which is not a valid address on that system, rather than myshop@domain which probably is. Sometimes these systems set the reply-to header in the message, but this isn’t visible in the envelope.
This is causing me an annoyance. On the one hand, if I leave it on, I seem to end up missing semi-important mail (even FON can’t get it right it seems). On the other, if I disable it I end up receiving a deluge of junk mail (ok, I have spam assassin to sort it for me, but it’s still annoying to have to spend money on the bandwidth and storage).
It would be nice if I could start blocking on SURBLs and RHBLs natively with Exim.
Grrrr…
I just got cold called by someone from Talk Talk broadband trying to flog me ADSL. My home number has been on the the TPS for well over a year which legally requires companies not to make marketing calls to me. It takes a maximum of 28 days for it to take effect, and I’ve never had one until tonight.
What’s made me particularly angry is that I queried why I was being called as my number is on the TPS. The lady on the phone demanded to know what my "registration number" was and they’d then stop calling me.
I stated that this wasn’t how the TPS worked to which the lady said that without a "registration number" she didn’t believe that I was on a do not call list. I was particularly angry at this remark and demanded to speak to her supervisor. She then hung up.
Arseholes. Thank $deity for online complaints forms…