Was supposed to blog about this last week or 2 ago but might as well do it now

So yea, a couple weeks ago we got some really bizarre weather here in the UK… bizarre in the way that it was totally unexpected, over a week of snow… snow that actually settled!  Was great, everything looked so cool covered in a white layer as far as the eye could see.  Then came the realisation that I had to drive on this stuff to get to work.  The first couple days were alright cause the serious snow hadn’t hit yet, that was due midweek.  However, when Wednesday rolled around I was getting rather nervous since I have no experience when it comes to driving on snow.  Luckily my house has extremely easy access to the motorway and once onto there I was safe… until I got to where I worked.

They hadn’t even gritted any of the roads!  Driving along the roads at 5mph wasn’t too bad though, but the offices were up a hill, so when I got to the bottom of the road that goes up to it and it was still covered in completely fresh snow (apart from a few tyre tracks) I decided against it and go in through the exit of the complex which is on flatter ground.  Unfortunately the gates were closed (think the gate mechanism was frozen shut).  So on I go and I come to the other end of the first road which looks a little less steep, so I go up it and it wasn’t long till my wheels were spinning freely.  A bit startled and panicky I put on the brakes and hit my hazard lights and let the 4×4 behind me past.  My GTi has too much low end power for snow driving, but remembering some advice I was given previously, I change to 2nd and very gently press the accelerator and slowly crept up the hill.

As soon as I was on the flat I was happy and proceeded to the office carpark… which was practically empty.  Anyway, I go in and start work, but there was hardly anyone around, but as time when on people started arriving.  Guess they left it a little later so it’d be safer.  However, I did hear that the original entrance to the road I was going to go up had been closed due to a crash halfway up it… it’s pretty steep, I’m glad I didn’t go that route!

The next day I left from my girlfriend’s house which is on the side of a hill, which I managed to get to the top of, unfortunately there was a crash at the bottom of the other side and traffic just was not moving.  The only time traffic was moving forward was when other drivers were getting impatient, giving up and pulling a U-turn and going another way.  Well I was sat at the top of this hill with my hand-brake on wondering what to do (remember I don’t have much drive-on-snow experience) and my car started to slide down the hill towards the car in front.  I slammed on the brakes and luckily 4 locked wheels gave enough traction to stop me.  That completely freaked me out and I decided to bottle, was so not going to risk crashing to get to work, I don’t prioritise things that way .  So I very carefully made my 3-point turn and handed back to my girlfriend’s house.  Luckily I don’t have to give up a day since I emailed a colleague to get the VPN details so I could work from home.  Of course, after the girlfriend got back from physio we went out and built a snowman it had a top hat .

One of the main reasons I took that day off was because we don’t get that kind of weather much and it hasn’t snowed that much for like a decade, so there’s no harm taking a snow day once in a few years or so?  Not much to ask  However, the next day was worse… previous days snow is now ice with new snow on top.  I can’t use the snow card again.  Was leaving from my girlfriend’s house again so was not looking forward to a repeat of the previous day… if I could get the freakin’ car away from the side of the road.  Was just wheel spinning where it was due to the camber of the road and ice.  Took a quite verbal lesson from the girlfriend on how to drive on snow (I guess they get quite a bit up north in Cali), managed to get the car into the middle of the road and drove on a bit to the main road that goes up the hill.  Man, this was a bad idea :/ loads of cars all driving up this icy road extremely slowly and half of them are wheel spinning.  This minivan in front of me got to a point where they couldn’t go forwards anymore, so I went around them, get about 10 metres further and also got to the point where I just had no traction (hill slowly increased in steepness).  At this point I was holding up traffic so I figured I’d pull over and work out a plan of action.  Unfortunately I was totally stuck against the curb now, couldn’t do anything but wheelspin and slip backwards and I didn’t want to damage my wheels.  So I called my girlfriend (was only about 300-400 yards away from her house) and she came out to help me, I so wanted to just say “Fuck it!  Work isn’t worth this…” but she encouraged me to keep trying (I wish she hadn’t…).  Anyway, she pushed against the back of my car as I slowly reversed away from the curb to the T-junction where I could turn around and I went back through the middle of town which took me over an hour, but at least I was heading downhill to safer roads and the bottom of the motorway.

All in all it took me 2:30 hours to make a 30 minute journey.  I was so tired of concentrating on driving and my ached hurt from pedal control.  Wasn’t the best experience of my life but at least I didn’t hit anything, which I think quite a few people did that morning (the road I got stuck on was closed shortly after I turned around… crash).  One of the things that annoyed me the most was when I rang up work to let them know I’d be in late, the receptionist went on to tell me how other people from the city I live in managed to make it in fine… big-fucking-whoop-de-doo, I wanted to bitch-slap her for her insolence.  Yea people made it in, but they probably lived in more accessible areas (like my house right next to the motorway… if I had stayed there that night) and they probably had more experience driving in hazardous conditions (haven’t even had my car for a year yet).  Anyway, I was glad that the worst of the snow/ice was over with (and that the weekend had arrived), hopefully the UK will just stay miserable and wet for a while… that I can deal with .

No matter how much I try I can’t get the stupid media streamer working 100%, really beginning to get on my nerves.

When I moved into the house I’m in at the moment I brought my server (WOPR) with me as well as my enormous media collection, unfortunately the mini-ITX box we had as the media centre wasn’t mine so it remained behind.  Luckily I’ve got a 360 which is capable of streaming from a media server and there are a few around for linux.

At first we ran twonkymedia, which is pretty good, but as it is commercial software an alternative had to be found when the trial ran out.  I had my mind set on purchasing a licence for it but only one thing stopped me.  No transcoding.  Since the 360 only played specific formats, a lot of the media in my collection is unplayable from the 360 and this was unacceptable, so twonky had to go.

I looked around and found a few opensource/free alternatives, one of them being fuppes and the reason fuppes stood out was because it claimed to support on-the-fly video transcoding, which would solve all my problems.  Getting it up and running wasn’t too tricky and we’ve been using it for a long time now.  Unfortunately there was 2 major issues with it.  The first is that the video transcoding doesn’t work, no idea why it doesn’t just refuses to do it as if the feature never existed even though the web interface claims it is enabled. And 2, every now and then while watching something on the 360 the video goes *BLDFDBLBFFASDBlarg* and dies, which I think maybe a caching issue since we’re running it over wireless.

But lately a 3rd issue has arisen (well not really lately but it’s become much more of an issue lately) and that is the database is failing to rebuild itself, I think I’ve reached the maximum size cause SQLite is now complaining halfway through an index rebuild that it is having IO errors or cannot write to disk (even though there is loads of space left).  I’ve been playing with SQLite trying to figure out if there is any issues with my installation of it and at first I thought there was, various libraries were reporting different versions, but that’s been fixed now and it does seem to rebuild faster, but it still crash and burns .

Anyway, I’m sure that I can sort out the rebuilding but I’m still at a complete loss as to why the video transcoding just doesn’t want to play.  Quite a few people on the forums claim to have gotten it to work but I can’t see how.  Even when I use their configs I get nothing, not even a debug message at the console.  I’m running the most recent revision from the SVN (0.627 from memory) but nothing.  Also the sourcecode hasn’t been updated in absolutely ages, which someone with better programming prowess than myself would take up the development of fuppes, I think it’s pretty good, just really buggy at the moment.

If I can’t work out how to sort it out soon I’m going to have to get rid of it and try another media streamer but I didn’t see many others which supported transcoding.

Bah…

Ugh, I can’t believe how tired I feel today… and there I was thinking I had a good night sleep.  Didn’t require much effort to actually get up this morning but was still an incredible effort to keep from jumping back into bed during my morning routine of getting ready for work.  Although, this was probably due to having a sexy red-head in it at the time .

In hindsight I should have stayed at home.  With all the snow that has fallen over the last couple days I was so tempted to use it as an excuse not to go into work (which I know a lot of people (would) have done).  The motorways were fairly uncongested and moving freely which was ok, but getting into the town where I work was fairly dangerous.  All the roads were white or icy, everyone moving 10mph… and then I got to the road that leads up the hill to where I work.  One look at that and I thought “Fuck it, I’ll go around and enter through the exit of the estate, at least that’s level.”, but alas, the gates were closed.  So I found the other end of the first road which goes up the hill a little less steeper and went up there.  Wasn’t really a surprise that my Polo GTi started wheel spinning halfway up… too much low-end power.  I managed to break the wheelspin and stop myself on the hill while I figured out how to proceed (am not used to driving in such conditions), I turned on my hazard lights to let the 4×4 behind me know I was having difficulties and let him past incase I slipped backwards into him.  After that I was faced with a hill-start on ice/snow but it wasn’t that bad, just had to be really sensitive on the accelerator.  Anyway, got into work thinking “I should have stayed at home.” and if it wasn’t for the fact I’d probably slide down the hill trying to leave I would have.

So here I am at work and an unrelenting tiredness has overcome me.  There’s only decaffeinated tea left, but I’ve had 2 pro plus but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything.  Having extreme difficulty focusing on work and feeling like my eyes want to roll into the back of my head, I needed to somehow keep my mind active through lunch.  So have started playing Singularity and now blogging to keep the myself from slipping into neutral or stalling, heh.

Maybe the reason I’m so freaking tired is because I’m fighting off an illness of somekind, had a pretty bad sore throat yesterday, but has eased up today.  I think I’m gonna take an early night tonight or I’m going to be crippled for badminton tomorrow.

Well, bad to Singularity… laters,
Jargon

Ugh, I can’t believe how they get away with it.

My home Internet has been out for over a week now and Virgin Media are difficult to deal with.  They keep blaming the outages on their customers so they don’t have to compensate them, it’s taken this long to get them to admit there is a fault with their system somewhere.

The first time I contacted them I decided to humour the guy at the end of the phone by following his instructions (even though I had been furiously doing exactly the same only moments before), which didn’t yield any positive results… as was expected.  He then said he’d send out an engineer (like they’d be of any use), so said OK, but unfortunately had to cancel since no one would be hope.  It’s silly, they can only send someone out during the hours when everyone is at work.

Anyway, my housemate called up the next day (Internet was still out) and followed the so-called troubleshooting again (they wouldn’t budge on the skipping ahead, morons), which resulted in – you guessed it – nothing!  So they said they’d send us a new modem (no you idiots, the problem is YOUR end), anyway we got our new modem but then had to ring up to activate it.  This time round they would only take a call from the contract holder (ugh…) so we called our 3rd housemate who was up in Cambridge at the time and told him to call them.

Funnily enough when the modem was activated the Internet came back up for a whopping 1 hour before it died again, about 5 minutes after I got home from work.  So we rang up again and this time after the whole song and dance of the troubleshooting routine, they finally went “Oh, wait a second, there’s a fault in the line.”, no shit Sherlock, we already knew that and we’re betting Virgin Media knew that as well but ran out of excuses to fob us off :/

I can’t believe companies can get away with treating their customers like shit and blaming us for their problems?  Like I said earlier, probably cause if they admitted their faults from the beginning they’d have to compensate us as well as everyone else they are fucking over, which is probably going to amount to a LOT of money.  Broadband companies need to be held accountable to their unscrupulous behaviour in my opinion.