Every day I take my laptop out of hibernation.
Every day the damn thing grinds to a halt as the hard drive gets thrashed to pieces as tiny little applications I have loaded try and access their memory registers and fire back up.
Every day I look at the memory manager and see that out of the 3GB I have in this machine I have over 2GB free.

Every day I wonder why it doesn’t make better use of the physical memory I have in this machine and prevent the hard drive thrashing which slows the entire thing down to a crawl.
Pathetically annoying, the drive is still being absolutely creamed now with so much memory free over 10 minutes after coming out of hibernation.
Annoying then that this is potentially the best / leanest OS under support from M$ at the moment.

Windows 7 better be good!

ATI have been pissing me off for a while now.

I had an Nvidia GTX 9800 card and a week later after purchasing it a new Radeon 4870 came out. It was clear what was going to happen, I was going to take the Nvidia card back and swap it over with the Radeon which was the same price but twice as powerful (or near enough). 

Without fuss it was swapped over and put into the machine. The first card, a Sapphire had a fucked second output and would cause massive corruption on the display, if it turned on at all. Eventually after getting nowhere with ATI support I took it back and changed it for a HIS card which was actually 8 quid less, result.

The problem is the HDMI / HDTV support, its the worst pile of SHIT I’ve ever used in my life. Even worse than the D-link gigabit NICs they released with no driver support for ANY windows operating system, no shit I tell you. If there is no driver support you can’t expect something to work, if there is support and it randomly works 1 in 10 times you become seriously frustrated.

Basically what happens is this, I go into either the CCC (catalyst control centre) or the windows display support and enable the 2nd monitor. In this case the TV. Nothing happens. The TV stays on its blue background as if there was no input at all. At first I got confused and though the port was knackered on the card, so I swapped over the monitor cable and rebooted, the port was fine. Right, so the TV is fine as it worked flawlessly with the Nvidia card, the cable is fine and the port on the card is fine. What does that leave?

Software support.

I tried turning the 2nd display on again when it was set back to the other port and again, nothing happened. Curiously though if I turn the TV on or off, regardless of the channel it is on, the entire frame buffer on the card resets, the main monitor drops to 1080p and will not go any higher until I enable the 2nd display. Which we’ve already concluded, doesn’t work.

So after I’ve fucked about and set the monitor back to the correct res, I start exprimenting with the second display. Curiously if I drop the TV display to 640×480 it turns on instantly, it just looks uitterly crap, as you’d expect. If I then put it back to 1080p the TV turns off again after the entire display has stalled, gone black and reset itself in a nasty fashion. This happens EVERY time I change a setting and EVERY time I am prompted with “do you want to keep these settings”. No option to turn that off.

Randomly enough the ONLY way to make this work is pure chance. I have a proceedure that used to work more often than not, but with the new driver release the chances of this technique working has decreased to about 1 in 10. I have to enable the second display, force it into 640×480 to get a picture. Confirm. Force it back up into 1080p @ 60 Hz. Confirm. Drop it to 50Hz. Confirm. Force it back up to 1080p @ 60Hz and SOMETIMES the TV will get a signal.

Since the new release this works about once in 10.
ATI don’t seem to care at all, their “support” monkies just paste back random bullshit about changing settings in my main computers BIOS or making sure it’s “up to the current version”. Yeah thats right, for a software issue on a graphics card I’d recommend average Joe upgrade their fucking mainboard BIOS, because thats not a risky thing to do without knowing what the fuck you’re playing at isn’t it.

Long and short of it ATI have tried to provide shitloads of configurable options for their HDTV support and all they’ve managed to do is severely fuck it up, provide random support that works very rarely and then deny all knowledge of events happening even when I can prove it on video. Nvidia was much simpler, I went “turn on 2nd display”, the TV turned on. First time. Full res. No random clunky resetting of the frame buffer on my main monitor, no loss of resolution, no fucking fuss.

Fuck you ATI, you useless bunch of hairy twats.

What a joke these things are. Anyone who has seen the advert recently of some woman telling the tale of how it has made her “feel better” and the fact that she’s got “the entire female population of her family” eating it can clearly see she’s talking completely out of her ass.

Well she’s not, the marketing twats behind it all are.

Point of note is that the advertising doesn’t contain any “science” behind it at all other than a diagram of something that is meant to be a yellow intestinal tract with a large arrow pointing downwards. Its quite easy really, food into poo - we’ve been doing that for ages without the help of “probiotic yogurt”. Or have we?

See simple fact of the matter is that all yogurts used to contain active cultures that aided digestion, before the germophobic yanks decided to pasteurise the content and kill everything. So what they’re actually doing in advertising this “pro-biotic” nonsense is basically putting back into yogurt what was already there in the first place… and then charging more for it?

The funniest part of all this is the class action lawsuit against Dannon lodged in California, for spenidng 100 million dollars on marketing and advertising the benefits of a product that the company’s own testing disproves. An active culture, which can be found in any natural yogurt that has not been treated, does infact aid digestion but the hilarious fact is that Dannon “made up” the NEW names of the cultures within the yogurt. Their yogurts are not special, its all marketing spin… Hicks would have a field day.

The cultures already had a name of course, but Dannon decided that the new names for their specific product would be: bifidus regularis, which supposedly helps regulate your digestive system and L. casei immunitas, which, you guessed it, supposedly strengthens your immune system.

The saddest part in all this are the stupid female idiots, depicted in their own adverts that thrust them on their families without needing so much as a shred of scientific evidence or proof that anything actually works or benefits you. Its also been proven that the amount of sugar they put in these things to make them bareable to eat actually feeds the cultures in the first place which negates most of the effect on the digestive system in the first place. That is if the cultures make it into the tract at all, not nuked by stomach acid.

Don’t buy these things, please.
Utter placebo, waste of time.
Do some exercise, eat some fibre.
Your metabolism will go up and you’ll be shitting more regular than you ever wanted.

Anyone who has worked in IT for a substantial length of time has more than likely come across “ITIL”.  For the uninitiated, that’s the “Information Technology Infrastructure Library”. And also for the uninitiated, it’s a load of total bullshit.

Somewhere along the line, a bunch of muppets decided they knew how every IT related business process should be run, and so documented it all to make it clear, concise and efficient.  Today this has involved into a hideous syllabus, which only a few select people can bear to understand.  Even Einstein’s brain would’ve spat this shit out like a bad donor kidney.

My particular beef is with ‘Change Control’.  It’s a perfectly acceptable concept, one that works in whatever customised form a business chooses to implement it in.  The thing is, where I work, to satisfy the thirst of rabid managment, the business has been forced into adopting the raw forms of these processes in a truly lame attempt at ’standardization’.  The result?  Flakey processes which, while labelled as streamlined and super efficient, just don’t work.

Why?  Well, I raise a change - could be anything, doesn’t matter.  The process dictates that this change has to be approved.  This is sensible!  Who has to approve it?  The change control manager - fine.  Someone in ‘Operations’ - hmm, don’t know who they are, they’re not based in the same building but whatever. Someone in my own team (who isn’t me) - eh?  Ok so after faffing around the change has found its way back to me, basically.  The problem here is that the ‘team’ I’m in actually refers to the poorly managed groups on the utterly shite incident logging system we’ve been forced to use.  The result is that no-one in this team has anything to do with what I do, so there’s no reason for them to care about any change I raise.  This is where the process falls on its face and dies a death.

So after 3 days I’m getting emails asking why the change hasn’t been approved, and I have to go round chasing random people to approve something which they know nothing about.  The conversation went something like this:

“Aha, you, you’re in my group!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Open up change 61361.”
“Yup…”
“Approve it please!”
“Ok…”
“Thanks!”
*pause*
“What have I just approved…?”

What an awesome system?! It’s taken 3 times longer than it used to, no-one knows what’s really going on, more people than necessary have been involved and now the change is almost late because of all that.

Brilliant.  Change control, fuck it, ITIL, can fuck right off.

Not quite the same as a rage post, this game hasn’t given me rage but I just wanted to write up a few comments here:

First stage: Cell stage

The best stage in the game, you go around avoiding predators, growing, eating, developing and you upgrade your character on a regular basis when you mate. You can add defences, offenses, different mouths to eat different kinds of food etc, its a real battle to get one step ahead of the things trying to eat you, great.

Second stage: Land stage

In this stage your character sprouts legs and joins with the other weird looking creations on land. The idea here is to either conquer other species by wiping them out of existence or becoming their allies. To become allies you have to do the extremely boring task of mimicking the other tribe when using a social stance. You can either sing to them, dance, charm them or pose, depending on the body parts you’ve installed. If you can’t do a particular talent that you are being presented, the chances are you can never be friends and you just end up attacking the them anyway. Extremely repetitive, extremely boring.

Third Stage: Tribal stage

You’ve now evolved to the point where you form a tribe, just as a few of the other species have and you can chose to attack them or suck up to them. I ended up smashing the shit out of all of them by literally force of numbers and clicking the mouse faster than the other team was. Exciting stuff… the more you conquer you can nab their technology in the form of crude tools/sticks/fire posts etc. So 20 minutes later and you’ve smacked the crap out of all the other tribes and you’re on top of the world. To be honest if I wanted to play war craft I would have installed it and had a lot more fun than this crap.

Fourth Stage: Civ stage

Other tribes who you didn’t manage to smash the shit out of before are now in the same state as you. You can build houses, factories, entertainment places etc. Vehicles. Its now turned into a cut down version of command and conquer, obviously just not as good. I think the designers were starting to run out of ideas in a serious way by this point, again if I wanted to play a point and click battle sim I’d install a good one and do so.

In this situation you are against your own kind, just with different clothes. So again after building more vehicles than the other teams you can either blow them up or create automatic trade routes and eventually buy them. Needless to say I didn’t buy any of the cities, I blew them all up. Eventually I took over the entire world and advanced to:

Fifth Stage: Space

Sigh… this is where things had the most promise but fall down seriously. The interface is annoying as the amount of mouse wheeling required just to zoom in and out of the planets takes ages and you’re sent on random missions. You design a space ship that doesn’t seem to have any sort of special properties, get sent on a few missions across space to other planets where you colonise another planet and then can’t do anything with it. You’re then sent to do some medial shit like scan a few more things on another planet, and er… ahem… “trade spice”. Yes seriously. You’re in a fucking space ship at the pinnacle of your existence and all they could possibly think of to do is mine and trade fucking spice deposits. Are you joking me? To make it even worse the game will repeatedly ask you to perform tasks and then give you no hint at how to do it.

To make it worse I can’t even work out how to get the spice you’ve mined into the ship! Apparently just flying over a planet and opening comms to a world you occupy should load the spices into your ship. It does not. So I have nothing to trade and utterly no will to play this game anymore. At all.

Whilst in a mission I was asked to survey a planet, I duly went to said planet and surveyed all life on it. I got back to the home world that asked me to do the survey and reported in. I was asked to then go back to the planet and grab a couple of the species they are interested in. The two options I was presented was “Ok” or “Couldn’t you have told me that before I went there?”.

Now for some reason the second option when selected, although it sounded reasonable to me was taken as a refusal to go back to the said planet and the mission instantly failed. Great design guys, me being prompted with a reasonable response coded into the game as a flat out refusal and as a result wastes about 15 minutes of my time driving around a planet “scanning” things that really have no relevance at all.

For some reason in this game the trade routes you establish are not automatic… no more ships are made to cope with demand and you’re actually reduced to becoming a cargo spaceship driving delivery boy. The trade routes in the tribal stage were automatic and managed by the game, why the hell does this then become your main focus of play in the space stage? So much promise… so much fail. No thanks!

Conclusion: Started off as an amazing idea full of promise and was actually fun in the first stage. The more you play it the further down the slide into the swimming pool full of infected pig shit you are helplessly flung. They clearly ran out of ideas how to make this fun after the first stage and resorted to ripping off other games in a seriously cut down form whilst forcing you to carry out repetitively boring tasks. Waste of time, download it, play the first stage and then uninstall it.

It can quite easily be the smallest things that tips you over the edge, looking back on such instances now you might think about a situation and wonder why you go so mad. The straw that broke the camels back though can quite easily be indicative of your general state of mind at the time where some individual pushes you just that little bit too far when you’re already having a hard time.

The majority of my work at the moment is hoovering up other people’s fuck ups and giving advice and help to people who really should know what they’re doing, or infact does not relate at all to my area of expertise. The amount I help out people see me as some sort of hardware / OS breakfix service to keep their environment going, when at the moment my actual work is designing a solution for a problem. With 2 colleagues off too it makes it hard when you’re the only point of contact that gets hassled.

The one good thing I find in Friday is when we all get together, me with my work friends and we’re able to go to the cateen for a good meal. Good being the important word here because it really is only good on a Friday at the canteen, because its pie day. The pies are ace, massive chunks of things with a lot of meat in them, the only thing that was really keeping me going today was the fact that at lunch time I’d have a nice meal, chill out and speak with my mates before the weekend.

One stupid fucking moron HAD to ruin it for me didn’t they. Just to cap everything off.

We go into the canteen and they’ve just served up the last from a tray of pie… no problems there is always generally another one as it was only half 12. The lady behind the counter, renound for being a bit fucking slow and weird at the best of times tells us that it’s going to take “at least 10 minutes” to bring another tray out. Obviously her own estimate there, asking the actual chef might have been a bit more accurate. So we decide 10 minutes is a long time to stand infront of a sweltering rack of food items so we go outside to the reception part and sit down to read the paper for a bit.

After 5 minutes we get back up and the queue has got quite big. As we turn the corner in the queue they are nearing the end of another entire tray of pie. They’ve served over 10 pieces of the fucking thing as well as another whole tray of fish in the 5 minutes we decided to sit down. So what it comes down to is we’ve been told to go away for 10 minutes, another tray comes out 1 minute later and they give it all away.

So we get to the front of the queue and they’ve literally just served up the last bits of the pie from that tray, turn to us and say “sorry, its all gone now :-D”. What? I almost fucking exploded. They told us to go away for 10 minutes only for us to come back and they serve the rest of the entire thing up to people infront of us as we watch? At one point it didnt register in that stupid cow’s fucking head that we were intentionally sent away and were waiting for this meal and at no point did she thing “ah I’ve got 3 people waiting for some of that, i’ll put it by”. Its common fucking decency. I hate being messed about by MORONS.

I said to them hang on a second, we were just told to go away for 10 minutes but 5 minutes later we come back and you’ve given the lot away, whats going on. She just clammed up and didn’t know what to say, fucking stupid bitch. The other woman on the counter seemed to think it was mildly amusing and thought I was somehow talking nonsence so just shrugged it off and said “well its gone now, all gone!”.

At this point I think I said quite a few F words very loudly, flung my tray in the general direction of the stack and stormed out.

Yeah its just pie, but I’ve had a seriously overloaded shitty week and it was the one thing I was looking forward to all day. I’ve not been left alone by people who need my help and I’ve had about 2 hours all week to get on with things that I need to do for myself. The second I sit down and try and read some documentation someone comes up to me asking for a favour. To make things worse some complete fucking discourteous retard sums it all up by messing me and my friends around and didn’t have the decentcy to put some dinner by for us or apologise when she’d clearly fucked up our plans.

I think these rants are *just* maanging to keep me sane today.

Edit: The people in charge of the canteen got wind of this and at break time this afternoon offered me free pie next week Rage vented, free pie obtained, set me up nicely for the weekend. Lets just wait and see if they give my free pie away next Friday, heh.

I am guilty of failing to see the point in this service anymore.

Previously sky was something of a luxury and it was something people serious about TV bought.
It was new when I was growing up (as was cable) and people with cable/sky were privilidged and could view shows and channels that the rest of us normal people on 4 channel tv could view. (Even now I’m not sure if 5 counts as a channel).

The thing is I always had a problem with the idea of how much you had to pay out to receive certain broadcasts. Ok you have a TV, so you shell out for the licesnse fee. You buy sky, you pay for the installation and the box. You purchase the sports packages so you can watch sports all day long. Then a boxing event comes on, but boxing evidently isn’t a sport so you then pay ANOTHER fee on top of your previous 3 to watch the boxing. How much of a bunch of fucking mugs are we?

Then the killer last night, the England game. I hear its on and not being a big follower of football I didn’t really care much, but I wanted to have a look. I turned on the TV to BBC, no football. ITV, no football. Hrm ok, must be on Sky. I go downstairs to the 2nd sky box where we have all the sports/movie channels. Its no on there either… have they dared make it pay per view? Nope can’t find it.

Turns out its on “Setanta” sports. To be honest, good for Setanta, its likely to rake them in millions. Anyone who fucks over Sky can’t be all bad. Then it occured to me that without the nations national sport on it’s privately bought channels anymore, and with the circumstances mentioned in the previous post about people cutting back on luxuries, just what is the POINT of Sky sports?

Who out there is possibly dumb enough to pay the license fee, pay for sky, then pay for the extra sports channels NOT TO BE ABLE TO WATCH THEIR OWN FUCKING COUNTRY PLAY A FOOTBALL GAME ON IT. Its bad enough that the premiership games got moved off sky sports onto their own fucking channels. Sky must be shitting it at the moment. I’m half tempted to cancel my subscription to them to be honest, its full of shite anyway.

Corporations have seemed to taking a pasting today from our friend and fellow writer Rag but in the current climate of recession things are going from bad to worse.

It’s pretty fucking sickening that a company that supplies something like water or electricity, services that people rely on as a need rather than a want can firstly rake in so much pure profit out of it and secondly get to control the economy in such a way because of it.

Take energy company A, they make profits of 25 billion pounds a year. They realise that current fuel prices for raw materials are bad enough, justified of course, by the war that we never got the choice to sign up to or not. However pro or anti war nonscense is outside the scope of this post, so that ends here. The big problem I have is now a raw fuel of a product costs more money, they don’t want to take the hit on their sick profit margins already, so pass the cost onto the already struggling consumer. It’s the same for food, China’s massive population demanding more grain etc has pushed the price for rar materials up a lot.

Instead of the business accepting that 20 billion pounds in a year is still an “alright” figure, the cost of the product to the consumer is ramped up shitloads so that normal working people suffer even more just to save the jobs of the few multi million pound earning directors. The company would obviously see it as bad directional leadership if they suddenly went from making 25 billion to a measley 20 billion profit per year and the greedy shits at the top get to keep their positions but raising the cost of their critical products by up to 30%.

ITS A FUCKING JOKE

All that will happen if this keeps on going is pure anarchy, if people literally get to the point where they can’t afford to eat and warm their houses, put fuel in their car to get to work and have clean water at an affordable cost all law will fly out of the window. Especially people with children to look after! The elderly are going to get fucked by this in the winter anyway, how long until people on a normal or below average wage are feeling it?

Already in my area people have left the gym in droves as people give up luxuries they simply can not afford anymore just to be able to pay the bills, its a disgrace. I’m not personally massively anti corporation, infact people that work hard and make more money should benefit grately from it, that is business, that is fair! There should however been some sort of tight control on businesses that provide services for normal people that are critical. I dont understand the state of this country, the infrastructure of public services, the roads, the national grid, the sheer amount of clean water lost every single year in burst / leaking pipes underground all because the unbelievably greedy tossers at the top couldn’t stand to do something right in their life for the majority of people out there.

The companies make an extreme amount of profit per year on services that are a necessity to the nation and yet the general state of play is appaling. The amount of money actually put back into the business and the infrastructure must be absolutely minimal. Don’t get me started on corporate tax evasion either…

You guys know who you are, and you’re the scum of the earth.

It is beginning to push me too far.  Only this week, emails have been circulated explaining how team members have been ’solutioneering’, and that ‘final productionisation’ is being reached.  How is it possible that so much of today’s modern business is based on such a mound of steaming, imginary bullshit?  Imaginary things do have their place - take maths for example.  An odd and perhaps rather extreme analogy, sure. But there are entire books written about real and imaginary numbers - hell, at least they can differentiate between the two - but the difference here is that there are thousands of people who can solidly testify and prove that they actually have use and real significance in the modern world.

Today I was handed “Infrastructure Services Proposed Organisational Structure v0.3 (what the fuck?)” in a rather non-thrilling team meeting.  There are seriously more posts and departments on it than there are members of staff.  The question I want to know the answer to is when will this total shithouse of a business concept finally end up collapsing in on itself when (if??) everyone realises the truth about their made up job titles and responsibilities which are based entirely on the generation of really quite blatent corporate bullshit?

Ok so the little worms threatened strike action a few weeks ago because they were unhappy with their above average pay rise and almost messed up my holiday.  Some of their demands were met and hooray, no strikes, so I get to go on holiday.

That’s all well and good but then it came to the end of the holiday, and we landed at BHX at 2:30am on Saturday.  At 3:30am we had our bags.

So after all that uproar, and all the extra money, the service is still pretty abismal.  Well done guys, you bunch of fucking workshy little weasels.

Cockends that see red as soon as a “race” is involved in an argument and completely lose their ability to listen to reason or comprehend valid points are the flavour of the day.

Resorting to ignoring someones point of view, even of valid real life experiences and pointing the finger claiming “racism”, especially when the other person has tried all they can to defend themselves in a logical collected manner to elivate any real fears of racist beaviour.

I’m fucking sick of it. If you’re doing it just to get a rise, stop. If you seriously mean it seek fucking help.
Either way I’ve had enough of it.

I have real trouble understanding people who make no effort at all to get out of your way.

I’m 6 foot 2, I weigh over 14 stone so I’m probably bigger than the average person out there. Granted most people do get out of my way when I’m walking along but at the same time I’ll gladly move aside or make an effort not to bump into someone else, I dont have attitude or anything like that.

One thing I’ve noticed though is there are some people out there who think it’s obviously their god given right to walk in a straight line where ever they may be and put 100% of the onus on you to move. Even if you’re twice their size and mass. To me walking at someone a foot bigger than me and 4 stone heavier seems a bit of a bad idea, I know what the consequences would be, so why do people take it upon themselves to do exactly the same to me?

I’m not sure if this is a cultural thing or not, the majority of the time this happens to me it’s indian people, mostly indian women. When I lived in southampton I was walking towards a subway to go under the road, a kid jumps out of his buggie and starts running straight at me. I saw him literally bee-lining for me so I stopped dead to let this little kid run past me with no danger of squishing him. The kid proceeds to literally run straight into my legs when I’m not moving and falls over, starts crying. The indian woman parent just starts having a right go at me in a language I couldn’t understand when it’s her retarded kid that has just run into something 8 times it’s size that wasn’t moving in the first place.

Yesterday at ASDA a similar thing happens with 2 more people, one time I’m pushing a trolley full of stuff out of the store and I’m keeping the thing in a straight line. Some indian woman with 2 kids makes it obviously apparently she’s not going to move and beings to steer her 2 small children straight towards me forcing me at the last moment to yank my awkwardly full trolley out of they way on risk of taking out her kids.

On the way into the store another indian woman decides to steer her trolley straight into the side of my girlfriend for no reason what so ever, apparently in a daze. Has 2 kids around her and she’s muttering to herself completely removed from reality. There was more than enough room to get by or a simple stop for 2 seconds would solved it. I saw it happening too before it did, I just knew she was going to drive the thing straight into Kat. I had visions of stopping it, a mental attempt to protect someone you care about by putting my hand on the front of her trolley and letting it jolt back into her to wake her the fuck up.

I just don’t get it? Is this a cultural thing or is this a racial thing against me?
From my POV it seems like a complete lack of respect for anyone else that isn’t indian and it seems to flow through the majority of people I come across in this situation. 

I can’t see the logic of doing this in a physical sense because I’m so much bigger than them i’d bowl them down like a 20 lb ball on pins made out of straw. I can’t see the logic in doing this in a mental sense either mostly because of the danger to your family and the sense of trying to get along with everyone else. I’ve never had a white / black / oriental person veer straight at me and attempt to walk through me so I dont understand what drives indian people to do it.

Maybe someone can enlighten me?