Back on the train again. Nearly missed it but I won't tell that story now. I'm sharing this time but the guy is very friendly. Also feel like we're sharing with the two Americans next door. I joked about how "piercing" the accent is.

They've actually been talking about the same thing for over 40 minutes now. After a while, I started to listen in and it sounds, but probably isn't, somewhat sinister. I keep hearing things like "clinical trials", "cytotoxins", "at some point you'll have to tell them what's in it", "make it up" and "tell them it's garlic and ginger". Fuck knows lol.

...you have a dream about two medieval knights standing on a stage, one in a red cape, teaching the audience about RedCloth, and the other in a blue cape, teaching the audience about BlueCloth. Yes, I really had this dream and yes, I do question my sanity. :|

Haha. I'm the biggest geek. I'll get to the point now because you'll probably stop reading after this. I've made it so that when we make a phone call on either of our cordless phones or when a call comes in, it automatically fades the music/TV/whatever volume down and when the call ends, it fades it back up again. Why? BECAUSE I CAN.

I've used Asterisk for this. That's the software I was paid to set up a few years ago to create a joint phone exchange between London and Shanghai. I resisted the temptation to install it at home for a long time because I already had a VoIP phone and they're prone to problems enough as it is. Having said that, until our router died, the phone was actually very reliable. Rather than replace the router, I set up this PC as the router and that did lead to the occasional breakage but I've since ironed out some of the glitches so it has been behaving a bit better lately. Since the phone now relies on the PC regardless, I figured there'd be little harm in adding Asterisk to the mix. Asterisk itself is pretty solid, it's just things like flaky graphics drivers that tend to cause problems.

I didn't install Asterisk just to do this nifty volume thing though. I'm not that bad. (-; Marna recently acquired a new toy. I say acquired because I'm the one who signed up for it. It's a Nokia E71 on a contract from 3 for £20 a month. The phone has every bell and whistle you can think of and the contract allows free unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls. I think this is an excellent deal but while Skype is very popular these days, I think there are relatively few people who use it as a conventional phone and so I suspect that most people won't take advantage of it for practical reasons. I, for one, don't like being chained to my PC by a headset. I can do better than that though. Skype has traditionally been quite a closed system and I haven't been its biggest fan for that reason but lately, it's started to open up a bit. Skype themselves are introducing Skype for SIP and Digium are introducing Skype for Asterisk. These are aimed at businesses though and will probably cost a packet. In the free world, there is something called Skypiax. This allows Asterisk to integrate with the regular Skype client. It's a bit clunky but I have got it working here. That means, Marna can call our regular phone for free and vice-versa. In fact, anyone on Skype can call us for free. One annoyance is that Skype has to be started before Asterisk but a little tinkering with the code will fix that.

This entry won't be interesting for many of you but it's mainly just to tell the world that it is possible to PXE boot BartPE when it is built from an OEM installation of Windows XP Professional SP3. There are pages saying that it works with SP2 but no one has mentioned SP3. It took me most of the weekend to get it to work but that was mainly because I was new to slipstreaming and PE Builder was not uppercasing the filenames like it should. I used the excellent RyanVM Integrator to do the slipstreaming. Don't enable the "optimize" setting because this seemed to cause problems for me. Maybe it was something else in the end but I would leave it disabled to be on the safe side. I fixed the filename case problem with a quick and dirty Ruby script. Finally, as the guide states, you do still need to fetch ramdisk.sys from Windows Server 2003 SP1, as well as the other files it mentions.

Behold! The amazing Windows Vista! Marvel as it takes a minute to tell you that it will take 20 minutes to unzip a perfectly ordinary 17MB zip file! Why even consider using Linux when it doesn't have a pretty animation? Who cares if it only takes 8 seconds* to perform the exact same operation!?

Oh and for the record, this installation of Vista is barely a day old.

UPDATE: When I wrote this, I didn't think it would actually take 20 minutes. It didn't. It took 35. That beggars belief. Normally I would chalk this up to some simple bug rather than an inherent design flaw but the fact that such an obvious bug made it into the final release and the fact that I've seen this sort of thing so much in Vista makes me think otherwise. Maybe they've fixed it in SP1 but I don't know because, like many people, I haven't been able to install it. And people wonder why I can't take Microsoft seriously.

* I told Linux to time it.

Phew! At around 4pm today, my hard drive started acting up. It would occasionally pause for about 30 seconds, effectively freezing the system during that time. By the fourth time this happened, I was getting seriously worried so I immediately took a new incremental backup. That went without a hitch and I was able to breathe much easier. It seemed as though the problem only occurred when writing to the drive. I tried the latest kernel but that didn't fix it. I saw a post by some guy that said loose SATA cables are a fairly common problem. It seemed like a long shot but it was worth a try. And what do you know. I reinserted the cable and everything's been fine since. Touch wood and all that.

kermitbantam and opalfruits came to stay at the weekend. It was lovely. But I'll write more about that when I'm not hunched over the old laptop and cursing the qwerty keyboard layout.

I really want to be able to tell you how awesome my new PC is but unfortunately it will not POST. This is the first stage of the boot process. The diagnostic display simply says CPU INIT. A search quickly tells you that this message is the dreaded curse of the ASUS Striker Extreme, the motherboard in question. There is no single cause and the suggested remedies include such anecdotal advice as raindancing. It is an expensive and very lavish motherboard but is infamous for this particular problem. It also wasn't the board of my choosing, I simply bought it second-hand from Echo, who had never used it before. Many report success after leaving the CMOS battery out for a couple of hours. That hasn't worked for me but some advise leaving it longer so I'm going to leave it overnight. If it still doesn't work, I'll try putting in my old Pentium 4 to see if that wakes it up. If that doesn't work, I'll cry. )-':

I did it. I really did it. It's only taken me eight years. I just finished Final Fantasy VIII. I bought it on the very day it came out back in 1999 and played most of the way through it in a very short time. Because I was in such a rush to progress through the story, I didn't level up enough and got stuck at the battle with Adel at the beginning of disc 4, which is known for being a particularly tricky point in the game. The fact is that FFVIII is not a game you can rush. Those who take their time generally find it quite easy but if you rush it like I did, you end up paying for it later.

I played it on and off during those past eight years, desperately trying to attain higher levels, better weapons and more GFs. I even started it again at one point but still got stuck in the same place. I eventually consulted some online guides. I didn't use them extensively, only when I needed to locate some of the more obscure things in the game and, heaven knows, there's plenty of those. I eventually secured a foothold and things quickly started to turn around. I think the real turning point was when I attained Tonberry. After that, everything suddenly became much easier. In fact, I managed to defeat Bahamut, work my way right through the Underwater Research Facility, defeat Ultima Weapon and progress all the way to the end without dying once (by that, I mean game over), except when I paid Omega Weapon a visit out of curiosity. I don't think I'll bother taking the time to defeat him since I have better things to do. As I expected, the final battle wasn't too tough but it was quite a lot longer than I expected, even by Final Fantasy standards. One funny point to mention is that the finishing blow was "Angelo Cannon" of all things. The dog took her down! :D

What amazes me the most is that despite posting at Final Fantasy forums for very many years (Aura isn't one anymore but it's still full of Final Fantasy nuts), I've never had a clue about the ending. Not one. I'm really pleased about that, especially since it was very different to what I was expecting. It wasn't as exciting as VII's ending but it was heart-warming and I liked it very much.

The whole thing has left me feeling very strange. Suddenly seeing so much new stuff from a game that really captivated me after eight whole years is a wonderful feeling. It almost felt like a sequel, though I suppose I shouldn't say that too loud because it's one of the only games in the series that Square hasn't fucked around with since its release! It obviously hasn't had the same impact that VII had on me but that feeling is still there. I imagine I'll have the game on my mind for a little while. I hope so.

So this now means that I've finished VI, VII and VIII. I always said I'd finish VIII before trying any of the later ones and I kept my word. I'm not sure which one I'll try next, I'm thinking either IX or XII (X sucks, XI is online) but I doubt I'll have time to get too far into another one soon anyway.

Marna asked me yesterday if there was any way she could enter text into the computer by handwriting. Back when I first met him, Richard Gilmore gave me a cheap graphics tablet to play with but I never really got it to work properly. Well last night, I persevered with success. I then installed an amazing little program called CellWriter, which turns your handwriting into text. It's perfect! I never knew such a thing existed for Linux. You just spend a few minutes training it and off you go. It's very easy, intuitive and surprisingly accurate. It no doubt helps that I don't write joined up normally. In case you haven't guessed, I've written this whole entry with it. I'll stick to typing, of course, but nevertheless I'm very impressed.

You can witness some amazing things when everyone else is mindlessly milling around you. Here I am at Victoria Station, bored out of my skull, when what do I see? Someone accidentally drops a one penny coin just next to me. It gets kicked and proceeds to roll in a very wide arc. It narrowly misses countless numbers of feet, breezes through the smallest of gaps between two bags on the ground, avoids some more feet and eventually comes to rest back beside me. And I'm the only one who saw it. Heh. Simple pleasures.