This weekend, in a true display of geek/nerd -ness, I added satellite TV capabilities to my HTPC.

Now I have ALL the functionality of those funky little Sky+ boxes for £0 per month :)

You read correctly = £0, nothing, nada, zero pounds

This is possible through the medium of FreeSat, like the Freeview TV thing, but less advertised!
Have a read of this website:  FreeSat – What’s on for a break down of whats available. You just need a satellite dish pointing in the right direction, and a FreeSat box (or, as in my case, a PC TV card for this purpose).

In my case I purchased a Hauppauge HVR-4000, their top-of-the-line TV card (I use this little box to record/view Freeview, cable, and now satellite TV). It even does FM and satellite radio!

I am a happy little geek

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Let me take the time to paint you a literary tale – A tale of technology, passion, treachery and triumph!

It starts with the gleam of an idea, to replace in a managed way two aging but steadfast servers at a client of ours site…
We bumble along for a while, knowing this needed doing but the backdrop of the global economic slowdown caused a substantial ‘back burner’ effect.

Everything came to a stunning halt as a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) ruthlessly caused THE ERROR on the primary server, kick starting some rapid planning and the initiation of “The November Fox Project” (I made that bit up we intended to simply replace the failing server, but I like the code name!)

Frenetic technical research, carried out by armies of multi-skilled professionals, created miracles in glorious TECHnicolour, as specifications flew across the cybersphere…

Eventually a shining paragon rose, phoenix like, from the ashes of it’s competitors. The HP Proliant ML350 was deemed to have the virtues of a Greek God and was thus “THE CHOSEN ONE”

I need a slurp of my tea here, hang on a mo…
Arrrrr :)
Where were we? … Ah yes..

Requisitions, Purchase Orders and transactional hell ensued – culminating in the delivery (late) of our hero.

But WAIT..!
Was our hero actually OUR NEMESIS??
After wrangling with the terrible Suppliersaur, and overcoming the evil “Out of Stock” monster, was The Champion of the Server’s health about to take a  painful turn??
The disks we got from the supplier were the wrong physical size!!! Our hero was mortally wounded right in the Hard Drives!! (and at approx. £250 EACH this was bloomin’ costly mistake!). It’s possibly the ONLY time in history I wish I had 2.5 inches when I actually HAD 3.5 inches!

Ahem… Cough cough… Check self… OK!

Yup – we were sent the wrong bloomin’ drives and so had to wait until the courier-elves delivered the correct drive cage for the drives we had – this being priced at £100 instead of replacing the drives at £500. With the deadline for the quest already passed could our hero ever make it to the sacred isles of Client-ia??

With the final part of the bless’ed server finally delivered and installed and our hero restored to life, the Technomage Simon worked his arcane wizardings and, fighting the devilish Microsoftious, did three times attempt to incant the hero with the Operating System of Choice (64 bit Small Business Server 2008).
The damn OS refused to install – it took nearly all day to get it installed! Grrr…

Finally with the dying embers of the sun in his eyes, the Technomage Simon delivered, the now fully revitalised server to the sacred isles of Client-ia and worked his wizardly doings in the bowels of ‘The comms-roomicon’. Surpassing all expectations to bring the populous of Client-ia a server to be proud of!!!

Might have got a bit carried away there…

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Today we held our second funding event – sending 6 eligible company directors to apply for £9,000 funding between them.

It’s going to be 2 weeks before we hear back, but so far we’ve managed to get a 100% success rate at getting the funding.

It’s also a chance for us to chat to our clients in a less formal place (this might come as a shock to most of our clients – that we can be LESS formal )
This morning we sat chatting with the clients just before their meetings in a nice hotel, over FREE coffee ~ Yup, we bought the drinks too!
Who said us Yorkshire men were ‘thifty’??

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Have you tried to take advantage of the Tesco ‘Double your money’ promotion?

Firstly you HAVE to exchange the rewards BEFORE you decide to buy – you even have to go to a special kiosk to do it (be prepared to wait while people argue about the below). I have seen people get to the till, reveal the vouchers expecting 2x the face value, only to be told they should have exchanged them before and “Sorry – nothing I can do…”, resulting in a LONG queue while the poor checkout girl points the unhappy shopper toward the beleaguered customer services people.

Tesco advertise that you can double your rewards money in-store as long as you say which department you are going to spend the money in (wine, clothing etc…)
That SOUNDS great I hear you cry ~ here’s the catch, they only double up in multiples of £5. This means that your £7.00 voucher will ONLY ‘double’ up to £10! YOU LOSE THE £2.00 THEY DIDN’T DOUBLE!!!
I’m no maths genius but that’s off even by my reckoning..!

The guy in front of me had another problem – he’d never got around to merging both his and his partners clubcards. This means even though he had 2x £7.00 vouchers, Tesco wouldn’t ‘double’ them and let him use the resulting £20.00 on the same transaction. They would only double them both to £10 (!) and let him spend 1…

This promotion FEELS LIKE A CON!! Somebody needs to point out to Tesco the meaning of the word ‘double’.
The promotion is EXTREMELY confounding – the girl who was doubling my vouchers (I had £25, doubling up to £50), had to stop and mentally tally up the guy before me’s vouchers before giving  him the bad news…

A quick conversation with the girl running the kiosk revealed that these kins of problems were happening A LOT!

Come on Tesco – get this right…
If you are going to double up ONLY multiples of £5 then present your vouchers in this value too!
£7.00 should be 1x £5.00 and 1x£2.00 vouchers – double the £5 and I’ll be left with £12.00 not the £10 you are offering!
Better still just to double the entire lot – it’s not like it’ll take much of a dent out of their £2.8Bn profits is it??
Also DO IT AT THE BLOOMIN’ TILL!!!

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Leeds council traffic department are stupud.
There is no other reasonable conclusion for the idiocy I received through the post the other day…

During the latter chunk of last year, they carried out a traffic survey – of the “where have you come from…” / “…going to” type, in an attempt to figure out why there are congestion problems.

Good so far :)

What’s not so good are the ridiculous  conclusions they have come up with – bear in mind this is from their OWN letter…

They claim there is too much traffic using our streets as a “rat run”. Not 100% true but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt…
They also claim that  52% AM and 40% PM was ‘through traffic’ – there are 2 good schools here and the council ‘aknowledge’ that the figure MIGHT be skewed by this fact. Erm… OF COURSE THEY WILL!!
This invalidates the surveys figures from the start!

They go on to say that the most effective measure would be to close some roads, but this would have “significant inconvenience” to the residents
REALLY??? CLOSING ROADS WOULD CAUSE ‘INCONVENIENCE’!?!
Call Stephen Hawking – his position is in jepardy, this person’s a genius!!

Then they decide that the only way to ‘reduce’ traffic is to ignore that issue entirely and propose making the entire village a 20MPH zone. These “‘reduce speeds and generally improve road safety” but “such schemes do not significantly reduce traffic levels”.
Wasn’t the point that you said that traffic levels needed reducing?

This next part is the REALLY annoying bit…

The next part of the letter says that, in the last 5 years there have been 5 accidents in the village (all of ‘slight’ severity):

1. A cyclist rode out ‘heedless’ of traffic
   = nothing to do with speed or amount of traffic.
2. Another accident involved a pedestrian and a stationary vehicle
   = nothing to do with speed or amount of traffic.
3. A motor cyclist skidded on some wet leaves
   = nothing to do with speed or amount of traffic.

The council appear to be solving (at GREAT inconvenience to the residents) a problem which DOESN’T EXIST!
This is why I pay my taxes…

WHOEVER IS IN CHARGE OF THIS FIASCO WANTS SACKING!

The only problem with traffic in this village is the idiot parents who park stupidly and will “only be 5 minutes”. These idiots then procede to block the entire road in their 4x4s; or drive on the wrong side of the road to get that extra metre closer to the school door, ‘cos little Johnny legs don’t work properly…

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