bärn~nĕt~lănd

| Category Holidays | Permalink

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So we went to Tenerife from Gran Canaria recently; it was a nice trip, we did the north coast and also went up to the area near Teide - the highest point in Spain.

Up there in the baking temperatures, we found this little lady who was very, very thirsty.  We managed to re-use a Tupperware container someone dumped up there in the National Park and gave her some water.
Meanwhile, Esther Ramirez Ramirez Ramirez Gonzales called 112 - Spain's emergency number.  Her persuasive nature resulted in our little friend being taken off to the sanctuary of a local kennel.  Our good deed for the day saved the life of a lovely young lady

| Category Tech | Permalink

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Oh the little people with little feet and little fingers have arrived.  In order to use the Asus EeePC, you have to either have ladyfingers or have fingernails.  Luckily, the 'andbrake 'as both.
Naturally, it came in German.  It's not too hard to remove most of the German locale but there is still some left.  Error messages and some dialog boxes feature German.

Anyway, she's 'appy now and it does office work, email, surfing and of course the killer application - Tetris.  Sudoku will be coming soon - or she'll kill me....

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......always complains that she is never featured on this site.  Well, time has come to rectify this.

In the old, old TG days....back long, long ago....I used to abuse my Wife in ways you can not imagine.  Yes, I might've tried to put her in a rubbish bag - but it was an expensive rubbish bag!!

If only I bought the larger ones....

| Category Tech | Permalink

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The webserver is now running Intel Atom.  Nice and quiet, small and only needing the second disk adding into a mirrored pair.

The second box will fall victim to my evil hand tomorrow night.  First thing that happened to it today when it arrived was to half-inch the SATA drive and cable.  I did get the RAM out but then realised.....they only have one slot.  Ahhhhh!!!!!!  

| Category Tech | Permalink

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Looks like I'll be kissing goodbye to this lovely machine.  The site's been running on an old Compaq Deskpro EN P3/1Ghz for some time (a year, I'd guess).  A few teething issues with the 64-bit server but

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The aging Compaq hosting Barnettland will soon be retired and replaced with a smaller brother - a Steg-constructed PC with an Intel Atom aboard.  The board is about 13cm x 13cm - very small....

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I can just picture a certain person with his pinky saying this:


I name this note the "Bobby G"

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Thank you, eBay.  I should shortly have a vintage, 1978 Speak & Spell arriving soon.  It's a true classic with the buttons being flush and not actually raised.  I think it's a classic and I think I'll keep it forever.

This is the type of thing eBay is great for; whilst we have been able to get a Rubik's Cube from a normal retail store, Speak & Spell has not been made for a long, long time and, perhaps because I never had one as a kid, I wanted one now.

Next stop: an original Raleigh Chopper - but with derailleur gears!!

| Category Apple | Permalink

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So I have firmware version 2 - it's not bad actually.  Best feature is that I could restore my settings, including WPA key, to the device.

Greatest positive is the App Store and the free iBeer!  Some improvements in the Safari and general usefulness of the device - I like the Touch more now.

| Category Football | Permalink

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We all know Cristiano Ronaldo.  40-odd goals last season.  Failed to shine on some bigger stages like Euro2008.


Slave.  Apparently that's how he feels.

£120'000 a week.  Now I know it's hard to be a football player and you might not feel like training on any given day - but SLAVE and £120'000 a week just don't go together.

Have a butchers at Dictionary.com's definition of slave.  Can you agree?   I really assume that it's a daft comment from an agent, surely?

| Category Apple | Permalink

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Having used the iPod Touch now for a week or two, I can say that I like it.  Yes, I do have to maintain my music in a playlist as there is too much to go onto the Touch but that's acceptible.

The screen is excellent.  I have used it to enjoy movies and TV programmes on the train and in the plane - and I cannot criticise it in any way.  The battery life is also good enough that I did not feel compelled to charge the device every day.

Using the Touch to connect to the internet I am not so fussed about; I actually think that BlackBerry with Opera Mini 4 is more usable - possibly due to the fact that the sites tend to be optimised for a small screen.  Safari on the Touch tries to be "big"; yes it is nice to be able to go from portrait to landscape and scroll with your finger but your starting point is often to squint!!  And let's not forget that it murders the battery...!

Google Maps managed to locate my IP to within about 50m last week in Stockholm - that was impressive.  I do also like the Weather applet - albeit the data from Yahoo! is not as local as I might like.

All-in-all, nice screen, good for movies and the rest is a little gimmicky.  I would rather have the Touch than the Jesus Phone, of course.  32Gb is just enough.......

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The latest addition to the stable is a 32Gb iPod Touch.  Initial thoughts - excellent  But why oh why can I not copy/paste my 63 digit WPA keyphrase into the Wifi settings - or, even better, manage my Wifi settings via iTunes?  

Playback quality and screen quality is wonderful; the interface is a little different to iPod Classic - but, then again, am I an old fart who is allergic to change?  

| Category Football | Permalink

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So tomorrow is the beginning of EURO2008.
I'm emplyoing my quarter-Italian roots for the next four weeks.  For the obvious reasons.  Hopefully I'm backing a winner and not a donkey - but we'll see

Forza Italia, as she told me to say!!

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13 long, long years ago is when I arrived in Switzerland.  In fact, 13 years to this very minute, I believe I was somewhere with Rob, Karen and Ffion Long on a day trip somewhere (Hi guys!)

So, to celebrate - here is a 13-function Swiss knife (called "Thomas"?  OK, maybe Swiss army-style or something )
I believe I shall celebrate this fact later today with some Italian food and French champagne

| Category Tech | Permalink

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If you notice the video embedded below, this is due to the great work of Declan who created BlogSphere - upon which this website is based.  Kudos to Declan - a star in the Domino community

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Well we're suffering a slight white-out today....

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Cunningly, as soon as I left to go to London for two days, something went wrong and no access was possible to the webserver.  No outbound access was possible either.

Investigation upon my return indicated that something was "odd".  Cable modem - check; phone service - check; routers getting DHCP addresses - nope.  Works out my switch to separate the inbound internet connection and thus allow me to use more than one IP address took a dump.

I think it has been plugged in for more than a year.....should I be upset?  30 francs and no "high availability"?

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Hallenstadion, Zurich - 9th March 2008

James Blunt played the first gig in the European Leg of his tour.  A relentless and technically excellent performance of around 90 minutes with no break meandered through his two albums' material.

The experience was enrichted with his feeling and humour injected throughout the concert; No Bravery was awesome and full of feeling....Out of My Mind was funny and amusing.  You're Beautiful was perhaps played too early as there was little crowd participation...!!

Of course the issue with playing in Zurich is that much of the crowd might as well be home watching the gig on a DVD.  Go figure.......!

All-in-all, I'd dare to say that James Blunt is actually better LIVE than on CD.  That's pretty impressive!!

| Category Birthdays | Permalink

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40, not to be confused with 4-0 (although that does affect a February-40 too).

Birthday wishes to the less young farts - you know who you are!!!!

| Category Tech | Permalink

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With my special student status, I am now online through the 3G network here.  With a student deal and 5Gb of traffic included per month, I can use my time on the train most excellently - and thankfully, repaying the need for my new student card from Liverpool Uni, much of the time is dedicated to my MSc.

Of course the software's fairly average and there is a Sesam driver and service which cause me to get an  error every 12 minutes....!