Red Alert’s Journal

Yesterday I visited the gym for my weekly dose of exertion, followed by relaxation. Yet again, the visit was spoilt by a mob of unruly children who were let run riot under their parents noses. First, they ran around the weights area roaring and screaming. Then one kid started trying to get up on treadmills even though they can’t reach the control panel. However, none of this quite compares to what they got up to in the pool area.

I decided to have a soak in the hot tub after I’d done my workout. I discovered, to my horror, that parents now seem unable to read as well. The parents of these three children, who were doing lengths in the pool, must have walked by three signs telling them that under 16’s were not permitted into the hot tub, sauna or steam room. However, they seemed to have little problem with their awful children drinking the hot tub water, spitting it out and then running in and out of the steam room while throwing swim floats around the place. The final straw was when a female patron got hit on the head with swim floats that they were throwing around the place. And did the parents say anything? No, they were letting the children ‘express themselves’, I was told.

It’s shocking how some parents think that their kids are above the rules, and let them show such disrespect towards other customers who’ve paid to come there too. Sadly, this is part of the whole school of parenting that lets the children ‘express themselves’ at all costs, without regard to any basic discipline. 

Filed under: Musings and Comment | Tagged: gym, parenting | No Comments »

It’s official, the Irish have some big problem with the rules of the roundabout. They’re not even that hard looking in the rules of the road are they… give way to traffic already on it, right? Wrong! The rules should really read – give way to taxis and to those in SUV’s. In fact, it’s quite a miracle to get on and off an Irish roundabout without getting milled by pretty much everyone else. I just don’t get it – why is a little flash on the indicator so hard to come by? And as for approaching in the right lane, well, you’re just asking the impossible there! I should point out to my readers that I’ve by now passed the dreaded driving test if you’ve been following some of my earlier posts, and the fabled rules of the roundabout were definitely tested on it. So come on people, let’s spin right round them!

Filed under: Musings and Comment | Tagged: insane, roundabouts | No Comments »

As some people know I have rather too much experience of the driving test for my own liking. Having been through the mill a few times, I’m now on the dreaded waiting list to repeat the experience. I attribute most of my failure as well to the actual test and getting overly worked up about it.

What baffles me is why the waiting list is still there in the first place? Surely there’s less and less young people in the country. Given that most people tackle driving between the ages of about 16 and 26 the waiting lists should be falling or at least stagnating.

I don’t call a 10 week idealised wait “on-demand testing” either! Ideal scenario: you ring up driver testing like you currently do for a dentist’s appointment and they say “Sure, come down on thursday morning at 11am”.

Anybody noticed the sudden drop in the number of visible L plates?

Filed under: Musings and Comment | No Comments »

I’ve a knack for messing up my own windows installation, and I often get called to help distressed computer using friends to put their machines back on track too. Remember the saying for dealing with Windows problems – for minor problems reboot, and for major problems reinstall.

One of the things that bugs me when re-doing Windows installs is that you always need the damn driver disks for any modern computer. This isn’t so much of a problem if it’s things like the video card or whatnot but the network card and hard disk controller can make the whole show very unpleasant. Enter n-Lite- this handy utility will allow you to add service packs, hotfixes and drivers to a windows install CD so that you don’t need to be flipping disks all the time. It’ll even burn a bootable new CD once you’ve made your changes. You can do other handy stuff too like turning off annoying popups and more.

Before reloading, there’s often stuff to be backed up. SysrescueCD is a very handy linux-based Live CD which can do things like disk partitionin, disk imaging and backups. I’ve been playing around recently with a thing called PXE – which is basically a few extensions on top of the DHCP protocol your computer uses to get an IP address. It lets your computer obtain a boot image from the network instead of the local hard drive – I first saw this in use in university where they had a setup that would re-image Windows 98 machines remotely. I think it also did a quick check on system files when the PC was started up too.

The real magic of all this is that I combined the customised windows CD image with the unattended windows installation system, which means I can take an injured computer, plug it into the network, set it to boot by PXE (the modern version of remote program load) and presto I can reinstall the version of windows I want. No rooting around for CD’s and it has the added bonus that I don’t have to change CD’s or deal with a machine that has a dead CD ROM. And it’s cool to restore a computer with your bare hands as well!

Filed under: Computers | No Comments »

According to wikipedia the word ‘doss’ doesn’t exist in the official lexicon. This is despite it being one of the most fulfilling ways to pad out your busy or not so busy workday. Take today for example – I came in bright and early at a quarter to nine in the morning. Office was quiet so i took the opportunity to watch some stuff on youtube with the speakers, not the headphones (it just doesn’t sound the same does it!). Then the obligatory brewing up of tea followed by scanning the morning news.

Now on a usual busy day with the boss present then it’d be time to get cracking. Usually with checking of the old email and doing a checkout on any work I’d done in the meanwhile. Being a strange creature I do sometimes get inspiration at odd hours of the night. But today it was different, mainly due to the absense of the boss – even though there is quite a stack of work to be done by next week! Met up with a friend for coffee which lasted over an hour – bringing us nearly into lunchtime. And then just as we were heading back to work then who should appear than another friend of ours who rarely calls in these days. So that turned into lunch and afternoon tea.

And yes, it’s too late now to start doing something, so excuse me while I make another cup of tea and load up Counterstrike!

Filed under: Musings and Comment | No Comments »

There’s a fabulous photo art exhibition of zoo animals in St. Stephen’s green. Go down and take a look before it goes!

Filed under: Art | No Comments »

How many pages a day do you print just to read something? It just occurred to me that I can go through an astonishing number of pages in the course of a day’s work – and by extension an astonishing number of trees need to be cut down to feed this habit. Here’s an idea: get one of the big paper boxes that the five reams come in, then put it beside your desk. When you’re done with a document you’ve printed, put the pages face down into it. Then use it for scrap paper – the added bonus being you pay for less refill pads too!

One good investment you could make is to get a printer with what’s called a duplexer built in. It’s able to flip the pages over and print on the other side, and best of all you can control all the fun from your page setup box as usual. We’ve got one in the lab here, and handily it can natively print two pages to one side of a sheet. Maybe the printer in your office has this too and it’s just waiting for you to activate it – if not, go ask your boss to buy you a new environmentally friendly printer.

Filed under: Computers, Musings and Comment | No Comments »

My linux installation was broken for some time, and with one thing and another I didn’t have the time to reinstall it. The straw that broke the camel’s back is that the other operating system which is installed on another hard disk has gone a bit wobbly. So I decided to go for it and do the install. I use Gentoo Linux, but I don’t exactly enjoy unnecessary punishment.

The last time I installed it, I selected all of KDE, my chosen desktop environment. This time I went for a much more cut-down KDE, initially only installing the bare desktop environment itself. Everything else I wanted was simply an add-on. Why would I bother installing things like a screen reader, when I was clearly never going to use them?

So far the computer’s almost ready for use. The usual lineup of Firefox, Thunderbird, LaTeX, Emacs and Openoffice are all there. I installed Audacity which I find great for recording radio programmes, and I tell myself I’ll use for recording my wonderful guitar playing eventually. Most of my hardware is also fully supported – the Audigy card, 17″ Display, ATI Radeon Video Card, Onboard sound etc all seem to be in order, as is the network printer which took me all of 15 seconds to set up! The only thing remaining to be put on is my Epson Multifunction Scanner/Printer, and a decision needs to be made on whether to use LDAP or not for centralised user management.

Filed under: Computers | No Comments »

I watched the appaling display put on in San Marino last night on the television. To be honest I don’t know who to blame. The Irish Team weren’t a team – they were a collection of young lads who aren’t the brightest shillings and who are paid comparitively large sums of money by their UK clubs. They didn’t come to play competitively, they seemed to think they were here for a little kick around. It showed, badly. The ball rolled in to the goal almost in slow motion yet nobody was there to catch or deflect it. And how exactly were we still 0-0 at half time?

I’m sorry to say it but San Marino deserved to win. It might have been a good day for Ireland if they did too, because we’d have to confront this head on and make decisions, instead of mocking the green jersey with this foolery.

Filed under: Sport | No Comments »

Zone is a word bandied around a lot these days. Your trusty house alarm probably has a few zones pencilled in on it, and no-parking, no-stopping and no-anything zones are in abundance. Zone brings a sense of order, and being “in the zone” conveys a glib sense of being on top of the world. When we mention zones though, we mustn’t ever forget the star of the show: The Friend Zone.

For the uninitiated here, the friend zone is that wonderful setup where you have a friend who is a girl but is not your girlfriend. She may appear as such to others both inside and outside your social circle, or may not as the case may be. Red Alert has experienced both variants in his past. The former generally is the most deadly. Whether the concept of a “friend zone” applies from the perspective of the female is a matter Red Alert isn’t really qualified to answer – being of the male variety.

Read more »

Filed under: Musings and Comment | No Comments »