Aquarionics

Today was a bad hardware day.

It isn’t the first one of such. My computer seems to be preprogrammed to die just as I run out of money (See The Bad Fortnight starting there, and reading on until 24th). Today’s exercise, however, was a little more fun…

I bought a new case at Christmas because the old one was dead and I was upgrading everything else anyway. One of the problems with the new case was that the power switch wasn’t seated properly, and so I blu-tacked it into place and ignored it for six months. Last weekend, just before going to see Eurovision, I tried to turn on my computer and it didn’t, because the switch had worked it’s way into the blu-tack and was now stuck.

Sunday, when I was back from Eurovision Meet, I ripped off the front of the case carefully and used the micro switch manually until I had time to fix it. Time to fix it came this morning, when I accidentally broke the switch by pulling out a wire. Attempting to put it back (stripping wires, reattaching them, etc.) didn’t work so I toddled off to Maplin (Electronics Geek Shop. USAians can think “Radio Shack”) for a new wire. Nope, seems my micro switch is special. Bugger. New case then.

So, I have a new case. Not only does it have a front mounted LCD temperature sensor panel, it also has a side-window and a cool blue-lit fan. It’s the cheapest they had, and it looks neat. So I carefully removed all of Maelstrom’s internals from the old case and placed them in the new, built up the power-chains, double checked all the jumpers, plugged it in, and turned it on.

Nothing happened.

I turned it on again.

Nothing happened.

I flipped the switch at the back, turning the power supply on.

I pressed the power button.

Each fan – of which there are four in the box – moved exactly four millimetres clockwise, then stopped.

I pressed the power button.

Nothing happened.

I pressed the power button.

Nothing continued to happen.

Stuck in a somewhat panicked loop now, I pressed the power button again.

Nothing happened.

I started to wonder if I had imagined the whole fans thing.
I waited a little while.
I turned off the power supply.
I waited a while.
I turned on the power supply.
I pressed the power button.

Each fan moved exactly four millimetres clockwise, then stopped.

I logged on to IRC via lonecat’s laptop, and asked for suggestions.
They thought it was the PSU.
I borrowed the PSU from reef – the server – and tested it with Maelstrom.

Each fan moved exactly four millimetres clockwise, then continued to spin.

I went back to Maplin, and bought the only 300W+ power supply they had in stock. This PSU has five important attributes:

1. It works
2. It has two fans in it
3. It is a 450W power supply
4. It still works

1. It’s gold plated.

   I’m not joking. The only PSU they had was a gold plated one, I feel like King Midas or something. I also bought 4 AAA batteries to put in my digicam, so you could see the results of all this in all it’s cool blue glory.

   So it’s a real shame my camera takes AA batteries, isn’t it?

   As I say, a bad hardware day.

So, We have on the one hand Oh My God as Blanket calmly ignores the desires of thousands of citizens and moves the ID cards in under a new name and department, that of immigration control.

I’m agreeing with Stuart on this one, they did the consultation, and they ignored us. In fact, even if it was merely a “What sort of things should we consider?” as Nick suggests in the comments, then they have ignored it. They have, as far as I have seen, completely failed to address most of the points brought up by the opponants of such a scheme.

Nick’s counterargument that the government are not obligied to listen to us is well noted, and whilst I agree with the points, I don’t like them. In fact, I really don’t like the idea that any government can produce ideals to make us vote for them, and the only thing we have to hold them to it is four years later. I realise that not all the election promises can suceed, real life gets in the way. And the fact that most of the country will still vote for this particuler set of clowns because they won’t even consider the other options.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, The US Government has found a loophole allowing them to build a floating death-camp with execution, and no appeal or jury. I think I’ll go back to watching West Wing DVDs, then I can live in a happy world where the people in charge of a country actually give a flying fuck about the opinions of everyone.

I’ve been Spanish-Inquisitioning on this post all day. The draft of it started “I have three types of readers”, which quickly became “I have five” then “I have six”, then the heady heights of “I have seven”. Realising I have more than seven readers, however, I had to expand on this slightly.

Wandering though my stats for the purposes of a Usenet post, I was thinking about the people who are reading this tripe at the moment. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of my readership, it would have $foo circles, where $foo is the number of circles I get when I describe it this time.

• People who want to know how I’m doing.
• People who want to know /what/ I’m doing.
• People who want to be entertained
• Google

• Me

  You don’t have to be in any single one of those groups, in fact you may be in up to three (I doubt anyone who is Google is also in the mood for entertainment and I am not Google). The balancing act appears to be keeping category 3, since categories 1 and 2 appear to be catered for. Category 4 something I’m actually going to have to filter somehow, and Category 5 is something of a captive audience.

  Category 4 I have a couple of problems with. Of all the pages on the Geekstuff server where Aquarionics is hosted, Aquarionics is now the biggest. Before Aquarionics was the biggest, a site called “Wibble UK” was the biggest. When Wibble closed down, and we moved servers, the site went away and so now when you go to wibble.co.uk, you get the default site for the Geekstuff server.

  The default site for Geekstuff is www.aquarionics.com.

  Lots of people liked wibble, including Google, so wibble went away with a high pagerank. Net result of this is that Aquarionics is spidered four times as often as it should be, as www.aquarionics.com. www.wibble.co.uk, programming.bleurgh.net and various others. On top of this, people like Dorathea link to me, meaning that Google thinks my witterings are worth anything. Tot this all up, and strange things happen like Aqcom becoming the worlds numberone authority – by Google, the only standard that matters – for the phrase ‘I Hate Dominos’ purely because of a comment that someone made three folds down.

  Anyway, to keep categories 1 and 2 happy:

  This weekend was fun. Saturday we (Me and Lonecat) wandered up to see Pol & Supermouse and watch Eurovision with Añejo, Adrian ccooke, James Green and his other half Nikki. It was fun, it was tacky (Incredibly so. Mouse redecorated the sitting room in glitter and made party-food, and served chicken-inna-basket and such things) and we got Nil Points. A Good Time Was Had By All.

  Next day we went to see Matrix Reloaded which isn’t as good as it thinks it is, but is still cool, had dinner and jelly and went home.

  Today I have been adding things to Epistula, including Descriptions (Short summeries for every post that will trump content-extracts for RSS feeds and Trackbacks), and I’m working on CutIDs and the reviews system.

In one of those horrible domain things that we hate so much, Vaughan at Wherever You Are let go of his hold on his domain for long enough for an evil search portal to grab it. He has taken this opertunity to rearrange his domain into a more country specific paradiem.

You can now find Wherever You Are at http://www.whereveryouare.org.uk, for your daily dose of fun and frolics and stuff.

Have a nice day.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of the UKB community. Please return to your seats.

Today is Eurovision.

What is Eurovision, I hear you ask. Aha, I answer, it is thusly:

The war is over. The tack has won. This is a celibrarion of the world’s greatest testiment to plastic music: Europop (Listen to that track over the remainder of this post. It’s by the Divine Comedy).

Various countries around “Europe” (Which includes Israel, for some reason) choose a song to enter in this great tournament. Some do it by saying “It’s This Song”, some – like the UK - do a popularity contest to see which is the crapest song and put it forward. On the night itself – Tonight, fact fans – the songs are performed (To several different definitions of “Live”) on stage by their creators. At half time there is a Thing, which could be anything, and has once given the world Riverdance. Be afraid of The Thing.

Anyway, when all the various people have strutted their funky stuff over the stage, they have the big vote thing where all the countries around the world give points to ten of the other countries (That is, they give ten points to the best, then nine eight seven etc. to the rest of the shortlist), the one with the most of the points at the end is the winner, and gets the chance to host the event next year.

Yay, woot, so far, so dandy.

The important point about Eutovision (Which has now been known as “A Song For Europe” for at least five years, but nobody noticed) is the songs, which are universally terrible and include things like last year’s Greek entry, which involved four greeks dressed in black cardboard boxes moving their arms at right angles and announcing that “Sagapo is the password” to a techo-style (Yet still bubbly europop) beat. It’s tacky, it’s terrible, it’s cheap (I swear that last year they were using Winamp pluggins on the back screens) and it’s incredibly fun all on it’s own.

Add in watching the subtitles – where the BBC Subtitling Dept. try in vain to transpose “Laa de la la la” for six lines without a spelling mistake – and the only Eurovision host that matters – Terry Wogan – and watching it with a group of friends, and it’s just fantastic.

Terry Wogan is a radio show host for BBC Radio 2, and for the whole of Eurovision he is the commontator. He sits in his box in London and makes sarcastic comments about the presenters, the songs, the Thing, and the entire Eurovision experience.

Eurovision is fun, tacky, pointless fluff. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.