Curses! Foiled!

[azekeil]

mandelorean just texted me (amongst others I presume) to tell me that the bike place where his girlfriend works is having a Harley open weekend - come along and she'll organise a ride on a Harley/Buell for us.. and I can't as I'm still recovering from this tonsilectomy! AAAAAARGH! kissycat1000 and I have just finished watching The Long Way Round, a series about Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman's trip around the world on motorcycles (I originally started riding motorcycles because I wanted to go around the world on one, so this is a bittersweet thing, although there's still plenty of time to do it if I can get it all together at some point). In the last episode, they got to ride on some wild custom choppers which reminded me of my passion for cruisers (my first bike was a cruiser [alright: in the style of]). ev1ldonut has also always been keen on them as well..

My bike has had the work done to it and was waiting to go to the tuners to be properly set up. Unfortunately the tuning centre chap got a bit of metal in his eye from a lathe and was rushed to hospital - poor chap. This also means that my bike is sitting there *pouts*.

As I've been shut inside with contact only from those already close to me (doctor's orders), I've had the chance to do little else but be rather geeky. Apologies made for the following only if you think I need to ;)

I have a good idea for a 'hifi' icon but I've lent my camera to gavzilla.. curses again!

dylan came over with his speakers, Meridian CD player and speaker cable to help me test my setup - thanks mate :) I've decided to keep the centre speaker as it sounds good - detailed, clear and authoratative. It also happens to be the last of it's type available. The Arcam AVR300 I couldn't quite justify keeping (apart from the fact I can't actually afford it right now) - it sounded great for movies, had all the bells and whistles, but just sounded a little harsh and unemotional when reproducing stereo music. I managed to tame the harshness with some different speaker cable but it still wasn't worth spending the money for.

So, back to the drawing board as far as the surround setup is concerned - for now it will stay as the bits I've cobbled together which includes a 4 channel power amp kissycat1000 has lent me.

I've rearranged my hifi a little bit to put the (large) centre speaker in the right place, but at the moment I only have a crappy camera phone and the photos came out really craply.

I've finally got around to building a computer system for the kids. Thanks to both racinghippo and fiendster I will almost certainly manage to build two computers, one for each of the kids! Result!

Additionally, I need to rebuild my internet gateway machine. It was a debian/testing installation, and it's install is in a bit of a state - I upgraded a load of stuff including perl and apache threw a wobbly. I've managed to get it back up and running but it's not ideal.

So, rather than reformat, install, and then have to spend several days solid configuring it (with varying levels of internet access and email accessability as I do so), I decided to build a test system on a virtual machine (using VMWare) and test installations of things, writing scripts to automate it as I go. There are lots of advantages to this, one of which is that with VMWare I can save a snapshot of the virtual disk's state and restore the machine to that state at the click of a button. So, I've installed the base system for debian sarge with a 2.6 kernel and taken a snapshot. I'm now going through the process of installing systems, writing the scripts and backing the scripts up before restoring the snapshot, testing and carrying on.

If the system turns out fairly smoothly I may release it into the public domain as an instant debian->[home router (with traffic shaping) / firewall / downloader / calendar / etc] maker. Will be my first reasonably sized contribution back to the public domain :)

My recovery continues to go well. I'm less tired and in less pain all the time, so that's good :)

Comments

[ev1ldonut.livejournal.com]

Nooooooooooooooo!!!!
We need more warning of such things! *pout*

*wants to go cruising*