Ah, busy times again! Went down to Bristol this weekend after missing out last weekend as the parents were away and someone needed to keep an eye on my Nan. Friday night was a date with Kate, spent all evening in Babushka, which was great fun. Saturday we did a bit of shopping (I got Charlotte Hatherley’s album, it’s good! As well as The Killers – Hot Fuss, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (?4, yes!) and Eddie Izzard – Glorious) and then Kate went out on a hen night. The aftermath of which included Kate lying on the floor of her room tell me she’d been this drunk before and could handle it. Oh dear!

Sunday included visiting an “at home” and them seeing Team America: World Police, which I laughed myself stupid at. Go see it.

Something I failed at though was fitting a graphics card to Kate’s computer, as it had no AGP port. So does anyone know the cheapest processor/motherboard combo I can get that has an AGP port, onboard sound and is at least 1.1GHz?

So I’m a bit stuck with SQL Server right now. I’m more used to MySQL, but for our main database in work we’ve got with the Microsoft solution. Can’t say that would have been my choice, but hey, what input do I have? Anyway. I’ve got table with 3 million records and large queries on such a thing are proving to be… slow. I think it’s down to the hardware, but I can’t figure out a quick way to make a rough guess at the rows returned. Damn.

In other news, I stumbled across “Bastardo” by Charlotte Hatherley (her what is in Ash) on the MTV2/NME chart program yesterday and it’s a nice tune. The video was rather surprising too, starring David Walliams in the title role, with cameos from Simon Pegg, Lucy Davies and others. Surprising and listenable. Must investigate more!

Hmm, I have Dilbert as a feed to my LiveJournal, and quite often it features things I encounter everyday in my life as a software engineer. However, today’s strip seems to star me. Damn my need for gadgets…

Busted to split. Hurrah! All I can say is thank god for some common sense. Pop music is fine for those who love it, but please don’t try and make bands try and look like they actually play their instruments or even write their songs. Good riddance chaps!

In no situation is doing this the right course of action. I mean what would you want to do that for?!

Hmm, I seem to be getting comment spam, that’s quite clever. There I was thinking it would only affect popular blogging systems such as Moveable Type, but here it is on my little old website. I’ll have to investigate to see if I can stop them happening. I think this version of the site tracks ip addresses, so I should be able to do some basic IP blocking, and maybe introduce some sort of word blacklist that will ban links. Or add some sort of BB code thing that will ban all comments that try and post a link without using them…

I hate them so very very much, for making lots of pretty shiny things that I want to spend my not pretty and not so shiny cash on.

Just look at this. Isn’t it just… great. I don’t know what specs it has, or anything useful, I know that I just want one. Unfortunately, the old bank balance says “Er… no” so I’ll just have to sit and look and sigh.

Hello, I’ve been busy, generally being with Kate and travelling about. It’s been busy, a blast and certainly fun. Unfortunately I’ve also downloaded Transport Tycoon Deluxe, so I’ve been playing that a bit. Damn. But yeah, I’m still around, will post random crap for you all to digest again. Hurrah!