Flying By

18 Days Until Aber
Hmm still knackered and got to decide about a lot of things at the moment :( Family all went manchester for the bank holiday weekend on sunday, saw all the relatives probably for the last time until xmas :| It was actually quite wierd to all go up at once as a family, not done it for ages.

On saturday I changed the firewall config so that it doesn't flood with messages, then reloaded and scanned for open ports, to my horror there were 5 open! arrgh! so spend the rest of the evening in a bit of a panic as to why this had happened, initially I thought it was a bug in my script causing wierd behaviour. In the end I decided to try and reset the firewall all together so flushed all the rules with me accessing from the outside and a default policy of drop, so I ended up without any means of connecting to the outside world. Great. Phoned bug and he reset the firewall for me while in a drunken state and I could get in the next morning and get all the services running agian. Until today [tuesday] I didn't realise what was causing me to think that the ports were open, it was Internet Connection Firewall for Windows XP on my parents machine i use as an internet gateway at home, according to a document I came to by chance, ICF uses proxies to allow connections to things like FTP and Netmeeting, so this was making my machine think that the port was open on my server when I scanned it. Great! In this document MS tells us that the Internet Connection Firewall is not a firewall, oh no, it's a "Security Experience" how noddy can you get? One of my colleagues said "An experience, yeah, like a roller coaster ride, ups, downs, and it makes you want to vomit" -hehe :) To their credit though, Securityfocus did some testing and it seems quite resilliant and suited to home users.
On monday the server crashed which was really annoying, possibly faulty ram, got to investigate. Car going in tommorrow to have the rust removed - that'll be another £130 gone :/

PS. Pictures are coming, honest, I've sorted them out, just not got around to resizing them, laptop battery died on the way home after showing relatives pictures on it.

Knackered

I'm bloody knackered at the moment, been running around like a blue arsed fly for the last couple of weeks... Went to petes, which was ok, minus the general stress, but we won't go into that here, went to the science museum in london, and got some really nice pictures of central london. ..I will get around to posting some pictures... honest! Had a big presentation on the monday where I was giving a demo, all went well, but I couldn't help but think that they wern't all that interested in what I had to say, ah well, it's all good experience I suppose isn't it! Spent the rest of the week recovering from all the preparation work I did, and then got my teeth back into what I should have been doing when i was preparing.

Last weekend I went to aber, the house is really taking shape now, new kitchen floor and two new fridges going in (the old ones have a permanant pack of ice in them that I warned the landlord would probably ruin the new laminate floor!). Took my mum's friend's steam cleaner and went around de-skanking the worst bits, even managed to get _all_ the paint off the hall floor, it's all looking like a different house to that we looked at a few months ago in horror!. Also sorted out the ram issue on the server and changed it to simms rather than dimms, which means that i can finally run online updates!

This coming weekend sees visit to family up in manchester - should be, er, fun, but a nessessary evil before I go back to uni....

Pictures will happen next week - I promise,

Interesting News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2175870.stm

Can you believe that people don't realise Groenig is taking the piss with the flanders family?

http://security.tombom.co.uk/shatter.html
Hmm, looks like the Windows have been broken again, fun fun fun - now wait for a massively wide-ranging explot!

Rage

This week has seen the mad rush at work to prepare for a big presentation, complete panick today when I realised how much I had to do, but lots of people helped me, and it got pretty much sorted in the end :o) Been fairly quiet otherwise, wrote an email to the uni the other night, quite long for me too, but the power went off *just* before I clicked send, VERY annoying. Also, the guy who won my second auction of my Palm III has not sent me any money 13 days later, herd nothing except a perplexing email asking me to tell him the difference between the product and another, I've emailed him with warnings of bad feedback if I don't hear anything by monday - RAGE! Phoned si at the house, apparently the little things with the house are not sorted yet - like no carpet in the kitchen! so im gonna go to aber next weekend and get a few bits sorted with the server, get a proper list of the things that are wrong, then talk to the landlord myself. Going to surrey this weekend to see pete, should be good =)

Pay Day

It was payday yesterday :)) Finally, I'm in the black! Had a bit of a quiet week or two as usual, main events were as follows. Got landed with the fact that I am going to be involved in a big presentation soon, yes, me as a lowly student, to a lot of people who have more years experience than I have been out of nappies, seems like I am going to have to do shitloads of practice making sure everything runs smoothly, I think this is a chance for me to show what I can do :) The roof in my room started leaking on wednesday during a heavy shower, fuck, it filled a coke glass in that shower, but the next day at work managed to get 4 litres in a bucket (luckily I was awake enough the next morning to think that it might overflow the glass) parents said that it should be sorted out soon :/

Weak End

Sunday. The cold did develop, into quite a bad one at that :/ to the extent that I was sent home by my colleagues on friday morning. Have done very little this weekend apart from sit around and recover, will have to try and make more of an effort to do interesting things next week! Did some more work on the firewall this weekend, got DHCP and a forwarding nameserver working :) Also gave it a new name - dafad - which is Welsh for sheep if you didn't know ;) Need to go shopping next weekend - need shoes and more work friendly T shirts.

Cold Sweat

Weather has been really nice ever since the weekend, been a good week so far, but way too hot at times... randomly woke up naturally before 7am on tuesday, so got into work at 7.45 - w00t for me! Got some cool coffee syrup that you put into your coffee and makes it taste of caramel, a bit of a dissapointment, maybe one of the more exoitic flavours would be more interesting next time, I did attempt to play it safe by getting the caramel. Went for a drink with a couple of friends tonight, was nice to catch up. I also am developing a cold :|

Yay DSL

I really need to update more than weekly at the moment, but it does have to be said that not much is happening outside the weekends :) This week went pretty much as usual, working 9-5 yada yada yada. Received phone call from demon, ADSL was enabled on the line on monday - yay. Went to the house on friday night to install the server, arrived very tired after a long drive and a long days work, only to walk towards the house to find James (who came down to give me a hand with the wiring etc) walking from the other direction at the exact same time, freaky.

Tested the ADSL modem with laptop, all worked perfectly straight away, connected at 576kbps - excellent. Then later on that evening attempted to get it all working on the server... after about 4 hours of obscure error messages and trying all sorts of different things, I realised I was specifying the wrong username - I'm going to blame the fact that I was very tired, but the entries in /var/log/messages were so verbose that nothing to do with authentication was actually mentioned! Shifted around some of the excess furnature on saturday night and getting a 3 seater sofa stuck in the doorway! On sunday morning, finished off the wiring up, tidied up a few things, then started my way back in the afternoon, the weather was good, and yet again, thought how I'm going to miss Wales, got stuck behind a massive convoy of caravans at one stage, and had plenty of time to admire the view!

5th of a century old

This week started with the usual work cycle. Not much happened during the week that is notable, except worked an extra hour every day so that I could take the afternoon off on friday to prepare for my birthday night out. Friday lunchtime went for a pub lunch with everyone, then I finished for the day, people started to arrive after about 4 ish, ended up with everyone in the kitchen drinking from around 8pm. Later on we made our way to the club, only to have Antony refused entry due to THROWING A CAN AT THE BIN, which was less than ideal. The Neanderthol doorman was completely unreasonable, and also claimed to "speak for the manager" when we asked if we could discuss the matter with him. In the end I gave up negotiating and went in with everyone else, Antony made his own way back :| When we acutally were inside they did supply all 12 of us with "bubbly" for my birthday (I got special promo tickets) to be honest, it was dire, but it was free :) I was especially annoyed by the fact that the bouncers would not let me go to the toilet when I didn't agree with the "special" whiskey drink that oli bought me, instead they made me stand outside in the patio area "for some fresh air" while I had to do my very best not to acutally be sick (I knew they were looking for a good excuse to chuck me out or something) FUCKING TWATS. Also I managed to really hurt my wrist at some stage (I think i fell over), and I am only just being able to type this. I won't be going there again in a hurry, in fact, I won't ever, but overall it was an good night, really nice to see everyone again. Saturday was recovery, and finding that I really couldn't really do all that much with my left hand - had to drive mum's car with PAS. Today saw my acutal birthday - got some cool things, didn't really do very much but I'm starting to feel old :| I mean, sheesh, 20, that's halfway to 40!

What a load of Bunker

I've been quite bad in not blogging for about 12 days... _slaps wrist_ the first reason I suppose was that not very much at all happened until the weekend just gone, then everything happened at once. First of all weekend before last just bimbled around before the parents got back (it would seem that they had a good time), spent some time sorting things out and generally tiding up on the saturday and sunday, went to worcester intending to buy shoes and a few clothes, but it ended up not happening, sometimes when I get to the shops I just can't be arsed to clothes shop, its one of my least favourite activities. Then worked for the week, started to finally get some work done, which is always good :) Then this weekend a friend CYCLED down from derby - took 10 hours!!! I was impressed, yet also worried... why on earth? ;) I ended going back to derbyshire with him, and then we had a look around a couple of small UKWMO nuclear bunkers (more to follow tomorrow) - took a few pictures. As with all the nuclear bunkers I find it impressive how much effort was put into preparing for a war that never happened. As per usual, brother wants the phone GET SOME MOBILE CREDIT, so thats all for today.