Part One: Describe Network Communications Using Layered Models...

Preface: For this blog entry, I am referring to Scott Bennett's book "31 Days Before Your CCNA Exam". While the occasional passage may be copied from this book, it is not my intention to infringe upon the copyright of this work (which is ©2007, Cisco Systems Inc), nor is it my intention to make the content of the book available to read online. 

Note for any casual readers: I hope you find this entertaining and perhaps even informative. It might seem a bit circuitous and at times perhaps even silly, but when describing things quickly, I tend to describe them in very train-of-thought type ways. I'll repeat myself, refer back to stuff I might not have said, perhaps even (I hope not!) contradict myself from time to time, but hey, this is a learning experience for me too, and as long as I know what I mean, that's the important thing ;-).

The first and most important thing that newcomers to networking theory are taught, are the ins and outs of layered models. Layered models provide a visual and conceptual representation of the most fundamental inner workings of the network.While initially appearing confusing, it's essential to your understanding of networking theory that you understand two particular layered models, inside and out.

THE OSI MODEL:

 

The thing to the left, is what's called the OSI model - The Open Systems Interconnect[ion] model. I'm not going to go into the history of it (released in 1984 to simplify and standardise network communications), but I will say that the OSI model - for us - is pretty much a brute fact - it's just there, it just exists. For thousands of classes of network engineers the world over, it is the scaffolding that holds our understanding of network communications up. Why is this relevant to us? Well, it will eventually become apparent, as future modules reference the OSI model.

It's a multilayered model. Think of it as a cocktail where all the layers are poured carefully on top of each other. I would show you a picture of one, but you'd be amazed how hard it is to find a picture of a layered cocktail on the net, that isn't payware on some stock photography website.

The layers of the OSI model are numbered from the bottom up, that is, 1=physical, 2=data link, 3=network and so on.

An easy way to remember the layers of the OSI model is with the mnemonic Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away 

That is,  Physical, Data-link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, Application.

It works the other way too, with All People Seem To Need Data Processing.

As information travels across a network or across the internet (itself simply a network of networks), it is continually changed and updated. While your request for a certain webpage (for example) - the payload - remains the same from source to destination, the box - or multitude of boxes, as you will see - that it travels in is continually redirected, relabeled, sometimes even repackaged altogether, while on its travels. These different types of labelling or packaging are called PDUs.

PDU: Protocol Data Unit: Think of this as a specific type of parcel. Layer 3 PDUs are packets, for example, whereas Layer 2 PDUs are frames. Layer 2 can't read packets, and layer 3 can't read frames.

The layers of the OSI model communicate with each other, but cannot read each other's PDUs:

For a layer to be able to "read the label" and direct the data where it needs to go, the data (or PDU) needs to be placed in a box designed for that layer, that is, encapsulated in a layer [x] PDU.

Example (in VERY general terms (we haven't gone onto ARPs or reverse ARPs or anything like that yet so I'm missing a great deal out), this is just for the purposes of describing the OSI model, remember): 

PC1 at the left, wants to send some data to PC2 at the right. connected to either PC is a Switch (square), and these are connected to each other, via two Routers (round). I've used both switches and routers in this example, because:

• In most cases, switches forward data in frame format, based exclusively on the layer 2 address of the frame (Layer 3 and higher multilayer switches are beyond the scope of the CCNA)
• Routers forward data in packet format, based exclusively on the layer 3 address of the packet.

Remember that I referred to a multitude of boxes? 

PDUs can be nested one in side the other. When you send information across the an ethernet network, what you're generally sending is Data, inside a segment, itself inside a packet, itself inside a frame. The frame is the lowest level PDU we deal with in this example.
So again, the higher level puts stuff inside an addressed box to send it to a lower level, which puts that box in another, bigger box, with its own address label written in that layer's own unique language, and sends it to an even lower level, which puts it in an even bigger box, and so on and so forth.
Remember transporters from Star Trek? that's layer 1. When the layer 2 PDU is finally ready to be sent, it goes on the transporter pad, and it's dematerialised. All those little atoms and all that energy flowing about? That's layer 1, and those are the bits.
You get to the transporter room wherever you're going, and the box rematerialises again. That's a layer 2 PDU, having been transmitted over Layer 1.

1. PC1 creates a frame destined for the router, addressed to the router with the router's layer 2 address. Inside that frame is a packet, with a layer 3 address. 
2. Copper wiring can't carry frames though, it can only carry electrical current, so the PC, having created the frame, transmits the bits, just like the star trek analogy, to the layer 2 Switch. The switch receives the bits and reconstitutes them into a frame.
3. The switch receives the frame, examines the address label, notices that it is for the router, and (again turning it into lots of bits, sends it on to the router. 
4. The router reassembles the bits into a frame, and then (remember, routers don't care about layer 2 addresses) opens the frame (box) and lifts out the packet (the smaller box inside), discarding the remains of the data that made up the frame. 
5. The router examines the address label on the packet, realises it now needs to be passed to the second router, and puts new address labels on the packet, marking it for the attention of the second router. This packet is also turned into bits, which are sent to the second router. 
6. The second router repeats the process, reconstituting the packet and reading the address label on it. Realising that the destination is a layer 2 address, the router takes the packet, places it inside a new frame, sticks a lovely new layer 2 address on it, and sends it towards the switch, turning it into bits in the process.
7. The second switch receives the bits, reconstitutes them into a frame, reads the layer 2 address which it recognises as belonging to PC2, and forwards the frame onto PC2's network card, as a stream of bits.
8. The stream of bits reaches PC2, where it is turned into a frame again, the PC realises "hey this is for me" and works its way through the packaging, opening as many boxes as it needs to, packet, segment and all, to find the data it's after. 

 Now, it's important to remember that this example isn't intended to go into the ins and outs of data transmission, nor does it describe in explicit detail, the steps of routing a packet from a source host to a destination host. That is for later on in my studying.
What the example does do though, is illustrate the fact that during its travels from source to destination, data is moved from one layer to another and back again (often repeatedly), and more importantly, emphasises the role of the OSI model in our understanding of this process.

In summary, the layers are as follows:

• 7: Application Layer: This consists of E-mail, FTP and other programs that allow the user to enter data.
• 6: Presentation Layer: This is where encryption and compression can occur. Here, data is represented in a standard syntax and format, such as ASCII.
• 5: Session Layer: This layer is responsible for setting up and closing down sessions between programs that exchange data.
• 4: Transport Layer: Segments are transported, helped on their way by functions that ensure reliability of transmission, detect errors, and control the flow of data.
• 3: Network Layer: Here, Packets are routed over the network. The path they are sent on is determined by their layer 3 address, the IP Address.
• 2: Data Link Layer: On this layer, frames traverse the local area network. This travel is facilitated by their layer 2 address, the MAC Address.
• 1: Physical Layer: This is where the magic happens. Data is transmitted as a series of light pulses (fibre optic), electrical pulses (copper cable), or radio waves (Wireless/Wi-Fi).

 THE TCP/IP MODEL:

 In the CCNA, we learn about a second type of layered model, known as the TCP/IP model. As with a great many technological concepts, the TCP/IP model was created by the military (or rather, the United States Department of Defense, on behalf of the military). In this case, the intention was to define a resilient network structure that could ensure consistent communications during nuclear war. As far as my studies indicate, the TCP/IP model is essentially a different concept to describe identical operations. We may touch on this again later (a later passage in the book actually indicates that this is not true. How so remains to be seen).

Remembering which layer of each model corresponds to its counterpart is a small challenge. It's easiest to remember that the layers A,P,S (7,6,5) which are not really dealt with by networking students, at least not in the CCNA curriculum, are bunched together into one big layer. Transport is unchanged, Network simply gets a name change and becomes "Internet", and then you have the two (or one) layers/layer at the bottom. 3,1,1,2 helps me remember. I don't know why.

Sublayers: In order to complicate things a little more, the data link layer of the OSI model actually consists of two sub-layers. OSI's layer 2 combines these 2 sub-layers into one layer, in much the same way that layer 1 of the  TCP/IP model combines the OSI model's L1 and L2 into one layer. It seems to be a conceptual thing.

• The upper sub-layer is called the Logical Link Control sublayer. This sublayer acts as an interface with the upper layers.
• The lower-sub-layer is called the Media Access Control sublayer, and, guess what, it controls access to the media. Ethernet operates in the physical layer, and in the MAC sublayer. 

 Frames: Layer 2 frames are made of different types of information called fields. These fields allow the receiving host to identify where a frame starts, where it ends, where it needs to go, and whether it has been transmitted correctly. Without the structure of a frame, the layer 1 transmission would just be a long squiggly stream of binary data. The fields in a generic frame are as follows:

• Start of Frame: This field identifies the beginning of the frame.
• Address: This contains the source and destination layer 2 (MAC) address.
• Length (or) Type: If this is a length field, it determines the length of the frame. If it is the type, it identifies the layer 3 protocol for the frame.
• Data: This is the important part. This is where the data intended for upper layers is kept. Despite being a layer 2 frame, upper-layer data is intended only for layers 3 and 4 of the TCP/IP model. In the case of the OSI model, it refers to layers 3 to 7, as you'd expect.
• Frame Check Sequence: We'll come across this one a lot. This field provides a number that represents the data in the frame, as well as a way to check the frame and arrive at the same number. Something called a Cyclic Redundancy Check is a common way to calculate the number, and to check for errors in the frame.

 Three layer 2 technologies that control how the media is accessed, are Ethernet, Token-Ring, and FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface). As part of the MAC sublayer, these technologies are divided into two groups: Deterministic and non deterministic. FDDI and Token-Ring are deterministic, as they provide a way for hosts to take turns accessing the media. Ethernet is nondeterministic and uses something called Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) as a way to access the media. This means that hosts will check whether the line is busy, and will only transmit if it is not.
If two hosts transmit at the same time, a collision would occur, and both hosts would be required to wait a random amount of time before trying again.

It is important to pay attention to the name of the specific layered model being referenced, in any layered model question.

The TCP/IP Application Layer: This layer features protocols and programs that prepare data to be encapsulated in lower layers. These programs include TFTP, FTP, SNMP, SMTP, Telnet and DNS.
More on these later.

TCP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) operate as protocols of the TCP/IP transport layer. Both protocols segment data from the applicaiton layer and send the segments to the destination. UDP differs from TCP in that it just blurts data at the destination host, and doesn't check whether it has been received. TCP on the other hand ensures reliable transfer with receipt acknowledgements, sequencing, and mechanisms to control the flow of data, and is therefore described as a "connection-oriented" protocol.

The TCP/IP Internet Layer is responsible for finding the best path for packets over the network. It is aided in this role by the inclusion of the connectionless protocol, IP. Remember, TCP Is connection-oriented, IP is not.
Other protocols that work at the internet layer of the TCP/IP model include:

• ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) to find a MAC address when only the IP address is known.
• Inverse/Reverse ARP (You've guessed it), to find an IP address when only the MAC is known.
• ICMP: Internet Control Message Protocol. 

 The TCP/IP Network Access Layer is also known as the "host to network" layer, and is responsible for providing the protocols that allow the data to access the physical media. Also found within this layer, are protocols that define the standards for the network media (copper, fiber, radio etc). Examples of these protocols are: Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, PPP, FDDI, ATM, and Frame Relay.

Important!

Remember, the application layer of the TCP/IP model includes the Application, Presentation and Session layers of the OSI model. Note that the network access layer includes the Data Link and Physical layers of the OSI model. 3,1,1,2.
The OSI model is more of an academic and theoretical construct, whereas the TCP/IP model is the basis for the development of the internet.

Flow Control and Reliability:

When you're thinking about the transport layer, remember that two major functions of the layer's role are Flow Control, and Reliability, with a capital R.
The transport layer achieves these goals through concepts such as sliding windows (not to be confused with the similarly named Gwyneth Paltrow movie), segment sequence numbers, and acknowledgements.

When two hosts get together and establish a TCP connection at the transport layer, they need to agree on what constitutes a "reasonable" flow of information. It is this flow control, that allows the receiving host to process the received information, in time to receive subsequent segments from the transmitting host.

In order to start passing segments at the transport layer, both hosts must set up and maintain a session. The software and operating system of the sender communicate with the receiver's OS and software, to set up and syncronise a session. TCP avoids congestion at the transport link, because the receiving host is able to send ready or not ready messages to the sending host.

THREE-WAY HANDSHAKE: Applications that use TCP must first set up a session as described above. The sender sends a SYN (synchronise) message. The receiver receives this message and sends back an ACK (Acknowledgement) message. The original sender receives the ACK, and transmits the third message, "ACK+1". During this process, the sequencing for communications via TCP is defined. Both hosts must send an initial sequence number, and both hosts must receive an acknowledgement, before the communication can proceed.

SLIDING WINDOWS: This function depends on the concept of a "window size". If the sender transmits a segment, the receiver receives it, and says "I received your segment, send the next one", that is a window size of one. If the sender transmits seven segments, and the receiving host says "I received your segments, send the next seven", that is a window size of seven. The one, or the seven, are the window size.
Now, any connection where the transmitting host is only sending one segment at a time, is going to be chock full of traffic, but not particularly fast. This is where sliding windows comes in.
The sender might send three segments, and in return the receiving host says, "I received your three segments, try sending four". Four are sent, in return the reply comes back "I received four, try sending five". Before you know it (in an ideal world), the sender is sending dozens of segments between each acknowledgement, and the connection is nice and speedy.

If at some point though, there's a problem, if data falls into a hole somewhere and the receiving host just sits there twiddling its thumbs, still waiting for the data to turn up, the sending host thinks "Hang on, I haven't got an acknowledgement, I'll send the data again, but this time I'll use a smaller window size. So the window size can decrease, as well as increase.

Sliding windows is the reason why, when you're downloading something, the computer changes its mind every second, when it comes to telling you how long you'll need to wait before the download is complete. Kind of like this. An annoyance this may be, but at least now you know why it does it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: How does the sending host know when to retransmit a segment though? Easy. Each time a "window" of segments is transmitted (and received at the other end), the receiving host acknowledges the receipt of the "window" in its entirety (remember, when using a greater window size than 1, the receiving host does not acknowledge each segment), and along with that acknowledgement, transmits a request for the next numbered segment that it expects to receive (the first one in the new window, along with the other segments that fit into that window).

Like this:

The "ACK" and the "4" are two separate parts of the same message. Essentially, ACK 4 means "I've received this window, please send the next bunch of segments, starting with segment 4".

This is all well and good. We know what happens when the data is received okay, and we know what happens when none of it is received.
But what happens when some of it is received, but not the rest? Again, this is where ACK numbers come in. Picture the diagram above, with a window size of three, but imagine that this scenario occurs:

SEND 1, 2, 3.
ACK 4.
SEND 4, 5, 6.
ACK 6.

Wait, what happened there? ACK 6? It's supposed to be ACK 7, right? Right. But this time round, the receiving host didn't receive segment number 6. So what happens now? Does the ACK6 mean that the sending host will transmit 6, 7, and 8? Well, no. I have to admit, I'm not sure why, and it wasn't ever really explained to me, but what actually happens in this scenario, is this:

SEND 1, 2, 3.
ACK 4.
SEND 4, 5, 6.
ACK 6.
SEND 6.
ACK 7.
SEND 7, 8, 9.

Weird huh? There is a reason for it, but as I say, at the moment I'm not sure what it is.

TCP COMPARED TO UDP: FTP, HTTP, SMTP and Telnet all use the transport layer TCP protocol. All of these protocols benefit from the connection-oriented reliable data transfer that TCP provides.

Remember "fields", those little different types of data inside a TCP segment?

Here they are:

• Source Port
• Destination Port
• Sequence Number (remember, just as described above)
• Acknowledgement Number 
• Header Length
• Reserved
• Code Bits
• Window (see?)
• Checksum
• Urgent Pointer
• Option
• Data

Many of these fields are filled with tiny bits of incredibly useful data, that ensures timely and reliable delivery of the segment payload.

UDP is used by other protocols, including TFTP, SNMP, DHCP and DNS.
UDP is a connectionless transport layer protocol. There's none of the lovely sequencing or error checking here. Think of TCP as the computer version of arranging to make a speech in front of invited guests, and UDP as the computer version of sticking your head out of the window and yelling BLARGH!!, while hoping that the people you want to reach are listening, and can hear you.

Error checking in UDP is left to the higher layer protocols, so while software applications might be able to tell whether they've received a message correctly, the UDP protocol itself doesn't care either way.

The fields inside a UDP segment are as follows:

• Source Port
• Destination Port
• Length
• Checksum
• Data

So why would anyone use UDP when TCP does a better job? Easy. TCP has a lot of what we call overhead. This is where, to deliver traffic from A to B, TCP actually causes quite a lot of traffic itself. A computer receives a couple of hundred TCP packets, and on the way, those sync numbers and ack numbers and window size settings have already been read hundreds of times, before the destination host has even had the opportunity to read the data.
UDP might be rough and ready, but it takes up less bandwidth and device (switch, router etc) resources to process.


PORT NUMBERS: where a source and destination MAC address can identify the specific machines that the data was sent from and intended for, another type of number, called a port number, identifies which individual software package the data is intended for.
You know what it's like, you're on facebook, you're on google, you're checking your email, there are half a dozen different websites open on your browser, and then windows is updating itself - yet again.

But what is there to stop your computer just getting totally confused with a deluge of data that it doesn't know how to process? Imagine if your email data went to your firefox window, or if, when loading a webpage, firefox tried to open the windows update data, while windows update scratched its head trying to figure out what to do with the latest icanhascheezburger pictures.

Port numbers exist to stop this from happening. For example, all HTTP (webpage data, broadly speaking) data entering your machine destined for your web browser, would  be encoded with a port number of 80. Your computer would read the data and say, "Ah, port 80, I'm going to send this to firefox". If you want to download a file from an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server, it would come encoded with a port number of 21 "Ah, port 21, this needs to go to the FTP program".
Port numbers are yet another clever gizmo that makes internet communications possible.

For a list of popular port numbers in use, go here. Doom fans will be amused to know that Doom uses UDP port number 666, which made me laugh when I found out.

FINAL BIT FOR TODAY: NETWORK LAYERS...

When designing a network, network engineers use what is called a hierarchical model (the term is used so often in Cisco classes that I spelled hierarchical twice just now without even having to look how to spell it).

The hierarchical model essentially means that devices are grouped into one of three ranks, or layers (hierarchical model layers are completely different from network model layers). These layers are:

• Core Layer: serves as the backbone of the network, where high speed transmission occurs. This layer generally consists of very powerful (and uber expensive) switches and routers.
• Distribution Layer: provides "policy based" connectivity, meaning that the majority data goes where it needs to go, without having to bother the core layer with it.
• Access Layer: This connects directly to the end users, PCs, IP phones, etc.

That's all for today, folks. Coming soon? A lovely rant about the awesomeness of Spanning-Tree Protocol.

Ciao, I'm off to the pub.

Let's Get Started...

Okay, so after the non-negligible distractions of the past 6 months (which I'm not going to pay lip service to), it's time to finally get moving forwards again, and get working towards finally taking and passing  the Cisco CCNA exam.

I graduated in early spring this year from college, taking with me both a level 2 and a level 3 C&G IT certificate, which I'm pretty pleased with. Essentially, I passed both courses.
I still need, however, to take the final CCNA exam, which is vendor certified, which in a nutshell means that the certificate comes direct from Cisco, and says "We approve of this guy configuring our hardware, we trust him to do it properly etc etc". 

With that in mind, in April I bought my own lab. What this is, is essentially my own kit to practice on at home. Packet Tracer is all well and good, and it's pretty versatile, but since I'm a hands-on type person, I much prefer getting to grips with the hardware itself rather than just the concepts.

 What you're looking at is my own little internetwork, primarily comprised of 7 connected devices, which then have computers/laptops/printers etc connecting at either end.

From top to bottom, we have:

• A pair of Catalyst 2950 24-port layer 2 switches. 
• A Catalyst 3550 48 (without expansion GBICs) layer 3 switch. 
• Two 2610XM Routers
• A 2620XM Router
• A Dell PowerEdge SC1425 Server. 

  Total cost about, hmm, about £450 including the little stuff like cables and whatnot. Sounds expensive, but when it's to help with qualifications, it's really not. Networking hardware depreciates faster than a brand new car. In a derby. With monster trucks.

Seriously, this expansion module (For something even bigger and expensive-erer) is nearly 50 grand! This is what networking hardware costs, and this is why people want engineers who are qualified and certified, by the vendor, by the book.

I'm doing my studying with the help of a rather cool book, which is one of the few paper books I've bought for a while.
I've actually had it for a while so I'm stretching the definition of 31 days somewhat, but hey, I've got to take the exam sooner or later. Would be a waste otherwise.

So, let's see how we go. Rather than take the exam 31 days from now (I don't have the money to book it at the minute) I'll run through the book, and make sure that I understand the concepts described therein. I've got some additional hardware that may be on the way (gratis) so it's my intention to practice the concepts I describe in each section.

So for the time being, this is going to turn into something of a network oriented blog. That's my intention anyway. Let's see how it goes...

Placeholder

I hope that I can come back and supercede this post sooner rather than later.

You folks might have noticed that I've stopped posting.

I'm still here, still alive and breathing.

There's so much stuff going on in my life that I can't bring myself to take the time out to post about what's been happening recently.

I have lots of things happening at the moment, my life has turned into a real day to day free for all.

There's nothing I really want to talk about. Sure I'm still waking up, going to work, coming back and sleeping, but am I enjoying anything enough to want to tell you guys about it? No.

I'm in a kinda crappy place right now and all hell is breaking loose. I'll be back to let you guys know about it one way or the other. How soon that happens, is another story.

I'll try and be more cheerful in future, but for now, I've got a lot going on.

All the best, stay safe.

[EDIT] There's a phrase: "One day, I'll look back on this and laugh".

When I do, that will be an awesome day indeed.

Well well, Christmas In Review (sort of)...

Yeah I noticed that my Christmas entries were a bit sparse, and didn't really emphasise how nice it was to be able to get together and spend time with everyone, in a spirit of cheerfulness and Christmassy whatnot.

I'd have to say that the highlight of my year, this year, was our trip to London, where we spent ages and ages wandering around an awesome christmas market, seeing the talking moose (which my brother and wife (his not mine)) did actually see (!) and browsing wonderful Christmassy stalls.

We'd not been back 8 hours before we were up again, on our way to Gainsborough as always, and that was nice too.
At our traditional Christmas Eve food shopping, I had to go back to the car to fetch the forgotten shopping list, and took my ickle nephew with me. As a result, we more or less ended up split into two parties each doing our own seperate shopping, but we got back together in time to pay.

Christmas day itself was great fun, and though I didn't get a single thing on my Christmas list (I did write one, and indeed left it on the fridge for 6 weeks beforehand), I was only mildly annoyed, becuase I got lots of other cool stuff.

More importantly, everyone seemed to like the presents that I got them, which always brings a smile to my face :-).

Christmas dinner was great, tasty, yummy, and though I took ages, I actually ate every single thing.

Boxing day was another fun occasion, with almost everyone coming round to share in our awesome little banquetty buffet thingie which we have, and again it was nice to get together as a family.

I can't remember too much of the two or three days after that. A few days ago I made some nachos with the awesome nacho dish thing that my brother and wife (his not mine) got me. With it, I bought some beer. After the beer ran out, I started on the Mead.

Awesome nachos, nice cold beer, tasty mead, awesome Skyrim (there is no other kind), and awesome music (that fits quite well with Skyrim, and has almost become its surrogate soundtrack), well that sounds like my idea of a good night in. Which is awesome really because it's exactly the night in that I had.

I'll do it again soon. This time round I'll be able to get into the spirit of things a little more authentically hehe (Image is not my property but I'm stealing it anyway because it hasn't arrived yet).
All I need now is a few steel ingots placed around my room, some wolf pelts on my bed, and I'll be all set.

So yeah, that's about it. I've got to reinstall everything on my PC because my awesome shiny solid state drive, having spent too much time hanging around on street corners with dysfunctional Xboxes, is now in the habit of giving me the shiny orange finger, a surefire signal that something is not quite right.
At least I managed to pull my Skyrim saves onto another drive before the SSD went skyward. I would have been annoyed had I had to restart.

That said, I will probably have to restart again anyway. It's a continuing source of consternation/mirth, depending on how seriously you take your gaming, the first thing each patch for Skyrim does, is to fix the damage the last one caused.
Seriously, one game patch made the dragons fly backwards. No, the video is not playing in reverse, the waterfalls are flowing the right way. See?
I can't watch that video without giggling. In the game, dragons are bad news, no matter how long you've been playing, but they look slightly silly wobbling around in a rearward fashion.

This bug is even more awesome.

But hey, tomorrow, today in fact, is going to be fun. 5 hours of absolute crazyness, wobbling around on my pizza scoot, swerving to avoid drunken idiots in the street, getting silly string squirted at me, etc etc etc. Fortunately, I'm back in time to celebrate the new year with my family.
Can't do much drinking though, I'm back out tomorrow night. Then I've got my semester 3 exam on wednesday. It's all happening! Yikes!

But, once it's done, I shall get some more yummy mead, make more awesome nachos, buy extra awesome beer, and have another big lad's (singular) night in. Woo!

Oh well, I'm off to relax and suchlike. I've been studying most of the night :-\.
Have fun!

Christmas Day - Yay!

Well, Up nice and early - ish (8am) - , after not being able to sleep particularly well, and now I'm tired, cold, and looking forward to a nice cup of tea and some fun laying all the presents out :-). Let's get it done hehe.

11:58:
I think that may be the name of a voyager episode...

Yep, all the presents are unwrapped, I got some shiny cool stuff, plenty of cool new clothes, not a bad day so far really. I've got a couple of things that I'm now going to be able to pick up for myself in the january sales, not the least of which are the skyrim soundtrack, the skyrim game guide, and an awesome drinking horn.

Everyone seemed to like the presents I gave them, and so far, the day has passed off without any arguing or shouting. Cool stuff :-).

Christmas Eve

Prologue-y Bit: 23:47, on the 23rd...

Well, I'm sat here with my lovely cold 660ml bottle of Stella and my two lovely (too hot) pepper steak slices. The camera battery is on charge, and early tomorrow morning we're off to the supermarket-that-looks-like-a-castle, for our traditional and lovely Christmas Eve shop :-).

I must remember to get some more Mead :-).

So yeah, I've finished for work for this year (apart from 5 hours on new year's eve) so now there's just college, and christmas to concentrate on. Yay!

More to follow. I'm going to finish my supper and have a nap before I do anything else :-).

06:20, Christmas Eve:

Yikes it's cold. Not cold enough to snow obviously, because that sort of thing only happens to people who don't want snow.
But hey, I'm up now, a little bleary eyed, sure, but it'll be nice to go Xmas food shopping again :-).

09:06: Shopping Done...

Well, we've just this minute returned from the supermarket-that-looks-like-a-castle, and we've not had a bad time. I found my yummy mead and bought two bottles, plus some japanese lager and some Hoegaarden which is very nice at Christmas time. I bought another Chocolate Orange because it is the law that you have to have these at Christmas, and I got the ickle guy some Buenos, one of which he kindly gave to the cashier at the checkout :-).

Now I suspect I have tidying up and things to do. Yay, Christmas!

12:06: More Stuff...

Oooh, exactly three hours since last I wrote. Spooky. Well, the christmas cards are delivered, the new neighbours are identified, the rooms have been cleaned, my mead has been photographed, and now I'm in the process of tidying my room so I can have a bit of a nap later on :-).
I might bring forward that nap actually, I'm super sleepy.

16:39: Nap! And Santa!

Well, I eventually had a small nap, despite the best efforts of the dog which would not shut up. I've just been woken up by my cute ickle nephew, and we're going to see santa in 10 minutes, on his van :-).
Aaaand, we're back. I have a very poor quality picture of Santa and his (this year) Land Rover driven sleigh :-). I think the Elves get together each december and buy him a new car as a christmas present.
Yikes, it's become very windy, and pretty cold too. But hey, it's shaping up quite well so far :-).
PS: Wow, my mum's quiches are amazing, as always!

Well Then (23:22)...

Well, nearly time for bed. I've brought all my pressies down to be collected by father christmas so that they can be delivered in the morning (;)), and I'm sitting about with some lovely mead, waiting for the opportunity to finish clearing stuff out of the dining room, so that my services are no longer required and I can retire to bed :-).

Or retire to my lovely mead and ale, it seems. Buying mead is always a gamble because everyone has a different idea of what it should taste like. You never really know what you're going to get.

Fortunately, this Harvest Gold stuff is quite nice, if a little bitter in the aftertaste, and at 13%ABV I picture many happy nights full of Mead ahead.

Today went pretty well, if a little tiringly (no sleep). I went downstairs this morning to find everyone else already up. Helpfully putting the shiny new star on top of the tree, we wandered down to the car and off we went.

Seems that lots of people had the same idea as the place was fairly crowded. We wandered round for a while, finding cool stuff like super noodles, mini mars bars, the lovely aforementioned mead, and some japanese lager.

the lil dude found a pick and mix area, where I managed to catch him on video as he took a cup, compared its size to the cup next to it, then put it back and took the bigger one.. Made me giggle.

We disappeared off to the cafe afterwards, where I had a sausage roll and some juice. After that, off home for some cleaning up, preparing the house, and - for me - delivering the cards.

I had a little nap, and was woken up later on by my nephew, who we took to see Father Christmas. I swear the queue to see him gets bigger.

Ever since, I've been playing Skyrim, as always, drinking yummy mead, listening to cool tunes, eating quiches, and bringing my presents down so they're easier to hand out tomorrow.

So there we go.
I've now no doubt got other stuff to do, but shortly I'm gonna have a nice shower, drink my special Christmas beer (hoegaarden), have some more yummy mead, and go to a warm cozy mead-induced sleep. Some things never go out of fashion it seems...

Ciao.

Sign goes up, snow stays up...

Well, a few days ago, the awesome little sign on the corner went up, proudly proclaiming that Father Christmas would be around on his Nissan Navara driven sleigh. Not only that, but Santa has sent a personal message, just like last year, to my amazed lil nephew.
Also, just like last year, my sister's fiancee (Brother in law?) took me to the local shopping mall for some last-minute emergency shopping.

Yep, thanks to various things such as college and work, and hangovers maybe, I've done precious little Christmas shopping. Not to worry however, as we generally do last minute Christmas shopping, and I had quite a few ideas for things to buy people.

A couple of these ideas were (displayed here because I didn't buy them due to them not being available/due to me being told that the intended recipient wanted something else more);

1. A rather lovely aromatic diffuser, that was nice and shiny, that made everything nearby smell nice, and that looked pretty cool. I didn't get this because I was told "Don't get that, this [other item] is what XYZ really wants".
2. An awesome Thrustmaster Ferrari GT Wheel and Pedals... I have been using one of these for a while, and my dad showed a strong interest in having a bit of a play with it. I had been hoping to get him one of his own, but the local game stores don't seem to sell them anymore.

Not to worry, I bought plenty of cool stuff, I avoided slipping into the "buy them anything, it doesn't matter" trap, and after spending ages searching for various stuff, came away from it all with a load of presents that I'm pretty confident their recipients will like.
Good stuff. We spent 7 hours out and about looking for lovely pressies for folks.

Along the way, we had a lovely meal in TGIs, relaxed, and took the little guy to see some jellyfish in a [jelly]fish aquarium in one of the local restaurants. I bought some silly putty, which is incredibly clever stuff, which is why it's taken me the best part of 40 minutes to write this stuff, and yeah, it was a nice, if hectic, day out.

On the way back, I got robbed inside the local convenience store, and by that I mean that I was charged £9.50 for three razor blades. Absolutely insane.
Still, since I've been using blunt blades since september 2010, it'll be nice to be clean-shaven again.

So yeah. The snow still hasn't arrived, but things are going more or less to plan, and I'm beginning to feel pretty Christmassy. I've got the college christmas do tomorrow, which should be fun. If not I'll just leave early and go to the off licence, hehe.

Some pickatures. Just one in fact, as the others aren't great.
It is a picture of my ridiculously large burger I got from TGI Friday's.

Have fun. Christmas Eve, soon :-).

White Christmas? Where??

Okay this is getting silly now. It's less than 2 weeks to go until Christmas and while everyone farther north has been thoughtfully and kindly pretending that they hate their large amounts of snow, we, here, are again snowless. I seem to remember this being a recurring thing, except we're about a month behind schedule in the weather scheme of things.

That's not to say that the weather hasn't caused any problems however, as on the friday just gone, it was so cold that the roads started to ice over at 6pm. This being a day that I was out riding a small scooter here there and everywhere, meant that I spent as much time riding with my feet just above the floor as I did with them on the running board or whatever it's called. "Crappy bit in leiu of footpegs", maybe. This was to stabilise the scooter just in case the wheels decided they wanted to go in different directions, as they did when I was zooming down a hill. Quite an, erm, interesting experience I suppose.

It did actually start snowing at one point, but only extremely briefly. Blink - for ten or twenty seconds - and you'd have missed it. So yeah, we're due some more "severe weather", but I doubt that any of that will include snow. Ho Hum.

However, we have been taking part in our regular festivities, which this year included our lovely trip to Kelham Island Victorian Christmas Market Thingie. We had plenty of fun, wandering round, buying miniature presents and whatnot, and the weather was amost not rainy at all.
The place was fairly packed, but we managed to see what we wanted to see. We saw people in period costumes, soldiers, chimneycleaners, maids, lovable street starfishes and thieves. People sold all sorts of cleverly homemade stuff from various stalls. Such stalls sold things ranging from exotic looking rugs, clothing made from recycled denim, home-made cupcakes (a family favourite it seems!) and jewellry

This being the UK, I had a traditional English Christmas snack, a burrito.
There's a joke in there somewhere, but no, it was a pretty nice burrito. Vegetarian chilli though, so it was a little lacking in, I don't know, presence. Still, I casually drizzled it with "medium" salsa (which, while fanning my mouth and trying to find the soured cream, I later described as "nothing medium about it"), and it came with free tortilla chips, so I didn't mind.

Even as we stood outside eating, the Don Engine powered its way through its 5 minute demonstration, the exhaust steam billowing out through the pipe in the roof nearby where, upon meeting the cold winter air, it immediately condensed into water which rained on us quite merrily.

A decent time was had by all, I believe, and after a brief visit to the fairground rides (which included a travelling exhibition making some of the most insanely outlandish claims I've ever heard (Siamese twin monkeys from the amazon! See the puma with 2 bodies, 8 legs, 1 head! Where they got this stuff from I have no idea), we made our soggy way home.

Last night was fun. I went with my lovely mum to a christmas concert, which we seem to enjoy going to each year, and again, it was a really nice occasion.

So yeah, things seem to be proceeding okay, apart from the annoyingly un-christmassy weather. The christmas party at college is tiptoeing closer, and at home, our christmas decorations are down, waiting to be put up (mine already are up). So there :-).

Have fun folks :-).

EPILOGUE: 14th December!

SNOW! Snowww! Snoeeee! Et al! Yes, as if in apology for its late arrival, the snow seems to have been coming down fairly heavily for the past hour or so. Woo, snow!

It's actually settling pretty well. Already, some idiot car driver has left tracks in it.

And so, is this year's snow song. Dunno why, it seems epic enough to remind me of epic snow.

Sums up the mood awesomely. After a disappointing winter with no snow, all of a sudden it comes dramatically out of nowhere, with colours flying.
It'd bring a tear to the eye, of a scriptwriter could take the time to write it into a movie :-)

What happened to the snow?

I'm not sure what's going on with winter this year. We're in the final few hours of November, and so far I have yet to see a single snowflake! This has been a particular source of annoyance for me, because everyone knows how much I love frozen precipitation. Not only that, but we got our snow (again, after everyone else did!) mid November, last year. No fair. Hmm.

That said, apparently it snowed in Scotland earlier this month, and is due to snow there again tonight, which I suppose is good for them. If they like snow, that is.

However, I'm going to have to wait for my snow, as despite the slowly cooling weather, we haven't had so much as a flake of it, as I said.

Yep, the countdown to christmas is on again (not that it was ever really off), and I've bought um *checks* 5 pressies so far.

And so the weekend just gone brought with it the first of the Christmas festivities, that is, our trip to London:

Part One: Winter Wonderland. Also, London.

Yep, every winter, or for the past couple anyway, my mum and I seem to enjoy going to London to see what's on there. And so, waking up ridiculously early on saturday, we were driven to the coach station by my lovely helpful Brother.

Thankfully, there was no huge long interminable wait, as the coach (a rather shiny, new, and astonishingly expensive one!) was already there waiting for us, and, well, the journey was pretty comfortable and didn't seem too long, I suppose.
I spent a while reading a book or two and listening to tunes while my mum caught up on her sleep.
Eventually, we arrived, as you'd expect really, and off we got. I'd not even taken my first few steps before someone almost walked into me. Yep, welcome to London, a city with - you'd think - a dozen people for every square meter of space.

We had our traditional ogle in the "prestige car's shop" (a run-down looking showroom that seemed to give the impression that the rent was more than selling lamborghinis and paganis could cover), and found a fairly shiny (and fairly old, in prestige car terms!) Lamborghini Diablo SE 30.

We headed, as we do normally, into hyde park, and before long, got to my favourite bit of the entire city, Winter Wonderland. It seems that other people love it too, as I stood and watched depressed looking people instantly breaking into festive smiles as they entered, smelling the foods and hearing the christmassy music. No, really! Okay, so it wasn't lovely and snowing, but it wasn't attacking me with squalls of rain like it has done before. The cold was quite seasonal, and the cheerfulness at being there certainly stopped me from feeling the chill. And so off we went, wandering around, looking at the various stalls around the entrance. These included the traditional Christmas Gift Store, loads of food places including a Farm Burgers place and a Chinese Noodle shack (Hmm, Chinese Noodles, a christmassy treat?!), and, best of all, a rather lovely looking Father Christmas, that actually looked like Father Christmas is supposed to look, and not like some guy in a fake beard.

I had fished out my camera by this point and had started taking happy little pictures of everything I thought might be interesting to remember later, like a happy little tourist, Bob Ross style, I suppose. The place was already beginning to fill up even as we wandered around the "first" bit.

A short sit down later, and we started working our way around the attractions, including a genuine ice rink with real ice (and costumed elves). We wandered up to the official gift shop where we met a couple of tourists who were enamoured with a cake tin, before making our way round to the festively named Angel Market. Here, I was pleased to see that the rather lovely variety of stalls that had attended last year, were in attendance again. After a few free samples of "mountain cheese" (eh?) from the Speck merchants [see last year's entry] (I think), we worked our way down the wide variety of craft stalls, looking at everything from jewelry to candles, from homemade leatherbound books, to the ever-present glühwein, and "long drinks", whatever they were.



In time, we got around to one of my favourite parts of the day. Ever since last year's rant on Krakauers, I'd been looking forward to another one. Or two. So off we went and bought our krakauers, before scooting into a log cabin to eat.
And there we stayed, eating our delicious krakauers, enjoying the heat from the lovely fire (in one of those log stove things), and listening to a familiar voice mutilating a couple of christmas songs.

Yep, the Animatronic moose had returned for another sellout tour. In fact, according to Winter Wonderland's opening hours, I'm 99.9% certain that he's there right this second, singing Christmas songs in not one, but three languages (GB, D, E). Again, I'm pretty sure I heard him dispensing helpful advice at some point.

I was going along to go and get a second Krakauer, but I thought I'd be best off seeing what the rest of the place had to offer first. However, tired with standing at the table in the lovely warm log cabin, my mum decided we'd be better off sitting down somewhere quiet and out of the way, where we could watch the animatronic moose. She disappeared off for a while, and returned with a trio of fresh potato cakes, which were liberally covered in apple sauce and sugar. Except they weren't, due to um, a mixup on my mum's part I guess. Removing most of the salt from the apple sauce, I ate the majority of the apple sauce, and most of a potato cake, before it turned cold and I lost interest. At this point we were joined by a quartet of Japanese tourists, who I seem to remember seeing take photos of each other.


Eventually, we carried on our tour of the place, before, to my absolute delight, I found a place dealing exclusively in honey and mead. Mead, if you don't know, is kind of like a wine or beer. Like a wine because it's sweet, like a beer because it's made with yeast. It's an old old drink, many thousands of years old (it was especially popular in the early middle ages (500-1500AD)), and is made chiefly with honey, water, and yeast. The alcohol comes from the fermentation of the sugars in the honey.

Now, as a fan, both of all things medieval and especially of Skyrim, in which mead is every other character's favourite drink, I'd been itching to give it a go, and so I did, as they were offering around free samples.
Mead tastes like warm runny honey, with just enough alcohol to make your throat burn slightly. It's really lovely, and so I bought a couple of bottles more or less right there. One of normal mead, the other of Spiced mead (technically a metheglin), dramatically labelled "Feuriger Drache" (Firey Dragon), which featured a lovely warm seasonal image of a slavering dragon with a rather expensive looking sword through its throat (no, really, I'll prove it later).
Mead is an absolute bugger to get hold of, so finding a place completely dedicated to it was fantastically good fortune, and cheered me up even more.

A final tour around, and off we wandered towards Harrods. Before we got there though, we had to take a detour down past a bit of grassy parkland, covered in autumns dry leaves, and absolutely frantic with squirrels (if 8 or 9 in a small area of grass is absolutely frantic).

These little dudes jumped about, searching under leaves for each other's food caches, and occasionally, bounding up to people. You see, there are so many people in and around hyde park, day in day out, that the squirrels are absolutely, totally and completely unafraid of people. Even as my mum rested against the iron fence, one individual hopped on top and came to see if she had any food, even going so far as to climb over her arm (this was repeated by a pigeon a few moments later).

I encouraged the attention of one squirrel in particular, who (without giving me opportunity to get any decent pictures), hopped over to the fence, between the bars, and stopped right at my feet. After a brief pause, (and I have a witness, my mum is my witness) said squirrel then jumped onto my leg, and climbed, bit by bit, up it, before disappearing round my back, much to the amusement of the people around me. He didn't seem bothered by the fact I was twisting around trying to see what he was up to, and seemed quite comfortable nestling under my backpack, in the small of my back. After a short time, he hopped down to the ground, presumably satisfied (or perhaps dissatisfied) that I didn't have any food for him.

A few moments later, another squirrel (or maybe the same one?) climbed the leg of a small girl, who was nearby, before hopping onto the fence nearby, where a couple of other tourists somehow convinced it to stay perfectly still for me to take a few pictures :-).

And yes, off to harrods.

Harrods, wow. Even by its own standards, it was absolutely ridiculously full of people. The only way to move from one room to another was to basically pick a flow of "traffic" that was going in the right direction, and to try and join that flow.
We stayed in harrods just long enough to get wound up and severely annoyed with the crowds.

After that, we went to another few places. We went to Trafalgar Square, to see the olympic countdown clock thingumy.

We went to Garfunkel's for a quick meal, where we met a nice family from Norwich (thus confirming my suspicion that no one you meet in London is actually from London).

And finally, we went to Fortnum & Mason, which is apparently a very popular and prestigious department store. It's famous for being the first place in the UK to sell Heinz Baked Beans, and the birthplace of the Scotch Egg. Yummy.
Admittedly, its decor, based mostly around seminaked Vaudeville style mannequines wasn't really to my taste, and would have looked more in place in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but hey, it's a privately owned business, so I suppose they can decorate the place how they want :-).

After that, we zoomed off to a pub, before catching the coach home.

And that's that. A nice, festive, if tiring day, out.

Some pickatures. In no particular order whatsoever, of course:

PART TWO: Gainsborough.

No sooner had I got to sleep after returning to London, than it was time to go to Gainsborough. The day was bright, the sky was clear (I think) and I was looking forward to it.

Arriving in Gainsborough, we went straight to the hall and wandered around looking at the lovely stuff that people were selling. As in London, varieties on a theme of hand made clever stuff were being sold throughout the hall. We did our traditional sitting down by the fire in the kitchen for a while, then went out to watch a sextet (it's a word) of minnie dancers (like morris dancers, but female I guess) who were quite capable of doing some interesting dance moves using nothing more than two shoefulls of bells and some bits of rope.

I have to admit, Morris Dancing's not really my thing, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves (with the exception of one woman who looked like she was there for a bet), and this was a medieval themed day after all, and so we watched for a while before heading off into the town.
There, I took the opportunity to do some shopping, buying a couple of inexpensive stocking fillers, before we had a small wander round what Gainsborough calls "A christmas market". I have to admit, in comparison to winter wonderland, it left me a bit underwhelmed, but since it was technically approaching Christmas time, and it was a market, it didn't feel fair to complain. Besides, I was in a happy christmassy mood :-).

A short car journey later, via the jeweller's with the unfortunate typeface (he has CHANGED his sign, so it's no longer unintentionally rude!), and we were at the local garden center, exploring their christmas decoration department, and trying to ignore their absolutely horrifically bad CD of musical nobodies (all with a diploma in writing severely dated 1980s gameshow theme tunes) butchering a few of my festive favourites. I recorded 3 home videos in the same room as that CD, two of which I have since deleted, I hate the music that much.Hammond organs do not belong in Christmas carols :P.

After that, off home, where I relaxed until I went to bed :-).

So yeah, we're getting slightly more christmassy than normal. Could still do with some snow though!

Halloween Stuff...

16:59: Ahh, Halloween.

Well, I'm hard at work, studying (no, really!) for wednesday's exam, my dad is hard at work getting the kitchen ready to be redecorated, and going by the shrieking outside, it looks like tonight's first group of trick or treaters are musically and noisily wandering down the road. Though they haven't gone into any houses yet. Maybe they're trick trick or treaters, meant to trick people.

17:05 Yep, and we've just had our first group of trick or treaters! And it looks like I'm not going to get much studying done heh. I'm currently creating a miniature presentation on "Administrative distance and equal cost paths (and why the two don't mix)". It's quite shiny. Maybe I'll even show it you one day.

Temporary Wild Tangent:

The thing I love about writing this blog is that while in a few months or even a few years I can reread this thing and smile at the memories, this is all happening now! It's really happening, the real halloween wind keeps blowing my door closed, trick and treaters are wandering up and down, and it's all actually really happening :-).

and I think one thing that my blog has taught me, is to enjoy life more :-). I hope that doesn't sound too weird. I'm going to take the opportunity to go out and enjoy it later, too :-).

Back to Normal:

The dog is making distinctly weird grawr grawr noises, and is currently doing an oscar-winning impression of a tauntaun. She's our furry alarm system.

17:47 Well the trick or treaters are coming regularly now. My ickle nephew is here getting changed, and the dog is giving herself a sore throat and everyone else a headache. :-).

20:45: We've been back for a while now. My ickle nephew got plenty of stuff, and we all had a pretty cool time. He seemed to turn the halloween thing into some kind of racket with a "You knock on the door and I ask for the sweets" motto heh.

Rather endearingly though, every bunty (bounty) he got, he passed to my mum, every mars bar he got, he passed to me. Really sweet of him :-).

We've since returned, examined his stash, and now he's busy watching cartoons while I've resumed my revision.

Halloween Weirdness (Halloween Eve)

Part One: Prologue. Sort of. Halloween Sunday, I suppose.

Part One of Sunday Bit.

Crappy halloween/bonfire night flavoured joke. What do bonfires (perhaps creepy bonfires with cauldrons and stuff on) and my halloween weekend have in common?

Answer? They both feature lots of kindling. Haha, hoho hehe etc.
Yep, after the astounding success of my most recent technological awesomeness, or getting a second free printer, I have now returned from the outside world to my cosy little lair, with yet another piece of sparkly technology. Don't panic though, I paid for this one. That's not to say that I should have paid for the last ones, no, they were gratis and therefore no payment was required :-).

At college, Jim (the one who fights with shrubberies) has gotten into the habit of bringing E-textbooks and other course materials to college to read on his shiny Kindle Keyboard. I instantly thought "Hey, something like that would be really useful for my course".

Of course, I've always used my ipod to read ebooks, but I fancied something with a bigger screen, something that wouldn't become impossible to read as soon as the sun came out, and the kindle seemed like an obvious choice, and so, digging into my miniscule overdraft, off I went into town to look for one.

I had quite a nice time, wandering around the bookshops, little gadget shops, expertly ducking and weaving around to avoid being emotionally blackmailed by the various "hello-sir-can-I-talk-to-you-for-a-minute-did-you-know-that-processed-food-is-radioactive-and-the-animals-don't-get-colour-tv-either-it-will-only-cost-you-10p-a-day-to-provide-chickens-with-sky-digital" folks.

Eventually, after ages of wandering around, I found my way to one of the larger department stores in town (its windows already filled with hanging snowflakes and christmassy scenes), where surely I'd be able to find one. And I found two.

Initially, I fancied one with a keyboard, but these things aren't really cheap, and I didn't really want to pay £40 extra for a keyboard. Instead, I bought this shiny little one. It seems to work fine, it looks great even when it's turned off, and it has 1.2Gb (which sounds like a miniscule amount until you remember that most ebooks take up anywhere from 100KB to a couple of MB a piece. Even the four largest ebooks I have, great big reference texts of 1100 pages plus, only take up 97Mb in total. Perhaps in time I may run out of space, but not for the forseeable future.
I even bought a nice leather wallet thingie to keep it in decent condition in my pocket. £6.50 on ebay :-). So yeah, it's sparkly, it's easy on the eyes (ever tried reading an ipod or an ipad display in direct sunlight? Whereas their LCDs become bright, glary and impossible to read, the rather cool E-ink display of the kindle absolutely and blatantly does not. If anything it's even easier to read the sharp contrasty display in bright sun). I'm glad I bought it.

I've done my mock exam for the end of semester 2 final exam, and the result was an encouraging 85.1%. Now I know what I need to read up on, the real exam should end with a higher score.
I hope so at least. We lost another student this week - having been off due to health issues, he has since decided that he has fallen too far behind to continue with the course. Shame.
Those of us that are staying the course though, are looking forward to our cool Christmas party thingie. We're predicting pizza, lots of lovely fireballs, cider, beer and whatnot, and lots of fun to be had.

Prologue Part 2 - Halloween. And Fireworks.

I'm not sure why, but Halloween seems to have turned into a weekend long thing. I don't mind, I like festivities. I was zooming about at work last night in the lovely autumn rain, and saw my first band of trick or treating folks attending a party. On the 29th! I suppose if you like beer on halloween parties, it makes sense to have it on a day that isn't the night before going to work first thing in the morning.

I'm expecting to see substantially more trick or treating folks out and about today, as the weather is better, and a few more folks might have put up their scary decorations.
I've got work in a couple of hours, I suppose I'll be able to find out for myself.

As for my ickle nephew, he has a cool bat costume, and he's also (now) got some cool glowstick thingies, and we're all looking forward to going out tomorrow, which I have off.

Unfortunately, I don't have bonfire night (the 5th) off. But it's not such a big problem. Since I'll be out and about all night, I'll get to see plenty of fireworks anyway.

So yeah, that's it for now. I've got some studying to do :-).

Hot CPUs, Cool Printers

Part One: College Bit

Argh, typing without my wrist rest (it snapped off :-\) is really uncomfortable.

2 minutes later...

How embarrasing. My expensive shiny G19 keyboard's wrist rest is now stuck to it with blu-tack. Still, that's what you get if all the little clips snap off I suppose.

Well, things are once again proceeding apace at college, as the dreaded Semester 2 final exam is tiptoeing its way towards us at the rate of approximately 7 days each week, which has got more than a couple of people hot under the collar. In preparation, I've been busy cracking on with as many of the online curriculum modules as I could cope with.

10,400 words and an online exam (100%) later, I'm now thoroughly sick of reading about EIGRP, and looking forward to a couple of nice easy modules. The next one is an introduction to Link-State protocols, and then we apply what we learn there, to the one after, which teaches us about OSPF.

Of course, we've already summarised both chapters at college, so it's more a case of cementing our understanding, than it is a case of being introduced to new stuff. If we all pass, I imagine that we're going to be getting on with another end of semester exam. Hopefully Jim can avoid drunkenly getting into a fight with vegetation this time, as apparently when the bush beat him last time, he was injured.

We're already planning our college christmas party, and even ickle Jack (who has since left the course) has said he will come. We might even be able to get our tutor to turn up for a couple of drinks. So yeah.

Part Two: Christmas Bit

So it looks like I've got a busy Christmas calendar. Yep, lots of people still think it's too early for that sort of thing, however, friends tell me they've already arranged their work Christmas parties, pubs and restaurants are taking bookings for Christmas dinners, and advent calendars are already on sale in the shops (surely, the chocolate inside them must expire before you even open it?). I might get myself an advent calendar with chocolates this year, as I miss having one to open every morning heh. The lil dude tells me he has a Lego calendar (Star Wars lego maybe?) this year, which should be fun for him. Until either his or our dog eats the bits, which seems to have become the new natural end of the life cycle of the Lego piece, in our respective houses.

But yeah. So far, this year, my preliminary christmas calendar includes (in some semblance of an approximate order, and subject to weather):

*Trip to Winter Wonderland in London
*Trip to Gainsborough old Hall
*Trip to Kelham Island Christmas Fair Thingy (which we missed last year cos of the snow)
*Trip to Wentworth to look round their Christmas department
*Trip to Castleton to wander round (they have illuminated christmas trees lining the streets in winter)
*Trip to Christmas Concert type thing again.
*Solo trip to local christmassy supermarket to buy some Christmas necessities (shortbread, beer, mexicana cheese, etc. I'll probably need to get some medication of some type as well, as I generally have a cold around Xmas time)
*College Xmas Party
*Work Xmas Party (generally just a few drinks at a pub near work, or even closing early and drinking in the shop)
*Family shopping trip for Xmas food
*Xmas Day
*Boxing Day

There may be others in there as well, such as taking the ickle dude round the "Magical Christmas Kingdom".

But yeah, lots of stuff to be getting on with, but first, lots of studying and whatnot.

I still need to start buying presents.

Part Three: Technological Bit

Well, I've been settling into the routine with my shiny new computer, and apart from one or two blips, it's been working fine.
One blip occured the other night. See, because of a chipset incompatibility (I think), my cooler will only draw power from the motherboard 3 boots out of every 5. The other 2 times it will refuse to power on.

"Send the cooler back" you might say. Doesn't work, if one cooler will do it, the replacement will do it. It's an incompatibility, not a hardware failure.

Anyway, last weekend, I came back proceeded to put Need for Speed on, and spent a happy hour racing around, earning money, and generally beating all comers. At some point, I wondered what the cpu temp would be after an hour of gaming.
Finding the LCD Display to be dark, I realised that I'd effectively been racing an hour on passive cooling only!
Restarting the machine, I checked to make sure the cooler had come on, and it did straight away, shrieking overtemp warnings at me, and flashing a coolant temperature of 89C! Coolant temperature is generally lower than CPU core temp, so I have no IDEA what the cpu temp was at that time. (It turns out that the max working temp for my processor is 75C, and the CPU's emergency shutdown temp is 125C. In retrospect, I hadn't damaged the CPU, and hadn't really run the risk of damaging it, but it was still a scary moment).

I set the cooler to Extreme cooling mode, which pushed the fan and pump up to max rpms, and the coolant temp took maybe a minute or so to drop from 89c to 29c. That's a good cooler! Phew, what a scare.
I'll get a cable so I can connect the cooler directly to the PSU in future. Should stop this happening again.

Part Three And A Bit: New Technological Friend

As I am wont to do, on my lunch break, I wandered into the lab at college to see what was what. While there, I examined the scrap shelf to see if there was anything interesting. Was there? Of course not. A few defunct laptops stacked like house bricks, a huge box of loose parts which some 16 year old created from what was once a working computer, and a huge slab sided thing which looked like a broken fax machine, that had been there since february, and hadn't been thrown in a skip yet.
Out of idle curiosity (it had been there since I first started college, I wondered what it was), I cleared the stacked crap off it and pulled it off the shelf onto the workbench. It turned out to be one of those all in one scanner printer thingumies that seem popular these days.

"What is this? What's wrong with it? It's been on the shelf at least since february"
The tutor wandered over. "Nothing's wrong with it".
"Well, why is it on a shelf, it's just taking up space".
"Take it if you want it", he replies.

Umm. Wow. After establishing if he was being serious, I scooted around until I found the power brick for it. I plugged the device in and turned it on, at which point it immediately started doing a sort of POST, checking all its functions, and making various clicking and clunking noises. Hmm, not broken then.
Later in my lunch break, I continued to play with it, and had a closer look at it. It was a scanner, printer, fax and copier, all in one. Awesome, since my scanner doesn't want to work with Windows 7 any more.

I managed to get a lift to take the thing home, and spent the rest of the night playing with it. 4 ink cartridges, 3 of which were almost full, the scanner worked flawlessly, and the print quality was fantastic. Wow.

So yeah, for anyone who's remotely bothered, it's an HP L7580 all-in-one type thing, designed mainly for small businesses rather than homes, which explains why it is freaking huge (it weights 32 pounds and dwarfs my lil laser printer). It copies, faxes, scans up to 4800DPI and can spit out awesome quality colour prints to the tune of about 5 a minute (best quality photos) or 34 pages (decent quality text) a minute.
Since printing monochrome on a laser printer is a hell of a lot cheaper than printing in colour on an inkjet, I'm tempted to use the Laser printer for high volume stuff like college coursework, and use the inkjet for more colourful and intricate stuff, as well as photos. Also, it has an internal speaker so it makes happy little beep boop noises as you use it, heh. Oh, and it prints directly from memory card :-D.





Having a scanner that works is awesome, and at 1200dpi (which isn't even beginning to push the scanner's capabilities), this one can turn a DVD cover into a picture which if you printed it out at its new resolution would measure 4 and a half meters by three meters! So yeah. Very very happy.

I wonder at this point if I should come up with cute little names for my printers. Write your suggestions on a postcard, and then scan the postcard and email it to me at an undisclosed address :-).

Anyway, really running out of time now, got to get ready for work, so I'd best get busy :-).

Here is a shiny picture of my new printer dwarfing my cute ickle laser printer :-).

Weather Weirdness...

Part One - Familyness:

...Yep, the nights are definitely drawing again, and the weather for the start of October has been weeeirrdd. A few weeks ago, the news reported that we should be expecting snow for the end of october. Amid the general cries of "oh no, not again", were one or two "I spose it's that time of year again then?"
So far, the snow hasn't materialised, but then we are only a little way through October. What has materialised though, is a rather unexpected, rather temporary but thoroughly enjoyable (apart from the night when you can't sleep) mini heatwave. Yep, even as late as early October, we had three or four of those "don't go outside you'll get sunburned" days.

All that seems to have come to a very definite cold and wet end though, as in the past couple of days, the temperature has dropped sharply, and the lovely sun has now been replaced with rainy rain. Fair enough, it's good for the plants I suppose.

At this point it occurse to me to wonder why I always seem fixated on the weather. I don't think it's a uniquely English thing, rahter, I suspect it's my way of pointing out (to our collective subconcious (do we have a collective subconcious? are we Borg? Perhaps I meant "Collective Sub-Conciouses-plural")) without labouring the point, that my favourite time of year is beginning to approach again. Which is awesome, actually, though I do now have to start buying Xmas pressies.

I lost out to my mum this year, this time she earned the "person who bought the first Christmas present of 2011" title. My ickle nephew for his part has been pointing at every other TV ad saying "I want that" heh. I have been giving some thought to getting him some of these, however, I have disturbing visions of him either wrapping them round his head, or whacking himself in the eye with them, or going a little crazy, kinda like this, so I'll make a decision under advisement, I think.

Before any of that stuff though, we have dun dun dunnnn, Halloween. I'm trying to get my mum to make a gold-edged blue cape/cloak thingie for my ickle nephew, so he can wear it with his Armouron and his blue Lightsaber, and all-in-all look way cooler than all the other kids. It might be an idea to attach a glowstick or two to him as well, as not only does it seem to have become fashionable, but it helps make him more visible at night as well.

(Actually, my parents have just come back from Toys'r'us with big bags of sweets for the kiddehs at halloween).

Part Two - Computeryness:

Well, it seems that my computer is now finally actually finished. I had a couple of little parts to put in it,but now they've arrived and seem to be working okay, I can crack on with reinstalling all the lovely shiny software and whatnot. The GPU means I can now run all games I have on insanely maximum graphics settings (apart from Xplane, amusingly, which I've had for years. Since it was designed to run across a network with the load being spread across multiple machines, turning the settings as high as they would go still resulted in 4-6 frames a second. But then I suppose I was being slightly daft :P. Big gap here because pictures mess the formatting up!




The other clever bit that arrived seems to be working quite nicely in reducing my program load times, but cos of its capacity limitations I haven't installed a great deal to it at the minute.
I've managed to carry over some of my software from the old install, so stuff like X-plane (all 80Gb of it!) thankfully doesn't need reinstalling (I'm keeping it on an "old fashioned" drive though).
I haven't yet finished configuring all thefeatures that windows is supposed to use to support SSDs, but apparently I can expect several small performance increases as and when I figure out how to enable said features, by arsing about in registry.

I've had a few problems with the system refusing to boot at all, the drives would spin up, the fans would spin, and then noooothiiing would happen. I think I've traced the problem to a standoff post which wasn't fitted properly (because it was crossthreaded), which could apparently have resulted in the motherboard not being grounded to the case properly.


As I mentioned in my last entry, the coolit ECO cooler that I was using was diagnosed as faulty by Coolit. In the end, I sent the cooler back to them, and they sent me a shiny new Coolit Vantage, which aside from looking awesome, is also very quiet, and works very well. Major thumbs up to coolit for their awesome customer service.

Now I have another teeny problem, which is that the motherboard only gives power to the CPU cooler 3 boots out of every 5. Apparently I can get round this by connecting the cooler to the PSU instead, as it's the cooler, not the mobo, that controls the cooler fan speed. The whole issue may be something to do with a partial incompatibility rather than a hardware failure, as it's a common problem on most gigabyte boards also.
But yeah. To summarise: Computer now finished, now working, not perfect, but almost :-).

Part Three - Meal Stuffs:

A while ago I made a really crappy job of creating some pasta sauce, which for some reason my mum really loved. I suggested that I'd be happy to try again and cook some pasta for the family, and so they went and bought loads of stuff with which to make a meal.
And would you know, it actually turned out really well. The sauce was lovely, the pasta was just right, and the garlic bread was incredible. Even the table looked nice. A nice time was had by all.

I mention this fleetingly, as it looks like me cooking might become a regular thing :-). I've been asked to do the pasta again actually, so I'm pretty pleased with that.

So yeah, quite a pleasant occasion.

Here are some picatures, as is traditional. I will no doubt be on again going on about my ickle nephew's halloween experiences. I believe he's going to some halloween event or other. Looks fun!

Ciao! Better start buying those presents ;-).

Sheets of rain and other liquid cooling...

Well, the weather seens to have turned very quickly. With Autumn having waited all summer for the chance to do its thing, now it's here it's definitely making its presence felt. The sky is all shades from the light "can't really be bothered" grey, to the very dark "I'd better get inside" grey. There's also a lovely patch of blue, of course, and while the rain has temporarily stopped completely, a couple of minutes ago, I was watching rain come down in sheets onto my neighbour's garage (everywhere else as well, but I was watching my neighbour's garage) where the wind blasted them from the roof against the neighbour's house wall. So yeah, summer seems to have had its chance.

Well, five minutes later and that temporary storm seems to have ended. It's all bright sunshine again.

Sooo, yeah.
A few days ago, wednesday or perhaps thursday, at 9:19PM, my computer, having been put in its new case, and fully assembled, booted into Windows for the first time, making it the first official (non testing) time this new computer has booted up. Yay, happy 0th birthday, computer. At this point I'd like to thank my big bro for generously donating many of the components now sitting inside the PC. In the end I used a donated motherboard and power supply (and cpu cooler - see below), new RAM, CPU and Case, and a GPU that I already owned.

I finally managed to grab a Coolit ECO ALC and install it, and for a short time it worked great. Now the pump is making a weird droning noise.
The seller is very apologetic and has promised a refund if that is what I wish, however, I went to check with the manufacturers whether the noise was a symptom of something serious (i.e. possible pump failure) or something beningn (possible trapped air bubble), first. No point going to the trouble of replacing it if it's just something that's going to go away.
The manufacturer for their part have suggested that the pump may be faulty and have "opened a support case". I'm not sure what that means but I guess it will all become clear. If coolit resolve the issue it might just be a case of replacing the defective ECO ALC with a working one. If on the other hand I have to deal with the seller and get a refund, I suppose I can always take the money from the refund and put it towards a shiny Corsair H80 (also made by coolit).

Time will tell. I've gone back to air cooling for a while until it all gets sorted out. I would say that CPU temps are unchanged, but I actually have no way of telling, since Speedfan seems to be a complete mess that doesn't seem to have a clue what it's doing. At least I don't have to worry about the pump exploding and splashing coolant all over my system anymore.

So, what else have I been doing? Well, I've been studying lots, and taking online exams and whatnot. I've also been playing lots of games with all the settings turned up to high, which is always fun.

I've also started looking online for gifts to buy for the end of year present festival that shall not be named yet. Yes, QVC's Endofyearpresentfestivalthatshallnotbenamedyet In July was quite well received by my mum (who loves Endofyearpresentfestivalthatshallnotbenamedyet) and I've heard on the internet that some stores are already stocking Xmas (oops there I go) stuff, including the local store which now stocks 2 varieties of mince pies (If you don't know what they are then go to your specialist food store (I've just had a quick look and they seem really hard to find in the US, which is a shame because they're really nice).

So yeah, I've got a few ideas for things to buy people, but we'll have to see what happens between now and then :-).

Apropos of nothing, I have been spending a hell of a lot of time listening to this album. I'd never heard of the band until a friend recommended them, though I think they're rather good :-).

As an aside, reading about mince pies on that site has lead me to read some more of it, and it seems to be perfect for my sense of humour. Here you go, for all you overseas folks who wondered what weird and awesome things we eat. There's some stuff on there that even i've never heard of.

I leave ye with some pickatures of various computer related things that I have been doing recently :-). Heh, or at least I will try to. The tabling seemed to work out okay this time round :-).

Have fun, I've got loads of revision to do. Meh.

We Have Liftoff... (New computer begins shakedown)...

It's official. As of a couple of seconds past 11pm, a little over 20 minutes ago, my new computer just booted into Windows for the first time.

I'm at the initial "sodding about" phase at the moment, and there's a lot of work to be done. Loads of applications, software, games etc to install, loads of drivers to be added, settings to be changed etc, and all of it is going to wait until my bro has salvaged what data he needs from the rather shiny and lovely primary SATA drive he has promised me.

At the moment, the machine is in a temporary case, using an IDE hard drive from one machine, an IDE CD drive from another, the tower case from a third and a spare cooling fan from a fourth. I suppose you could say I'm temporarily loaning a racehorse the legs from another animal, to see if it can run :-).

Once I get the SATA drive, I'll start from scratch and reinstall everything, and here's why:

The Motherboard I am using uses only one IDE channel, which is fair enough. I mean it's not the 80s anymore, right? The downside is that since I only have two SATA drives, one of which is too small to use as a primary, and the other of which has already been designated a secondary, I have to use two PATA devices on the same channel at the same time, which apparently causes bottlenecking on the PATA bus.

Not only that, but where sata cables are sleek, slim and curvy, IDE "ribbons" are bulky, crumply, ugly, and, let's just face it, they look really bad and attract dust like a magnet. They're difficult to fold around corners of the case, difficult to route round things, and they act like a great big long electronic tarpaulin strung from one side of your case to the other to obstruct air flow.
So the sooner the SATA drive (which uses sleek slim cables) is in there, the better.

Speaking of air flow, my new computer is happily "hooing" (that's the noise it makes, seriously, it's a quiet "Hooooooooo" sound (at 100% RPM and silent at anything less than about 60%) to itself, as I try to see how low I can get the core temp to go.
Considering that the side of the case is off, and the fact that aside from an 80mm fan I balanced on one of the aforementioned IDE cables to cool the chipset (and the PSU fan which has its own job to do), the solitary 120mm fan of my new and sparkly Coolit ECO ALC cooler is the only fan in the case, it is doing a damn good job of holding my CPU at a steady 32 degrees C. The Zalman air cooler in my other (this) computer can only manage 36c, and that's in a cool case surrounded by other fans, on a CPU that is slower by some 400Mhz. Okay, 4 degrees isn't a big difference, but both machines are effectively idling, and apparently it's under heavy load that the ECO struts its stuff.

Of course, my new rig isn't ready to strut its stuff yet. It doesn't have DirectX installed, and it is currently packing a lowly 256mb Geforce 7600GT in its digital pants. A card which would probably not suffice for hardcore gaming these days, even if it weren't damaged, which it is. Having suffered a hefty dose of heat damage a while back, any black screen is now liberally dotted with pretty red, green and blue pixels. I'll replace the 7600 with my GTX260 when I move the machine to its permanent home in the lovely new case I've bought.

Amusingly, the little 50mm (maybe?) fan of the gpu is making far, far noise than the ECO's 120. In fact, since I haven't installed any drivers other than the default, it was only four minutes after the computer booted to desktop for the first time that it lost its bluescreen virginity, with some kind of Nvidia driver error that is apparently popular among later versions of Windows. I don't expect this error to be a problem once the latest drivers are installed of course.

So yeah. I'm not doing anything hugely in depth, but it'd be nice to remember the very first time that my computer went online.

Ciao!

Excuse the dreadful mess, the case is my "It's the only spare case that will take 120mm fans" case.
The camera is my "I'm sorry I've lost my tripod mounting plate" camera.

When the day of the big build comes I will borrow a tripod if needs be and take some better pics :-).