Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Descending into technology hell

Underneath it all, I'm a techie through and through. Not just a dabbler (hmmm maybe that's questionable now), but a full on deep, deep techie.

I mean, I know more than is healthy for people about network protocols, and I don't mean knowing what TPC/IP means, I still know what SNA and SDLC were, how to trouble shoot Token Ring networks and the makeup of an ethernet packet, asynchronous wan traffic, Virtual Circuits and X25 the list oges on.

And I have always loved hardware, whether it's opening up a server and appreciating the engineering that has gone into it (hardware porn as we know it), or just building my own PCs (writing this on one)I have always been happy to roll my sleeves up and wield a screwdriver.

So it is galling to find myself getting deeper and deeper into the well of technical problems, with no light of inspiration coming on.

It all started with a NAS box, an HP Proliant Microserver to be precise. A really nice bit of kit. A 12" cube with a low power (15w) CPu, space for 4 full size drives up to 8gb ram, perfect. I thought I'd go with ZFS for the storage, so it made sense to use Solaris, in this case Nexentastor community edition, full on storage appliance class software.

This stuff works, other people have got it working, it shouldn't be a problem. Download an iso, burn it and install. It grinds along for an age, doesn't fail, just sort of grinds to a halt. Hmmmm. OK download again, recheck the md5, burn again - same result. Next, memcheck still nothing fails. Swap the cd drive, no joy, the flash, no joy, he memory, no joy, the disks, no joy. Hardware seems not to be a problem, install Ubuntu - it works.

Back to the drawing board, previous release? No. Other hardware? No. Another microserver? No.

Bloody stumped and run out of time, bearing in mind that I am doing this in hour/2 hour sprints late at night. Stalled for now.

If that wasn't bad enough, I have a crucial m4 SSD (I cannot express how much I love SSDs), which decides to stop working. Not permanently, oh no that would be too easy, no this would stop about an hour after booting. Hair duly torn out, I mean how can this happen, its solid state it works or it doesn't. Eventually this is tracked down to a sodding firmware issue that kicks in after 5000 hours or so. Crucial eventually admit this, but will not have a fix out for two whole weeks! Sh*t.

That's now two computers down, but at least I have my toshiba laptop, hah that's what I thought. It duly decides to screw me up more by finding rare and unusual ways of powering itself off. Its a great laptop, lightweight and powerful looks good and works well good keyboard lots to like really. But it decides that if you hold it by anywhere to the left of the keyboard it poweres down bigtime, the onky way to get it to power up again is by taking the battery out and replacing it.

all of a sudden I have no computers left, and the family are not happy. Not at all.

There you go, technology hell (lucky I had an old Acer Revo to keep the home front at bay...)

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Money, money, money, must be funny, in a football world

So, Harry's in court again, has he blown his chances of making England Coach?

Now, I don't intend to argue the rights or wrongs of this case, it is still going through court and I don't have enough knowledge to make a considered judgement. Let's wait for the court to decide on his guilt or not, and any sentence.

I would normally expect that this would end all chances of him being appointed England coach, but with the lack of other options you never know what the FA may do, and how they may justify it. There certainly aren't many other English candidates and they may be inclined to give it to Harry regardless. Let's wait and see, although I must say that I would personally be appalled if they did.

What has surprised me, and in hindsight I should have seen this coming, was that Harry Redknapp was paid a 10% commission on every player he sold. That's right, he was rewarded for selling players.

Now correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that a Managers job was to keep his players and to get the best results for the team - not to trade players for commission. Surely the reward for the manager for getting the most money for a player that they sold (reluctantly or otherwise) was to be able to improve his team, not line his own pocket?

I would have thought at there would be some form of a commercial director or finance director whose job it was to maximise the proceeds of a sale, and to put that on the club's bottom line. Have we moved so far away from any normal practice that this would be acceptable. Incentivising the manager to sell players seems to me to involve some kind of conflict of interest.

Better people than me I am sure will do the sums of who he sold, and what he may have been paid and compare that to league progress etc. and we can only wonder what could have been achieved, or not.

And I bet none of the money made its way to grassroots, youth football.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Football Funding

I have a friend whose son is a decent footballer at 10 years old. He plays in the local league (above his age group). Whilst he is never going to be a premier league footballer, it is something that he enjoys and it is a big part of his life.

This is all good.

The English Premier League, the FA, the Champions League and the clubs within the premier league are awash with money. Rolling in it, gorging on it £1.78bn from Sky for 2010-13, spending it lavishly - (Fernando Torres was sold for £50m, that's more than the cost of a School) if not wisely. Paying players £200k a week for goodness sake. In the UK the average price of a semi-detached house is £200k or a week's wages for some footballers.

Now, they all talk about the importance of grass roots football, of putting something back into the game, about the importance of the fans etc.

Bullshit.

My friends 10 year old has to pay about £50 a month for the privilege of playing in a local league. £12.50 a week to cover training sessions, matches etc. this is not an inconsiderable sum. It excludes many and discourages others.

We should all be ashamed of this. We bemoan the lack of home grown talent in the Premier League, yet we neglect investment in our youngsters. And these are the children who support the Premier League teams and help fund the players' excessive lifestyles.

So when you hear about John Terry's £4.6m mortgage remember that's about 92,000 children-months of football.

Sunday, January 08, 2012

Harry Nilsson and Brandy Alexanders

Delighted to find out that Harry Nilsson and John Lennon were great drinking buddies whose favorite tipple was the cocktail Brandy Alexander.

As a long time Nilsson fan, as well as a great drinker of cocktails it is nice to find the two strands coming together.

In earlier times (OK the early 80's) we used to go "cocktail bombing", where you turn up at someone's house with a cocktail shaker and the ingredients to a cocktail, and all get smashed. Ideally with something that wasn't that well known,after all we can all make a screwdriver.

One of my favorites at the time was a Brandy Alexander. Brandy, Cream and Creme de Cacao, sprinkled with chocolate. Many happy times were had with that simple combination.

Happy times.