The Edge Of Madness

This weekend I'm doing National Road Rally.

Motorcycle rally around England. The one I'm doing is "Special Gold" class, which is 540 miles. The rally runs from 2pm Saturday until 10am Sunday. There's a class above this which is Platinum, which consists of doing a test at the end of the rally, and I can't be stuffed doing that.

Now according to some, I'm going against the spirit of the rally by using satnav gps. But fuck that, I'm more interested in the ride than spending hours on a map working out where I'm going.

And here's the other twist.

Here's a copy of the Control matrix .

Have to do exactly 540 miles...and visit the maximum number of checkpoints possible...and they don't tell you what the maximum number of checkpoints is. Only requirement is you end at number 99. The numbers don't mean zip, they just match up to the description of the point.

Of course I had to code something up. My solution is a little sucky, it's a brute force with a random path selection. But since it's a finite set, and a once off run, I don't care

This is the first time in my life, I've solved a real life situation with code. Fairly cool.

Here's a list of routes that I generated. Oh, the lines marked with BINGO and ALMOST were based on where I wanted to start from.

Well my brand spanking new BMW F800 GS broke down. EWS problem, or engine immoblizer.

There's a rfid chip in the key, and the engine won't start if it doesn't detect the chip in the key.

Thankfully not in woop woop, but outside Tim's place. And thankfully early in the evening, as we were going to dinner, Tim wanted to play with her. Technically yes, Tim did break my bike.

About 4 hours until the tow truck came. Motorcycle recovery van. Chatting to the bloke, he said he's been picking up Beemers with the problem for months now. Fairly standard fault with one part, they haven't wanted to do a full recall due to the massive amount of bikes they'd have to fix.

Oh well, again at least it didn't happen last week when I was in Dover. Or anyway else more remote.

I've been procrastinating working on my pet project for months now. Not for the lack of wanting to work on it, but for not wanting to have to set everything up.

Also I had to plug in the mouse, keyboard and monitor into the linux box everytime I wanted to use it. (yeah xwindows is setup, but sometimes I like just connecting in). So bought a keyboard, mouse and monitor belkin switch earlier in the week which works a treat.

Had some time, so pulled the finger out and did it. Running Ubuntu version Hardy Heron.

To setup MySQL took 2 frigging commands. Up and running a breeze.

To setup jboss, 3 commands. Again piece of piss.

Eclipse, java & cvs was also a piece of piss. So yeah, took all of 1 hour to be setup and running, with my own "Hello World" servlet through JBoss.

I still have to do a proper ant script & integrate in struts, but I've done that a million times before.

If I have a peaceful month, I should have a demo up and running. Playing with the front end first. Yeah, it sounds secretive, but it really isn't. Just don't want to talk about it unless I can't do it (or get lazy).

There's only one annoying thing about Ubuntu. Every time my router bounces, it doesn't auto reconnect. I have to login and kick off the try and connect to internet thing. I might try and see if I can automate that now.

Bit of a wrap post from the last couple of weeks.

At drinks, prob a tuesday night. Mate of mine's girlfriend comes along, and starts talking about how she's planning to get a tattoo.

"Whereabouts?" I asked.

"On my lower back," was the reponse.

"Oh you mean a tramp stamp". Stunned incredulity was the response, she'd never heard the term before. She then turns to one of her friends, who was planning to get the same thing done, who also hadn't heard the term before. My mate, Kham, who knows the term and also calls them "Arse Antlers" also wasn't worried as he was fairly certain she had no intention of ever getting it done.

Anyway, ran into her again at "London Taste Festival"(keep reading I'll get to it) on Thursday, where she told me she had mentioned the term "Tramp Stamp" to a friend at work.....who has a lower back tattoo....and who has never heard the term before. God damn, it's even on wikipedia for fuck's sake. Tramp Stamp

From what I heard she got a little upset about that, called her boyfriend up asking him if he knew about the term, and then was planning to send me an e-mail bagging me out about it. For what? Bringing a common slang term to your attention? Anyway, funny.

Onto Ian G's 50th. Bloke at work, who impressively has done 27 years in the trenches as a developer. That's right as developer, not taking the soft option and gone into management. (And he's also damn good). Went to the Queen Mary, so we could sit outside...purely to smoke the Monte Cristo Number 4's he brought along for the occasion. That was damn good.

After that, the more dedicated (mainly due to a mix-up where we all thought it was Friday, when it was actually Wednesday - working weekends tends to do that to you), went out for dinner. In the Austrian restaurant just down the street from me. Interesting place, crawl down into a basement. All the staff are dressed in leaderhosen.

Kham takes a seat next to the keyboard player. Which wasn't too bad. But then the bloke decides to play cow bells. Rings them at full volume, turning Kham slightly def. But it got louder as two girls from two seperate groups were having b'day parties, and he brought them up to play. Highly hilarious.

One of the girls was studying musical theatre, and the bloke knew it. And it turned out she was an Aussie, so he got her to sing "Waltzing Matilda". And unsurprisingly there was half a dozen other Aussies in the audience who joined in. Including my "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi" at the end. Yeah you can't take me anywhere

Later prompted by a few shots of Schnapps she sang a rather good rendition of "Over the Rainbow".

Rob knocked over a candle onto Thanh, then broke a glass spilling coke on him to put him out. Staff were cool and brought out a non-glass meal for Thanh.

Big let down was the food. Schitnzel was not good, and I had the runs for most of the next day.

Finally onto "London Taste Festival". Pay £35, get £20 worth of food vouchers. Most of the best restaurants in London had a stand there, where you could pay around £5 for a taster of their dish. Pretty good, I had some roast pork from Cafe Anglaise (which is just around the corner from me), a Foi Gras Burger, some Waygu beef, Quails egg, some spring rolls. And a lot of beer. And a couple of rounds of Mojito's. There's a polaroid that I'll post up later where we ended up sitting on a bunch of lounge chairs getting pissed.

The only problem with these events, is to put it bluntly, the people there make my fists itch. All the wannabe haughty taughty. And us, dressed like bums, getting pissed, taking the piss out of everything. Highly amusing

Think that's it for the last few weeks. Lana's in Russia at the moment, back on Wednesday.

Okay, me and Lana been watching Britain's got Talent, so decided to go and see the it live.

I stuffed up and thought the tickets I got were for the semi-finals, not the live show.

The following may sound like a grumpy old man rant. But fuck it.

Let's start with the noise.

I've been in the mosh pit of a Metallica concert, and at enough festivals. I put fracking termni pipes on my Monster, and it used to amuse me immensely to ride through a carpark and set off car alarms due to the noise. But the one thing the grates on my nerves - teenage girls screaming. That's right, this show was packed to the gills with teenage girls. Or older girls acting like teenage girls. All there to see their heart throb - George Sampson. And also Andrew Johnston.

It's the first time I've ever put earplugs in at a concert. Just my ipod noise canceling ones. Sorted it out brilliantly. All to drown out screaming girls. It's impossible to describe the wave of noise unless you've been at a boy band concert.

Now through the dance acts, it was fine to have them screaming like banshees, but when Andrew was signing, most of it was being drowned out by these fools.

It also explains why George won. The most likely person to call in is a teenage girl.

Enough with me bagging out the crowd. Onto the show.

To sum it up - amateur hour. The organisers had no idea about what the crowd would be like, lighting was crappy, sound was average. A comic to warm the crowd up, when it should have been the other way around. Extremely bad jokes. Highlights from the show were put onto the big screen.

Also while the acts looks good on tv, a few of them were rather bad. Andrew Muir, while he has talent, still needs a lot of practice. Nemisis, the dance group, a few of them were a couple of seconds off in the routines. And if my untrained, shot to hell reflexes can spot it, that's bad.

But there were 3 things that made it all worth while.

A surprise duet between Faryl Smith & Andrew Johnston was breath takingly beautiful (the teenage girls screaming in the audience was again fracking annoying).

A fantastic 3 way dance off between Nemisis, Signature & George Sampson.

And George's dance number. While I've seen it before on tv, it's still amazingly done.