James Lloyd

It appears to be the trend to do a bit of a year round up on your blog so here goes. Tried to buy a house House Fell through Took our house off the market to conentrate on Wedding planning Got Married

I have completed my first week at EDS, which is very exciting. From what I have seen so far the role will expose me to lots of new technologies and some extremely knowledgable people. My first project I have to lead is a large server cosolidation program. So im currently swatting up on VMware ESX server.

Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy another stupid car tax please sign the petition http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/traveltax/

It appears My work is far more interesting than my life. Last week my other site ( www.phpadadmin.com ) got 30% more visits than this one.  Not sure how I feel about that. Though a lack of real content here and the other site being largely rant free probably has alot to do with it.

After it finally making it public at work, I can now announce I have got a new job as an Infrastructure Consultant at EDS . This is extremely exciting,  my year and a half at the NHS has been quite eventful and I feel like I have delivered a lot.

After an incredibly brief stint running on my Sky Router ( Reflashed to be a netgear DG834GT ).  My BT home hub arrived and its a very nice looking piece of kit, though quite enormous.  The bit that impressed me the most about this router was the telephone integration.

Monday sigh, however just read here that PS3 positions in preorder queues are reaching as much as

Played last night fantastic first impressions, graphics much improved over PES5, though you'd expect that! A huge improvement over the over 5 incarnations they have in fact finally rendered the crowd. From a playing point of view anyone who was familiar with the PES 5 controls will be able to pick a controller and have a good game, though reading through the manual it appears the added extra moves number in the hundreds.

So last Saturday I moved into my new "Diet House", temporary accommodation while myself & Sarah desperately try and find a house worth purchasing.

Finally sony have made a proper HD tv. All those of you watching Sky in 720p thinking you have HD don't. The new sony KDL-46X2000 supports both 1080i & 1080p, which basically mean it can play proper HD 1920x1080 pictures at 25 or 50 fps. Sky HD only supports 1080i (25fps) but your Sky box wont be downsizing the signal its receiving.

Last Friday I exchanged contract on my house, which makes me officially homeless. This week have been mainly packing and moving stuff to Hannahs house in Portsmouth. Which will be our home until some one with a decent house decides to move. Currently having to suffer watching tele through the built in speakers, not a very nice experience.

Google Rank It appears my google rank has shot up an Entire Point from 3 to 4. Im not sure why this has happened, and is fristrating as when I do any SEO work on the site recently it appears to be fruitless.

This is a cool new feature in google reader you can add all your rss feeds you like to read. Then it will create a public web page of all those feeds. So i have got one of all my freinds blogs which is very groovey, and an easy one stop shop for me to read each day with out having to surf about. see it here James' Freinds Blogs

Hoorah Im back on the internet, with 2 days of downtime which was quite a nightmare. Recieved the Sky broadband router this morning. During the two days down time I had long conversations with the people at sky. First I spoke to the "Tech" support center in India, they were as you'd expect rubbish, not technical people at all and just reading off a script.

Typically when something slightly dodgy happens the grannies and Politicians kick off in a "ra ra ra that should be banned" etc. The rather spectacular crash of Richard Hammond is no exception. The crash taking place at Elvington airfield, near York (check me out im blogging with facts) in a Vampire Dragster and just under 300Mph, has caused the anti fun brigade to call for a TopGear to be canceled.

I am a self confessed nerd and techno geek, and as such since 1995 have had a mobile phone, and for my sins upgraded every year since. My first mobile was a Nokia 101 a wonderful piece of kit the size of a small continent and feature packed with such gems as Ring and Dial .

Found this earlier, www.wearetheinternet.org bunch of people "fighting for net nautrality", while they appear to have a good cause they are clearly all slightly disturbed. While the video is clearly painful to watch from the outset, I reccomend you hold off clicking stop until after you see the fat guy dressed as tron, Brilliant! ooo hes got his own website www.tronguy.net

After reading my own highly informative post on the costs of the new Sky Broadband offering.� I have thinking about my own broadband situation, I'm currently with plus.net who so far have been excellent for these reasons:

For two important reasons im selling the 18-55mm lens that came with my Canon 350d. The massive financial poverty associated with an impending house purchase I upgraded recently to a lens that has slightly more features :) Ebay Listing Here

Tags: New Lens , Canon , Pengiuns dont take many pictures and the ones they do take the chemist refuse to print them due to the rude content Just purchased a lovely new lens ( see Left).

Tags: Wedding Speechs , Grooms Speech , Best Mans Speech , Penguin in horrific pritstick related death hundreds killed Navs Speech My Speech ( Cringe )

Navs Wedding Aug 21, 2006 - 89 Photos

Tags: Penguins hate turnips so dont give them any , Sky broadband Got this in the mail today free wireless router and Free 2mb broadband (assuming you already have sky, but then why wouldn't you ?)

Tags: googletalk , blogger , new versions , huge flipping penguin Google have just rolled out the first set of new set of features to a select bunch of users. New Stuff about the arrive is .....

Tags: Stag Night , Pub Crawl , Highland Run Finally stuck up the pics of the Epic event that was Navs Stag night last Saturday. All in all 14 Pubs were counted ( pubs at the end were mainly identified using simons photos ). Thats 15 drinks for a couple of us as some had 2 pints in the may flower madness. All the pictures can be found here....

Tags: Gazump , People of Questionable Morale Standing Sometime ago we were in the process of buying a house in anthill close ( right move link ). After us spending out considerable sums of cash on Solicitor shanigans, the vendors of questionable morale standing Gazumped us an accepted an offer of only 8k more.

Tags: Stag night , Finally So far confirmed: Nav ( shocker managed to pin him down to a day ) Simon Me Marc ( Update: is joining from the start w00t! ) Steve ( joining us later as hes double booked, hes doing something with a horse! ) John Sam Pete Jimmy the D Dad Dave TBC

Found this teaser trailer on google video its frustratingly short on facts on the new film, hence teaser I suppose.

In a bid to be not hugely dissapointed, in a last christmas xbox 360 stylee "Sorry, we cannot meet the demand" ra ra ra. I have ordered a PS3 no less than 5 months early.

Sarahs birthday went on into the night last Saturday photos to follow (if its cooler). We again ended up playing aeroplanes, A deffinately ideal pastime for any 30 somthings. near death areoplane experience ( i personally blame Marc :P )

Mercedes 220E Coupe Petrol 1996 N Reg Full Service History from new Automatic Gearbox Metallic Blue Beige Leather Interior Electric Windows Electric Sunroof 130,000 Guaranteed Mileage Since New New Exhaust (The Back Section) 4 good tyres (1 year old) Would suit repair / breaking for parts Regularly driven until last week, when lost compression, probably needs new Engine, (possibly get away with just new head gasket / block) Vehicle can be viewed at garage upon request ( Stockbridge, Hampshire ) For Collection Only For Sale HERE

I have just hung up on a call from another recruitment agency trying to get me to employ some bloke or something: Agency: hi, I'm <whoever> from <whoever> I'm just chasing up on your correspondence you sent us a couple of months ago

This is a MZ-RH10 1Gb Hi-MD recorder in its' original box. Used once ! Comes complete with 2 extra 1Gb Minidisc as well as the one shipped in the box. BUY ME HERE Features:

There are currently loads of articles posting about tut tinterenet, about the 360 controller and how it

But then you knew that have you ever seen Darren / Marc / Simon drunk on wine ?

Tags: Harry Potter HARRY POTTER DIES On Richard & Judy today JK rowling in an interview rather foolishly got tricked into answering this question. When confirming she would not be writing any more than 7 books. She then went on to say that, the way to make sure no other "non-author" books are written after her work is to kill off your main character at the end of the series. This spoiler is an attempt to beats Sams classic DUMBLEDOR DIES! [poll=4]

Tags: local.live.com , maps.google.com , live maps , google maps Checkout local.live.com like maps.google.com it has satellite imagery to compliment its maps, the details on the msn map are outstanding and you can rotate the maps and view them north south east or west. Very very cool. The images appear to be quite up to date as well.

Despite having 13860 hits since March 28th. I

Tags: Futurama , Zapp Branigan W00t! Just out that 13 new episodes are on the way! TV Squad Reports

Tags: Google Spreadsheet , Excel 2007 Google not content with producing a far better IM client than MSN messenger IMHO, have now produced Google spreadsheets, an online tool specifically for producing spreadsheets online with no client side software required ( save a browser ). Whether M$ can get enough features in Excel 2007 ( other than looking pretty ) remains to be seen

Tags: Nav's Stag Weekend , Shananigans are a conspiring [ Insert suitable Graphic note to self design suitable graphic ] Shananigans have been a conspiring, started to ask about interrest for Nav's stag today, initial response have been good. Although now grappling with large issue of date preference appears to be 50:50 split. Lessons learn't here dont give blokes options. Imediate response from Julian Pete and Steve ( proof indeed he reads his emails and ignores them apart from this occasion ). Poll at bottom of post locaitons! Place your bets now Play at home fun! [poll=3] "You have been selected from literally ten's of applicants, to celebrate Nav's final days of real life, before he transisitions to the dark side. At this stage facts are naturally generally thin on the ground. However we need to get an idea of numbers and dates people can't do. Facts so far : There will be a celebration The celebration will take place over a weekend ( potentaily ...

Tags: Denmead House , Sell your house Free Finally someone realised that this house selling lark needn't cost thousands to sell your home, in fact you can do it for free. The Fabulous people at privatehousemove.co.uk will display your home on their site for an extremely reasonable no pounds and no pence.Its so and the houses are extremely well priced too, take for example this rather attractive 3 bed I stumbled upon. Situtated in Denmead, probably the most sort after village in the Waterlooville area. With ample parking for 3 cars plus a garage, you'd be crazy to over look this oppotunity.

Tags: Daves Birthday , BBQ On Sunday Me Sarah and Simon went to Daves birthday BBQ, an excelent event where the beer was free flowing (a must for any event I will attend). Photos Here UPDATE: Daves posted some more Here .Daves blog is super secret so you'll need to register to view it. This I believe is so that the secret service can't track his where abouts.

Tags: Okopipi , Blue Frog , Anit Spam " Okopipi Die Spam Die" Sounds like the title from some dodgey black and whitet eastern european film, but Okopipi is an Anti Spam project. The project was born out of the ashes of the Blue Frog project ( Okopipi is a a type of poision dart from frog or something) the blue frog project, who produced a peice of software that sent spam to spam servers. The blue frog project died is a spectacular DDOS attack. Any way are starting to right a serverless ( p2p ) client that will spam the spammers. w00t indeed!

Tags: Mac Book Motion Sensor , Mac Book Pro Macbook have a motion sensor built in which is used to protect your harddrive if you drop thing. Presumably by parking the drive when it thinks its falling. However someone has written a util to make better use of this facility here

Tags: Wedding Photos , Chess Photography www.chessphotography.co.uk Mark our Pro Photographer at the wedding has stuck up the proof shots from the wedding. all of which are pretty stunning ( must get me a Canon D5 ), the online shots can be found here .

Tags: Achat , Instant Messaging , Open source I am currently not spending as much time writing uninformative useless blog entries, this is because I'm in the process of redesigning the web site for the achat. http://sourceforge.net/projects/achat/ http://achat.sourceforge.net/

Tags: Sky + , Sky Plus , Sky HD , Sky SATA The register have just posted the first review of Sky HD it can be found here

Tags: Random Night out , Gun Warf , Tiger Tiger Is Rubbish We went out last Saturday and for the first time in ages it was for absolutely no reason at all. SO typically there are many pictures, because simons memory card is far too big. None of the pictures are "great" but their all keepers. "Their all keepers" Pics can be found HERE

Tags: xbox 360 , media center extender , XVID So last night I rebuilt my PC with Media Center Edition, somthing I have been putting off for some time. Due to the epic nightmare it always turns out to be. Antics that followed : Discovered didn't have the drivers around for my SATA raid controller Found drivers Realised Cant install them from USB device as Windows will only look for them on A: drive Spend 20 minutes looking for a floppy disk Find floppy disk to find my floppy drive wont format it ( probably has had a strop through lack of attension Think Stuff it ill use the SATA 133 controller instead of the SATA 150 ( morale you can never have enough controllers on the mother board ) All is well windows installs in record time ( about 10 minutes, despite telling me at the start this was going to last 39 minutes). So I have got MCE up and running and immediately install the Xbox Media Center Extender software so I can connect my Xbox 360. This install takes quite an ...

Tags: Xbox 360 , Xbox 360 hacks , firmware hack , dvd hack Xtreme Firmware , Have just released details of a new firmware for the Xbox 360 TS-H943 ( toshiba ) DVD drive. The new firmware fools the xbox into thinking all discs have the 360's Disc protection. So this allows it to read "backups". Details found here the download has already been removed, but I'd expect it on #xbins within hours.

Tags: Cyber-Shot U , Sony , Digital Camera After reviewing the pictures of the go karting on my Cyber-Shot U 30 its very clear that the camera has in fact Died a very painful death. Very odd pictures This annoying as cant exactly stick my Cannon 350d in my pocket when clubbing. Current plan is to trawl ebay for another one. As it appear no one makes a proper ultra compact digital camera anymore dammit.

Tags: Go Karting , Driving Gods , w00t On Saturday 10 of us wen go karting for my 30th. Having the oppotunity to split the group in to two groups. I immediately grabbed my self the people I thought would be fasted round the track ( and Marc ). To our shock and surprise we confimed what we had all secretly suspected that we are all in fact Driving gods!. In the 2 hour endurance there were 12 teams. From the rolling start we we're in 9th position ( being Kart No.9 ), but within 6 laps we were first, and the adrenaline started to pump. By the end of the race our team took the fastest lap 3 times ( me, nav then me again ). Marcus to my shock was extremely quick. So naturally we finished 2 laps in front. Though this could of been a different story, as in the final laps i got some dodgey signalling from Marc showing me two fingers ( in an informational, not abuse way ) trying to indicate to me that we were 2 laps ahead. I took this to mean we we're in second place, and changed to my ...

Thought I'd post re how I got the Google talk status thingy working on the side bar. This was stupidly simple ( after excessive googling that is ). Its easy because of a guy called Nathan Fritz has written a jabber bot called Edgar . The bot adds its self to your Googletalk contacts list, ( this is so it has visibility of your status ) then you can query the PHP status script at the Edgar site. i.e. for my side bar I have just added the code ( can you call it code ? ) below : <li>Someone<b><?php readfile("http://edgar.netflint.net/status.php? jid=someemail@gmail.com/talk&type=text"); ?></b></li>

Tags: BMW Mini , Poor BMW Service , Snows BMW ...... And continue it does a bit more. So today I got a call from one of the managers at snows , to tell me that BMW had agreed to extend the TLC on the mini so that the new engine gets the three years servicing we paid for it from new. This is good news, though really the least they could do. The new engine is in the mini and appears to be doing all the things a engine should minus all the knocking noises it shouldn't. This is good, from this whole process I have had to liaise with BMW customer service and Snows BMW Customer service quite frequently. BMW them selves come across as a very reasonable bunch, who we're obviously trying to help. Snows on the other hand, portrayed your typical bunch Swiss Tony types. They we're completely uninterested in helping, they lied to me and Sarah out right on several occasions about what was and what had happened the mini. I have since spoken to colleagues with BMW's re Snows, a...

Tags: SKY HD , SKY + , HD TV , HD 1080i EXCLUSIVE: Sky changes mind and announces 1080i for all its HD broadcasts So whos bought a 720p only tele then? :P "Having originally stated that it would likely use a combination of 720p and 1080i high definition formats on its new HD platform, Sky has just exclusively revealed to us that it's now intending to broadcast all of its Sky HD channels in the 1080i format from launch. It will be interesting to see how this surprising decision works out when it comes to showing sports footage, which is widely thought to look better in 720p because of its high motion content. The 1080i decision also lends a little - though it really is only a little - more credibility to the scare story run in the Daily Mail a few weeks back suggesting that the 720/768-line TVs that currently make up the vast majority of the TV market aren't completely ideal for getting the best from the available (1080i) HD signals. Another interesting fact we discovered d...

Darren found these in the tube in Singapore

Tags: Flange hopping , Flange " I have invented a new game - Flange-hopping. This is where you click on any space on the Updated Spaces, and leave a comment saying 'Flange'. Then you go on another random space and do the same again. Over and over and over. It's brilliant! Even if I say so myself, which I just did. Once I finish this blog entry, I'm going on a marathon Flange-hopping session. Hooray for my wasted life!" From Chuff Read more............................. ( Image taken from google image search for flange hopping )

Seriously can I be bothered to do another logo? er no

Tags: BMW 1 Series , BMW 116 , BMW 116 Sport Now I'm an opinionated sod, that's pretty well established, and its very easy to right off things as being crap, or ugly, or just plain shit. Which makes it all the more relevant when say that the BMW 1 Series is incredibly ugly and the engine in the 116 is absolutely gutless. You may consider these points a big deal and certainly if you are the kind of person who aspires to be one day sat in the weekend sun in your Porsche Boxter with the roof down, then indeed you wont be wanting a 1 series. However those two points aside, I have to say that the 1 series is with out a doubt the best handling car I have driven to date and I once owned a non-chaved Saxo VTR ( this was back in 98 when they still had some cred left (with non chavs)). Once inside the cabin of the one series you can no longer see any of the body work, unless your preferred driving position is that of a praying mantis. The interior in my 116 sport was your typical Japa...

Tags: Beer Belly , Drinking , Tiger Tiger Check out www.the beer belly .com for all your drinking needs... Could be useful for say Tiger Tiger, you could get drunk for cheap. Or maybe while out running, because you only start running if you have a beer belly, so this would help you keep your fluid levels topped up, and in time you'll be able to fit more in when you lose some weight... are there any others? M

Tags: MSN Messenger , Google talk , Googletalk FYI, looks like we're ditching MSN messenger in favour of Google Talk . This is largely due to it being alot less bloated, and it also has excelent integration into Gmail . ( Need a gmail invite ? email me )

Tags: BMW Mini , Poor BMW Service , Snows BMW ...... And continue it does. Today got the call from snows , they have replaced the Mini's engine with a new one, apparently the block on this one is the correct length, (still haven't got my copy of the report). Any way I drove down to snows in my car specifically to test drive the Mini, and all seems well. Gearbox now only making a couple of normal sounding mechanical noises when changing gear. No noises when you just depress the clutch ( your a pathetic clutch and the accelerator is much more attractive ). Just to be sure I got them to let me test drive another mini directly afterwards, both make the same apparently Mini type noises, can only be a good thing. New battle now, im quite happy to accept the car assuming they start the TLC pack ( on the engine maintenance only ) for threes on the new engine. After all its a brand spankers Engine clutch and Gearbox. Unreasonable ? don't think so, so tomorrow its on t...

Tags: Marcs 30th , Tiger Tiger , Bar 38 Quick entry Simon just sent me the pics from Saturday night, of Marc's 30th in Tiger Tiger / Bar 38. Pictures Here Strawberry beer who'd a thunk it ? Amusing video here which incidentally i uploaded to google video :)