R*V 111 Party

I just came across the video that R*V made for our “111″ party.
To me this represents the good times of working (and playing) there.
It’s a bit self-indulgent so you might not care to watch the whole 9 minutes!

Quality of Life

According to a study conducted by Adrian White of the University of Leicester and reported in BusinessWeek, Austrians are the 3rd happiest nation in the world.

Having lived in Vienna for 3 years I’d tend to disagree with that. It’s a wonderful place to live, but I wouldn’t say they people were particularly expressive about their happiness.

Mercer produce reports which deal with similar metrics such as Quality of Life and Cost of Living.

Despite my optimistic enthusiasm, Spain doesn’t come off so well.

And don’t get me started about the UK…

Hard drive backup, crash and recovery

So my laptop hard drive died (just after I’d finished my MA – thank god it wasn’t before!), probably due to lack of respect I treated it with. I’d often jog with my laptop in a rucksack, and as it’s an Apple PowerBook I almost never turn it off (good battery life, solid OS that doesn’t need to be reset or shutdown frequently like Windows does). Unfortunately this means that I probably bumped the drive head on the platter a lot. Ooops.

It started to make some nasty noises for about a week prior to finally giving up, but stupidly I didn’t take any immediate action. In fact I noticed that if I tilted the machine at certain angles it would work better or worse, so in my impatience to get things done that’s what I relied on. And it worked. For a while.

So I finally got around to buying a new drive (Hitachi Travelstar 0A25015 7K100 100GB ATA6 7200 RPM 8MB Buffer) and have been installing all the old software again, which was pretty quick and easy. As I’d been using a free remote backup tool (Mozy) I was also able to recover my personal files. Mozy gets my thumbs up big time. It’s a total no-brainer, just install and forget about it. When things go bad on your local disk (they will, it’s only a matter of time) you just download all your data again.

I did have a bit of trouble as I initially downloaded my data onto a Windows machine, but for some reason I wasn’t able to decrypt the data using the key from my Mac. Once I’d got my new hard drive installed though I was able to decrypt the data fine, so I’m a happy bunny again!

If I weren’t a poor student I might even pay for the service, but as it is I get 2GB for free, which is actually pretty good. I did lose a load of movies and music which were too big to back up unfortunately.

Online at home again

Just got my internet connection set up again (since I moved house).

Ran a speed test which is sadly slower than last time, only 4.6MB download & 0.8MB up. Apparently I’m now 1848m away, whereas in Bristol I was only about 585m.

Oh well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles I guess. Still, it’s good to be back!

Real Guitars are for old people

I’ve recently been playing Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock (Wii) instead of my bass.

Check out Kyle and Stan in Southpark Episode 1113: Guitar Queer-o.

There’s lots more coke and sex in the house.