Monday, March 26th, 2007
Sainsbury’s seems to be a complete nightmare (at least for me) whenever I need to go in quickly and pick up a few things because I can’t find anything. Things aren’t where I would expect. For example, I wanted kitchen roll. Kitchen roll is generally with the toilet rolls in the paper wrapped around cardboard aisle. Not in Sainsbury’s their not. Kitchen roll is with detergents, which is… obvious.
I also wanted some tomato ketchup. Luckily I have learnt from previous Sainsbury’s wanderings that condiments are in the frozen section, because of course pickles do go with turkey twizzlers…
After my experience with UKfast, I expect Mr Sainsbury to ring me up personally and offer to rearrange my local stores to my liking (and get some more ciders in please). I think that’s fair.
Oh, and the taste the difference beef joint I bought to roast has instructions about cooking the meat slowly to improve it’s flavour, then starts off by instructing you to pre-heat the oven to 250 degrees C. Eh?
Tags: customer service, Food, Sainsbury's, Shopping
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Sunday, March 18th, 2007
Autosport has a new podcast, which I downloaded last night to listen to on my way to my kart race yesterday morning. I haven’t really been keeping up with my podcasts of late, so I put them on for the journey to and from Whilton Mill. It certainly helped the journey go quickly on the way there and kept me awake on the drive back. I think I’m going to start listening to them more while I’m in the car because it seems like the perfect environment for them and I rarely seem to be able to listen to them any other time. Radio and by extension podcasts seem to work best when you’re doing something that leaves a lot of your brain free for something else, like driving. Listening in work is a bit of a problem because it’s harder to concentrate on the stuff I’m actually paid to do and listen to what someone is saying. Listening at home is hard because I’ve usually got so many jobs to do it’s difficult to sort out the time to do something were I can actually pay attention to the podcast as it plays.
Anyway, the current list of podcasts on my (now 3 year old) iPod are as follows:
- Fighting Talk
- The Now Show
- Autosport
- Mark Kermode’s Film Reviews
- Gareth Jones on Speed
Those seem to suit my tastes, on demand, much better than any radio station could.
The karting itself didn’t go great. I’m not sure where we finished but it wasn’t anywhere worth mentioning. I did qualifying and was 7th when I came in, but then the sun came out and we were pushed down to 19th, which was a bit disappointing. Still, next race in two weeks so a chance to put it right will come soon.
Tags: Apple, iPod, Karting, podcasts
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Wednesday, March 14th, 2007
With my adventures in playing with Asterisk I have found an application that is possibly even more confusing and difficult to set up. – Shorewall. I have to open up the ports on the firewall of the Ubuntu Server I installed to allow SIP connections on port 5060 and I assume later I’ll have to also allow IAX. For some unknown reason though, Ubuntu packages shorewall.conf into /etc/shorewall/shorewall.conf on installation of the OS, not with the shorewall package. Somehow along the way I’ve deleted that file and now I can’t get it back. What a pain in the arse.
Luckily I have a dual-boot machine here in work so hopefully I can boot in to Ubuntu (with shiny Beryl installed on a dual-monitor set up!) and get another copy of the file from there…
Tags: Asterisk, firewall, Linux, Shorewall, Ubuntu, VoIP
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Sunday, March 11th, 2007
In work we have a very expensive Cisco VoIP system. Whenever configuration changes are needed it seems to take quite a while to get exactly what you want. To see how complicated this whole Voice over IP stuff is, I’ve decided to have a play around with Asterisk, the free, open-source IP PBX.
My initial playing about seems to confirm that VoIP is pretty complicated. Or at least, Asterisk is – there must be 10-15 different configuration files. I think if I can get it all working it should be quite a nice system though. It can do voicemail, do not disturb and all kinds of other cool things. I’ll write up what I come up with.
At the moment I think I need to fiddle around with the firewall on the machine Asterisk is running on to open the port up for SIP. Then once I manage to connect a phone up, I can have a go at setting up a dial plan to call between two different phones. From there I want to work on getting the server to route calls to our Freedom2Phone account that comes free with Freedom2Surf…
Tags: Asterisk, VoIP
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Saturday, March 10th, 2007
We went for a long weekend away last weekend. We planned on leaving it to the last minute and seeing what we could get, but there didn’t seem to be any decent offers around. Kate wanted to go to Paris but instead we went for the cheaper option of Powys. We stayed at “The Dragon Hotel” in Crickhowell, which we’d found when searching for a pub with rooms. I don’t think it really was a pub with rooms, but it was really nice. We’d booked a “superior” room and when we turned up I was a bit worried – the decor seemed a bit drab, like the cliché of a hotel without enough being spent on maintenance. However the room itself was immaculate, totally different to the corridor we’d just come in from!
After a quick wander around Crickhowell in some drizzle, we went for dinner in the hotel restaurant. The food was simply brilliant – the highlight for me was my starter of pan fried goat’s cheese with apple and ginger chutney. The following two courses were excellent too and with the total bill coming to under £60 for the pair of us including a bottle of wine it proved good value too.
On Saturday after a hearty cooked breakfast in the hotel we decided to go for a walk amongst the Brecon Beacons. We headed up towards Llangattock and from there got onto the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal and started walking towards Brecon. After walking for a while we decided that we’d try and make it all the way to Brecon and then get the bus back from there. That’s nearly 15 miles by road. We didn’t make it in the end as we hadn’t planned properly or taken supplies. We got to Brynich, about 1.5 miles outside of Brecon, which is a pretty good effort I reckon.
Kate unfortunately has dodgy feet which were quite aggravated by this point, so we got a taxi back and I then left Kate in the bath back in the hotel while I got some snacks, including a Choc Dip! We had Chinese for dinner from The Beaufort and while the wait for indeterminable, the food was really good when it came.
On Sunday we went down to Big Pit, where I’ve been twice before over the years, but it’s probably over 10 years since I last went. It was a good day and the canteen and baths were an interesting addition since I last went. Then we headed home and overall, it was a good weekend. The hotel and food are thoroughly recommended, although maybe not the walk to Brecon, nice as the countryside is.
Tags: Eating Out, Hotels, Restaurants, Travel
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