Neil
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Blog Comments posted by Neil
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Does this include egigs?nope, not for the next few months.
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Neil, do you think that T, Reading, Leeds will always sell out or do you think that it could also start to effect these, 12 months ago I would have predicted that Glastonbury will always sell out but possibly with the lower numbers for Reading/Leeds and T, are they always guaranteed to sell out?
Does Download make a significant profit, thats me thinking aloud by the way not asking if you have insider knowledge.
i think the boom in live music is to some extent over .... I'd go as far as to say that the durge that certain mags often promote as worthwhile music has come back and bit it on the arse.
But the likes of T, Reading/Leeds, and V fest will probably continue to do well, as it's line-ups that sell the tickets and with these fests being run by the biggest promoters able to pay the highest fees and use those fees to tie the acts to exclusive or semi-exclusive deals, they'll continue to get the most popular acts and sell their tickets because of that.
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Are you seeing any significant drop off in interweb usage of the site Neil? I would have thought that would be an interesting indicator ; if usage levels are around the same as previous years then it might be the case that the same individuals are going to fewer festivals, rather than fewer individuals.
nope, there's no drop-off in site usage (the numbers are still going up), but I wouldn't really expect there to be - as 'net usage becomes more common (and easier via broadband) more people use the net to find out about things. There has been a smaller growth in use this year compared to all previous years tho.
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The new server is now installed - see
http://www.efestivals.co.uk/forums/blog/ne...p?showentry=977
for the details.
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The first photos using the new gallery style are now online here:
http://www.efestivals.co.uk/festivals/exet...galleries.shtml
As more photos come in from Vibraphonic they'll be added into the new style gallery.
When there's time, this new gallery style will be rolled back across all of the galleries from previous years.
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a few more invisible bits have been done today to help optimise the servers - again, a significant improvement is visible to me immediately, and I'm confident of things working better this year than last year.
There's still more to do as well, so it's looking great.
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Well, that and the mud.
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free, from http://www.fedoraproject.org
Download to DVD, write to DVD (you need a writing tool that writes ISOs, which is a bootable disc format), and away you go.
For ISO writing, I used http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net/
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about ten weeks on, and I'm now pretty sure that I've permanently f**ked one of my fingers from toasting it.
It's not a great problem - in fact it's minimal, but strange all the same. I definitely have a different sensation of feeling on my fingertip now, which every time makes me consider if i should use a different finger for whatever I'm doing.
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installation is a breeze - no harder than anything microshit.
If its your first try at anything linux, it's perhaps best installed on a 2nd computer - if you have something older around, that you thought was now too slow to be used for anything, that's the perfect bit of hardware to use. You'll discover it wasn't so slow after all.
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nope, helicopters.
These are the ones I have:-
Raptor 30 v2 (this has a petrol engine, the rest are electric). This is about 1.5M nose to tail.
Mini Titan - this is about 75cm nose to tail.
Twister CP v2 - this is about 60cm long.
Twister Coastguard - about 40 cm long.
The one I broke when playing with it in my house (the Twister CP) is now repaired and flying again - i did just briefly lift it off the ground in my kitchen to check it flies after the repair, and managed not to crash it again. Thank god.
The only one I should really play with indoors is the Coastguard, the others have the very real capability of decapitating me. Although the coastguard looks like a toy - and compared to the others it is a toy - it's still damned hard to fly well for a novice like me. Having wrecked all of the above (some more than once) over the last few months, i'm going to put all but the coastguard away for the moment while i continue with the lessons I've been having alongside practicing on the simulator I have (they're not really the sorts of things you can fly with any competence without being well trained).
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Can this report be viewed by anyone?
well, it could if I put it online.
I believe that the report is something that is available only by (probably very expensive) subscription, so it's probably not the sort of thing I should make publicly available, sorry.
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The configuration that was screwed on the servers has now been put back, so everything is looking as it should be. There's still some behind-the-scenes things to sort out from what went wrong but that's less urgent.
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I took the plunge again on Saturday, and decided to have the knackered burnt 'copter rebuilt .... pleasingly, when I actually bothered to have a properly look at it, it wasn't as melted/burnt as I'd originally thought (I'd avoided looking at it before Saturday as it was too depressing
). The re-build will cost around £250 I guess.I also had some more lessons at the w/e, and my flying skills are coming on a bit ... i'm maybe at the point now where I could take off, hover, and then land again without a serious crash ... well, perhaps 50% of the time.
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Hmmmm .... I spoke to bloody soon!
Doing the upgrades on the older server completely screwed the configuration of that older server, with the result that nothing on that server could be accessed (but luckily nothing has been lost). I've done a quick and dirty fix so that the most important things still work, but aside from that it's best left to the experts to sort out. Because it screwed up after 6pm last night, this means waiting until Monday to get someone on the case.
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I've been back to the hospital this afternoon, and the good news is that my fingers should all be fine, tho it'll be a while before they're properly healed. At least they're bandage-free now, which makes normal life a bit easier.
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blimey charlie, thankfully it happened whilst you were there or it could have been a lot worse. We have a proper toyshop near us that has been selling a remote control helicopter for some time, I had been giving it considerable thought as well, I think I will stick to solitaire.
Even if the problem was a fault with the battery and not something I did, I would have thought it was highly unusual for the battery to explode like it did - if there was that much of a problem with the batteries, I wouldn't have thought they'd be being sold.
If you do think about buying a 'copter, be careful what you buy. Until you start spending major cash (all of the kit I've bought has cost nearly a grand in total), they're only good for flying indoors because they can't handle even a tiny bit of wind. The prices might not look too bad for an ARTF (almost ready to fly) copter, but then you have to buy the radio controller, gyros, servos, battery, chargers, etc, etc. And then you have to build it (which is where you discover it's not 'almost' after all
), and then get the setup & balance right else it will never fly well.And if you do buy one, don't go thinking you'll be able to fly it straight off, they are mighty difficult to fly (I've been told that helicopter pilots reckon the real thing is easier!). I've been having lessons where the instructor has dual remote controls (so he can save his copter from me crashing it!), and after quite a few hours of these lessons, plus practicing on a realistic simulator (Reflex XTR) with my remote controller plugged into my computer, I know I'd do nothing other than crash if I tried flying the real thing solo ... and with the copter being expensive, crashing is expensive too!
If you buy one, you need somewhere to fly it (either a club site, or make an arrangement with a farmer). The local park is NOT a good place to do it, cos you could decapitate someone!!! (seriously!).
Having said all that, I've got bitten with it - it's great fun. For the moment I'm going to hold off buying a replacement (the training happens on a copter of the instructors), but I'll buy another one at some point. A guy I was chatting to last week has bought himself a collection of different models (both electric and internal combustion) off ebay, so that's maybe what I'll do when I'm good enough so that a crash isn't guaranteed.
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i know you won't regret it
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it was an expensive remote control helicopter.
It was one of these beauties....
C5cSbjN6rAM
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What sort of a toy was it? A remote control type thing or something bigger?? ..Just curious? and are you going to have a chat with the shop keeper that you bought from - might be worth it incase there is a common fault of some kind?
it was an expensive remote control helicopter. The battery was a Li-Po.
Yes, I'll probably take it up with the shop I bought it from, but part of me is embarrassed to do that. There's two realistic options for the explosion - a dodgy battery, or a dodgy Neil.
The reality is that neither can be proven - the battery is now a lump of melted metal, and there's no way of knowing if I'd connected it the right or wrong way round. I'm a qualified electrician, so I'd like to think I wasn't an idiot - but I have no way of knowing for sure.
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Been back to the hospital this morning, and as I'd thought, there's only an issue with two of my fingers (tho the others are blistered from the burns).
The 3rd finger on my right hand had broken skin around one of the burns, so that's been redressed so that it doesn't get infected. This should clear itself up ok given time.
The 2nd finger on my right hand is the one that was most badly burnt, with a teardrop shaped burn on the fingertip about 1/2 inch square. The skin is almost white here, although it's all intact and unbroken. When it's touched it feels like a fingertip feels when it's got a coating of superglue over it (I'm sure most people know that sort of feeling). Anyway, at the moment the 'nurse practicioner' (what's one of those anyway?) who looked at it wasn't happy to say it'll be OK (tho he seemed to indicate that he thought it probably would be), so I have to go back in three days for him to check it again. At worst, it might need (plastic?) surgery, but i think this would be more to restore any lost feeling than a medical necessity, and bearing in mind that it's a not too important finger on my non-primary hand, it's probably something I wouldn't bother with ... at the moment, I have some feeling but it's unclear if this would be permanent.
All in all, I've had a very lucky escape!
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AS a matter of interest, how many does the chatroom hold
however many the limit is set at.
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Nope - those sorts of things (turning off some of the forum features) will be done as well, but I'll also be turning off bits of the main website, such as the line-ups and rumours.
I've just completed the second test, and unfortunately things don't run better but run slightly worse with the changed setup, so that idea goes in the bin.
There is another bit of reconfiguration that's just been identified, which will certainly improve things a little more - how much I don't know at this point, but it'll definitely give an improvement. Those changes should be made in the next hour or so, and then another test will be done to try and get some idea of how much it's improved things (it might be the case that any improvement is too little to see - but it *will* be an improvement, guaranteed).
I'm also thinking about how I might be able to re-configure the chatroom in such a way that it'll give a bit more ooomph to the forums - I can probably move it onto one of the other servers and still keep it integrated with the forums.
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the boards will be modded during the festival this year.
the incompetence of BT
in Neil's Blog
A blog by Neil in General
Posted
I was thinking I'd perhaps been too harsh on BT here, and had thought about deleting this blog entry. But....
First thing yesterday morning, they managed to cut off my two main business numbers, as well as some of my broadband services. 24 hours later I've got my broadband services restored but am still waiting for something to happen with my phone numbers.
Incompetent c**ts is a massive understatement.