webvictim.net

It’s been a lovely weekend. My best friend Matt and I held a bit of a barbecue and gaming evening at his house on Saturday which was great fun - Sarah, Louise and Jo came round and we played Monopoly, baseball on the Wii and Guitar Hero. We also got rather drunk which was fun, until such time as I got a phone call from my brother saying that he’d had a car crash. It turned out that my parents couldn’t drive and neither could I, but I got a lift down to go and see him as he sounded a bit shaken up on the phone.

When I got there, it turned out that the car that hit him had driven off with a broken radiator - my brother’s car was in a pretty bad way, so they must have hit him pretty hard. I just let the police do their job and gave my brother a comforting arm round the shoulders - not a lot else I could do really. I’m unsure if they’ve caught the people who did it yet or whether that’s still in progress.

I watched the European Cup final last night, thought it was a brilliant game - Spain totally deserved to win as they were all over Germany from about 15 minutes in until right at the end of the game. Torres scored a lovely goal, and Spain were unlucky not to get two or three more.

It’s rather hot today. Work is going alright, but it’s a bit loud thanks to the 3 HP DL140s running by my feet. Configuring servers is a noisy process!

My week off work was great fun. I had the entire house and the whole internet connection to myself, and nobody else but me to worry about for an entire week. I stayed up late, got up late and did many amusing things. I shopped for myself, bought all the things my parents don’t believe in buying, I had some hilarious efforts at cooking and just did whatever the hell I wanted to.

Unfortunately these things do have to come to an end, and it was an effort to get up for work on Monday morning. I thought that was bad, but it was nothing compared to what it was like this morning. I thought I was going to collapse when I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower - I’m totally not a morning person. People have said you can change yourself to be but I just don’t believe it. I’ve *never* been able to get up properly in the mornings, not matter when I go to bed and how much sleep I have. Still, I’m going to try and get to bed a bit earlier in future.

I think I’m going to do some experimentation with the Zend framework this evening. It’s a way of programming that separates content and layout for a site, and then ties it together using a “controller”. It sounds like the perfect scalable solution for an idea I have for a new website. I’m going to start it and see whether the idea still takes my fancy when I’ve done a bit of coding with it.

I’ve just rewritten my IRC bot (botsworth) as well, to use TuB’s framework. Unfortunately he’s changed it already and so it’ll probably be due a rewrite sometime soon. He is ridiculously impulsive and will often change his mind entirely about something in a matter of minutes!

The Premier League is looking like it’ll be an epic battle this season, from the matches I’ve seen so far. I’m tipping United, Chelsea or Liverpool for the title - I’ve been told not to write off teams like Arsenal, but I’m just not convinced. I may stand to eat my words…

I spent most of the Saturday and Sunday of my long weekend drinking, eating, sleeping, watching the football and playing Pro Evo 6 and Monopoly. It’s been great fun.

I’d forgotten how good Monopoly was as a game, probably because I’d not played it in years. There were tense negotiations and the games were all pretty even, until Matt’s girlfriend showed up and managed to beat us all into a pulp in one game, accumulating about £6000 and just about all the property on the board after an absolutely terrible start. It seems that beginner’s luck was definitely in the air!

The football was great. Although it pains me to say it, I’d far rather see United win the league than Chelsea. Combine that with the fact that they’re both out of the Champions League and it’s great news for me (a Liverpool fan). I just hope the Champions League final isn’t a repeat of 2005 - I don’t think I could handle being that nervous again. The Arsenal-Chelsea match was quite good - I wanted to really see Arsene go for it and try and stop Mourinho at any cost, and he did just that by holding them to a draw. It’s going to be fun to watch Chelsea make a guard of honour for the United players on Wednesday night :>

Big Sam Allardyce has apparently been linked with Glenn Roeder’s recently-vacated job as Newcastle manager - I have to say I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he went. He’s not done that bad a job at Bolton, but I think the lure of a slightly larger club is definitely getting to him. I just hope he stops everyone banging on about the spent force that is Michael Owen. He might only be young, but he’s certainly not got the speed or skill he used to have.

That said, I’d almost like him to prove me wrong and bring the England team out of the slump they’re in, as my potential road trip to Euro 2008 isn’t looking like an amazing prospect with their current form. I think that appointing Steve McLaren was a big mistake - he’s basically Sven, but with ginger hair and slightly more ability to show emotion. We could also do with pulling Paul Scholes out of retirement, because he’s clearly one of the players that we can’t do well without.

I’m interested - what do you think?

I’ve had a productive day today. I’ve sorted a number of work-based problems that were causing me trouble, and I am now sitting watching Liverpool own PSV in the Champions League while eating a Subway.

I have recently discovered the delights of The Werewolf game. This game is brilliant when you play it on IRC with people you’ve known for a while. You just find yourself sitting and laughing at your monitor :)

This weekend has been lovely - the weather in my part of England has been the warmest so far this year, and it was lovely to cruise round in my car with the windows open and the tunes playing. It’s not quite been warm enough for the air conditioning yet, though.

I’ve started watching Heroes and I have to say, I’m a bit addicted. TuB shouted at me for its lack of plot, but I’m really not complaining to be honest. It’s got a decent amount of eye-candy and there is definitely a load of weird stuff going on, enough to make me ask questions but not enough to make it like Lost.

Lost is beginning to annoy me. They never explain anything to you, and then when they do, they’ll tell you something but it’ll make you ask another load of questions about something else. Sometimes I just feel like having something to watch that isn’t such hard work.

The football was quite good yesterday, although Spurs really should have made it 4-1 before half time, and they shouldn’t have gone off the boil and let Chelsea even things up again. All I can say is that I hope they win in the replay (I’m not a Spurs fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I dislike Chelsea a whole lot more)

I also rediscovered World of Warcraft this weekend. I put got three levels onto my warrior (taking him from 56 up to 59) and then decided I couldn’t be arsed again. I’ll probably let the rested XP build up again and log in in about two weeks!

Today, I have done very little. I watched the Bolton vs Blackburn game (Blackburn won basically because they had two penalities given, there wasn’t a lot else to say) and I earnt £40 fixing a computer.

There were three fundamental things wrong with this computer:
1) It was running Windows XP on 128MB of RAM (ouch, swap file thrashing)
2) It was running Norton Antivirus (this is bad, no matter what)
3) Its ADSL modem/router combination had no microfilter between it and the wall socket

I got rid of the expired Norton Antivirus without a second thought and installed the wonderful AVG Free instead. The 128MB of RAM is more a problem, although I advised him that if he wanted his computer to speed up, he could shell out £50 or so and it would be a lot better.

The thing that made me laugh the most was the lack of microfilters in the system. Originally I wasn’t sure what the problem was, because he told me that he doesn’t answer the phone next to the computer any more because whenever he picks it up, it disconnects him from the Internet. This sounded a little odd, so I decided to investigate…


C:\Documents and Settings\User>ping -t webvictim.net
Pinging webvictim.net [80.175.29.126] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=46
Reply from 80.175.29.126: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=46


Nothing wrong there at all, everything pretty much as I’d expect it to be. So at this point, I picked up the phone and started to talk into it as though I was answering a call.

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination host unreachable.


I asked him how long it had been like this and he couldn’t remember. Wouldn’t you have done something about it before now?! I mean… honestly!

I advised him to purchase some microfilters :)

Liverpool played Manchester United earlier today, and their performance wasn’t bad at all. United of course got a cheeky goal right at the end as they love to do, and robbed the game from an otherwise mean-looking Liverpool. Scholes got sent off for swinging a punch at someone who tackled him, and rightly so I think - no need for that in the game.

I’m just watching Portsmouth vs Chelsea now while eating. Not sure where this one’s going to go.

Football is so much better when it’s free :-)