Yay! Glastonbury 2004 tickets went on sale at 8pm last night.

After 2 hours of trying on the website, I finally got to the order form, submitted it and got confirmation! 10 mnutes later an email arrived to confirm… so we’re going! And also managed to order the tickets for Cedde and Helen, so they’re coming too. Accidentally ordered an extra car ticket and camper ticket but might be able to cancel those.

For those who can’t even get through to the order form, try this link as that seems to go directly there. Good luck if you’re trying. I know that a lot of the people on Urban75 had stayed up all night without success.

Once again I was amazed that the ticket agency really weren’t prepared for the number of people accessing their site and it was inaccessible for most of the evening, not even allowing connections. And the phone lines were much the same, by all accounts. Some people had success calling the international order number for UK tickets, but Radio 1 announced that too, which caused the queues to fill up again. As of about 8am, 60,000 tickets, about half of the total available) had gone.

Not a pleasant experience, sitting there fretting about tickets and constantly hitting the reload button, but it seems to have worked out nicely. I just hope there aren’t too many people out tere who really want tickets who are unable to get them.

Sorry for the downtime yesterday; this was due to me moving the server and then having to wait a couple of hours for the DNS changes to catch up.

The move went pretty smoothly, I whipped the server out of the Netscalibur rack and put it into the Exonetric rack on the next floor down in Telehouse North

I’ve rejigged my MoveableType templates to add some advertising for Exonetric, as a way of thanking them for hosting the server, and I can thoroughly recommend their service (and they’re nice chaps too). They provide colo and “FreeBSD jail services at competitive prices.

After moving the server, we retired to The Southwark Tavern for a joint leaving drinking session for 3 Netscalibur/Claranet people. The whole lower floor was booked out and attendance was very good. I was asked to be “official” photographer, which resulted in the usual collection of pictures of the back of heads, the ceiling and assorted drunken loons .

The survey of the flat was completed yesterday, and (fingers crossed) that all went well, with no great surprises. Things are moving along nicely.

Off to lunch now with a couple of other ex-Netscallies.

Another quiet week. I had a wander around Brixton in the rain last Wednesday followed by a few beers with some ex-Netscallies at The Market Porter by London Bridge. Everyone seems to be doing very well, which is as it should be.

The flat sale seems to be moving along, no date for the survey yet, but they’ve got a couple more days.

Vic and I have been watching a few films:-

* Spellbound – very good, low budget documentary about the US National Spelling Bee
* Goodbye Lenin – German comedy (!) about a family and the fall of the Berlin Wall
* Underworld – pretty poor vampires vs werewolves shooty flick, made only just bearable by Kate Beckinsale wearing a rubber catsuit throughout.
* Love Actually – chintzy Brit Rom-Com thing. Not as bad as I’d feared.
* In The Cut – Meg Ryan thriller which is surprisingly sexually explicit in places.

The server that this site is hosted on will probably be moving later in the week. Shouldn’t cause more than a few hours of downtime while all the DNS re-aligns.
It’ll be moving to a new uk colo service run by a former colleague of mine. (Very reasonable rates etc etc).

Since I finished work, and more so since we put the flat on the market, I’ve not been going out very much. As a result, I’ve not had much to write about here really.

Trying to keep busy I’ve set up a site dedicated to the old Telecom Gold Noticebd with some pictures and a message board. I’m sure anyone who wants to would be welcome to join in. I intend putting up more pictures and maybe a history of the Noticebd.

Popped into town and met up with my brother, Nick, last week. It made a change to go out, and try out my pre-pay Oyster Card which seems to work well. I still need to find out when the new rules kick in about it only charging you the price of a Travelcard, if you could have made all the journeys using one, and when the buses take pre-pay.

We’ve had 7 viewings of the flat so far, with another 2 due in the next hour. We’ve accepted an offer, but you never know what’s going to happen with the other viewings.

Better make myself scarce, so I’m going for a wander around Brixton.

Updated 12:40 – The estate agents have cancelled the extra viewings as they want to give the buyers 5 days to arrange a survey

I’ve been meaning to get around to this for ages. I took a load of pictures of rice terraces in the North of Bali, when Vic and I were on our honeymoon last year.

I’ve stitched a bunch of them together to make a Quicktime VR panorama, which can be seen by clicking on the picture below..

It’s a bit on the large side (1.7mb) and you need Quicktime and the VR plug-in so my apologies for anyone on a slow link.

The TG Noticebd reunion went off fantastically well, though Vic and I arrived a little later than originally planned. Lots of old faces, and a few people who were from before my Noticebd era.

So many folk armed with cameras naturally resulted in lots of digital pictures and a few folks have donated retro pictures from the heyday of the Noticebd It was great to see so many of the crew, and to see how little most had changed. Chesh even turned up later than everyone else, just like he used to 15 years ago.

I’m hoping that there’ll be another Eyeball rather sooner than the last 10 year interval.

I’ve also created a new message board for the old TGers; if anyone wants access to it, drop me an email as I don’t want it to be publically visible just yet.

Vic and I worked off our hangovers by tidying the flat up ready for putting it on the market. So we’re now officially “For Sale”, in case anyone out there wants to buy a 2 bedroom garden flat in Brixton.

Just across the road from where I live, there’s a mural painted on the side of a house. It’s been there since I moved here in 1992. In fact, I think it dates from 1985. In all that time it’s survived untouched.

Until about 6 months ago, when a tagger decided that he/she would enhance it by spraying their tag on it in black paint.

The mural really is quite a work, with a real window being incorporated into the picture, along with swans, herons and a watermill.

Why they’ve decided to damage it after 18 years, I’ve no idea. Deeply sad.

Everything going well, our flat should go on the market on Monday. We’ve had some “issues” with the estate agents though. We phoned them to say we’d like to put it on the market last Friday, and they sent though some paperwork which arrived on Saturday. As Vic is going through a redundancy process and we needed to sort a couple of things out, we didn’t immediately complete the paperwork.

On Wednesday and Thursday the estate agents called to say they’d arranged viewings, despite them not having any paperwork, details, keys or permission. Vic sent them off with a few robust words. We’ve now agreed they can arrange viewings from Monday, when they come around to take details, photos and get keys.

I’m not looking forward to future dealings with the agents, but I guess they’re a necessary (and expensive) evil if we’re to sell with minimum hassle.

The floor guys should be in in the next week or so to fix up the hallway floor. They did try to make out we need to replace the floor in the backroom too, but I just don’t have £1100 quid and time to shift all the furniture.

Last minute tidying up this weekend then.

During less busy moments, I’ve been trying out a few game demos. The new Unreal Tournament 2004 demo is very similar to the previous UT 2003 and plays well. I’ve been a big fan of UT2003 for a while, and this inspired me to get my home networks UT2003 server running agin on my Linux server. Vic and I can now play UT2003 against each other again (and she’s quite good for a girl ;) ).

I’ve also played the two demos of Call of Duty a WW2 first person game. Previously I’ve completed Medal of Honour and MOH:Spearhead, and Call of Duty is similar in style (probably because it was written by some of the original MoH developers). There are two demos around, and both are interesting, and, for me at least, challenging to play.

There seem to be a lot of WW2 computer games around at the moment, which seems at odds with the general trend in toys and games, which is away from realistic war simulations or models. When I was younger, most of the Action Man outfits were military uniforms of one sort of another, but now they seem to be more science-fiction/adventure sport oriented. Maybe that’s why the computer games (which are generally aimed at an older age group) are covering WW2, to feed the interest of people of my age who were into war games and stories in the 70’s. Maybe it’s a good thing that children aren’t encouraged to be interested in WW2 any more; some might say it glorifies war.

Having said that, I’m not exactly a violent person and don’t believe that the recent war in Iraq was legitimately justified, so it hasn’t made me into some war-crazed jingoistic violence-monger. There were some important lessons learned in WW2, and my generation only learned them second-hand. In 20 years time, there won’t be many people left who lived through WW2, and no one will remember a time when the UK was at risk of invasion and war on its own territory. Again, this could be a good thing in that those who have not been threatened by our European neighbours will probably be better European citizens, not resenting past conflicts, but it does make me wonder whether it will lead to the UK population becoming complacent, and possibly making some of the same mistakes of the past.

It’s been a busy week, still fixing the last few bits of the flat ready for putting it on the market (this week, we hope).

I managed to acquire a copy of Tom Baker’s autobiography from his website shop, along with a copy of the new Pyramids of Mars DVD Both were signed by Tom too.

Grimsby Town got a new manager and promptly lost 3-0 in their first match under him. Seems a long way since the previous week’s 6-1 victory over Barnsley!

There seems to be a bout of redundancies amongst people I know; Paul McDonald is leaving Warner Chappell , and it looks like my wife, Victoria, will be leaving the NTA
With rising interest rates, it’s probably a good time to sell up and travel, so let’s hope that all comes to pass.

The travelling plans are morphing as time passes, the idea of taking the Trans Siberian railway over to Vladivostok isn’t so likely now, as the train gets very busy during the summer and it gets more difficult to get a ticket at a decent price, so we may well be going from the UK to India.

Before that, we have Deb’s wedding in France to attend, and Glastonbury (if we can get tickets), so we’re considering buying a camper van, and doing a bit of a tour round before setting off to India. I’ve not driven for about 16 years, and Vic doesn’t drive at all, so that could all be a bit exciting!

The TG Noticebd reunion is on this Saturday, which I’m quite looking forward to. I’ve not seen most of that lot in more than 10 years.

Doing lunch with Dan and Daemonn today which will get me out of the house again. I didn’t get out much last week due to jobs to do and Vic being home with a very bad cold. I did manage to get two light fitting sorted out, so the front room is no longer lit by a light fitting held up by a bit of wire wrapped through a screw hole. And the bathroom has a new light and shaver point, not that I’m likely to use either.