There’s a whole heirachy of supermarkets here in the UK, from the posh/expensive to the more standard super super markets, to the mini marts and corner stores.  The major ones (that I know of) in their apparent order of goodness are something like:

• Waitrose
• Marks and Spencer
• Sainsbury’s
• Tesco
• ASDA (Walmart)
• Morrisons
• Somerfield
• and a whole bunch of smaller chains and corner stores that either aren’t in my area
  

As you can probably imagine, the higher up the list a store is, the better it’s produce and fresh food is supposed to be, with the down side that it usually costs a percentage more than the equivalent items in the store below it.  In all honesty (from past purchases), this seems to be the case.  In fact I’ve often noticed if we pick up dinner from our local Waitrose (for lack of a cheaper alternative), what might be £10 at Tesco, is almost always £25, and picking up lunch from Marks and Spencers (roll/baguette, yoghurt/fruit and a juice)  usually totals about £7, when the equivalent lunch from the Sainsbury’s around the corner is usually half of that.

In the same way, I’ve often noticed doing a weeks shopping, when actually in the store is often cheaper (or we get a lot more for the same price) when shopping at ASDA instead of Tesco.  I’ve wondered a few times if there’s actuallya noticeable difference between the larger super markets (Sainsbury’s, Tesco & ASDA) prices, or the price is made up by impulse purchases around the store.  There’s no question the two super markets on the top of the list are significantly more expensive then the larger stores, and I’ve often felt the pain of a overpriced dinner, or mid week shop, but we seem to spend approximately the same amount each time we do a big shop regardless of store.

As we move into the new place we’ll no longer have access to a car to do a weekly or fortnightly shop so we’ll be relying heavily on internet shopping and home delivery, so I took the time last night do the same shop from ASDA, Tesco and Sainsbury’s using their online shopping portal.  I was surprised by the results.

I did the initial shop through ASDA, and completed a £75 shop which comprised of about a fortnights food, as well as a few items such as laundry detergents, razor blades, bleach that were runnig low at the time.  This is about on par with our previous grocery habits, as when we lived in a group of four it was almost always consistently £70-£100/wk.  Going from previous experience, this figure should probably stay about the same as we run out of different higher-priced items at various stages throughout the month.  I did exactly the same shop at both Tesco and then Sainsbury’s, and the totals came out at £75 and £70 respectively with savings made from one store on discounted/multi buy items and on other items at the different stores.  On a week to week basis, depending on what was on the shopping list, these figures would be subject to change as different stores had different and/or better specials.

I’ll do the same test the next time I do a shop, but I have to say Sainsbury’s is the clear winner in the online shopping stakes, due to cheaper delivery, and a much better online shopping experience than the other two.  ASDA’s online interface was nothing short of attrocious and must have been designed by monkeys.  Not only was it difficult to find products (even when using the search function), the actual design and layout of the pages seemed cheap and pre 2000 looking, which unfortunately was not reflected in the sale price.  The reward/loyalty program offered by Tesco’s Clubcard scheme seems to be the best one with 2-for-1 one offers and £5-10 discount vouchers given out on regular basis (depending on amount of shopping done).

I know recycling is an expensive process and its the responsibility of the recycler to put the correct items out (depending on what can be recycled in the local community), but around here, things are getting mad.  Over the past few months, we’ve had an ever increasing amount of recycling which has been rejected by our council workers, everything from some plastics, tins, milk cartons.

I got home the other day, and was confronted by this:

All the clear plastic is recyclable, as well as the milk cartons.  I can’t help but thinking they’re now probably spending more time sorting through my rubbish (and everyone elses for that matter) to reject stuff they don’t want, than they would if it was done down at a sorting/trash centre.  Gah

Note: Attempting to recycle wire coathangers might have been pushing it.. Maybe just a little.

I’ve written before about internet shock sites, it’s by no means a new phenomenon.  Despite the fact most are displayed with such sheer gut-wrenching distaste, there’s something about them that always appeals to the net nerd, or any non-prude with even a tenth of a normal sense of humour.  I mean it, despite the initial horror, they all share a special place in my heart as the ultimate rickroll weapon, and a great way to tell who possesses stomach of steel and the inverse, cadbury chuck.

Think of any sick site, you name it, and I’d almost garuantee it’s ridden the popularity/Digg wave at some point, and have become household names, even to the uninformed.  I’ve met a few people over time who’ve not seen Goatse before, but they understand the legendary meaning that goes with the word.  Same goes for Rotten, Tubgirl and anything in the animated GIF section on 4chan.org (ech).

On to the point of this post, I was sent a link the idea by a friend at work to what seemed like a rather innocuous bookshop (Lulu.com), little did I know I was about to journey down a path of discovery so amazing that I’d experience  the unique feeling of intense side splitting laughter coupled with an uneasy uneasy urge to reach for the nearest bucket, waste paper bin, tiny paper cup (“Phil… If you’re going to spew.. spew into this” - Waynes World)  or some other suitable spew recepticle.

The link goes to a book in the diverse Lulu catalog entitled: “Natural Harvest - A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes”

What worried me the most about this link was I thought it was a play on words, and the books content centered around:

• Global warming, and the alternatives to water in the coming famine
• a satirical story from a Ships cook about food preparation in the navy; or perhaps
• a book for vegan’s who’ve out of options.

But no, Natural Harvest is a serious recipe book on how to prepare dips, soups, creams and meals aided by the use of a little known cooking ingredient, semen.  And I quote,

“Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food. This book hopes to change that.”

And after you get over the horror of the thought of whisking, beating and mixing some other mammal’s semen in a kitchen bowl, you’re somehow given a kick in the guts when shown the images of Creamy Cum Crepes, dick dijonnaise, and my personal favourite Man made Oysters.

But it gets better (or is that worse), the comments down the bottom are a mix of funny piss-takers, horrified on-lookers and parties who are interested in the culinary delights or nutricious benefits of this absurd practice.  But don’t just take my word for it:

“This is the best book that I have ever cum across !!!”

“I am a proud Vegan and am working my way towards complete fruitarianism. I have a preference for live foods (”raw” to those uninitiated). I am aware that semen is a byproduct of a creature with a nervous system, but I am intrigued by the protein possibilities of semen for vegetarians, and its ready accessibility for me.”

“I had always viewed having 3 testicles as a curse. People would make fun of me…High School gym class was a nightmare. But no more!! I have now found a use for old number 3! This book now gives me a purpose in life, and I’m proud to have a “trifecta.”

————

(sometime later after writing this post)

Dear the Internet

Once again, I’ve come to the nasty realisation that you’re killing me, sometimes in a horrible, nasty way.

I do appreciate the fact you’re letting me die laughing though.

Ciao!

I’m not a game by any means, and in any year I’d play only a handful of new titles.  Most of the time if I bother to sit down and play a game it’ll be an old favourite like Counterstrike Source or Quake III, but occasionally a game comes along that will hold my attention for many, many hours of joyful life-stealing pleasure.  To name a few:

• Civilisation 2
• Final Fantasy VII & VIII
• Transport Tycoon Deluxe and more recently OpenTTD
• All of the Grant Theft Auto series, but most recently GTA: San Andreas

On December 3rd, Grand Theft Auto IV came out for the PeeCee, and having refrained from trying it on the Playstation3 or Xbox 360 I gleefully got my hands on a copy and waited out the almost 40 minute install.  I should have known pre-install that there wasn’t a hope in hell it was going to play nicely on the laptop, especially not at a great quality/resolution.  After all, it more than meets the requirement for the minimum required system (from Rockstar Site), and meets most of the requirement for recommended system (the video card is the big let down here).

I can play at the amazing resolution of 800×600 with all higher graphic settings disabled due to low specification of system.  I have to wonder who came up with the idea of limiting the quality settings for lower spec cards, it should be the users choice to wind up the settings and make the game unplayable if they so wish.

Back to the game, as you’d probably guess, the performance on my system leaves a lot to be desired but is still playable, and even explosions don’t seem to slow it down too far, but I’m always left wanting more, especially seeing some of the screenshots of people running it at 1920×1200 on monster machines.

I’m left wondering though, is it worth me spending +£1000 on a desktop machine that can play this correctly or giving up and going back to minesweeper.  I’m not sure i could warrant the price given that this is probably the one title I’ll acutally play this year (as well as in 2009), but considering I got months and months of play out of GTA:SA who knows.  It’s an investment in time I guess, and heck, I’d have spent a lot more having fun on booze in the process.

The game itself is fantastic though, I can forsee in the next few years having a map of London (or New York, or perhaps Tehran) with every building, feature, person manipulatable , almost like a GTA in that corny old VR world of the 80’s that everyone was dreaming about.  I could get coffee in the store I go to every morning at work and then go to work on the office front door with a baseball bat, just for the point of it…

Then I’d escape down the tube to my batcave, or home maybe.

Two months ago, I wrote about the Icybox NAS-4220B Network storage unit, my first choice in the search for a set it, and forget it storage and home server solution, and if anyone’s used an Icybox before I have no doubt they’d be at least as dissappointed as I was in my few months of battle with it.  I won’t get into it again, no one likes a whinger but it was so flawed but writing everything to 1,000,000 floppy disks would probably have been a quicker, easier and more reliable solution.

Recently an oppurtunity came up to buy another NAS unit, the QNAP TS-409 Pro, from a friend at work for a good price, so after quick thought and some research (more than I had done for the Icybox!), I snapped it up.  And after a month of use, I havent regretted it.  It’s a four drive SOHO (prosumer, maybe) backup solution which currently has 4x 500GB drives in a RAID5 configuration.

The best things:

• Gigabit network connectivity (realworld gigabit, this time (20 - 40MB/s, much better than the 5 - 10MB/s from the Icybox)
• 4x SATA Bays capable of RAID0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD configs
• Inbuilt media, iTunes, music streaming server
• Torrent/HTTP queue downloader
• NSLU2 support with iPKG management (basic linux OS with Debian like package installer).
• FTP/Samba/NFS/HTTP file access
• support for USB drives/keys and one touch/scheduled backup of core files, either from the unit itself or from locations around the local network.
• and a whole bunch of other features like web server, database, time server etc etc.

I’m especially interested in the IPKG manager and NSLU2 based linux console as it really closes the gap between useless (or limited use) network device, and fully configurable server or computer, and I’ve got a bunch of scheduled tasks UnRAR’ing downloads, backing up photos and documents, rebuilding/exporting the music collection and downloading new album artwork and doing other system and network diagnostic tasks.  Infinitely useful!

Nothings perfect though, and it can’t all be good, in the case of the QNAP, its loud as hell and building the initial RAID array took a fair few hours but that’s to be expected, and under the circumstances, I think I can let it pass.

I’ve never really been interested in the whole social networking scene, especially not for anything other than communication.  But due to recent boredom with my music collection (mostly after running out of songs on my iPod on a daily basis), I’ve taken to listening to Last.fm recently.

It’s great so far, and is turning out to be a welcome change to being mid way through a 2 hour mix as I’m currently used to, and I can listen to a whole range of music I wouldn’t usually get to.

I’m still wondering what the point of the social networking side to this is though, so I can compare my music taste with someone named jeebee34 halfway accross the world and realise my music compatitibility with him/her is only 12%?  What does this prove, that I should start listening to Madonna or Justin Timberlake to boost this rating with my new found online friend?

Last.fm makes use of the concept of scrobbling, which is where whatever you’re currently listening to is submitted up to the last.fm server for everyone to see, and scrutinise.  This doesn’t just work for when you’re listening to last.fm radio itself but through any popular media player (such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, amarok, Exaile, etc), or through any number of music devices, such as an iPod or my Nokia N95.  You’ve go to wonder though, what do they do with all those stored music preferences?  Could it be used to tailor a bunch of music adverts to our inboxes around Christmas time, or perhaps used in court to prove that we’d listened to a bunch of Metallica music, far more than one person could possibly own?

All that aside though, I’ve been quite impressed at how well it can map music choices to a chosen genre or tag, and searching by tags or artists return results you’d expect (mostly, anyway).  A friend searched for music like Daft Punk the other day and was blessed with the sweet soothing sounds of koRn, so I’m not sure what went wrong there.

Favourite Tags so far:

• dnb
• progressive trance
• psytrance (see a trend happening here?)

So if you’re a last.fm’er, jump on, look at my profile and add me

As many of you know, I bitch frequently, and today is no exception.  I’m not just bitching about slow transfer speeds from a restricted device which should be capable of far more (yes, the N95), I’m over that now, as there a bigger demon in its midst.  One that defies all logic completely, to which I can find no possible explanation, apart from shit-ness by the manufacturer in question.

Disclaimer: The paragraphs below will be boring, and slightly technical, and my contain Vendor Verdicts which whilst not directly opposing HD911’s stringent rules regarding Product/Name Defamation and the Fair-trade and Distribution Protection act of Liverpool 1983*

I bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit from a relatively reputable online computer dealer in England at the end of last year after much deliberation and a little mis-directed (and now seemingly useless) research.  For the money, the unit was supposed to be one of the better performers.  At the time I bought two hard drives to go along with the unit, which were one of the faster drives available on the market at the time.  The NAS, an ICYBOX NAS4220-B (you can see here the name of the offending company has been removed to comply with HD911’s policies), flat out refused to boot/function or do pretty much anything with the new drives.

A little time ticked by, and (stupidly) the owner and purchaser did not RMA either the drives, nor the NAS unit in time, and the store would no longer accept the products as refunds, so I used the hard drives elsewhere and shelved the obviously trusty unit for another day.  Over the next few months, I tried the drives with a few different versions of the Icybox’s firmware, and even went to the extent of disabling features on the drives themselves to see if they would wotk, but still had no luck.

Fast forward to August 2008, I purchased a cheaer, lower spec harddrive to go in the unit as it could surely serve a better purpose than sitting in the cupboard gaining dust, for this aluminium monstrosity cost £100, and that could have been better spent on beer or a treatment program for the authors ever growing fascination with the game World of Warcraft, and a level 40 dwarf (sorry, little person) named El-dorf.

You must understand, by this point I had an amazingly profuse dislike for the pre-purchased NAS unit, neither it nor its manuracturer website or support forums inspired any confidence at all in a good product.  But I wanted it to work, at least in half the way you’d expect a unit to function.  There’s an element of pride here too, and an IT guys damaged ego over a poor purchase decision can be difficult to mend, as I usually make good, educated decisions about what a good product is and where/how to buy it.

So the new hard drive worked as it should and I was away, madly copying the collected works of self-recorded flute solos, and bad karaoke-style ABBA renditions, but noticed something astounding, transfers via built in “gigabit” network connection were going unusually slow.  Just to back this up, I have a laptop hard drive that can quite happily read/write at 40-50MB/s for sustained periods, a Broadcom gigabit port that should be capable of at least this plugged into another gigabit port on the NAS.  The top speed for the 15 hours of transferring was 5MB/s, not even a quarter of what I would deem reasonable, and hardware I had 12 years ago quite happily chugged away at a quicker speed than this.

I’ve done the normal thing and taken everything possible out of the equation, tested via different PC, new/different cable, through a switch, over wireless (not that I was expecting higher speeds this way mind you), and chanted sweet nothings at it, but to no avail.  It seems that the manufacturer thought they’d add yet another shitty feature (to enhance the plethora of other teeth-nashing inadequacies), that being horrendous speed.  In fact, I can quite happily transfer over the gigabit network to other devices at 50MB/s, and the 802.11g wireless network at 3.5MB/s.

If I was to review this product, and say something nice about it, I’d say it would stand the test of time as a door stop, and wouldn’t look out of place next to the 1960’s Parasonik tube amplifier rip-off that your parents still have sitting in the garage, it really is that cool.

Subsequently I’m saving up the money for a better unit (with supporting research) as we speak.

* Link to Legal Documentation required, consult this document for further information (#1443253)

Not particularly exciting, but HD911 is now one year old!  From its humble beginnings, it’s tickled the worlds news sources on a daily basis, and been the source of much controversy from Boston to Baghdad…

Oh wait, that’s not true, or should I say ture.

However, now I’m left wondering exactly what to do with my lovechild, that which I’ve nurtured into adulthood, and has give me back so much.  I’ve said it before, and I’m pretty sure I’ll say it again, I’d like to get out “talking cod-shit to strangers”, and embark on a whole new level of world domination, and i have high plans for the next 12 months.

But do I disband HD911 and let it fall by the way side into the otherwise packed scum bucket that is the internet?  Or do I transition, from blog about nothing, to empire about something?

Wait and see… I know I am.

I know what you’re thinking, and that’s this post’s title seems odd, and out of place on HD911, a contemporary glance at the state of neo-napoleonic faecal art in 1930’s France.  Errr, somethign like that.

As I’ve said before, since leaving my previous position as a C#/ASP.NET minded monkey, I’ve been tooling, (or should I say battling), with the infamous choice of script kiddy and billion dollar social network empire, PHP.  It truly lives up to its meaning as the Palace of Hedonistic Pleasure, and continues to be an outstanding joy to work with, and you know i mean this in a completely non-sarcastic way.

That’s not to say its hard, it just seems to open the void between what is right and wrong a lot more than other languages I’ve worked with of late.  Think of it like riding a bike, there’s a right and wrong way to ride a bike, and once you learn, it’s usually smooth sailling.. You can either keep speed and move forward (right), or fall off (wrong).  PHP works in much the same way, but provides the stupid (me) with many many more ways to fall off.  And from what i’ve seen so far, it doesn’t take much to end up over the handlebars, face planting into a wall with the still-spinning front wheel grinding away at what little is left of your thigh, tummy or scrotum if one is that way inclined.

After an lengthy conversation discussing (bitching) how easy falling off the proverbial bike is, a colleague at work, said, “That’s the way it works, you take the good with the bad, it’s a state of PHP-ness.”

At which point I cracked up laughing, and forever more when I cringe at some of our code base, a smile will peel across my face.

p-h-p-ness  (pee-h-p-ness)

At the office, we, the Web Services team form a team of four people who handle the core data storage and communications centre for the companies main application.  It’s by no means the most complex (it’s extremely simple in fact) or even the most important, but none the less, it forms the glue between each of the client applications and hosts the file/data store for all shared information used throughout the system.

As part of the build process we’ve done a recent refactor which improves performance and security and aims to generally make our service easier to consume by every device that uses it.  This process has taken the better part of six weeks next to full time work by four of us and at least two weeks work from a fifth person that left recently.  I don’t want to say I’ve poured my heart and soul into it, that would be lieing, but its definitely been something that we’ve become immensely proud of.

Anyway, today the decision was made to drop all the work completed toward the new version, and continue where we forked off on the previous release, which really is a huge shame.  Now I feel like we’ve taken a step backward, erasing a bunch of work that would have ultimately made the project a lot more stable and laid a few of the foundations for future-proofivity, if thats even a word.  I shouldn’t get too aread of myself though, in reality it was months away from the final goal, but at least there was move towards that goal.

I shouldn’t be surprised though, there seems to be many examples of this and far worse (mal)practices in the IT industry around the web, and it seems to me to often be the way the things work, especially in smaller Software Development situations.  I’ve even seen it before at previous jobs, and its never pretty.

The thing that gets me though, is the absolute waste of resources and man-hours that goes into a mistake such as this.  Assuming we worked two thirds of the week each, I’d put the time spent at:

4.5 staff x 27 hours x 6 weeks  = 729 man hours

By my crude calculations this is just about enough man hours to build a small skyscraper, or the Titanic if you will, but… That’s Life, after all!

Who knows, in another month, the project will probaly take another path altogether requiring a complete rewrite, refactor or perhaps disbanded altogether!