Last time we did this a friend insisted I had to write a ‘What I did on my holidays’ essay for every day. I’m not sure we’ve done something interesting every day, but in that spirit, here’s what we’ve done so far:

Friday
My holiday started early when I left work at lunchtime to go to my final French exam. I’ve not found the practice papers hard, so I was looking forward to the exam if anything (in the same way you might look forward to a good puzzle; a crossword or a suduku). Afterwards, I went for a drink with Helen, one of the other students, and realised that after a year of studying with her I hadn’t picked up on how much we actually have in common. One of the things I’ve really loved about going back to college is making so many new friends, and hopefully I’ve just met another one.

The holiday started for real when Stuart finished work and we got ready for Out of the Blue. They were returning after a couple of month’s absence in a new venue (the refurbished Ohm) and it was great to have them back. We danced all night, and walked home to the dawn chorus (and we might have detoured via the dodgy take away where we were the only sober people in the place apart from the staff).

Saturday
We had planned to spend Saturday recovering, but instead I ended up going to the Take That concert at the City of Manchester stadium. My friend Deborah had bought tickets on eBay (yes, your alarm bells should start ringing) for Sunday’s reserved seating. We ended up with tickets for Saturday’s general admission. At least we even got tickets – other people buying from the same seller ended up with nothing. I put it down to the beautiful way Deborah complained to the seller…

I have to be honest, I wasn’t a Take That fan first time round. Not because I disliked Take That, particularly, more because the whole boy band thing passed me by. Doesn’t stop me admitting that the concert was brilliant. I suppose one of the advantages of being absolutely massive is that you can do whatever you want – and if whatever you want includes a tango version of It Only Takes a Minute, then that’s alright by me.

I wasn’t as impressed by the catering at the stadium, though. I was expecting outrageous prices (£3 for a tiny microwave pizza, £2 for a pie). What I wasn’t expecting was them to sell out of everything I was able to eat before the main act came on. In the end, I had to be content with a bag of crisps. I was very very glad that I’d decided to eat lots of flapjack before I went in (the theory was all the oats and sugar would keep me going through the day. After all, the 6 1” square pieces I ate provided a meal’s worth of calories on their own.)

Wednesday
You’ve seen the picture of my big camp mirror already. What I didn’t mention is how much trouble it was to put it up. I’ve had it for ages, but not been able to work out how to get to the space above the stairs. Eventually, we bought a special ladder with a platform that supposedly works on stairs. It sort of did, but not enough. We still had to dangle precariously over the stairs to get to the wall.

The really annoying thing is after a morning of measuring and measuring again it’s still not hanging straight. The fixings on the back aren’t equal and while we’ve compensated for it, we didn’t do it enough. So the whole thing has to come down again and we’ve got to work out how to pad out the hooks to correct it. I’m really tempted to leave it like it is, except it’ll drive me mad every time I walk past it. Nothing’s ever easy, is it?

Thursday
After a quick trip to Decathlon in Stockport (a sports shop that sells sports equipment? Weird.) we went searching for somewhere to skate that wasn’t up and down our street. We’d hoped that Tatton park might have somewhere, so we went down to have a look. It was very odd to go there when there wasn’t an RHS show on, and I hadn’t appreciated how beautiful it was. While there wasn’t anywhere skate friendly, we’re planning to go back with our bikes to suss out the isolated corners in the near future. Even I feel hopeful that I could potter round without falling off and really hurting myself. Again.

We’re not parking there again though. £4? Rip off!

Friday
I’m so sad! Stuart was up at Maplin looking for plastic boxes for his Thecus mod, and I wandered over to laugh at the rubbish disco equipment. I hadn’t realised how cheap that sort of thing actually is, and so I am the proud owner of a 20cm mirror ball to hang over my decks – and the motor to make it work. Not bad for a tenner, eh? I’m after a strobe next, although I suppose I’d better learn how to mix first.

Today
Our dynamic holiday gets better and better. Today we cleared our backlog of ironing – it only took 5 hours. Rock and roll!

The point of this is that I performed a mini mod on our Thecus storage box. The box is great at what it does, unfortunately it is also very whiny about it. It is a relatively small case, with two 320Gb disks spinning away generating heat, which Thecus chose to cool with a 4cm fan. The fan might be just enough to pull air through the case and keep everything cool enough (if 48C is considered cool enough) but it does this at around 4900RPM. The problem with 4900RPM is that it produces a very piercing whine when there are no other sounds around.

So I gave up yesterday and modded it to fit an 8cm fan to it. The case isn’t actually big enough to fit the fan into it so I have had to fit it externally using the tried and tested technique of cardboard and sticky tape (Frankenstein might now consider this box to be a friend of his).

Ignoring the looks of the thing the difference is unimaginable (4900RPM down to around 960RPM) on the noise front and it now pulls a lot more air through the case which does actually do some cooling. The additional cooling means that the disk is now running about 7C cooler than before which can only be a good thing.

Not got any photos yet but I’ll try and pop some up in a little while.

Sadly at the end of last week one of our neighbours was broken into and had his plasma telly stolen by some thieving scumbags. We discovered later that this was one of many ‘plasma breaks’ that have been happening in our area by a very organised group of criminals.

Our neighbour when he found out he had been burgled was only really worried about the data on his PC or the backups of it. We are exactly the same, although we don’t necessarily do the backups as regularly as we should.

The burglary has prompted us to sort it out as we would be really pissed off if we lost all our photos/music/emails so we’ve gone and bought some network storage. A lovely little black box we can hide in the house and only needs a network connection and power to it. For those of you that care it is a Thecus N2100, with a pair of Western Digital Raid Edition 320GB drives in a RAID 1 configuration. We are planning to find a cosy little home for it hidden away in a corner of the house and if the PCs get stolen so be it. The hardware can be replaced easily enough.

Setup of the box was not quite as easy as it should have been, changing to the latest firmware (currently 2.0.0) helped, and having disks that are tested and certified to work with it helped. Not sure on the network performance of it yet, I’ll be upgrading to gigabit at some point as it supports that.

I have been messing around with running a Windows 2003 Server box but it just runs too slowly on the old hardware I have spare. Instead that is going to become a games server.