Luke Sheldrick's Blog

Christmas 2008, is all but over now, just NYE to go, which reminds me I still haven’t planned anything. This year I joined the extended family in Norfolk. My brother (Paul), Sister-in-law (to be / Sally) and Sally’s folks (Carole and Roy) stayed in a wood lodge in the woods, which was pretty nice. Well once we’d worked out the heating. The rest all stayed else where, but usually visited in the evenings. The lodge below reminded me of something from a horror film.

The view however was pretty nice to wake up to;

The drive up there and back wasn’t too bad, I did have my iPhone tracking it, just for the hell of it, but haven’t found a way to show the route on here yet. This was where we were staying however;



Interestingly the tracker had a spazm when I first set it up, but still registers I go everywhere at 14658 mph… if only.

Christmas day we had lunch at the local restaurant, which was nice… still can’t ever beat a home cooked roast though, and I really missed the Turkey sandwiches for days after
The place was near to Cromer, where a lot of the extended family live. Didn’t actually get to see much of the scenery, but am sure will go back soon enough.

Had to come home on Saturday, as first day back in the office on Sunday, which was rather difficult. Having almost 6 weeks off, then coming back to work…ekk! The worst was yesterday, having to get up at 5am again… yuck. Still only one more day shift in the week (Friday) then back on night shifts… which are usually quiet.

Finally got my flickr account slightly more up to date. I was trying to do it whilst I was away, but my 3G card had no signal, along with my iPhone (actually nobody had any signal), there was no wifi around. With the exception of the local pub where it was £6 an hour, and ran at silly speeds, still didn’t stop my brother and I paying for our occasional fix.

The eee 701 being my laptop I take everywhere, the HP my brothers. Essential Diet Cokes

Also found a cool plugin from tantannoodles which integrates my flickr account with my blog. Had to hack most of the css, so it sort of looks like the rest of the blog.

Some of the Christmas photo’s can be seen below, or the album here.

Today is Remembrance Sunday, where we remember our fallen Soldiers.  Those served and sacrificed in their roles protecting the Country, and our way of life.

Both my Granddad and Nan (on my Fathers side) served in the Second World war. My Nan, was an Engineer on the fighter planes, and my Granddad on the frontline. Ted, was captured and was a Japanese prisoner of war. I never met him, he passed away before I was born, as were my Grandparents on my Mothers side. Some of the stories my Nan told me about what he went through made my stomach churn. They were were served a small bowl of plain rice a day, and the conditions they were subjected to, well you can probably imagine, weren’t very pleasant.

Today are thoughts are with them all. My thought’s are also with the men and women serving today. I went to school with a few guys who are actively serving in Iraq, hopefully they’ll come home safely.

So, it would seem like I haven’t had 5 minutes to update my blog in what seems like ages… what with being busy with work, visiting friends & family, geeking, and generally being out, my time seems a bit sparse.

I went to a gig Friday with a couple of friends, to see Metronomy. I’d heard about them a a few weeks before, and fallen in love with their album… I must admit, the gigs I’ve been going to, before I went to them, I wouldn’t have said I would like, but how wrong I was.

When we arrived on Friday, it was a treat to find out that Micachu and The Cock’n'Bull Kid were supporting. I’d seen both of them previously. Both of them I really enjoyed, both previously and Friday. Micachu is a really cool act to watch, their ‘Electonics’ band member is amazing to watch, making sounds out of loads of geekery toys.

Then came Metronomy, the crowd went wild… it was such a good amosphere. For a quiet small venue, the crowd certainly made up for it, there was even crowd surfing. They came on, to a dark stage, and when each member did their part of the intro, they switched on a light on their t-shirt. All a bit tacky maybe, but still very cool. Their act was flawless.

Can’t really put into words how good it all was. I’d totally recommend all 3, even if it’s not the genre you’d normally listen to.

If you were interested in any of them, find the links below:
The Cock’n'Bull Kid
Micachu
Metronomy

I also had to sign up to myspace again, as they wouldn’t let me reopen my account from a few years back. I only plan to use it for tracking bands, but if you’re on there, feel free to add me [link]

Well not really, but the whole giving up drinking and shaving until November fell through. Nevermind, the hangover’s were worth it.. not

You know, I always have a load of shit, I think I should blog about, but when I get 5 to actually sit down and type something up, I’ve either forgot about it, or well think it does indeed sound shit so forget about it.

Friday saw a few drinks after work, which led to 2 bars, 2 clubs and ending up losing a wad in the casino…. this is when you realise that first shot was a bad, very bad idea. Nevermind, had a good night [what I can remember of it anyways].

Spent the weekend working, and starting to play with Gentoo. I’m sure I’ll rant more about that all later. Today found an absolutely brilliant tool, that I had kinda been looking for a while. I run a couple of servers, that run Windows 2003, and VMWare Server 1.0.7, mostly just as R&D machines. I could look into setting up a nice ESX cluster, but I just haven’t got around to it. Also on the list to look play with is Xen and KVM. KVM especially looks quite interesting, just been bought out by RedHat, and boasts that it can run more on your hardware than VMWare can.

Anyways I digress, what I currently do is pretty bad in way of backing up my VM Guests, in that I will every now and again, turn one off, copy it’s directory on the host, switch it back on, and move that copy offsite. Whilst it works, and is better than nothing, it’s not really ideal as it causes an outage when I do it. I know with Windows Shadow Copy it can copy/mirror drives [including any locked files] but what I wanted to be able to do was the odd locked file, i.e. the vmdk that’s locked. Bring in hobocopy. Does exactly what I was looking for, you can tell it a source and destination file or directory, and it will use the Microsoft Shadow service, and mirror it for you, complete, and intact. Perfect! it even has the functionality to do incrimental backups using a state file. Wouldn’t work for VMWare files, as it would just see the file as being changed, even though only 1meg of the 100GB file has changed, it would still copy the whole flat file. Baring that, an excellent tool. Now just to setup a schdule to make a mirror, and rsync it offsite, and a nice enterprise offsite backup, for nothing

Tonight I went out with a few friends, to The Royal Albert Hall, to see cocknbullkid when my friend told me about it, I kinda didn’t believe it, but yes it was true. Very good artist, even if the sound levels were a bit off, and the set seemed a bit short, really enjoyed it. Then off to soho for a coffee. Was a bit weird walking around soho sober, looks totally different to when you’ve had 10 double black russians Just for proof, picture below of the comp’ed ticket I / we managed to blag at the door

Today see’s many o things, not that I am going to discuss on the open t’internets…. but on a more non/public way, I have just closed my facebook profile…. a number of reasons they include:

• Am getting too much info following stories, it’s like real life soap drama’s. I don’t have time to follow them.
• Too contactable, I am feeling like every inch of my life, is contactable via facebook.
• Too tempted to right shitty statue, which no-one really cares about, and doesn’t really help anything.
• Don’t fancy the upcoming unheartfelt, happy birthday messages, so I’ll save you the trouble.

This will be a temporary feature, I expect, but at least 7 calender days…. I wonder if I’ll break. For all of those that I have replied to messages with, sorry you’ll just have to email me.

Many a thing I would like to blog about, but not that stupid, not even after a few beers…. going to bed I think, looking forward to a hangover… thanks Stella