Patrick Stewart vs James Corden

First off I've seen most of this awards ceremony and James Corden was an arse... he frequently used the people who came up onto the stage as the butt of his jokes..... and I think Patrick just brought him down a peg or two..... lets face it he's a knight of the realm, a distinguished Shakespearian actor and a star of many films....

James Corden on the other hand has accomplished .... ohhh let me see .... ahh yes....."Gavin and Stacy" which brought him to the public eye...... he is nowhere near the altitude of Patrick Stewart and simply never will be.... Patrick was probably incensed by his attitude as I would have been in his shoes......if you're getting paid to do something at least have the common decency to look like you want to be there and don't try to insult people to get a laugh.... and yes .... tuck your shirt in nobody wants to see your expansive muffin top....


Good on you Patrick !!! there is no excuse for bad manners ..... and you didn't die on stage.... you made James Corden look utterly stupid.... as he so rightly deserved.... it is he who went down like a Messerschmitt in flames

not you :)

Patrick Stewart wasn't there to be funny whereas James Corden was (meant to be)... it's a shame that James Corden had such an Titanic and epic fail in the humour department..... his one liners were about as funny as drowning kittens..... there is a fine line between being stupid and rude........ or funny.... I guess two out of three isn't bad..... he should just stick to being funny in future

iPod 5.5 video 30GB

Well my iPod coughed and died again.... probably because Freya had been using it as a hammer to bash some toy or other (with it switched on).... I tried everything to revive it...

From firing up Linux and using gparted and disk utility, reformatting it with foreign file systems, running badblocks on it, you name it I ran it.... I even loaded DOS USB drivers via the ASPI interface and tried to run Spinrite on it but it still failed....

Then I went into the iPod diagnostics (reset followed by holding down rewind and select whilst it was booting) .... I went into the IO area and looked at the smart data which said it had :-

Retracts = 86
Reallocs = 371
Pending sectors = 151
power on hours = 1127
start stops = 10703

so obviously (to me at least) it knew it had bad blocks but it hadn't remapped them, the difficulty was telling the hard drive where it's bad blocks were .... I have to admit I stumbled across it by accident, you can't "really" access the iPod at such a low level because the operating system "thinks" it's only 7.1 GB so obviously the firmware on the iPod does some fancy remapping of the disk surface via the partition....

Ahhh I thought.... the iPod firmware must look after bad sectors simply by mapping them out at filesystem level not hardware level.... so each time you format your iPod you must lose this bad block map, hence why you always get back to square one each time you restore your iPod... so I experimented and tried to sync the iPod several times.... each time I rebooted the iPod (after it failed) and looked at the diagnostic smart data.... low and behold each time I did this the Reallocs went up and the pending sectors went down....I repeated this until the iPod started syncing without failing....

My iPod is now syncing happily after remapping the bad area(s) on the disk (automatically I might add) ... once it's finished I'll recover the iPod again and see if the bad blocks stay remapped... Well..... I like to prove a theory rather than take it as gospel

London

We took a short break to London and decided to use the underground and other public transport.... and basically do all the cheesy touristy things tourists do..... my feet very nearly fell off several times.... I have no idea how many miles we walked.... but I have to say we enjoyed it immensely ....

The weather was good for the first day and we went walkabout to Covent Garden and generally bimbled about until it was time to go back to the Hotel ......then on the second day it was raining for pretty much all of it so we decided to do the natural history museum.... we didn't get to see the Dinosaur collection other than Dippy in the front part of the museum but he was pretty impressive on his own..... this was because it was raining outside and it was half term.... so half of the nations kids descended on the museum at once....

We emerged from the restaurant they have in the museum and were surrounded by screaming kids....... making headway through the place was pretty unpleasant in parts.... more like rush hour on one of the tube stations than a nice quiet museum....needless to say the queue for the Dinosaur exhibition was immense with a half hour wait at least endlessly winding back and forth like a snake in the neat zig zag lanes... at this point FOMO boy was getting bored and Freya was starting to get Glaswegian... to the executive decision was made to leave....

But still, it was enjoyable and we took a fair few photographs whilst there.... although my poor camera didn't cope too well with the lighting in there and the flash was almost completely pointless.... so after the rain stopped enough to venture out we decided to navigate over to the London Eye with Andrea's dog eared and trusty map of London.....

Well it had to be done.... and once there it was surprisingly quick to get on .... I was expecting at least an hour or so wait but no .... we got on very quickly we probably waited less than 20 minutes....... I'd recommend you do the 4D experience before the "flight" .... (prepare to get wet and watch out for that first seagull ......)

It has some really stunning views over London unfortunately the thick glass of the capsule (designed to stop idiots from trying to jump through it.....) took something away from the photographs.... I think they are starting to get a little hazy with UV light so it gives your photographs a sort of washed out colour.... although to the naked eye they look quiet clear.... weird..... I suppose it simply could have been pollution .... who knows.... either way it was a stunning view....

We then polished off the day with a visit to the Rainforest Cafe.... I'd recommend this place if you have kids .... Freya and Andrew loved it .... it's hard to describe unless you've been but it's worth every (expensive) penny....and the meal was delicious ... always a bonus :)

On the last day we all went to the swimming pool in the morning at the Hotel and had a swim and a jacuzzi a bit of steam room and Sauna.... then checked out ... all in all a brilliant way to top off the short break ....we took time out to meet up with my sister Christine in Trafalgar Square (Andrew's favourite place) .... I think Trafalgar Square blew FOMO boy away by the sheer size of it and he particularly liked the Lions.... although the second time he tried to sit on them the sun had been shining for most of the morning and short trousers and red hot bronze got him off the Lion much quicker than he got on it..... (first lesson in conduction of heat)

We sat in the square had a beer and a chat for a while then we all went off to St James Park for a picnic..... and got mobbed by pigeons and squirrels .... Christine had to be in work by 4pm so we idled away our time wandering about until it was time to catch our train at Paddington.... albeit a bit too much time idled away....


We missed it !!! ..... but got the next one and hit Carmarthen station around midnight... I think I was the only one awake at that point.....

an absolutely brilliant time....but tiring.....we packed a lot more than that into the three days there but it would have made intensely boring reading.... in fact I'm surprised you've got this far !!!!

describing a break/holiday ..... is almost as bad as somebody whipping out a thick photo album of their camping holiday in Scunthorpe complete with train spotting pictures ..... :)