A while back, I posted about how I was getting a lot of problems on Firefox 1.5 with it being unable to find servers the first time round. It was bloody annoying, and making me head towards disliking FF1.5.

However, I was mistaken. It wasn’t Firefox’s fault at all. It turns out that the weekend before I installed 1.5, we had a contractor in the office setting up a couple of servers. In the process, he broke the network a bit, and utterly chiffed the DNS settings on the network.

For the non-geeky : DNS settings are the bit that translate www.website.com to its true address (say, 182.219.201.87) – which means you don’t need to remember a string of numbers, just www.website.com . If the DNS settings are chiffed, then you don’t get to see websites.

We’ve now fixed the problem, DNS is working OK, and Firefox finds websites first time.

So I’d like to apologise for being pissed off with a bit of software that was working just fine – it was a problem due to something else entirely.

Sometimes timing is strange. For instance, it takes me roughly 20 minutes to walk from home to the rail station in the morning. The train leaves at 8.50 (ish). If I leave at 8.25, I’m always at least five minutes late when I get to the station, and thus miss my train. However, if I leave at 8.15, I’m there by 8.35 and freeze my arse off on the platform for quarter of an hour.

So – why do the times change like that? To be honest, I have no idea. I’d like to know though – it’s one of those annoying things. You think you’ll be there just perfectly on time, and you’re late. You give it a few more minutes so you know you won’t miss it, and get there in record time. Bizarre.

In addition to the stuff I wrote about in the previous post, two more things…

I’ve just seen a learner driver, accompanied by her instructor, attempt to turn the wrong way – ignoring the sodding great blue and white “turn right only” sign – into the one-way system. Fortunately, the road was clear of oncoming traffic, but still, rather than stopping her and getting her to do a three-point-turn to go the right way, the instructor instead got her to carry on down the road until the first (thankfully close) turn off to the right, and go down there.

Now, maybe it’s a first lesson, maybe she hasn’t got to the three-point-turn bit, maybe he just thought it would be an element of added danger to be turning round, but Jesus H Christ, what an example to set. “Oh, you’ve gone the wrong way. Well, just carry on doing it, then turn off when you can”.

Which brings me to the second – bizarrely linked – thing. A man died in a motorway crash over the weekend (and injured three others at the same time) driving the wrong way down the M6. Apparently he’d driven 14 bloody miles the wrong way, down a motorway. Maybe he thought he was the only one driving the correct way. Maybe he was just a fuckwit. Either way, it’s a scary process.

Apparently, from today bad drivers in London can be fined up to £100 for things like blocking box junctions, ignore road-signs, and misuse bus lanes. And about bloody time too.

I find it amazing how crap a large majority of drivers really are. I get to see it every day from the office, the people who don’t understand the one-way system, and miss the “no-entry” signs completely, then have to reverse in order to go the correct way. Truly scary.

The more people are made aware of shitty driving skills, the better. That’s my (not so) humble opinion, anyway.

A while back, Herself promised to get me a Sony PSP for my birthday. It was one of those things I didn’t really need but one of the guys at work had got one on the day of release, and I was pretty impressed with the entire thing. So yeah, it was on my “oooh, oooh” list.

Come the birthday, and it didn’t materialise for reasons like everywhere being out of stock. Fairly good reasons, to be fair. So Herself said she’d get it for me for Christmas instead – and I placed an order for one with Amazon, which she could pay for. Easy. Only, of course, Amazon are – on occasions such as this – tossers, and were out of stock, and couldn’t guarantee delivery even in time for Christmas. Bearing in mind it was ordered on about Nov 10th, I figure that’s a bit of a piss-take.

Anyway, last week I got an email from Dabs.com saying they’d got PSP “Giga Packs” in stock now, so I ordered it. And lo, it arrived the next day. Unfortunately, this was a whole month before Christmas, and I’m crap at the entire willpower thing. So Herself tried to motivate me…

“If you can not open it, and leave it ’til Christmas, I’ll buy it. However, you can open it now, but you’ll have to pay for it, and I’ll get you something else for Christmas”.

Of course, it didn’t work. I managed to wait a whole three days before cracking, but crack I did.

And it’s great – I’m still impressed with the entire thing. I’ve been playing Wipeout Pure and Colin McRae rally (you get the idea of the kind of games I like) since then, and it’s still cool. Once I’ve sorted out PC stuff, I’ll also be ripping DVDs or Tivo’d programmes onto the 1Gb memory stick that came with it, and that’ll be cool too.

I know, I’m sad – but hey, what the hell, it’s a gadget. And it was never going to survive untouched for a month. Like the man said, “I can resist everything but temptation”.

So yes, “The Woman In White”. It’s off to a bad start in my book by being by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, but we’ll gloss over that for the moment.

All told, it was an enjoyable performance. Certainly over-done and over-acted in some scenes, but in a way that kind of fits with the entire “Victoriana” theme of the production. The set itself is technically fantastic, with sections moving around, revolving, and also having projections put on them to set the scene – very technical, but excellently done. On a couple of occasions the changes and perspective alterations became quite dizzying and disorientating, but overall it was an interesting way of providing the scenes etc.

Lloyd-Webber himself is still a plagiarising twat though. I keep finding myself identifying bits of rhythms within the songs, and sometimes that can be quite jarring. I swear that one of the main themes throughout the production actually uses the chorus chords from “Hey, Macarena!”. So you can imagine how annoying that is.

Overall though, it was an enjoyable way to spend a manky cold November afternoon. I wouldn’t want to see it again, but I’m glad that I did see it. If that makes any sense at all…