The other day at work I paid a short visit to the ‘Thorpe Print Centre’ which is the main press for Archant (formally Eastern Counties Newspapers) primarily to install a new printer in one of the offices. While I was there I took the opportunity to take a few snaps of the press whilst it was churning out the daily Evening News paper. It’s a pretty impressive sight and is very reminiscent of bygone industrial days with tonnes of machinery whirring away deafeningly loudly and roles of paper flying around inside it. When first opened in 1995 the Thorpe press was supposedly the most advanced in Europe and is apparently due for a £12.5m upgrade soon to double its capacity. Unfortunately because of the poor lighting conditions many of my photos came out a little blurred except one which I am particularly pleased with:
Click for a bigger version
This is just a small part of the press which, as a whole, looks remarkably like a ‘character’ out of an 80’s children’s TV show (in my mind anyway) that entertained me for many an hour back then, namely Bertha!
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An interesting piece of film history was auctioned off today, among other items in London, for a massive £29,875 - The gruesome alien “chest-burster” (an embryonic monster) that emerges from John Hurt’s chest in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien was renowned for scaring audiences when first seen in the cinema long before I was even born! The model, which is hydraulically powered, was sold to Irish singer Chris de Burgh (no, I’ve never heard of him either!) who described it as “an iconic piece of science fiction film history”.
“In space no one can hear you scream”
I can’t personally imagine putting this sort of thing on my mantle-piece but each to his own! Rumor has it that when the infamous scene was filmed the actors didn’t really know what was going to happen and so what we see is their genuine reactions. Other rumors state that this is just a rumor. One thing I know for a fact is that the first time I saw it my reactions were pretty genuine!
“I know what you had for breakfast”
More on this story over at BBC News.
(N.B. This is my 100th post on the new blog system!!)
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Whoops… After re-directing the http router port onto the backup server last night whilst I upgraded the main server I forgot to direct it back which is why the site may have looked a little out of date the past few hours! As you may have guessed the server upgrade went according to plan if not quite as smoothly as intended (cloning a Linux installation isn’t as straightforward as I expected) and by 11pm last night I’d burnt off four shiny new DVD’s using K3b (running under Gnome). As I wanted my DVD drive to be region free I managed to find a great site which provides hacked versions of the official firmware. Amazingly they even have a program to flash it from Linux and my drive gained the added bonus from going from being able to write at 8x speed to 12x (DVD)! Effectively in the end you get a higher spec drive for a lot less.
I thought today I’d have a bit of a rant about computer waste. Having dumped a couple of tonnes of old and broken kit recently at work (see pictures below) it was struck home to me the rate at which we must be filling up land-fill sites. If a computers average lifespan is 2-4 years then already there must be a huge number of them awaiting decommission around the world and even if they work they are practically useless to anyone and have no monetary value. Companies can’t even give them away because of electrical safety and data protection issues!
At this rate you can imagine that we’re going to have some major disposal problems before long (some places already do). As ever I imagine that this problem will be ignored like everything else until it’s staring us in the face with refuse collection outlets being no longer able to take the stuff. Recycling seems like an obvious solution but if it costs more to recycle something than it does to produce something new then few are likely to go down that route. It’s a rather bleak outlook on this front.
If you thought that was interesting… 
why not head over and download the latest episodes of Samurai 7 which I’ll be watching tonight probably.
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Just a quick not to say that there may be a short period of server downtime this evening when I turn things off to install a new 250GB hard drive and a DVD Writer - this should take about an hour all things going well and should be done by 9pm at the latest. Once the new HD is installed that’ll bring the server’s total storage capacity up to a whopping 620GB! For those who think that’s a bit OTT believe me I need it - At the current rate of expansion I’m getting through around 5-10GB a week which is a fair old chunk. Although all important document type data is backed up nightly there is simply too much media type stuff to do the same for so if I have a HD failure then I’m going to be in on VERY bad mood. See you on the other side!
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Formula 1 is one of the few sports that I quite like watch of a Sunday afternoon when I’m at home - everything else is just boring (where’s the fun in kicking a ball round a bit of grass etc?!). There’s something about watching cars going round a track at 100mph plus with the possibility that they’ll plough into a wall or each other at any second that defiantly appeals. Today was the British Grand Prix, held at Silverstone, no prizes for guessing who won! Although the weather wasn’t spectacular it could have been a lot worse and there were a few hairy moments with a pretty spectacular cash for Jarno Trulli who luckily walked away unhurt.
After a show drive through central London by a number of old drivers the other day there has been talk of the British Grand Prix moving to capital which to my mind sounds like a great idea if the logistical problems could be worked out not to mention the financial implications. A proposed map of the route the race might take can be seen here.
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