So on Saturday morning Ben, Dave, Robin and I all drove towards Vegas in separate cars. On the way there we met up with Andy and George. Sadly Andy & George were sharing a car, a concept that I just couldn’t get on with. A front wheel drive car at that.

The drive to Vegas was relatively dull. I did enjoy this particular piece of truck-moving excellence.

I15, the highway from Pasadena to Vegas, is quite hilly.

This further revealed the crapness of my car. At 75mph, with cruise control on, the car’s auto-box would be in fourth gear. That also happens to be its highest ratio. The road would go uphill, and I’d notice the speed drop to just below 70, at which point the car would have to change to 3rd. This is on a freeway, not a steep mountain road! To actually get the thing back up to 75 I needed to floor it, forcing it to drop to 2nd. Awful! Really frustrating for those following me in better cars too – sorry guys!

Once in Vegas we had an excellent boys night out – no photos I’m afraid! Las Vegas at night is awesome!

We stayed at a fairly minging hotel called Tropicana, and walked to Palms for a night out. Be warned – that’s a 40 minute walk! The next day we rose late and had a hearty breakfast in Hooters. The girls were joining us for the next two nights, so we had booked a rather more swanky hotel for that duration: the MGM grand.

Quick sidenote – the US practise of permitting a right turn at a junction even when the lights are red (UK equivalent turning left) is brilliant. I think it would really improve traffic flow over here. Of course, their inability to cope with the concept of a free-flowing roundabout more than destroys any overall advantage the turn on red might give them.

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, in Las Vegas.

In Vegas, there are escalators on the street. Wow!

Our hotel was immense. Walking from the room to reception? 7 minutes, solid walking. To the car in the adjoining car park? Another 7 or so minutes. The casino flow stretched as far as the eye could see, with countless restaurants, bars, shops and facilities. We counted 3 branches of Starbucks within our hotel. There might well be more – there’s no way we explored the whole place – we hadn’t brought hiking gear! Oh I nearly forgot to mention, there was a pride of lions living in our hotel foyer too.

On the Saturday night the others went out to see a magic show. I was more interested in sleeping – so got 11 much needed quality hours in. Turns out the only thing I really felt I missed was the most hilarious restaurant name:

On Sunday we set about exploring Vegas by day. We nipped across the walkway from our hotel into our neighbouring ‘resort’ – “New York New York”.

New York was like our hotel in terms of scale. No lions, but instead they had a rollercoaster running throughout the building which popped out onto the roof for a bit too. This next picture was taken inside:

A veritable indoor city. We set about having breakfast. Ben won my holiday award for best breakfast: he had two huge slices of pizza, a large bottle of Peroni and a massive Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

We then took the monorail and went for a wonder. I found this great car with the licence plate “LOW MOE”.

Did Ben & Sarah get married in Vegas? Was Elvis really a witness?

We went up the Stratosphere tower – 1,000 ft above the strip.

From right on top, the views were immense!

Yes, there’s even a Starbucks up there too! There are a few white knuckle rides up there – including this one for grade A loonies:

We then nipped to Mirage – another ‘resort’ (hotel). They had a zoo. As you do.

We returned to the hotel for a quick rest and a drink, and then set out to explore the city by night.

We saw the Bellagio fountains do their thing:

And saw some more great hotel receptions:

On the Monday be popped to the Venetian on our way out of Vegas. Unreal! Full on canals, St Mark’s Square, punts, the lot! Yes, the photo below is again, taken indoors.

Then it was goodbye to Vegas, and we pointed our cars at Arizona.

Since my own wedding last August, the next great event on the horizon has been Robin’s wedding in California. We flew out without a problem from Heathrow’s terminal 5, and landed in LAX around 4pm on a sunny Thursday afternoon. The first job was to collect our cars. We all know that there aren’t any good American cars at all, but they do at least have lots of entertaining V8s. Sadly I couldn’t justify the cost of one of these, but I could afford a 2.7 litre V6 Dodge Charger. You may recall that a 1969 Dodge Charger was the star of TV’s “Dukes of Hazzard”. That’s about the only credibility this hire car had – in all other respects it was, as fully expected, rubbish. Still, it gave a great opportunity for an aviator “Licence, and registration” style picture:

It was at least in a decent colour, and had alloy wheels. Sadly, Ben’s had neither of these redeeming qualities.

A short drive had me convinced that this was in fact a 1.0 litre eco edition, such was the distressing lack of performance. I had to stop and check.

Sadly it was indeed a 2.7 V6. It was just incredibly shit. As expected.

Fortunately our hotel wasn’t too far away, and had a rather redeeming view.

To keep costs down, Ben, Sarah, Di and I were sharing a hotel room. Domitory style farting and snoring comedy was certainly the order of the day! I tried to move the beds further apart to ease the pain but typically this ended in bed-leg-breaking disaster.

The next day we set out to explore the local area. I managed to avoid the 5-0 ( I would be less fortunate in Arizona).

We stopped at Manhattan beach where I not only saw the Pacific ocean for the first time in my life, but even put a foot in it. It was damn cold.

We swanned around Beverley Hills, took in Hollywood Boulevard, and ended up on the Hollywood hills overlooking Los Angeles.

A quick picture taken on Hollywood Boulevard for the benefit of my colleagues!

On Saturday morning we checked out and wafted through Downtown LA to Pasedena (damn sat-nav was stuck on shortest route!). Pasadena is significantly nicer than LA main.

In Pasadena we met Robin, Jamie, Dave and Jen. Here are the boys ready for their stag do – we’re off to Vegas next!

Today marks the end of a rather crazy wedding holiday season for me, so here is some long overdue retro-blogging fuelled by jet lag. Our company’s founder, Matt McNeill, was married at the end of March. Sadly this clashed with Robin’s wedding, but I was able to attend the stag weekend, which took place in Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.

It was a short trip to a beautiful part of the world, for typical man-events: eating, paint-balling, eating, karting, eating, boozing and eating. There was a lot of eating. A LOT. Up at 4:00am on the Friday morning, we had a pre-breakfast of fried sausages and onions in pitta bread accompanied by a bottle of Leffe. Then at Stanstead at 6:30am, a full english breakfast with two pints of Carling. We continued in this vein, pausing only to relocate, shoot each other, and kart(!).

Just after a delicious lunch in Santiago on Friday:

Some karting on the Saturday morning:

I must pause to enthuse about this circuit. Safety briefing: no. Marshals and flags: no. Quick, reliable karts: yes. Karts easy to oversteer: yes. Beer on sale during pit stops: yes. Blind eye turned to obvious, deliberate and malicious contact during racing: yes. Wonderful! Easily the best karting, ever.

A great weekend away, and what a reminder of what warm weather is like. Roll on summer!

We’ve got a 40″ LCD TV made by Humax. We paid about £500 for it in early 2007, and up until recently I’ve been really very pleased with it. My mind has been changed because the remote control was becoming less and less responsive, and now it does nothing at all.

I had dismissed issues such as flat batteries and dirty lenses on transmitters and receivers, and so turned to the internet for help. Here’s an interesting way of telling whether your remote control is broadcasting anything at all. This is a photo taken with my SLR, of my point-and-shoot camera pointing at the end of the remote control.

Button not pressed:

And now when the button is pressed:

It’s faint, but you should be able to see a dim blue light in there. Due to this flickering it’s very hard to take a photo, but when looking at the point-and-shoot’s screen with the naked eye, the flicker is very bright indeed.

Anyway, this proved that the remote was at least firing. It is possible that it is broken in some way, but I can’t check for that so I’m going to proceed on the basis that the remote is fine. So I turned my attention to the TV.

Getting the TV apart was quite easy. I was generally impressed by the engineering and the way in which it is screwed together.

Eventually I got to the IR board.

I fired up the TV and tried pointing the remote directly at the receiver in the hope that the TV case was dirty, but no luck. I took the multimeter to the pins on the IR receiver and found 5V, earth, and a third pin that wobbled around 3.5V regardless of remote control interaction – I guess I need an oscilloscope to get any further there. I re-flowed the solder on the IR receiver’s three pins to be sure there were no dry joints, but still no luck.

So at this point I’ve put the TV back together and have sent an email to Humax’s support department to see if I can source a replacement IR board. What’s interesting is that the TV’s buttons are connected to the left of that board, and the cable on the right leads into the TV proper. So as the TV’s buttons work (it’d be useless now without those!) I’d have thought the problem is localised to the IR receiver or the few components around it.

Should be pence to fix really, but without more knowledge and assistance it looks like we will have to buy another TV. In this age of vast consumerism that seems quite a shame.

Anyway, for now the TV at least works. I can certainly use the exercise generated by the lack of remote control.

Apologies to the petrolheads out there for whom this will be gobbledegook, but I’ll try to make this comprehensible as I hope it will help others travelling the ‘net. My home server appeared to break itself while I was away this weekend. That may seem like an outrageous claim, but really – it was fine, I switched it off, I went away, I switched it on again, and it was broken.

Being a scientific sort, I’d better define broken. It booted, but the graphical user interface (GUI) wouldn’t start. It turns out that last week I applied a yum update (a bit like Windows update) which updated the X server (the graphical interface part of the server). This wasn’t properly tested for a hardware configuration similar to mine, and it broke everything.

A bit of internet research soon showed that other people had suffered the same problem, and today a kind soul has posted i386 fix instructions. I’ve adapted these for x86_64 users (like me):

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=215255#13

Honk honk! 

I have just been sent some snail mail by BMW Vines group. One of the highlights of their feature appears to be “The new 116d – the most efficient BMW yet”.

As you can imagine, I am beside myself with excitement and will trade the M5 for one first thing in the morning.

Diane and I took the M5 to Exeter yesterday to visit some friends. This afternoon, I decided to nip across to Dartmoor so I could photograph the M5 in a favourite spot. ‘Dup’ in 2005.

Wol in 2007.

Sadly I can’t find the photo of ‘rul’ there, but here’s the M5 surveying Dartmoor as its predecessors have over the years:

The car of course behaved like an absolute monster, roaring its way across Dartmoor. It was a fantastic day – sun shining, not too much traffic,ultimate super saloon performance and a V8 soundtrack to die for. So we charged around the area stopping for the odd photo.

At one point the M5 instructed me to check its brake lights, and lo and behold, one needed replacing. A quick trip to Newton Abbot’s Halfords saw that sorted.

Overall the trip was an absolute pleasure in the M5 – managed it all on just the one fuel tank too!

Awesome car.