All the way from Cambridge

Just home after meeting up with Paul, his mother, and brother whilst they are trekking all over London this week. We had a few beers down at the Cittie of York pub.  This place is great, not only do they produce their own beers, but they are so cheap.  £2 (GBP) for a pint. Not bad in central London.

We then went for dinner in Covent Garden, oddly enough at the same resturaunt as I went too when Bill was over here. Crazy.

I think we started to bore his brother towards the end of the night, but his mother was right in there discussing Apache with us.

Great company, nice food and drink. Best of all - putting a face to the name. It’s not quite the same just looking at photo’s it’s good to get out and meet these folks.

Earlier today I was on the end of yet another presentation. Only this time I walked out wanting to buy the service(s) on offer.  Webroot are a provider of hosted email, and web filtering tools.  My employer currently uses an alternate solution, but sufficed to say after today’s meeting we may be looking elsewhere.

The product is far superior to that of all it’s competitors. 24×7 support, true TLS support, BC capabilities, mail archiving and LDAP support.  The presentation literally blew me away with the features, quality of the product and more simply the speed of the portal.

I am hopeful this will be the end to a few of my bugbears with the current supplier.

Today Alice and I became members of the National Trust.  This means that we can now visit any of their venues/sites and gain free admission.  We have been meaning to do this for goodness knows how long.  We decided to do it after a visit to Anglesey Abbey in Lode, Cambridgeshire.

On Wednesday my dearly beloved, no not the wife, this one is due for it’s first service since the wife and I bought the car at the back end of last year.  I am quietly worried about the cost of this, I have heard many scary things about BMW service costs. Oh well. it’s what comes with the territory I supose.

Here’s to many more miles of happy zipping and zooming about.

Bah!

Windows popped up today and told me I may have been using illegal version of Microsoft software. Whaaaaat? This is a $work installation of Vista. Using the VLK.  The error I was presented with is :

Code: 0×8007232B
Description: DNS name does not exist.

Odd, I had no other issues with name resolution.  A lot of google bashing resulted in one suggested error that during the initial install the network drivers failed to load quickly enough to complete the activation process. Resulting in this limbo state.

The Fix: Right click my computer, select “Re Enter My Product Key” - Do this and allow the process to complete.  Voilla! All works fine now.  Phew!

It’s come round to the time where I am now in the market for a new drum kit.  I haven’t bought a kit for over 4 years now, and I seem to have lost touch with who is good, and more importantly who is not.

in the past I have always bought premier, or tama kits. I know these names and their kits well.  But, a lot folks seem to pushing kits made by Mapex.  I have never heard of them, nor played on one.  Has anyone else played, or better yet owned one of these?  I have found some interesting looking kits on ebay, here and here. Yes I know, ebay is not the best of places to buy stuff these days, but you can get a feel for what’s what in the market.

What I am after is a recommendation as to whether or not Mapex is a brand worth investing in.