The more accurate diary. (Old stuff)

Warning: These are old.

October 2
Alan gone away again :( Sniffle. His racking (or parts of it) arrived and he spent a merry several hours building it. I have instructions to watch the post for a number of other things whilst he is away, which is a nusisance, as it means I can't go away until they arrive.

Wandering around the new house, jumping at noises still. Eep.

Rest of September
More boxes. Discovered the speed of cablemodem. Mozilla now take two minutes instead of two hours to download. Whee. Tried to clear space in home directory and did rm on the wrong bit. Oh well, that's what backups are for.


September 27
Spent the morning with hammer, nails, cable pins (or whatever the word is), and one hundred metres of ethernet cable from downstairs to the machine room.

Spent the afternoon enjoying the fruits of the morning's labour. (Mailing lists and email, principally.)

Spent the evening thinking, "Damn, where did the time go?"

September 23
We have now moved house, and Alan has his net access back. He even plugged my machine in, too. I would be happier if my monitor and (or even or) keyboard were plugged into it as well. I can currently only play on this new wonderful connection when I can get him off his machine so I can ssh in remotely on mine (like now: good heavens, I can use a text editor across the network and see the letters change as I type!)

Tired of my plaints on this issue, he has given me 100 metres of twisted pair ethernet cable and invited me to sort my own connection out. Ha very ha. It is rather frustrating to learn of the wonderful speed of the net just when you can't get on it, so I may have to try to do this. Expect me when you see me.

Currently I am hip-deep in boxes still to sort out, but this is an improvement from neck-deep, a few days ago. I have been keeping a sort of diary on the laptop, but by the time I work out how to plug it in, it will be Christmas.

Back to the boxes.

September 18
Unsubscribed or suspended subscriptions from tons of mailing lists. Someone should write a tool to do this.

Packed more boxes; filled many more binbags. Where did we get all this... *stuff*? Alan has a wobbling tower of filled boxes in the computer room, and still all the computers to do. I still have five bookcases to do. Ugh. Alan has a cold, too. Alan + cold + dust -> very loud sneezes. Went for a curry to attempt to make him well (and also I have packed much of the kitchen. Whoops).

September 17
Stared listlessly at boxes. Put things in them. Looked at rest of contents of rooms. Headed for binbags.

Eyed the list of bugs Alan and Malcolm fixed, recalled my threats to close them all, and then realised I had to send cc's to people so they'd know they were closed, which meant picking the right email addresses out of the long list. Sounds like a job for a script. Oh dear..

September 16
Boxes arrived to pack possessions up in. Alan has filled several upstairs with parts of the computer room and it looks no emptier. Downstairs, I am taking the opportunity to get rid of stuff, but he doesn't know that yet. Move imminent. The first machine to get connected back onto the net will be one of Alan's (surprise), and it emerges that the plan about logistics and avoiding dropping mail could be more... well, it could exist for a start. Ho hum. Don't be surprised if I vanish for a while.

People are still desperately keeping their petrol tanks full, which is not having a good effect on petrol supplies, and supermarkets had to ration bread and milk in some parts of the country because we all turn out to be totally selfish. Forget leaving something for the next person to buy. We must have it all, personally, ourselves, now! People are complaining about the "state" of public transport as if it's a surprise to them, and then justifying more car use by this. ("You can't expect me to use public transport when it's like that?" "Why not? I do.") No-one is thinking, "Well, perhaps we should invest in public transport and make it usable". (For comparisons, the only place I know with worse public transport is America, and Europe is by and large way ahead of us.) And, apparently, the government has plunged in popularity because it didn't drop the price of petrol. First time in a while I have actually approved of anything it's done :) Oh, the bicycle shops are rumoured to be happy, too.

September 15
Messed with DocBook and more GNOME FAQ stuff. jade resolutely produces the link from the copyright mark to a page containing the licence text, but it refuses to produce the page containing the licence text itself. Sigh.

Just getting used to the lack of traffic noise and it started again. Boo. :)

September 14
Made a pretty list of bugs to close in the bug-tracker because Alan regards that kind of thing as too much effort. More windows got done in the new house. It is now almost habitable.
September 13
Lots of car-owners panicking about petrol. Lots of car owners using public transport for the first time. Lots of car-owners not knowing where the stops are or to have their change ready in their hand or even what the price is, I suspect. Swansea is quiet. It emerges that about half the cars that are normally parked in our road are parked without permits, because it was amazingly empty today. In fact, Swansea is blissfully quiet. I nenver realised how much noise was in the background until today.

Apparently all the fuss about the environment, reducing pollution and so on, doesn't count when it involves the price of petrol, and you only call the police in when you're being picketed if it's a union picket. When it's people not in unions, then you just sit there.

Forgot to panic-buy. Went to local restaurant which is usually too busy to get into instead. Yum.

September 12
Booked removal van "if there's petrol". Watched the BBC website for news, got rumours and news via friends elsewhere, wondered whether the blockaders were up the sharp end of the RIP act yet, since apparently they're being subversive and communicating via -- gasp -- websites and email.

Went for the usual shopping trip to the supermarket. This supermarket doesn't have a petrol pump, but it was packed. The shelves were bare in parts. I laughed a lot until I discovered someone had panic-bought all my favourite fruit juice. Then I decided things were serious. Alan tried to persuade me that chocolate cheesecake was full of energy (ie, sugar and fat) and thus high on any reasonable person's priority list. I said no, and attempted to panic-buy some feta cheese instead, slightly hindered by a lack of panic. Alan sulked.

Huge queues for the old bread (the stuff they sell off cheap at the end of the day because it won't last), no bread, milk, or teabags. No fresh peas, carrots and potatoes. Plenty of fresh "tesco quality pack" (baby carrots with broccoli florets and so on) things. No oven chips or frozen veg except for sweetcorn. No-one likes sweetcorn? No frozen beefburgers. Plenty of vegetarian meals, organic food, rice, pasta and coffee.

And everybody bought masses of toilet roll. Bumped into friends, and discovered we weren't the only people who seemed to have bought less than usual.

In other news: typhoons in Japan make thousands homeless, thousands of refugees are heading for the borders in Afghanistan, Burundi's civil war continues, El Salavador's national emergency (floods and fear of subsequent epidemic) continues, and none of this was seen on the TV headlines here. We think we have a crisis, you see. (I got those off the BBC website.)

September 11
Apparently we (Britain) are having a petrol crisis. I am not over-delighted at it, because I can think of all sorts of people working in the 'emergency services' who won't be on the list for getting petrol. The local hospitals have always had contingency plans for things like bad weather, bomb warnings on the phone, and so on, but I don't remember "refinery is blockaded" in the list. District nurses, health visitors, community psychiatric nurses, healthcare support workers, "home helps"... they all use cars. People tell me "of course you don't support it; you don't have to pay the tax because you don't have a car", so I gather that none of the prices on the train, the bus or the taxis are remotely affected by the price of petrol. Oh well.

However, the window-fitting company decided to conserve petrol and do local jobs, so they did the kitchen window today. Sounds good, but finding a removal van could be funny if this continues.

September 10
Typical Sunday. I was up early, Alan was not. Alan got up at some stage and headed straight to the computer room, where he stayed. He was persuaded out by the lure of a take-out for tea.
September 9th
Alan up in the morning again! (With much wailing and gnashing of teeth). After kitchen finally established (sans handles, and sans floor covering, but still), the plan was to head to the rugby ground, but we ended up watching it on television instead.

Alan's reference to cultural events is probably because I discovered he'd never seen the Last Night of the Proms before (the final night of the annual promenade concerts, where everything is very silly indeed) and was rather shocked. So we watched it, and he looked rather shocked himself when in one particular piece that gets played every year, people started honking the hooters which get smuggled in annually, carefully picked to be totally off-key, and much much louder than the orchestra. I laughed.

September 8th
Alan up in the morning again! He was expecting a parcel, and since I was elsewhere to let the kitchen man back in, he had to listen for the postman. I was suitably sympathetic.

I was less sympathetic when he nearly broke my Vaio. For real this time. Software breaking, I can cope with. He had some photos on 'flash cards' which I wanted to see. So I slid one into the PCMICA slot and observed aloud that it seemed to stick halfway. "Oh, rubbish" he said, and pushed hard. We looked at the pictures, discovered it was the wrong set, and went to remove it for the next one...

It wouldn't come out. I pushed the little lever to remove it, and it stayed where it was and instead the corner of the keyboard popped out. I squawked a lot, and tried to persuade him not to try the next card when we eventually got it out and pushed the keyboard back into place. Alas, to no avail. That one also refused to come out. Eventually, half of it came out, leaving the other half in there. I didn't want to watch this any more and left him to it. Later he emerged, waving the offending article and claiming "It's a known problem, the keyboard will be fine, and it's Sony's fault anyway".

I cannot say I am over-impressed.

September 7th
Alan forced to awaken early to be at house for people to arrive and put the kitchen together. I was setting off shopping when various phone calls happened. First the window people wanted to come early, and second the kitchen man rang to say "Oh, you're not in Caerphilly, are you?". Told them all to come, and went shopping. Found Alan destroying wallpaper in the room that most of the damp-proofing had been done in (so carpets up, and because Alan "couldn't find" a bin-bag, wallpaper on floor...)

Retreated to remaining intact room to listen to music and get stuff done on laptop. Listened to music, got very little done. Lots of windows got done, though. Alan got through to NTL and found one half of them do admit the house exists, so we can have a cablemodem. Yippee.

A plumber came along and removed some more piping from the kitchen. Our skip is getting very full (and we haven't started getting the wallpaper in there..)

September 6th
It rained again, but I managed to paint the front door, some new shelves and my nose (that bit wasn't intended, no). A nice man came and tapped off all the supplies for the gas fires so we could remove them, and did the radiator too. We now have gaping holes in the walls and I fear woodlice and beasties again. Lots of fun attempting to fill the skip with our rubbish before the rest of the neighbourhood fill it with theirs.

I see the stuff for cleaning paint brushes has "do not dispose of down drains or sink" (which is fair enough, since it's evil and nasty and it scares me: it also appears not to clean my paint brushes). I foresee another phone call with the council again about "So what exactly do you expect me to do with it?" but I can already guess the answer. It'll be the same as for glass. "Not our problem." Perhaps I should let Alan ring them. He just loves that kind of response. Then again, perhaps that would be unkind.

September 5th
We were going to take another chair over today, but it rained. Alan was very pleased. I wasn't: I wanted to paint the front door. I hung about waiting in hope the rain would tail off. Then got a phone call from the people delivering a skip for rubbish:

"Well, it's delivered, but we'll have to come back"
"Why?"
"We put it next door and the lady isn't happy".

She wasn't the only one. Hot-footed it over there to apologise and, um, meet neighbour... Eventually the skip people came back and moved it.

Parents visited and had to share the one chair (we couldn't run and take a chair...) Oops. Kitchen deliverers arrived. We now have a new kitchen in bits in the room next to the kitchen, and a dead kitchen in the skip.

September 4th
Got bored waiting for Alan to emerge for promised house stuff. Was just about to set off and surprise him later when he arrived downstairs and stared as he discovered me wrestling a beanbag and chair out of the door. After the inevitable discussions of the wisdom of such a move, he decided to help and not to reach for the camera.

Alan is quite tall and takes long strides. I am not quite so tall (she says, delicately) and take three to his two. This makes for interesting experiences attempting to transport armchairs along narrow streets past entertained pedestrians without stepping into the rather busy road. Upbraidings and recriminations were avoided due to the necessity of watching out for said pedestrians and cars.

Apparently some kernel release happened. The first I knew was a series of "Telsa, what's this userland app?" questions about some comment he made. As if I had seen the comment or knew what the userland app he was referring to was. (Well, I know what it is, but I'm sure all will become clear anyway.)

Qt is apparently going GPL. Whee.

Discovered "I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle" on the television and all further thought of computers was abandoned.

September 3rd
Laptop crashed :( Not good. It must be Alan's fault. I don't expect my computer to crash. It confuses me. Rebooted and saw the names he'd given the different kernels (this after promising me he wouldn't touch the laptop without my knowledge. Grr). I'm sure not everyone gets "Boom!" as a lilo.conf label. I feel so special now.

House stuff. Alan thinks peeling wallpaper off is fun. He doesn't think putting it in the bin is fun. Oh, my poor carpet. Looked at the "list of stuff to do in what order". Realised that actually, we'd missed something critical out. Argh. Re-assessed "safe to move in" day.

Glorious low-hanging and bright orange sickle moon tonight. I had forgotten. Harvest moon season.

September 2nd
More boring stuff at new house. It's strange how seeing rooms with no skirting boards and great gaping holes affects you. "There's a hole! This house is no longer intact! Waah!" Even if the hole was already there and just covered up. Alan thinks I am being silly. I, however, can't forget the giant slug from yesterday. These are big holes...

From IRC, from a spammer with more enthusiasm than sense (the first lines must be imagined to be very very rapid):

Spammer: 10
Spammer: 9
Spammer: 8
Spammer: 7
Spammer: 6
Spammer: 5
***Signoff: Spammer (excess flood)

Well, it made me (and the other channel inhabitants) laugh. Behold: the auto-lart.

September 1st
Oh dear, the day to get my mail down to a sensible size. Oh dear. Oh dear. Spent a lot of time reading bugs for a package Alan has been messing with and working out whether the descriptions of "How-To-Repeat" bore any resemblance to Alan's descriptions of what he'd allegedly fixed. Result: one very confused Telsa.

Spotted a slug in the back yard. Whilst I was in the kitchen looking out of the back window. Yes. A very large slug indeed. Uurgh.

August 31st
This must have been a particularly productive day. I have no idea what either of us did.

I've been asked for a more obvious feedback route. So there you are! But please note: This should be clear from the above, but: I am not a kernel hacker. I am not an anything hacker. "Is this diary true?" will get answered. (It is.) "I have a problem compiling the brainsplat module under the pre-sliced option terminator; I am using the mutability framewedger on the standard infernalisation build" will not. (Well, it might be answered in a similar vein, but for a real answer, look elsewhere. It's much safer.)