Warning: These are old.
Wandering around the new house, jumping at noises still. Eep.
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?"
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.
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).
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..
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.
Just getting used to the lack of traffic noise and it started again. Boo. :)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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..)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)