Warning: These are old.
On with the diary. If the fonts are wrong
then
this may explain it.
Daffodil day here, also know as St David's Day. Excellent day to do the shopping. Cooking demonstrations in the market (followed by a smell of burning and then a smell of air freshener), many small children in national dress, most other people wearing daffodils, and two temporary marquees with a ton of stalls in them with local produce have appeared.
This local produce was noticeably skewed in certain directions. I am now possessed of the indisputably useful information that there are twelve vineyards in Wales. This is only slightly disconcerting. Far more disconcerting is the realisation that I think I managed to try alcohol -- largely the distilled kind -- from all of them.
Floated home to a Gnome desktop I have managed to destroy. (Here's
one I destroyed earlier.
) Got the cards in
aisleriot to display two
different sets of numbers simultaneously and gnome-terminal to
start with random fonts. My word.
Installed some remarkable themes that make Gnome (and sawfish, and windowmaker, and xmms, and..) look like the Mozilla modern style. Beautiful. Very large screenshots (be warned) at the usual place. But since my gnome-terminal madness does not look likely to resolve itself, clearly this is a sign that I should just install the Gnome-2 betas on this box rather than some testing box I then only use a little and see what happens.
Are you a code poet?showing up. (Actually, on trying that again, it seems to cycle through several, but I thought the code poet one was cute the first time).
Google made it into the
Guardian newspaper's
corrections
and clarifications column the other day, too. I hope they
don't start checking how to spell colour
and centre
with that now: the US spellings are bound to outnumber the proper
ones.
Threw a bunch of old vegetables out. Sigh. Throwing food out
irks me. When I say old
, I mean bought this week
.
The potatoes survived, but are all striking out for any nearby
soil that may happen to exist in the cupboard. I am quite sure
that when I was little, the potatoes we bought from the greengrocer
would last somewhat longer than three days. My dad has memories of
buying potatoes by the hundredweight in autumn and storing then in
the outside cwtch and then eating them until spring when he was
young. Of course, they were proper potatoes then.
Bought some business card CDs because I had a cunning plan. Got them home. Forgot the plan.
Alan decided that it is my job to back up the ogg collection. 8.2Gb. Joy. Next thing to learn: incremental backups :)
No wonder it was loud last night. Local news said we had record-breaking winds here, and more floods are on their way. Having seen footage of the floods in La Paz last week, though, I think we've come off pretty lightly.
Returned via Tesco, to Alan's disgust. Conned into shopping! I think I win.
Started sunny and clear, became rainy and typical, and turned into bitterly cold when we went out for a wander in the evening. Pretty normal stuff, but there isn't much else to say...
Back to the return of Return to the Forbidden Planet because Alan hadn't seen it. What a disaster, I had to see it again too :) Distressingly empty theatre: and people who book aisle seats for that particular show and then don't get up and dance at the end should feel ashamed, since I had to get past lots of people. It's not often you're actively encouraged to do that.
Alan updated his diary without prompting. Wow.
Alan should have said this but his diary is out of date again.
I am not allowed to be too rude about him though because he has
apparently taken my Why did you think I needed a tape drive?
plaints to heart and, to make up, has bought me something he thought
I might prefer. A furry mouse striped in pink and cream like
Bagpuss
(an old children's programme). He's so sweet.
Alan has still not removed the broken laser printer from my room. He snaffled the working one some time ago. He's very lucky I forgot to put the bins out or it might have gone out with them.
The email pile is disastrously high. Apologies to those waiting for responses.
Out to the theatre with friends to see Return to the Forbidden Planet for about the sixth time. Alan couldn't go because he was in Cardiff, so I think I may get a seventh visit in by the end of the week.
Decided to ignore it, loftily. You can't see it from in here, after all...
Spent most of the day running around in circles and achieving nothing. Skipped LUG to get some work finished, and failed to finish it.
Asked Alan to keep an eye out whilst I went for more clothes and
some coffee. He got bored rapidly and started digging through the
box of junk he had earlier claimed was all my rubbish (which I
threw back at him a while ago). He dragged out a white box in
triumph and announced, It's a motion-detector
. Of course
it is. Just the sort of thing everyone has lying unused at the
bottom of a heap of electronics. (Not that I can complain: the
only thing I ever wanted to build out of Maplins catalogues was
a Geiger counter. No, I have no idea why.)
At first it responded to police cars and gusts of wind, but eventually it worked more sanely. Well, I think it did. I didn't hear any unwanted visitors taking anything away, at least..
Alan had a noodle eruption in the evening. I came in to find him picking bits of noodles off the floor. Apparently they flew out of the cupboard at him. Yes, Alan.
The optician has a new trick now. When trying on new spectacle frames, a computer camera takes pictures of you. Then you put on your working glasses and look at the pictures whilst able to focus. Cunning. My eyes are not improving, alas.
Sunny again. The word discombobulated (scroll down; if that doesn't work, this might) springs to mind. As if by magic, builders appeared. Scaffolding to go soon. However will I direct people to the house now?
Val Henson got interviewed on Newsforge. Cool.
official bodyLynx-friendly website which validates. Shame about the rest of them...
Apparently the builders got bored waiting for the sun. No rain yesterday. No rain for the first couple of hours of today. So it's lunchtime and they are here in hope.
Giggled a lot at the invitation to LCA 2003 (which took a long time to download: the README and mpeg are mirrored on ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/ among other places). Alan promptly grabbed the mpeg because he had been looking for a PAL mpeg and thought it would be amusing to submit as the sample mpeg for a bug report.
No rain all of today. I only need another two days and we can have the outside of the house finished. On past rain-free day counts, this seems unlikely.
Went through a box of Telsa-rubbish
Alan has left lying
about. Extracted 10% of it , and put the remainder back in his
room. It's not mine. He can have it back.
Five minutes after that, Alan stole the CD.
Also arriving was a new battery for my Vaio. I managed to destroy the old one. I had two pieces of advice on batteries: always keep them in when the power is on; or continually charge, drain and recharge them. I followed the first as the easier option, and was left with a battery that lasted long enough to boot up the laptop, login, and type startx. This is not very good. I would try to blame Sony for this, along with the amazing pop-out keyboard, the non-standard screw sizes, and the non-documentation, but I think on this one it might be my fault.
Alan updated his diary. So that's what he's been doing. It makes no sense to me.
Broke xconfig. The make xconfig sort, not the setting-up-X sort. I've sure there were never so many options before. Alan told me to use it, and then told me it was broken. Sigh.
Alan tidied up a bit today. He has made room for the working laser printer in his room. The broken one is still down here.
Alan is keeping ridiculous hours at the moment, and has been coming to bed at about 4am for a week. Unfortunately, this is wrecking my schedule too, and I keep finding myself awake at 2am and not wanting to get up in the mornings. I don't like this. Mornings are cool.
Justin's thirtieth seemed a good excuse for a party. Lots of people from all over the place, some of whom I hadn't seen for years. Much catching-up. It's really strange how there are one or two places that seem to have employed lots of people I know over the years: there was a NTL reminiscence session at one stage, and then two people who had never met discovered they worked for the same company and had travelled up separately.
Alan disgraced himself by browsing Ebay from Sharon's computer during the party. We got back home and he disappeared into the computer room. I fear I know what he was doing there.
Alan has been playing with the printers (plural) and with a computer downstairs. I have been playing and singing along to oggs. I'm not sure he appreciated the singing, but I don't care.
People keep asking me about the building. The penultimate update (I hope): the inside is done. The decorating to cover up the inside is done. The cellar pump is on order. And we are waiting for a few consecutive rain-free days for the final stuff on the outside of the house. We have been waiting for a while on that last one...
Today is just wonderful, and it's only just half-way through.
Slightly later: went shopping with Dick and Alan and managed to
get Alan into the bookshop. Spent lots of money. Left book tokens
at home. Whoops. LUG meeting later. Spent rather less there :)
Still only one topic in some sections of Wales: overheard various
people discussing the disastrous rugby results. Came back to find
the coach had resigned. Or left through a mutual decision
or something (the other deciders being the WRU, whose website has
the only chatboard which is not calling for their resignation
en masse).
Just going down brieflysaid Alan, and rebooted before I even had a chance to save and logout. Five hours later, he was staring at fsck forlornly and not responding to
When will you want tea?.
Still raining. We need three days without rain before the builders can finish the outside of the house. The scaffolding is still up as a consequence. When it comes down, I'm not going to be able to find the house any more.
Some very helpful person found out how to order You Slosh CDs. After all these years, I can finally replace them. Alas, they do not answer the phone at 8pm. Tomorrow... tomorrow.. :)
RIP Welsh Rugby. Western Mail has about twelve pages of commentary, little of it polite. Evening Post has a few words to say too. And one of the Welsh bookmakers is offering odds on Henry's (he's the Welsh coach) successor in the event he goes.
And an Irish friend was terribly nice about it all, too.
Got Alan to switch mail stuff so that another machine which thinks its called the same thing gets my email. Think it went well, but you never know.
Another parcel. Alan has despaired of the laser printer he acquired cheap on Ebay (it didn't survive the journey) and has bought another at a knockdown price. Now there are two of the things sitting in the corner of my room. Since it has not vanished upstairs, I have a suspicion that this one doesn't work either.
Too many rows, accusations and ill-informed comments on IRC, so watched the first quarter of I, Claudius on the telly instead. Now that's how to subvert and usurp and plot.
pods are for whales, not Walesand
So in the training session, Henry shouts "Usual positions, lads!" and turns round to find everyone lined up behind the postsjokes. And that's the Welsh posters. I dread to think what they're saying over the border.
I have discovered what has happened to my old terminal. Alan swiped it a while ago, and it seems to be a serial console for what appears to me to be an Etch-a-Sketch toy. Alan assures me it's actually a computer.
Alan got up so late he missed the start of the rugby. Shame on him. France beat Italy. Italy seemed to have a game plan that involved being a man short at all times. England beat Scotland. The game was better than the very one-sided score suggests. Ireland/Wales tomorrow.
Tethys let me know where I'd messed up a stylesheet and showed me how to add pretties from CSS3 (do they never stop) so that at least Mozilla would see them. I have the terrible feeling that this ridiculous style I was playing with will turn into something pretty now.
It's getting quite windy here. The Six Nations rugby starts this weekend, and lots of Welsh fans are trying to get across the Irish Sea to Dublin. I hope it's more exciting that the morass Swansea have got themselves into.
Alan spent most of the day hacking until I dragged him out for a meal (reason we eat out so much: no computers at restaurants). It was a leave-the-hat-behind night. Alan's would have gone sailing off into the wind. I wasn't confident my woolly one would survive either.
Don't knowin a puzzled tone of voice.
He has successfully put the laser printer back together but it still doesn't work. Naturally it remains in my room as a result. He has also created a Telsa-trap in his room. Yesterday I wandered in and stopped to find I couldn't get any further: huge pieces of machinery were blocking my way in. I had to call him to move it before I could reach him. He found this funny. Today there was nothing visible there, so I bounded in and then ended up on the floor saying very rude words after treading on a number of case screws in bare feet. He thought that was funny too. I am not sure I shall look tomorrow.
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.)