Warning: These are old.
remember to do thislists for remembering too late tomorrow. Went to pub instead (combined LUG meet), where we overwhelmed the staff with food requests.
I won't be able to check email on my usual address from Guadec (damn firewall...), but I might catch stuff sent to telsa at (www|ftp).linux.org.uk. If I look :) Don't expect fast replies.
please print this all on the same pagegames with various applications, feeding them maps until they (and I) were sick. Nat frightened the life out of me by being under the impression that it started tomorrow. I am not that ready. But all that is left is the laptop and printing out the timetable and getting the phone tariff changed to allow me to send text messages to international numbers and... Oh. Not at all ready, then.
BBC News 24 had a rolling interactive bulletin of headlines with five times as much about the death of the Queen Mother as any single other stoey. Clearly, absolutely nothing of any urgency or importance has happened anywhere across the globe today.
Eating-up-scraps-day. Alan has discovered how to combine old mashed potatoes with beetroot and cheese. I'm not sure he should be praised for this.
Learned the Spanish for Where are the (women's) toilets?, I am allergic to shellfish and I want to go to.... Feel somewhat under-prepared for Spain.
Just after midnight, watched my Gnome fish get ill and die. This is possibly my stupidest contribution to Gnome: persuading someone that he should write the code for the fish to float upside down on April Fool's Day. Better (worse?) yet, it has been localised! Apparently Spain has its own special day for this. I am so penitent. Think of the hours that could have been saved if this has not happened. We might have had a flight simulator hidden in Gnumeric by now.
Read two of the books I was supposed to be saving for the journey. Oops. Bad Telsa. I wish I read slower. Books just don't last around here.
First we had buns, and then Dick did something mean: he showed me a puzzle. It was a wooden cuboid which breaks apart forty-nine (I think) sticks of wood cut with a jigsaw into not-quite-identical pieces. It took me about two hours to finish it. Then I realised I was about to miss a Gnome-2 release meeting, and had to jump into a taxi to get back in time. I had planned to do my Guadec packing today, but between puzzles and meetings that overran incredibly, no such luck.
Bright sun again today. On a holiday. Whatever next?
Lots of sun. Went around opening all the windows, or trying to. Mostly I went around trying to fit the right keys into the right window locks.
Parcelforce found the house today and delivered another parcel (this is beyond a joke. Normal people get letters. We get parcels of junk. None of it is normally any use at all, although Alan seems very happy with today's), whilst also managing to redeliver yesterday's to the local post office. (You can tell them to deliver there instead, but they have to fail to deliver it to a house first.)
Collected plane tickets and Euros for Guadec and started investigating cheap flights to Canada for OLS. Ouch. Also bought some books for the trip and am resolved not to read them before I leave this time. I bought some last week and have read them all already. This time I shall behave.
Passing the music shop, I remembered the name of one of the
copy-protected CDs
being tried out in Britain. I am now the proud owner of a Shakira
album which has a CD logo on it and a little note saying Will not
play on PC/MAC
. Clearly, this needed investigating.
So far, we have played it on three CD players and a DVD player. None of those were attached to computers. When it came to computers, it got more interesting. Trying to read the CD crashed Alan's laptop so badly it had to be powered off and on again. Not nice. It won't play on a PA-RISC box (so clearly the warning needs adding to: and I dread to imagine the results if, say, it went through the entire list of architectures Debian supports...) It wouldn't play in a CD drive on another machine (PC). Then it played first time on a HP CD burner on another one. Not only would it play: grip picked up the information on the CD from FreeDB and displayed it fine: so it's clear playing for someone else out there, too.
Apparently the thing has two tables of contents, and by placing
paper over the outer one, you can get CD drives to read them anyway.
I jest not. Fortunately, we didn't need to go that far. On my computer,
dmesg rapidly filled with complaints and grip told me that cdparanoia
decided it could not find a way to read audio from this drive
.
I tried it again to capture the errors. Being me, of course, I dropped
it on the way to the drive, and it caught on the monitor. There didn't
seem to be any damage visible. Weirdly, though, it was after this
that it suddenly decided to play in my drive. I have never heard
Shakira before, but I presume it's meant to sound the way it did.
Not only did it play on this one, it seems to rip too. With the
exception of the mystery file datencd which I presume
is the second table of contents or something.
Despite the weirdness that surrounds me in my life and the entertainment value of being able to claim it, I fear I must rule out the idea that dropping the CD somehow scraped through the extra table of contents and nothing else. For a start, as I write this, I popped it in the drive again, and it won't play today.
Demand Alan mend it, of course.
Having successfully delivered a parcel yesterday, Parcelforce
are resting on their laurels. Today we got a card saying Tried
to deliver but you were out
. No. We were not out. Yes. The
doorbell is working. Alan is expecting three packages at the
moment. We are consequently listening for the doorbell keenly.
I grant that the downstairs doorbell has not been the same since
the incident of the plaster dust, requiring exploratory surgery
and emergency measures; but the upstairs one is entirely loud
enough: and anyway, the downstairs doorbell was working yesterday
and this evening. I find its apparent sudden shirking of its duty
in daylight (or at least office) hours somewhat suspicious.
Since it is clearly impossible that someone didn't ring it and just dropped the card in the letterbox, I am forced to the conclusion that we posses a vampire doorbell.
Well, it seems logical to me.
Parcelforce guy showed up with a delivery of a large box
of lead
(his words). That'll be a new UPS then.
That was the longest install ever for a very embarrassing reason: I have one of those KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switches, and to flip the keyboard, monitor and mouse between computers, I have to hit the scroll lock key. I must have hit it too much. I kicked off the install; flipped back to usual box to play gnome-games; flipped back to the install and discovered it was still sitting there at the same package. Apparently the scroll lock works even in the installer. Whoops.
Watched the Wales A/England A match in the evening in hopes of seeing at least one Welsh win. Whee. Hopes proved well-founded. Apparently the odds on the Wales side actually winning in the main game tomorrow are something like 12 to 1. Oh dear. Not sure my hopes will be so well-founded there.
Tickets arrived at the travel agent for Guadec travel. Forgot to get them.
In a fit of tidying, found updated procmail and muttrc examples sitting about which I had meant to put up ages ago. Finally got around to it and moved the old ones to new names (the old ones have -1.0 at the end of the names now).
LUG in the evening. Cardiff's turn to host it. Hatched an incredibly ambitious plan. Now someone has to make it happen. Won't be me.
Bin day! Everything in this pile you don't remove is going out.
That was easy.
Puzzled over the cryptic comment RH talk - Alan
in my
(paper) diary for April 17th. I like my paper diary. It's far
easier to reach and update than any of the shared calendar apps
I have found yet. And it doesn't require perl, mysql and a
graphical browser. And since I have started toting it around,
Alan has started using it too. Not only asking what he is doing
on particular days, but adding to it of his own volution: something
we never managed with the shared calendar apps (frankly, the best we
found was one file, group-writable, and a group of me and him).
Unfortunately, he has not yet learned to add things like what, where and why to his entries. I hope RH know what he's doing then. Because where this is, who is involved, and whether he's expected to talk to RH, about RH, or for RH, I have no clue. This would be okay except for one thing: neither has he.
Managed to squeeze in at favourite local restaurant. Staff teased us about not having been there for ages and promptly supplied a superlative meal. Surely this is an error on their part: it might imply to us that the less frequently we go, the better the food...
Alan had a GPG key for all of half an hour today. I signed it, I nagged him about revocation certificates, he duly went to make one, and gpg died horribly. Investigation revealed that he'd made it on one of his more experimental boxes. Oops.
Later: I must say, he rose to the challenge (doubtless he'll say it was an instruction) and cooked a really excellent meal.
I'm a little perturbed by the idea that even speaking up on a mailing list causes mailing lists to die, but I am going to claim this is a coincidence. I certainly hope it is.
Alan announced he was going to Bristol in the afternoon. I thought I had him trained to put these things in the diary (the book on the desk, that is), but apparently not. He managed to arrive back extremely late after missing one train and waiting two hours for the next one.
I am far too kind to mention in return that Alan later managed
to start an email, get halfway through it, realise it was all
wrong, and then hit send
when he meant to hit quit
.
I am quite sure that if he used mutt this would not have happened.
My bash bug appears to happen on all gnome-terminals and xterms, not just those started since I changed something. Why won't it happen to Alan too? (Assuning you have no function or command called foo, do foo ' (with the apostrophe). At the prompt hit ^C. I expect it to give up and return me to my real prompt. It won't. It wants me to do ^C and then return. And it's only happening to me.) I am cursed.
Found another of Alan's silly Beatles parodies, even if it took me six months to notice it. Dear me.
Bright light! Bright light) anyway. Since I know he had water on him earlier, too, I'll just have to make sure not to feed him after midnight.
Persuaded him into the bookshop to his disgust, and then finally managed to book flights to GUADEC although I fear arriving at almost midnight in Seville is going to pose transport troubles.
Later caught Alan eating after midnight. Oh dear. If I didn't actually feed him and he made supper himself, does that mean I am safe?
Not bug-day? Release team meeting instead? In -- what, how many minutes?Ouch.
Alan cut his finger whilst cooking tonight. What a copy-cat.
Managed to make an extremely deep slice through my finger whilst cooking. Alan managed not to say it was my fault (which it was) for an entire half an hour, by which time I decided not to kill him, since hanging onto his words for that long must have been a real effort.
Muddled my way through a kernel build for the laptop. It's no longer scary now. It's just boring. Decided 11pm was not the time to figure out how to add it with grub instead of lilo. It'll probably languish for a month now.
I found the chequebook. It was underneath the bananas.
Alan managed to overrun drastically (of course) and Evolution managed to confound Dick by not spotting its IMAP server or something for a while, but it didn't crash :) Dick added a pantomime air by throwing Ximian freebies out into the audience, although I suspect collusion on the issue of who got the monkey. (He walked up and passed it over to someone. Hmm.) Two school trips went to get their buses back before the monkey appeared: the rest of the audience was a mix of local students, West Wales LUG, friends from Cardiff, who had managed to get a lift with a friend from London (how on earth..?) and a scattering of people in suits whom I presume to be local business people.
Then tea and biscuits as preparation for the serious stuff and the restaurant bracketed by two pubs. I now have a pile of GnuPG keys to sign, which I can never remember how to do, but this time I am determined to.
Where has my day gone?(spot the morning person), Alan has now taken to coming to bed at 4am again. I will not, not, not follow him in this. Someone has to be awake to catch the postman.
Did the daily Where is my day?
scream and then spent far too
much of the remainder of it attempting to sort out transport to
Guadec. I wish I were better at
organising. Spent several hours at the travel agent hoping they'd
organise it for me and waiting for their computer to work. I think our
internet connection is faster than theirs.
Attempted to write directions for car drivers around Swansea. Being carless, I am an obvious choice for this. Finished and found Alan's slides awaiting proof-reading. I'm amazed. He's done them more than twelve hours before a talk. The last time he managed that was in Australia a year ago when I lied to him and told him he was talking a day earlier than he really was.
Alan came down and spotted a theatre flier in the heap of Stuff To
Tidy Up. Oh
, he said. Lindisfarne are playing
. I'd
forgotten about that, so I asked when. In about fifty minutes
.
Abandoned cooking, email and my weekly installment of EastEnders in
bath-towels (this is how Alan describes I, Claudius) to head
for the bright lights.
There are advantages to living a mile from the city centre. Some hours later, wandered home clutching a new album, listening to Alan plan how to oggify (is this a verb? Convert CD to ogg files, anyway..) three CDs simultaneously, and warbling Clear White Light into the air and startling people at traffic lights who thought I was singing at them. Oh well.
Although the fact that more people read this site on UNIX than
on Windows is a little unusual. However, this is by a margin of
100 when each one totals 69000-ish. So it's only just there.
And takes no account of people like me who set their user-agent
to things like steam-powered abacus or
treadmill/mouse-driven. I don't bother with Mozilla: I
want Mozilla to show up in logs, so there is no excuse for webmasters
to say Everyone uses IE
. But Lynx lets you change it on the fly,
which is always good when you're bored and prevaricating before
back-ups.
Finally, the computer attached to the television turned out to have some practical use. Alan attached a monitor to it, and then managed to get one game on the television and the other game on the monitor. Whee.
The fact that Wales have finally won a game affords some relief. Bizarre game: great fun with lots of running (but I can't remmeber a single ruck in the first half) until 60 minutes in, at which stage there were mass substitutions. About the only remaining people on the field were the ref and touch judges, and I began to wonder whether they'd change one of those, too.
So the computer attached to the television had a real use for once today, although I'm not sure that I want to encourage Alan to think I am getting used to 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.
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.)