Warning: These are old.
Back. The astute will have guessed that I was away. Alan returned from Japan to London Heathrow, narrowly preventing his luggage from continuing on to Halifax; I met him there, we got on a plane for Newfoundland, and after some meandering and the inevitable conference (OLS), we have returned.
Looking at mail, I think I forgot to slot in my procmailrc for when I'm away. Ugh.
I didn't keep notes whilst there, so expect any write-ups to be both cursory and inaccurate.
Apparently Alan's luggage caught up with him yesterday. And he returns today (or begins to. Timezones are complicated things) for stage two (three?) of his travels.
Ran out of things to throw out, tidy, or move to confuse him.
Woke up bright and early, opened the window, and discovered that the commentary for the England match (I assume) was blasting from some house's window so loudly that I could almost hear the words myself. At seven in the morning.
Discovered Alan had arrived in Japan sans luggage, and had apparently had his overnight bag weighed and put in the hold. So the emergency clothes change and his asthma stuff was in it too and is now sitting in Paris somewhere. Not helpful. Dug out more medicine and clothes for him and stared at packing hoping it would do itself. Alas.
Collected money for OLS. Madness at the bank. Alan had ordered it originally, but since he is now in Japan, I had to get it. This is not a shared bank account, so we had gone in to clear this last week. However, first they said it hadn't been paid for, then they said they couldn't take a cheque for it and I'd have to pay cash, then they agreed that I could pay for it out of my old account there and write a cheque from my real account to go into the old one and cover it, and just as I'd given up and was writing it, they found the note saying the money was to come out of Alan's.
Day did not improve until the evening, when I went out for meal with friends. Dick kept refilling other people's glasses and watching the results with sardonic amusement. Dick is evil. Drank gallons of water when I got back home, to avoid disaster in the morning.
Alan has presumably arrived in Japan. People have been teasing me that he'll get mistaken for a football fan, but somehow I find that unlikely.
Found out Alan had made it to LinuxTag, courtesy of a friend IRCing from his talk...
Excavated great piles of stuff to get rid of whilst he can't stop me.
Alan up before seven! Off at silly times to get the train to get the plane to get another train to get to LinuxTag. If he's not there, then I don't know where he is, so please don't ask.
I used the time to raise clouds of dust without sending Alan leaping for his inhaler, ran into town to collect new glasses (wow -- I can see across the road again now), and do the shopping, and discovered new shoes and no socks are a bad combination. Added plasters to the shopping list, limped home, and watched the rugby. Oh dear, Wales lost again. Made piles of lists of Things To Do whilst Alan is away. Exhausted by all the effort of making them, didn't do anything on them.
Whizzed into town to confirm that I could do some things at the bank that Alan was supposed to, to buy some yen (a matter of four travel agents and two banks before we found some), and sundry other stuff. Even the guy in the Welsh shop (souvenirs, language lessons, and so on) was watching England on the television: can't I escape football?
Alan kept wandering in and telling me, This needs to be done
whilst I'm away
and leaving cryptic instructions and computers
to parcel up and send to places on the floor. Discovered a computer
he sent last month has not yet showed up: frantic ringing of
company before recipient found the person who'd signed for it. Tried
to get the tickets Alan needs now into his bag and the tickets I need
later not into his bag.
Many phone calls. Much email (lots about bash: perhaps I should
have said What I expected
yesterday: the thing is
that that has worked fine for months because I haven't had rpms
in that directory before, so it confused me totally when it did
this. I was looking for what I had typoed, not what it was actually
doing.).
Last thing at night, remembered to get Alan to reach the new jar of coffee down from the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard. I can't reach up there, and it would be a poor week if I was caffeine-less with the magic substance in the house but out of reach!
England failed to lose in the football so I suppose we have another week of the stuff blotting out the schedules yet.
Discovery of the day: using --exclude *.rpm with no quote marks in a tar command line only works as you expect if there is no file ending in rpm in the directory you do the command in. Because bash kindly expanded it to the names of the rpms in question. Grr.
GNOME 2 continues on apace. I veer from moods of doom to exhilaration with each new message about it.
Travel agent rang to tell us the accommodation we had booked for something had in fact not been booked and was now full. Joy. Spent some time perusing the net and the Rough Guide book and eventually found something else. About that time, Alan announced that he was no longer going to Linuxtag on Saturday and returning on Sunday: he was going on Saturday and returning a week later. There are lots of things we were going to be doing over the next week. Made a splendid list of Friday's todo list, which is next week's todo list all in one day.
Not a good day. Woke up late, with a heavy cold, with no fruit juice (my idea of a cold-cure) in the house, bright sun to give me a headache, and unbelievable amounts of bounces from gnome-list in my email. Along with lots of things to do, and an RMS talk I had intended to go to. Got nearly nothing done, beyond a procmail rule. That helped.
But then Mozilla 1.0 came out and brightened the day. I am
very happy, and I hope the Mozilla people have a really good
party. I look forward to all the people who kept posting
to various web forums saying It'll never come out and it's
rubbish anyway
eating their words; but they'll probably
post explaining that they have been using it exclusively since
M6 or something.
Another nice day. Which is probably why Alan slept through most of it. He woke up in time to construct the final piece of furniture and it all looks very cool now.
More jubilee noises Extremely loud, this time. Decided it probably wasn't bombs but instead fireworks.
Someone (he knows who he is) suggested I help to maintain gnome-list and stupidly I didn't run away fast enough.
It's Monday, but it's also the first of two bank holidays in a row. The extra one is because the Queen is celebrating her golden jubilee: fifty years on the throne. Lots of people here are celebrating this for her too. (And of course there are the various Stuff the Monarchy events as well...) And if you don't want to do either of those, you can always celebrate a day off work.
It was also the night a friend was celebrating his birthday. This, frankly, was rather more important to me. So we wandered down into town towards Wind Street, which means going through Castle Square (yes, we have a castle: or bits of one, at least). And as we approached it, we could hear lots of noise.
The council had put a giant LCD screen up in it, and people were sitting on all the circular steps around it with drinks in their hands watching the concert at the Palace on it. (I'm still boggling at the idea of Brian May playing on the roof and Ozzy playing Paranoid for a regal celebration.)
Great night out, and we returned back through the square (which is of course a circle: a square would be too obvious) to find the numbers vastly increased. People who had been moving on to the next pub had stopped in the square on the way and were now swaying about with their drinks and singing All You Need Is Love. Loitered for a while to watch them. Castle Square is turning into far more of a focal point than the old Castle Gardens it replaced is. (Perhaps it was different once, but the old gardens were basically a few shrubs and patches of earth covered in dog mess, plastic bags, and cans. Ugh.)
Apparently the TV is staying for the World Cup. Grumble. They didn't do this for the rugby.
Wow. Alan has finally finished building (and rearranging) the first installment of the IKEA shelves, and they are brilliant. There is space on his floor, and his room looks so much bigger.
In between whinging about my wrists and wandering off to read, I have been playing with XHTML, and I think I only need to make one change in my habits before I can alter the DTD. I have turned a couple of pages (the ones no-one reads) into it, and they seem to work.
If no-one complains that they can't read my test page (which is last month's diary with a few more closing paragraph tags) within the next few days, I think I shall switch to that.
Still hot here. And, unfortunately, airless. I hope it thunders soon.
How come we visited two computer shops by accident (hmm) whilst wandering around town and Alan wouldn't come to the bookshop? Pooh.
Jubilee weekend is in full swing and bafflingly it is not raining. It always rains on holidays here.
Barbecue at Dick's. Yummy. Fatal error of the night was showing Alan and Justin the Playstation 2, which had them both attempting to mow down innocent pedestrians and spray cars with water cannon. And I thought they were such gentle people...
Ran analog and discovered that since they went up, my Guadec 3 and talks write-ups have been looked at by a whole hundred people. Well, less than that, really, since a lot of that was me trying to correct and validate them. Oh well.
Alan left a bookcase outside the bathroom for me. Apparently he doesn't need it any more. How kind.
Cleaned all the kitchen to gleaming last night. Even cleaned the grill pan after Alan left it to fester yesterday following grilling bacon (ugh. I hate cleaning fat off things). Came down in the morning to find midnight snack residue all over kitchen. Sigh. Made it all beautiful again. Then for lunch, Alan finished the bacon and left the grill pan full of bacon fat again. Grr.
More IVAR construction on Alan's part. He has one unit completed, and has found an inconvenient powerpoint sticking out behind it. He has heaped all the stuff from the bookcase and the floor onto and into the unit. Let's hope that it doesn't need moving two inches to the left now. When it comes to fitting the next unit in, it might.
Evening involved leaving Alan behind to (presumably) build more bits of room whilst we went to see Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Alas, I presume I am too late to make all the jokes about s/Clones/Clowns. What a terrible film. Remarkable how similar the Jedi library is to the Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin, mind you. Even had all the statues. Only difference was that all the books were blue :)
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.)