Warning: These are old.
Ooh. An extra day. I should probably have done something constructive with it.
Cold, but no more snow. Went to a twmpath (no, there is no missing vowel there: pretend the w is a u or an oo sound) dance in the evening. Alan wimped out, pretending he was revising. (Alan hates dancing. Sniff.)
No snow today.
Soapbox time: whilst I agree that configuring stuff on Linux is not easy, how is it that ESR's Aunt Tillie can't do it? This is the same Aunt Tillie who didn't want distro kernels but wanted to update her kernel to include new drivers (a printer driver, perhaps?), surely.
Woke up to a muted soft bright world. The snow was lying still. Looked at the main road nearby. Even with the cars driving into town there was still snow on the surface.
Because this is a city and on the coast, it is rarely hit by snow. Generally you only find out it's been snowing when the cars drive in from Gower or the hilly bits just behind the city all covered in snow. So when it falls here, then you know it's bad in the rest of the area.
Almost all school cancelled, lots of school buses didn't run,
and everyone out taking photos. Alan set off to university
then rang me up, I'm on the beach
The beach? Why?
Looking at the snow. It's all the way down to the sea
.
Later he likened it to a Lowry painting, with pale washed-out
skylines and stick figures in the darkness with their dogs.
The cafe I go to on Thursdays was shut too. Sniff.
Evening spent attempting to hold conversations in Welsh with
Gareth. There is a claim that it gets easier
to speak another language after a few drinks. Tested this
theory extensively. Now I know the Welsh for dregs
,
the last bit at the bottom of the bottle, too :)
Was shopping in town when white stuff started falling from the sky. We are in Swansea centre, where it never snows, so I looked round for the fire causing the ash, or the demolition causing the dust, and so on, before realising it really was snow.
Since Gareth and Alan both like hot things, decided it was chilli night. Gareth chopped the chillies and included all the seeds. Caught him before he did this to the red chillies as well.
The chilli smell wasn't there in cooking so added a dollop of mashed chilli gloop to it. Discovered later that Alan uses one dollop of that as a chilli substitute, not as an addition. Oops.
Thank goodness I made a yoghurty thing to go with it. Blew my head off, but Gareth and Alan ate it with every sign of enjoyment and then asked for more. It must be a man thing.
Around midnight, the snow started to fall again.
I am sure I was really busy but I can't think on what. Repeat for yesterday, too.
I no longer hate my sister quite so much. I finished level 70 on frozen-bubble, and whizzed through much of the rest.
Rugby today. Oh... dear. All the other games turned out as
expected, but this one was supposed to be the could go either
way
one. It did. Comprehensively. Ouch.
Whee. Alan was awarded the FSF award at FOSDEM tonight. He couldn't make it; I couldn't make it; Dan Veillard, luckily, could make it, and accepted it for him.
Flying visit from Jono Bacon today. Trying to persuade him he needs a kneelie-stool, or whatever these silly contraptions are called, because he looked so incredulous when he saw mine.
He had to go back early, so spent more time driving than being here.
I forget when, but here is something I forgot from earlier in the week. My sister finished frozen-bubble. I have been stuck at level 70 since about two days after installing the thing. I am not sure I like her now.
Her boyfriend will probably be very relieved that she has finished it, though I understand he is reluctant to play the two-player version: she gets all sad when his penguins die. And blames him for making it cry.
#gnome full of people arriving to tell us what they think of Nautilus. fedora-test-list full of people subscribing to say what they think of Nautilus. Bugzilla... empty.
I thought it would be fun to have streaming oggs in the kitchen.
Stupidly, I mentioned this to Alan. Now strange parcels have
arrived, and there is a pair of speakers in the kitchen, attached
to (I presume) a computer. Somewhere. Alan has rsync'd all his
favourite music to it. I don't know why. He is rarely in the
kitchen. He has left a little space for mine. There are currently
a number of flaws with this arrangement. First, I don't know
where the computer is. Second, I can't get my music onto it.
Third, I can't get it to play anything. Fourth, I gather that
the volume is unchangeable. And finally, we have acquired some
daft USB remote control (Remote-Control Bob, with a surreal
and tacky I'm Bob. Press my buttons and play with me
picture which makes it look like.. erm, well. I'm not going
there) which will one day do the volume. But first, Alan must
write the driver for it.
And of course, now that it is half-working (ie, it works for him, but not for me), he is going to lose interest and I shall have all his music blasting out unstoppably.
Out for curry in the evening. The nice thing about being
veggie is that it makes it so much faster to pick from the
menu.
Oh, they'll do veggie versions of most things here:
you just have to ask.
Oh.
Are you ready to order?
Erm, can we have a few more minutes, I just found I have another
three pages of menu to look at...
Yesterday I committed rules for Dasher and Conglomerate to jhbuild. Today, no-one has complained. I am very proud. I was pretty sure the Dasher ones would work, because Matthew Garrett did those; but I did the Conglomerate ones. All on my very own. (Yes, okay, it's not that clever, but the clever bit is that I didn't break anything.)
If someone I know is going to cheer for whoever Wales is playing against, then I am going to say the best ten minutes of the England game were those directly after half-time, when Italy had the ball. They didn't score with it, mind you, but they kept trying.
Completely forgot that we were going out tonight, to hear Steve Knightly and Martyn Joseph. Argh. Realised at 10pm. Desolate. Damn, damn, damn. I can't believe I did that. I was so looking forward to it.
House full today: as well as a Gareth, we have an Emily.
All, plus Dick, went to the pub to watch the rugby. Wales won, thankfully, and some was very pretty (okay, it would have gone better without the crossing). Hoping that this will continue, although the local rugby has not been inspiring so far this season.
To Justin's and Sharon's in the evening, to pore over three take-out menus. No optimising of special offers, but a certain amount of optimising of which places to go to in what order. Played Fluxx after. Gareth has a sense of the dramatic and managed to get about ten goes in a row before winning the game. (He could have played the winning card as the first of those ten.)
Alan vacuumed.
Yes, this is worth a diary entry.
Scribble scribble.
Justin's birthday, so out in the evening. Returned to find Alan downloading Fedora test builds and clogging up the modem.
This is much more like I expected it to be in the first place.
Haven't you got any lectures to go to?
No,
No?
I've got some books to read and an essay to write,
which is
going to be interesting. I don't believe Alan reads anything
which doesn't come in PDF.
When the boiler broke, there was a very nasty smell. Alan took
one sniff and said Oooh. Burning transformer
. It smelled
like burning rubber to me, but he says it's electric or insulation.
The boiler man said it was nothing to do with the boiler and that
he'd never smelt it before, and fixed the boiler. Eventually.
Now, the smell is back. I am not reassured.
Ended up switching the boiler off, opening doors and windows, and shivering as the smell dispersed. Then I did normal things, and there was no smell. (And no heating. Brr.)
Gareth volunteered to cook. Alan decided to take the tap apart to see the washer size at the same time. What timing.
No cold water downstairs. It could be worse. We have cold water elsewhere and hot water everywhere, which is an improvement on last week. It was very cold (for here, okay? We're not talking Canada temperatures...) last night, so it is possible that a pipe has frozen. Or a washer has gone (the most likely). Or Gareth is a saboteur.
Naturally, today was the day I chose to make soup. Which involves lots of water. Go me.
Discovered more jhbuild cleverness. Even if it doesn't have the rules for something, it can still be told to build it using all the normal jhbuild rules. Installed conglomerate. Crashed it a lot. Can't get gdb to run from bug-buddy at the moment. When I run conglomerate from inside gdb, though, it doesn't crash, and sails through happily.
Still can't reach machine where mail at the address at the bottom goes to. I think it's out of commission until Alan re-does the local network. If you have tried to email me there, don't expect much of an answer.
Today was sort-out-house day: washing, tidying, all that stuff. Alan was not awake for most of it.
There have been no further house disasters, but Gareth returns tonight.
Definitely today was different from expectations, but it was also different from last night's expectations. Ended up hanging on phones waiting for hours, and accidentally (honest) accepting an Orkut invitation. I was going to be strong and ignore it, but I peeped over a friend's shoulder and it was interesting to see who knew who, so I went to have a look.
Oops. There goes another hour.
Hrm. Spent an entertaining hour on the phone trying to find out how you find a dentist at short notice. Looks like tomorrow is going to be different from what I expected.
Yes, it's definitely getting colder. Regardless, took Bryn to Joe's Ice Cream in the afternoon. Bryn is from the other end of Wales. The claim to ice-cream fame there is a place called Cadwalader's in Criccieth. It's one of the few places I have actually been to. Bryn won't admit that Joe's is better. I smell bias.
Clearly the water in our boiler was affected by .. I dunno, celestial tides or something. Water wasn't only falling out of that: it was pouring in sheets from the sky. Loads of people ducked out of travelling in for the LUG meeting, although Bryn made it down from Aberystwyth to visit.
The nice boiler repair man came to fix it at mid-day and got the pressure nice and high again. As Bryn and Gareth arrived in the house, the pressure was dropping again and out went the radiators again. I think he needs to come back. Although an alternative theory is that Gareth is secretly sabotaging things at night.
Day started unpromisingly with a complete lack of email, irc, name server, or indeed anything not attached to my computer. Discovered that the power supply to something had gone bang. Or phut. Or something. This something is, of course, what connects just about everything together at home. I now know far more about the networking at home than I ever wanted to. Alan says it will all get tidied up one day. I live in hope.
Alan bodged something together to talk to the outside world. Mail to the address at the bottom of this page will spool up but I shall not be able to read it for some time. I have another email address at a very similar hostname. I bet Google knows it. That still works. For now..
Day finished in fine style as all the hot water fell out of the boiler. How exciting. Kitchen somewhat damp. House somewhat cold.
Alan starts the IT section of the course today. Hee.
Visit from Rhys in the evening. Caught up with much Oh,
they have moved too
details. People keep moving around.
It's so confusing.
Crash course in silly X games with multiple monitors. I used to know how to do this. I decided back then that it was way too weird. It's still pretty weird. Of course, I have to do things the silly way around.
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.)