Warning: These are old.
Oh poo.
I never did the magic rsync to put the last entry up. Cunning. Erm, well, it's all still true except that just this week the very important file showed up, and I have not installed any bloggy bits at all because they are all too complicated for me to understand.
Well, I made it to the Eisteddfod, I made it to UKUUG, I have
managed to survive the noise of the new neighbours (this could be
about eight entries in itself, but I just don't have the heart to
go there), Alan managed to hand his final written thing in on time
and discovered it will probably be months before it is marked, and
the machine which used to host this diary and which contains all the
backups of things I considered worth putting on the web died a painful
death. Anyone who didn't see the final no, you should be looking
at this address
decision won't be seeing this to know, of
course.
With the utter trust in machinery which readers of this diary will have observed over the past years, I do in fact have extra backups somewhere entirely different. In two separate places, in fact. Neither is completely up to date, but I have got off lightly: a few months missing out of seven and a half years is little. There is one file which is going to cause a certain amount of difficulty, but I think I had better break it to the person who sent it to me for safe-keeping first :(
Alan promised that now he was not doing his thesis thing he would start keeping his diary again, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Yet.
Given the disappearance of its original home, I think I shall take advantage of the hiatus to attempt to install one of these bloggy things with RSS (which should keep some people happy) and what-not. This is still not a blog, though. I want to make that very clear.
And it'll probably take me far too long to install something that doesn't break the first time I do something stupid.
Yeah, I'm behind again. All will become more regular when Alan gets back to writing his. In the meantime: there is a Linux conference in Swansea shortly, which has cunningly been scheduled for the week I am at the other end of the country at the Eisteddfod. I shall try to manage pieces of both of them.
The highlights of the month so far: Alan is getting to the end of
his thesis-writing and entering the traditional game of hunt-the-binder;
I lost patience in the long-running discussion of how to decorate some
more of the house, waited until my sister came to visit, and we simply
painted it before Alan could object; Alan has had his mobile phone
stolen, replaced, returned, and the centre of a saga involving the
insurers, the phone company, assorted others, the intriguing question
of whether it will ever be switched on again, amid multiple applications
of Data Protection Act requests for information and god knows what;
we went on a week-long summer school; and Wikipedia is still dangerously
addictive, which I realised when I found myself looking at a book in
the bookshop and thinking I bet it would be useful for Wikipedia
.
Oh, and Harry Potter came out, and every single one of my predictions was hilariously wrong. It takes skill to be that wrong.
Lions team for second test has a lot of changes. Local newspapers ecstatic. Fingers crossed.
Alan continues on his thesis stuff. I finally got to read most of it today. The point of the thesis is the conclusions he draws from the data, I imagine. Lots of references and strange terminology there. But the data itself is what is fascinating me, although this is overshadowed as I, Alan, aspell, and various printed sources wrangle over the number of t's in target(t)ing and whether or not punctuation is optional.
Lions recriminations begin. Well, actually they began at about 10am yesterday morning, but the Sunday papers are jumping in now.
We do not have Sky, so I was thinking of going down to the pub to watch the first of the Lions tests. (Regular readers of this diary who also follow the rugby will doubtless have noticed the omission. There's the explanation. No Sky. There was also the make up of the team, which has been a sore subject for some.) The Lions are a joint team. Every four years, players from four of the teams who compete against each other in the Six Nations all end up in the same squad, and head down into the other hemisphere to... erm.. err, get beaten, apparently. Certainly, in the last tour, the Australians won. This one is against New Zealand.
The games are on at 8am here, and after all my planning, I forget today until I put on the radio and heard the commentary. Oh. Dear. Decided not to go down to the pub and watch the second half there.
Pretended to steward a procession in the early afternoon, although
no-one in it really looked like they were likely to walk up the wrong
street or something. After that, down to the park to watch the
proclamation ceremony for the Eisteddfod, complete with flower girls
and swords and cries of Is there peace?
and a new archdruid
into the bargain. I have some nice pictures now.
Out in the evening with family.
Thunder in the night, but still hot.
Pretended to guide parents around Gower. Erm. Except with a mediaeval manor house, Norman churches, and dad a historian who likes mediaeval things, there's not much I can tell him. Wonderful day, though: Weobley, Llangennith, Cefn Bryn, much wildlife and many wild flowers.
Parents are visiting currently. With a car. Hence it is time to venture a bit further afield. So up through Swansea Valley to the same waterfalls I saw in spring. One of the ones at Melincourt had dried up. Waah.
Parents arrived to visit.
Super-hot (mid-20's is hot, okay?) and sticky.
Alan has not moved his new trousers from last week. They are still sitting in the shopping bag where he dropped it the day he bought it. Sigh.
Amazingly hot, so I hid in the library most of the day. It's cool there. All the computers were down (not my fault, although I have noticed that they are down quite a lot when I go there) but luckily, I still remember how to use a card catalogue.
Doctor Who is over. Waah. (And they never did mention that virus again.
We have been trying to connect the television up to a hard drive to
dump all the programmes we have saved onto it. It started off quite
promisingly, with the instructions actually mentioning Linux as one
of the two file formats that was usable. When Alan said Hmm,
wonder which one?
we realised that perhaps it wasn't going to be
that simple. I decided to let him work it out without my assistance
(or breaking anything) and this is my excuse for spending five hours
in the library. On my return, it still wasn't working spectacularly
well. We had to delete two programmes to make sure we had room for things,
and it seems to have eaten another one of its own accord. Then the
television went mad, asking us if we wanted to record the reserved
programme about sixty times before we turned it off. I wanted to
smack it, but Alan said no. Even after that, after it started
recording Doctor Who, it then stopped two minutes into the
programme. Grr.
Out to a social night. Alan didn't go, and thus missed hearing some good music. Silly Alan.
Argh. Apparently I have completely misunderstood everything about the *linux.org.uk machines, and this diary should be on zeniv, not zenii. Last move, I promise.
End of term for the Welsh courses approaches, hence the class trip. Out to Pentre Ifan and then Nevern. Someone had put a big Not Suitable For Coaches sign up in the last two weeks, so we didn't get to Pentre Ifan (wail), but Nerven was lovely: old old church, a corridor of yews, and a gigantic Celtic cross.
Alan declared himself busy so I vanished for the day courtesy of a lift to Llandeilo to watch the Sealed Knot recreate part of the English Civil War (in Wales, yes, English Civil War is a stupid term for it). Justin, Sharon, Steve and I had a nice picnic and then winced as lots of loud noises happened.
On my return, amazed and awed to discover that Alan had taken himself shopping and bought himself some new trousers.
Another lovely day. I knew it would be. I have an exam. Lots of writing in the morning, then a three-hour wait, then the oral. It wouldn't be a proper exam if it had been nice weather outside, now, would it?
LUG in the evening in Carmarthen. Lovely sunny day. Free afternoon. So got the train with a friend very very early and arrived there about five hours early. Blazingly hot day. Carmarthen is not terribly large, but still managed to get lost several times. I maintain this is a useful technique, because then you end up finding your way back to somewhere central from multiple directions.
No, I don't know what happened to the diary either. It just didn't get written. It becomes difficult to write about a kernel-hacking other half when all he is doing is hiding in his room either hacking kernels or writing dissertations (he claims) or buying, cleaning up, and reselling model trains (I reckon).
What have I been doing, then? Not much. Missed a couple of LUGs, mooched around Swansea, went to a birthday party, been gripped by Doctor Who, missed a conference, was completely unmissed at it, been panicing about a silly exam, got around to adding stuff to Wikipedia, collected innumerable parcels from the postman because Alan is never up then, missed a week-long event in Cardiff (a week. I am an idiot.) Wondered why I am the only person to whom stupidities happen such as cooking rhubarb for forty minutes and still it won't cook (yes, the gas was on..), voted in an election, bought a pair of shoes (yes, this is a major event, because I hate and avoid shopping for clothes), got persuaded to try and get posters up for something, found that the novelty has worn off the Exciting Television (if you turn it off whilst it's recording, it stops recording: a design genius has been at work clearly).. erm.. inspiration fails.
For Doctor Who watchers: the Doctor and Rose aren't on the computers in the Long Game. So we think Mickey must release the virus.
And that's about it.
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.)