| Monday 31st January 2005 18:42MST | → 2 Comments |
Met up with Graham, Iain and Martin for a pub lunch. Otherwise nothing doing today, apart from finally being relieved that bf’s last month’s worth of pills did arrive when we thought they’d been lost. He’d be in trouble without them. In the end, they took ten days to get across the Atlantic.
It’s interesting that not many days after the BBC is criticised for crap coverage of European politics, that the flagship Radio 4 news programme, PM, has devoted nearly fifteen minutes to Michael Jackson’s trial. I didn’t realise its ‘mission to explain’ meant showbiz took priority over world politics. The UK public are complaining they are ‘uninformed’ over the proposed European Constitution but would be less so if the BBC devoted a number of programmes and debates to this. It has yet to happen.
In the meantime, campaign for an elected head of state.
| Sunday 30th January 2005 14:15MST | → 1 Comments |
Former minister Chris Smith reveals he is HIV+. He states the reason was wanting to end the stigma surrounding the issue (encouraged by the ever wonderful Nelson Mandela) but I can just imagine how our oh-so-tolerant-and-understanding right-wing media will respond. Probably something along the lines of demanding every politician declare their sexuality publically and queers give details of their private life that straights would never be required to do. Oh, and any who are HIV+ or have AIDS should be sacked.
Fanciful? Let us not forget that classic headline from The Sun:
Are we being run by a gay mafia?
It’s interesting that The Observer, in an article about the London Olympic bid, suggested one reason it might fail is due to the cynical newpaper media in this country. I wouldn’t hesitate to add the word ‘nasty’, though I wonder if The Observer includes itself in the list?
| Saturday 29th January 2005 18:45MST | → 0 Comments |
We saw Cirque du Soleil yesterday. It was fantastic and I’m glad we got a box, so avoided ending up with neck-ache through having to look up all the time! Well recommended, especially the version we saw, called Dralion.
It was also the first time I’d been in the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington Gore. Beforehand we had fun wandering around the Natural History Museum, at bf’s request. I’ll put up some pictures soon, including some from the new Darwin Centre where they put on display a selection of their specimens kept in jars! Both cool and scary.
From Boing Boing is a story (possibly apocryphal) of use of the test-based browser Lynx being mistaken for an attempted server hack. I use elinks quite regularly, especially to read on-line newspapers, so: Dear The Guardian, please don’t send the rozzers round.
| Thursday 27th January 2005 22:50MST | → 1 Comments |
It was my last day at work. When I arrived this morning my workstation had already been packed away, as had everyone else’s, so we few who remained spent the day clearing our desks and pondering the future. Others had been brought in to pack up all the equipment, files, etc. so we all felt rather like spare parts - standing around wondering when to give up and go to the pub (12:30 in the end). I’m somewhat sad, as I really got on well with my colleagues and I’ll miss them. We swapped email addresses so hopefully can stay in touch.
I’d been employed there (off and on) for just over four years so it was time to move on anyway. It has been the longest I’ve stayed in any job.
I found it cute that the people who manage the building where our office was were also sad to see us leave as they thought we were one of their ‘nicer’ tenants.
I pinched a (otherwise unwanted) hatstand for bf, ostensibly to discourage him from buying one - which we don’t really need anyway but he seems to dislike my wall-mounted version.
An entry from Wikipedia on the Pentium made me laugh:
Shortly after the introduction of the Pentium microprocessor, a floating-point arithmetic glitch was found which affected the accuracy of calculations, leading to the popular expression, “I am Pentium of Borg. Accuracy is irrelevant. You will be approximated.”…
| Wednesday 26th January 2005 22:32MST | → 1 Comments |
A visit to the dentist today. It was a new surgery as I dropped off the ‘books’ of my previous one because I didn’t go often enough (timespan: some years) and now they don’t take any new NHS patients. It wasn’t too scary and I need some work done, though the earliest convenient time would be just under two weeks from now as bf has filled up my diary with lots of planned adventures (e.g. visits to Winchester and Brighton, along with all manner of events in London).
In the afternoon I visited a small software company someone had put me onto for a chat with their MD about openings. There may be a team-leader/project managery type role for me there. We shall see.
| Tuesday 25th January 2005 21:01MST | → 0 Comments |
Presenting Original Electronic Music Radio, brought to you by the dudes from Dub Beautiful Collective. I like.
| Monday 24th January 2005 12:35MST | → 0 Comments |
“Friends of Europe is a Brussels-based think tank without national or political bias that promotes discussion, research and new thinking of European policy issues.”
I’ve been considering the mechanics of putting my website under version control, using either CVS (which I know) or Subversion (which I don’t). It would work similar to the approach for source code where the various elements, such as HTML, PHP libraries, images, etc. would be partitioned in appropriate repository locations and I would run a ‘build’ script to put it all together and deploy either to the test section on my local box or FTP’d to the site.
I suppose what I’m doing is writing the other half of a content management system - the first half being my site itself, which uses a somewhat hacked CM structure I created over the years. However, I need to work out how to sync CVS with dynamic content added to the site (i.e. pictures) along with stuff in the database, especially if the schema is updated but the data should be left. In other words, my build/deploy mechanism could start getting very complicated. It’s worth it for the academic challenge, especially if I use command-line PHP (greatly under-rated IMHO) or even Python, taking advantage of its froozy libraries that do everything you could possibly want.
| Sunday 23rd January 2005 21:27MST | → 0 Comments |
Courtesy of
Error message generator.
| Saturday 22nd January 2005 21:12MST | → 0 Comments |
I thought I’d lost my original CV (such that I have one) but it was lurking on my iMac, which was the first time I’d switched it on in months and reminded me how nice the GUI is. Maybe I’ll be tempted by the Mac mini, if the bonus comes through.
Once I’ve done my CV, I might work for these guys.
Cheney targets Iran as top threat to peace, stability. Meanwhile, the rest of the world considers the (new) Bush administration to be the top threat to peace and stability.
| Thursday 20th January 2005 0:00MST | → 1 Comments |
Got the webcam going again, simply by installing a more kernel-friendly driver. I’m also using a different capture-and-upload app called camE, which hopefully won’t corrupt the images as much as ‘webcam‘ did. Then again, it might have been due to my choice of a cheap and cheerful camera.
I also got the sound working too, with a little (OK, a lot) of help from ALSA. Nevertheless, all this was far from trivial and any non-technical person, specifically non-Linux technical, who was confronted with an apparently unrecognised sound card would have been stuffed. Linux, it seems, still has some way to go before your granny can use it.
Meanwhile, my latest batch of search terms asymptotically approaches the surreal:
totally silent vacuum cleaner prototype
how worms get into cadbury
back end of a train
2005 email address swiss boring overseas corporation ltd
withdrawl of consent medical procedures
Kofi Annan Cultural Relativism
free sample pics trampling
never give up stork
rent a chair for self employed hairdressers in somerset
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