| Sunday 29th January 2006 15:10MST | → 0 Comments |
After purchasing and wiring up my Belkin USB hub, the webcam won’t work through it and has to be plugged directly into one of the (fortunately spare) ports on the Thinkpad itself. I wonder why?
Yesterday, Terry wanted to visit the British Museum (first time I’ve linked to a .museum domain!). We’d been before some years ago but it was only a flying visit. This time we saw a good 80%, including the ubiquitous mummys. However, I would say that the second most popular exhibit seemed to be the Rosetta Stone - fortunately, one of my favourites too.
We lunched at TAS and spent the rest of the day wandering up and down Tottenham Court Road, taking in Heal’s and Purves & Purves. Wandering back to the South Bank, we were too late to visit the Hayward Gallery (ostensibly to see the Dan Flavin retrospective), so ambled along the Thames taking night-time shots. It was freezing cold. As usual, I’ll have to put up the pictures (and actually do it this time).
Also bought recently: Oracle 10g: A Beginner’s Guide and Le Morte D’Arthur.
| Thursday 26th January 2006 21:14MST | → 1 Comments |
My new purchase an ATMT 300GB (7200RPM) USB 2.0 3.5″ External Hard Disk Drive. Absolutely peachy when talking to my Linux laptop and will do well to store backups, images, music and scans (oh, by the way I bought an HP 2400c flatbed scanner the other day for
| Monday 23rd January 2006 21:30MST | → 0 Comments |
In 2005, the country with the ‘highest number of judgments finding at least one violation recorded against it’ (violations of the European Convention on Human Rights) was Turkey with 270. Doesn’t bode well for their entry into the EU, though they are starting to get the hint and have recently dropped charges against a Turkish writer charged with ‘insulting Turkishness’.
I’m supposed to be learning Italian now - starting a month or so late. Oh well, Terry has been reading the book so I’ll just let him do all the talking.
| Saturday 21st January 2006 18:34MST | → 0 Comments |
Cold gone now (though Terry is still suffering). It seemed to be a wierd sort of infection - as if it was flu but the symptoms didn’t come all at once but one after the other. In my case it was the runny nose followed by headaches. About half my colleagues at work were struck down over the past few weeks.
I have a new shower. The ‘control’ knob had gone on the previous one so my landlady decided just to replace the whole lot with a new shower unit which looks a bit more snazzy and a slightly quieter. On weekdays, I like to listen to the Radio 4 Today programme in the shower and previously had to turn the radio up to maximum volume and have it right next to my ear. Even then, it barely exceeded the volume of the shower motor. My next door neighbour must hate me (though I suspect he leaves before I get up).
The government has defended storing the DNA profiles of about 24,000 children and young people aged 10 to 18.. More specifically:
The youngsters’ details are held on the UK database, despite them never having been cautioned, charged or convicted of an offence…
As usual, Noo Labour has tried to defend it by saying a ‘balance’ had to be struck. Well, they seem to have perpetually faulty scales as their policies are constantly weighted well in favour of the police and the Government to the detriment of individual liberties. What makes this worse is it was never authorised by Parliament.
I wonder if the modern political spectrum needs to be tilted significantly from the old-fashioned left-vs-right to authoritarian-vs-libertarian (though I hesitate using the term ‘libertarian’ as I prefer it to mean ‘respect of all basic liberties’ and not that right-wing, hyper-individualism version found in the US).
| Tuesday 17th January 2006 22:23MST | → 0 Comments |
Blearrggghhh, I’ve got a cold!
| Sunday 15th January 2006 18:31MST | → 0 Comments |
Having re-arranged the sitting room, which involved moving the media centre PC away from the window, I decided to have my webcam running on my Linux machine again.
This may sound like a daft idea given that I often use my Linux laptop in its… well,… portable mode but in reality I’d had nothing but trouble with the cam running on Windows 2000. The box seemingly ‘lost’ its network connection or forgot how DNS worked, requiring a reboot. Sometimes the picture would just stop being captured for inexplicable reasons. None of these problems was easily tracable and even getting the machine to reboot once a day to mitigate them was easier said than done.
Now I’ve got it working perfectly on my laptop using the wonders of configurable shell scripting and cron (with image archiving) and I’ll be surprised if anything non-hardware goes wrong.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere for all of us (especially me).
| Saturday 14th January 2006 15:04MST | → 0 Comments |
Last week ended on a high. A ‘Request For Information’ document I produced (basically a sort of ‘pre-tender’ qualification questionnaire from a potential customer) was described by my boss as ‘outstanding’. I had a swell head for the rest of the day.
Terry has flu again, though there’s a lot of it about and half the people at work are afflicted. Right now he’s trying to take his mind off it by planning a re-arrangement of the furniture in the sitting room, with ‘to scale’ cutouts on squared paper.
I’ve only recently renewed my membership of the Lib Dems so I’ll still be able to exercise my right of leader selection. Personally, the party needs to be respected more and I think only Menzies Campbell really fits that. I suspect the other Orange Book types would try to convert the party into ‘Tory Lite’ which would really make it stand out compared to the other two!
| Wednesday 11th January 2006 22:34MST | → 0 Comments |
Visited the famous Borough Market in London for the first time. Terry had wanted to go there for quite some time and I must admit, even though markets never particularly thrill me, it was impressive - especially the number of cheese stalls and their huge slabs of cheese. While there we popped into Neals Yard Dairy. These visits were between seeing the Turner Prize exhibits and Degas, Sickert & Toulouse Lautrec exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Rousseau exhibition at Tate Modern.
It was also the day I found myself suggesting Terry go back to smoking after he supposedly had given up, because he was in such a foul mood (nicotine patches obviously not working) and I just couldn’t cope with months of such an atmosphere.
I’m making a fresh attempt to give quality time to learning J2EE (specifically EJBs) and maybe some auxiliary quality time to finally getting to grips with CSS.
| Thursday 5th January 2006 20:53MST | → 1 Comments |
Richard Corbett MEP analyses the recent Radio 4 Today programme poll where Jose Manuel Barroso was supposedly voted as the most powerful man in Britain. There’s nothing more for me to add here, apart from the bit about the Commission being voted for is stretching it somewhat (their appointment is either approved or not by the European Parliament). Just another example of how there isn’t anything remotely close to proper debate and discussion (and facts) in this country when it comes to the EU.
From what I’ve experienced in my relationship (diary passim), I’m probably more understanding of Charles Kennedy’s drink problem admission then a lot of people will be. However, that’s completely separate from my feeling that he doesn’t have the gravitas to be a party leader - which is something of a shame as there’s a danger that whoever might replace him could adopt the cynical, self-centred, ‘criticise everything’ attitude of the other main parties just to get attention. The fault is very much (IMHO) with the media that rarely gives the LibDems airtime or column inches because they prefer to discuss policy in a sensible fashion. Yet another reason to weep for the state of democracy in this country.
| Sunday 1st January 2006 13:39MST | → 0 Comments |
Happy New Year, though /var/log/messages on my Linux box puts it so much better:
Dec 31 23:59:59 localhost kernel: Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC
Usual revelries with Terry and Daryl in the centre of Guildford, followed by wandering up to the top of Bright Hill (a high point) to watch fireworks being set off from many miles around.
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