After a long lay in, I got up at about 11:15am. Lunch ensued and then we went off to Asda in Falmouth to get a new pillow (which should help me get a better night’s sleep) and thence into Helston so that my Dad could pay the money I took out of the Alliance & Leicester account when I closed it into his account. The money is the residue of that which was surplus when we bought this house after moving down from N.Bedfordshire in ’87. It’s going to be used to pay for a new front and back door.

This evening I managed to finish Half-Life 2. I can understand why some of the reviews said that the end was a bit of an anticlimax. Still, at least it didn’t have a big monster at the end and it’s definitely set up for a sequel, or possibly new chapter. It’s also somewhat longer than Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which is good, but somewhat shorter than the original Half-Life or the original Unreal. The one really disappointing thing about the game was thqt it was totally linear with only one route through the whole game.

Anyway, time for bed. Hopefully, the new pillow will give me a better sleep tonight.

The first day back down in Cornwall for the Christmas break. It’s almost exactly 5 calendar months since I started the last set of diary entries for my summer holiday.

It’s surprising what’s changed and what hasn’t changed in that time. Firstly there was Cropredy and meeting the almost grown up Leila which has led to a friendship. Second was the almost constantly busy term at work meaning that I could hardly complete anything fully. If anything it’s been full of mostly finished stuff which I’m sure I’m going to have to revisit so as to do them properly. However, other than that nothing has changed.

As for today, I was up at 7:30am so I could pack and get out by 9:50 to pick up Tom Jordan. Despite the sporadic snow/slush on high ground down to Taunton, the journey was without incident. However, there seems to have been no point to getting the car washed yesterday.

This afternoon/evening we watched “Finding Nemo” on the Disney Channel. This is the first time I’ve seen this film. In my opinion, this seems to be Pixar’s weakest film, though still mostly fun and excellent in places.

Anyway, it’s the end of the day and I’m definitely in need of a sleep.

And now for.. The Gallery.

(Que music from “Vision On”/”Take Hart”)

Yes, I’ve almost completed the transfer of all my digital photos onto my server’s “gallery” server. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending upon your point of view there are no pictures created by children using tissue paper or glitter so it’s not at all like the old television Gallery referred to above. Still, it does make my whole catalogue of photos available online.

Late night last night… *sleep*

Last night I attended a combined leaving do for Kate Hendry (going off to Antarctica for 3 months on Jan 1st) and birthday party for both Kate (who’s birthday is on the 31st December) and Nicola (birthday today).

I got home at about 1:15am..

Photos here. (Yes, I’ve finally installed Gallery as well!)

Meme time.


You Are the Helper


2


You always put on a happy face and try to help those around you.

You’re incredibly empathetic and care about everyone you know.

Able to see the good in others, you’re thoughtful, warm, and sincere.

You connect with people who are charming and charismatic.

Grumble, grumble, fume.

Effin’ BT cancelled my ADSL connection last night at about 9:45pm.

Of course, Zen Internet only have support from 8am – 8pm.

This morning I got ping-ponged between Zen and BT.

The BT database shows that a BT worker cancelled my connection, yet until I forcefully made them aware of it they insisted that it must have been the ISP who requested it.

I’m not happy.

It looks like I’ll not get my ADSL back until 5 working days after this gets sorted by BT Wholesale.

Zen Internet are still awaiting a reply from BT Wholesale about the matter, it could be hours until they get a reply.

I’m not happy.

It looks like lingula.org.uk will be off the air for at least the next week.

I’m not happy.

A Grim meme

You scored as Lawful Good. A lawful good person acts as a good person is expected or required to act. They are dedicated to upholding both what is right and what is set down in law.

Lawful Good

90%

Lawful Neutral

75%

Neutral Good

65%

Chaotic Good

50%

True Neutral

45%

Lawful Evil

35%

Neutral Evil

25%

Chaotic Evil

10%

Chaotic Neutral

10%

What is your Alignment?
created with QuizFarm.com

Meaningless statistics.

Did you know that if you plot the population density of haystacks against that of brothels that you find that there’s an inverse relationship?

Indeed, from this you can prove that the two are mutually exclusive.

Hence, a new idea for New Labour to pick up:- Inoculate towns and cities against prostitution by installing haystacks. Of course, this would need a new QANGO (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation) such as the Office for Haystacks with a Haystack Czar and the Haystack Direct hotline.

I’m sure this would be a populist winner in the fight against anti-social behaviour.

Weekend changes

It’s been a pretty geeky weekend this weekend.

Having replaced the 80GB disk in my games machine last weekend with a faster 160GB one it gave me the opportunity to at last build a functional replacement from my old SPARCstation 4 as my main server. So, that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend. I had to do the OS install and then configure the web server, learn how to set up the postfix mail daemon so that it didn’t relay nasty e-mails and finally get Bullet to compile and run in a chroot(3)’ed environment.

Of all of the tasks, getting Bullet running was the hardest. Rob’s use oc C is starting to show its age and is causing problems. The assumptions he’s made are starting to break down with modern compilers which are more strict on enforcing ANSI C. Add to this I had to work out the minimum necessary to get a Linux chroot(3)’ed environment (and the discovery that if you link Linux executables staticly they still need the dynamic libraries!!!!)).

I’ve still a few things to do yet. I’ve got to find out how to persuade Apache 2 to allow user web sites (ie. http://…/~user/) which it’s not at the moment and I can’t see why not at the moment. Also, setting up samba for the local Windows file serving would be nice. That’s about that, really.

As for the other stuff I’ve done. Well, I didn’t do a lot on Saturday, mostly due to an animal rights protest happening around work so I couldn’t park and go into town. Today, other than the server hacking, I popped into Oxford City and did a little shopping. I got myself a new jumper for the Edinburgh Wool Shop ‘cos one or two of my older ones are starting to wear out. I also got myself a coffee from Starbucks. On the way back to te car I thought I’d have a look in the Oxford Museum of the History of Science as I was passing.

I was expecting something akin to the Science Museum in London but in a much smaller form. I was very disappointed. It should really be called the Museum of Early Astronomy, Navigation and Biology. If you need an astrolade they have huge numbers. If you want old telescopes they have some along with a similar number of microscopes. The trouble is that that’s about all there is and nothing later than about 1850.

And so, that’s about it, really.