I just *HAD* to post this link to The Register.. it made me chuckle.

Having read the article from New Scientist I’m left with the question which isn’t answered… Isn’t there a possibility that the people who write diaries regularly probably going to be the character type who have the medical and phsychological problems described as the consiquences of diary writing in the article?

From what I can see, the only way to prove or disprove this would be to find a large sample of non-diary writers, do a medical on them all and then get half to start writing diaries without telling them what the study is for (so as not to cause a placebo effect). Just testing those who are already writing or not writing is pointless as you can’t separate cause and effect.

Sometimes I dispair about the psychologists (and many medical researchers) who seem to be pseudo-scientists who abuse statistics to prove the conjecture they formulated before the study. A true scientist should try as hard as they can to knock down their own conjecture or theory and only if it withstands every attack they can think of start to believe it might hold some sense of truth.

Well, last night I finally tried putting a 64 bit operating system on my laptop as an experiment.

I shrank the Windows partition by a further 5GB, put a new partition on it and installed the MandrakeLinux 10.0 RC1 AMD64 distribution on it.

So far, other than the 2.6 kernel which is used during the install process not being able to access the keyboard I’ve not had any problems. Of course, it can’t use the wireless ethernet as ndiswrapper only works as a 32bit driver. I built a newer Linus kernel (2.6.7) and installed that as x86-64 support is getting (generally) better with each release. I didn’t put 2.6.8{,.1} on there as that seems to be a rather buggy release.

The machine does feel substantially quicker than when it was running in 32bit mode. I think the kernel build was almost double the speed, though this is only a feeling as I didn’t time it. However, after the kernel build using the original kernel I did notice that the system started bogging down and becoming a little unresponsive but I’ve not seen this (yet) with the newer kernel.

Anyway, it looks promising.

My parents went home on Tuesday morning.

Someone at work returned my old mountain bike last night.

I did my washing tonight.

At work, I’ve been moving our undergrad network from an old Solaris server to a WinServ2K+3 system with the Interix^H^H^H^H^H^H^HServices for UNIX system to do the InActive Directory to NIS conversion and NFS serving for when the undergrad PCs are running Linux (and the old Solaris box running e-mail). Some bashing of head against wall, installing Cygwin and hacking later and things are starting to come together.

(Why, Oh WHY did Interix build tcsh with the almost never used vi command line editting mode, by the way? Emacs mode is the usual default and would be far easier to use for anyone, including VI lovers.. not even mentioning Windows types.)

Right, some of the pictures from Rachel & Graham’s open house/BBQ thingy last weekend are now on-line.

Please note that as my parents are visiting and sleeping in the machine room and spare bedroom, the machine running the web site will be switched off between 10pm and sometime in the morning tonight and tomorrow night.

Via Slashdot.. hamster powered night light.

Maybe it’s time to look into the renewable energy of hamster power for when the oil and gas run out?

OK, so what’s been happening to me other than wibbling over the last couple of weeks since Cropredy?

Well, there was the visit to the ex-Mongolian Wok restaurant, I think it’s called SoJo’s now and it’s moved to a new building (with a redirection sign in the old window). It’s one of those places you go to have fun as an experience rathr then to enjoy the cuisine as you have to make up the dishes yourself.

Last Friday I popped over to Guildford to meet up with a bunch of the By The Gods exiles for a meal and a chat in a pub. Alec was there along with Maureen, Joe, Bevis, Bill and Tim (I think that’s everyone). Much fun was had, though the two hour journey to get there including an hour of traffic jams wasn’t. I didn’t take any of my cameras so no piccies, I’m afraid.

Saturday was Rachel & Graham’s open house/BBQ party. Great fun, lots of cricket, no burnt food, oh and lots of photographic mayhem. I have piccies, most of which were taken by Alec as he seemed to like to play with my camera. I’ll post them soon.

Sunday was spent still at Rachel and Graham’s eating up the left-overs from the party the day before. In the afternoon we all went off to see Shrek 2 in Basingstoke. However, due to a tactical miscalculation on the part of Graham, Chris was given some lemonade before we left which gave him wind. Chris became convinced that he was going to be sick with threw him into a tizzy and hence the biggest tantrum ever, all in the middle of the shopping centre and cinema. Rachel and Graham were not at all pleased. Once the film started, however, Chris calmed down and forgot all about his tummy ache.

As for the rest of the week, nothing much has happened. By parents arrived yesterday for the bank holiday weekend. As usual there’ll be a family get-together on Saturday when my uncle and aunt from Enfield visit. Other than that there are no plans.

It looks like my Mum might be going potty.

I got a phone call this evening from my parents confirming that they were arriving tomorrow. However, my Mum was insistant that we had a wedding to go to somewhere in Berkshire on Saturday involving the youngest daughter of an american airman she’d met in 1948 and who had visited them last Friday and stayed overnight. This was news to me and news to my Dad as well, he couldn’t remember anyone visiting, let alone staying overnight on Friday and there had been no mention of this during the other phone calls we’ve had since the weekend. It seems that my Mum had suddenly come up with this false memory sometime this afternoon.

She’s been behaving increasingly oddly since my Nan, who’s going very potty herself, rang up and let loose a rant at my Mum just over a year ago. This caused a massive rift between her and her Mum. Add to this the death of her brother at Easter and a bought of shingles on her face which has prevented her from doing her favourite activity of reading and you see that she’s been under a bit of mental stress and has seemed to bottle it up and not want to talk about it.

My Dad phoned back later and discussed this with me and our idea is to try to talk to my Mum’s GP about her odd behaviour and see if he can help her. I’m wondering if it might be depression which has turned into some sort of psychosis.. but I have little knowledge of this sort of mental illness so I’m just clutching at straws.

I’m mainly writing this entry to put my thoughts out of my head so that they don’t go around and around and cause me problems. Now I’ve written it I feel a lot better. I can now just take things as they come , see what happens and roll with the punches.

I had a nice, long chat on the phone with Steve Howe and the situation is nowhere near as bad as it first seemed. For a start Leila didn’t say anything which might give the impression of having a crush on me, merely that “age doesn’t matter” when talking to people via e-mail.

Anyway, the upshot of it all is that Steve sees that it’s good for her to have someone she can talk to and be friends with and possibly talk about things that she might not want to talk to her parents about and thinks that of all the people he knows that I’m one of the best choices he can think of.

I feel a lot better after that phone call.