Well, I’ve got the car washed ready for its service on Tuesday. Now all I have to do is do the washing up, get some tea and tidy up.

What a fun and interesting life I lead.

Well, it’s a week since Cropredy finished.

In that time I’ve totally failed to arrange to go and see Terminator 3 and done little else, really.

Yesterday’s fun included getting my hair cut, disposing of the iMac at work which got drowned and buying a new, bigger and very much more quiet hard disk for my laptop.

It’s amazing how I coped with the old laptop disk for so long. Not only was it only 5GB which had to be split in two for Windows and Linux, so neither had enough space, but it was flippin noisey. I mean it whirred at a level that in a quiet house you could hear it in the bedroom upstairs when the machine was in the living room. It also clicked and clonked as it did its job. And no, it wasn’t faulty, it was merely the way an IBM Travelstar sounds.

The new disk is 40GB and you can hardly hear it in a quiet room when you’ve got the laptop on your lap. It also seems faster too.

As for today. Well, I’m going to be tidying a great deal. I’m also going to wash the car which seems to have a dust layer so thick that it’s more beige than black at the moment.

Whilst I was showering this morning I got into an idle thought mode and thinking strange things, as you do when doing mundane tasks..

I got to thinking how you’d make an accurate protractor using nothing other than a straight edge, a compass (not the north pointing kind) and a sharp pencil.

I determined that you could do it as long as you didn’t mark the divisions in degrees as below 45 degrees all the divisions would be fractional if you used the simple technique of sub-dividing an angle. (ie. from the origin make a chord which passes through lines from the origin subtending the angle, then find the point equidistant from each of the points of intersection between the lines and the cords and draw a line from the origin through the equidistant point.)

Surely, therefore, it would be better to have the circle divided into degrees which were based upon a power of two? In that way the whole set of marks on a protractor etc. could be generated by simple angle subdivision. Far easier and far more logical.

Of course, we can blame the current (non-radian) division of a circle on the Babylonians.. they have a lot to answer for do those Babylonians.

Well, I’ve spent most of the day trying to determine how someone got into the machine which runs Bullet and changed the password for the demo account.

Alec was a brilliant help here, not only on the phone but via the write(1) command.

Anyway, the upshot was that no-one did get onto the machine. In fact it was software doing what it was designed to do. Unfortunately, this “correct” operation changed when I installed a huge patch cluster the other day. Oh well!

Anyway, thanks to Alec, I now have a set of tools to test the integrity of files on the system using checksums held at Sun and a security lockdown tool call JASS. So it wasn’t a total loss.

If you’re interested in seeing a selection of the pictures I took at the Cropredy music festival last week, you can find them on my web site:-

http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~steve/pictures/cropredy03/

Well, as no doubt I’ve already said before, this year I decided to commute to the Cropredy Festival. I think this was a very good decision in the end seeing the weather we had. It was HOT, I mean nearly record breaking temperatures in an open field which is south facing. Commuting meant that I could get a decent sleep at night and, more importantly, could shower!

Anyway, other than the temperature, this year’s Cropredy was a little different in other ways as the attendance of those people I generally go to see was smaller than usual. Also, personal friction between two camps within the Hunt family due to a complicated friendship/ex-freindship thingy made the politics interesting. That and Lindsey being there with her new boyfriend fiancee (with whom she’s been going out for little more than 3 weeks!) meaning that we hardly saw the two of them meant that a lot of the time I was left holding the baby, both figuratively with respect to making sure the stuff on the field didn’t get knicked and actually as I had to entertain Thomas, Mel’s oldest, who’s a handful even at the best of times and doesn’t seem to know what the word “no” means.

The Hunt family also befriended their next-tent-neighbour on the camp site, Chris, who, with her 3 year old daughter, Joannah, spent all their time with our group. Again, I was called upon to be child minder for this sweet bundle of mischief. I didn’t mind that much minding Joannah as she’s not a handful and is a sweet little thing.

Although playing with kids is fun, after a while you do want to be able to get away from it. Also, if you do actually want to listen to music etc. it can become tiresome to be interrupted continuously. I know that if it was my own children it would be a different matter, but they weren’t and I wasn’t really expecting the 3 days to be full of child minding duty.

Also, the length of time I was left alone on the field site while others went and did other things such as shop, meaning that I couldn’t do or go anywhere myself ment that on the whole I didn’t enjoy Cropredy nearly as much this year.

Well, it’s all after the cut…

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Well, I’m back from two weeks of holidays in Cornwall. I had a fortnight of glorious wet weather.

Anyway, I’ll update this journal with the diary I kept while I was away once I’ve retrieved the text from my Psion and have forged it into the right format for here.

Am I glad to be back? Not really. The machines around here greeted me back by a few of them having fits or dying. Thankfully, the important one merely needed its firmware refreshing.

Back to the grind in the overly hot weather…

Lindsey phoned up last night for a chat.

It was then I discovered that I had the dates of the Cropredy music festival totally wrong. Instead of it being mid-August, as I had thought, it was the weekend I had planned still to be on my hols in Cornwall.

So, this morning I’ve taken steps to try to bring my holiday forward by a week, meaning that I start it tomorrow rather than in a week’s time.

I need to do some contingency planning.

Hmm.. the fan I bought from Woolworths about 6 weeks ago has failed this evening, meaning that I’m probably not going to get much sleep tonight.

Last night the fan ran at its lowest speed all night and was a godsend. I use the fan to cool down after cycling home also.. but now I have no fan except that on a little electric heater which I can turn the heating elements off on and the bearings on that are a bit iffy.

Oh well, I’ll have to get another fan somewhere. Hopefully it will be quieter (as in less turbulence) than the old one.