So, what have I been up to since Thursday?<\/p>\n
Well, Thursday evening I went out to the pub quiz. We didn’t win anything this week.<\/p>\n
Friday morning I got my old bike ready for the road by oiling it up and putting new brake pads on the rear. At this point I noticed that I need a new rim on my back wheel as it’s really badly worn by the brakes. On one side it worn down by a good 2mm but on the other it’s more 4mm, so the wall of the rim is probably paper-thin now! I also tried to replace the pedals but couldn’t get the old ones off.<\/p>\n
In work, it was the day all the new postgrads and undergrads get inducted, or induced, so it was pretty busy.<\/p>\n
Saturday started with getting up at about 9am and driving into Witney to get a hair cut. I timed it just right as the barbers was empty and I walked straight in and got the hair cut. The person cutting my hair told me that it had been the first break she’d had all morning.<\/p>\n
Then it was into Oxford, where I had a latte and wandered around the shops. I picked up three CDs in Virgin Megastore’s sale. Also, having decided that although my iPod Shuffle is fine a lot of the time, there are times when I’d like to choose what to listen to, so I splurged out on an 8GB iPod Nano. The price in Dixons^H^H^H^H^H^HCurrys.digital is the same as on the High Education Apple web site (I think Apple have woken up to students prefering to buy iPods from the HE web shop).<\/p>\n
Yesterday afternoon, evening and this morning I started playing with the latest version of the Mandriva Linux distribution. My first impressions? Well, gratuitous changes (such as moving autofs stuff from \/etc into is own sub-directory which will break lots of set-up scripts), lots of show stopping bugs (such as CD\/DVD writing not working and the default 3D X server desktop preventing logins) and a new degree of annoying automatic “updating” of system files such as \/etc\/hosts and \/etc\/resolv.conf. I’m not positively impressed.<\/p>\n
I finally managed to get the new petals on the old bike after buying a set of open ended spanners. However, it needed more than just a spanner to get the old pedals off though. I needed a hammer a lot of muscle work to get them to budge. The first one took a few hits before it eased but the otherone needed about 5 minutes of heavy bashing before the thing even started to move and then kept needing the hammer until the thread was almost completely out.<\/p>\n
This afternoon I managed to get out and cut the grass in the back garden. It was quite a job as it’s not been cut for a good 5 weeks now and was as many inches tall. Still, that’s done now.<\/p>\n
Time to get ready for the first week of term now then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, what have I been up to since Thursday? Well, Thursday evening I went out to the pub quiz. We didn’t win anything this week. Friday morning I got my old bike ready for the road by oiling it up … Continue reading