Andrew's diary

Sunday, 30 March 2003

Woke up and went for an early morning swim (well, we paid for a hotel with a swimming pool - I was bloody well going to use it!) before a large breakfast and the drive home.

Saturday, 29 March 2003

Jo & Mark's wedding. The first time I'd been to a civil ceremony (excluding registry offices) so didn't really know what to expect. A relatively large room at the base of a memorial with panoramic views overlooking Lancaster - it was really nice. A string quartet provided the music - except for the final piece: "Star Wars" by John Williams :-)

The evening do was good too - nice hotel, nice food and a good DJ. Hotel was nice and it was good to see Dawn & Steve, Nicky & Steve and Martin & Stacy who couldn't make it to our engagement. And, of course, Jo & Mark and Julie & Pete who did :-)

Friday, 28 March 2003

Tony Blair said something insightful today: "it's only a week in, but with 24 hour news coverage it's easy to forget that". And it is. It's also been interesting how my own attitude to the war has changed, but I don't support it any more than I did before and don't think that I need to support the troups (they're brave souls after all). However, in the lead-up and the first few days I'd religiously watch as much coverage as possible from as many sources as I could to try and ascertain what was really going on. However, now I've only got the news tickers on EH & TOTH and the Today programme in the morning. I don't count what I see on Breakfast - it's usually just a rehash of what Today was talking about the day before. Of all of them, Radio 4 is the one I prefer - if for no other reason than it being less sensationalist.

Thursday, 27 March 2003

Started playing with "Model K" - a 34MB cut-down version of Knoppix as it's one of the only distributions to fit on the credit-card sized CD-Rs I've got. Unfortunately, it's not particularly suited to being a rescue CD: it's not even got a text editor; it would, however, be useful to bootstrap a Debian install.

Tuesday, 25 March 2003

Read in a local paper: local parents are objecting to their children being taken to a synagogue "because of the war". I don't know which is more worrying: the incredible stupidity or the blatant racial hatred and bigotry.

The Library delivered their copy of "Google Hacks" - looks like a nice book, and I'm not just saying that because I saw my name in print ;-)

Sunday, 23 March 2003

Various people are complaining that Iraqi TV is showing prisoners of war and this contravenes the Geneva Convention. What about the Iraqi soldiers shown surrendering which the US military have been releasing to all and sundry?

Head to bed early and set the video for 24 and the last ever X-Files (though I haven't seen the rest of this series ;-))

Saturday, 22 March 2003

Mel's found a dress she thinks she likes in a bridal shop in Alton. Nice day to wander around Portsmouth and have a few pints, too :-)

Sorted out the wedding finances in the evening. Tricky subject to broach.

Friday, 21 March 2003

In bed with bad head most of the day. Allen and Carol down in the evening: tomorrow Mel and Carol are going wedding dress shopping in Portsmouth. Allen and I are going on a pub crawl.

Lay in bed (not being able to get to sleep after too much sleep earlier in the day) and had some random thought enter my head - I think it was prompted by thinking about Stephen Fry, but I'm not sure why I was thinking about him. Is it possible to have a monogamous celibate relationship? Celibate relationships are obviously possible, but can you then be unfaithful or even have an affair? (Assuming you take celibacy to its extreme of no intimate contact). What an odd thought to have.

Thursday, 20 March 2003

War starts. Well, I say "war" - perhaps I mean "illegal, bullying, ill-considered, attack based on rumour and supposition". Yeah, that's what I mean.

Domino is so broken we're going to have to reimplement the (relatively, but not absolutely) complicated stuff we do on the homepage in mod_perl and run the homepage off Apache instead. The shedding of Domino has begun... ;-)

Amazon cancelled our orders and told us it was a mistake! Shocking.

Wednesday, 19 March 2003

Worked at home today, writing up strategy documents and reading Jakob Nielsen's "Desiging Usable Intranets". Just before lunch up pops a shout on EH about Amazon selling cheap iPAQs. Order two H5450s for £23.02 each. It doesn't, however, take Amazon long to pull the site and start telling the news sites that they won't be fulfilling the orders. However, us customers don't receive any notification and, by the end of the day, the order is still pending.

Had News 24 on all day - looks like we'll be going to war (officially) tomorrow :-(

New series of ER started on Channel 4 - the dismemberment was a bit graphic and unexpected. Fantastic make-up, but eww eww eww!

Tuesday, 18 March 2003

TechnoGames started yesterday: two whole weeks of general crap and hyperbole. There's nothing that innovative here: no general purpose robot who is good at rope climbing and obstacle courses and jumping. So what's the point?

Bender: Now Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern hitting machine!

Leela: Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns! I mean come on! Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels. Futurama - Fear Of A Bot Planet

Monday, 17 March 2003

Tried to get the CUPS-based printer working with HTTP/IPP from Windows 2000. Unfortunately, every time I added it I got "Could not connect to the printer" - which was bizarre as I could see the laptop succesfully connecting in CUPS' access log. Eventually found out that at that point, Windows has already created a local port for the printer; so creating a "Local Printer" and then selecting the URL from the list of ports, and then the driver, worked flawlessly. It's even more odd as it worked fine in XP.

British Gas have lived up to the first of their promises: received the cheque today :-)

Saturday, 15 March 2003

Lovely day, so took the opportunity to fix the gate; whilst Mel did some gardenning. We also started the mammoth job of tidying the tip of a study - didn't get it finished...

Jonathan Creek was much better this week - Maureen Lipman and Bill Bailey: an all-star cast indeed. Julia Sawalha didn't look have bad either ;-)

Friday, 14 March 2003

Got a letter from British Gas: they've apologised and are sending us a cheque for £50 (rather than the £100 we asked for). Just glad it's over (for now).

Reading today's NTK linked to a scan of an article in Marie Claire about Danny O'Brien himself. And his girlfriend. And her boyfriend. Very odd ;-)

Thursday, 13 March 2003

Saw the last half of Kevin Warwick's book promo^W^Wtalk. It seemed to consist of publicity photos of or from his book. The most annoying thing was some of his research did sound interesting or useful, but he's so keen to earn money off it (or just likes the publicity) that it all gets hyped up and the small bit of science lost in a sea of hyperbole. The other thing which sprung to mind was a quote from Jurassic Park:

Your scientists took the research of geniuses and they took the next step. The trouble is they were so concerned about whether or not they could do it, they didn't ask whether or not they should do it. Ian Malcolm

Of course, that's slightly disingenuous. What was worrying, however, was the number of people coming out of it saying "yeah, that was really good". Bah.

Wednesday, 12 March 2003

My neck's hurting again. It's really rather distracting. Finished off !LPRSpool - need to sort out an icon, some help etc. and release it.

Went to see this year's Young Visions, being held at Intech due to the house furbishments. It looked good, but I think the girl in charge of communications for this year took an instant dislike to me. What is it with people in that role? Emma didn't used to like me that much either; it's not that important but it'd be interesting to know why some people just don't like you (or me).

Watched the last ever Farscape from Monday. The cliff-hanger wasn't too bad - change "To Be Continued" to "The End" and it would be better, of course. Alternatively, once it was known it was going to be the last one, chop off the last 5 seconds and then put up some text saying "The End". That'd probably have kept the fans happier.

Woke up at about 4am after having a rather unpleasant dream about the figure in this photo. It's always sent shivers down my spine since the first time I saw it (can't remember when) even though it could easily be done using a double exposure. I don't think it's real so why does it bother me so much? Perhaps the lack of any humanity and the deadness behind the eyes.

Monday, 10 March 2003

It seems Mel isn't immune to work politics either - which is a shame: it also sounds like the same sort of politics which are driving experienced teachers away from teaching and into other jobs. Dave told me about a "lucky" escape he had on Thursday. Bathroom designer (well, more of a salesman really) came round for a couple of hours to measure up and give us a price for totally gutting the existing room; doing the necessary building, plumbing, wiring etc. It was more than we were expecting, but probably not totally unreasonable given the amount of work required. More quotes needed.

My Psion's screen cable also cracked - which means no display :-(

Sunday, 09 March 2003

Mel's been reading this, but has discovered it won't display anything before February 2001 - it's a scalability issue which I'll have to rewrite around. Installed and configured CUPS before Mel was out of bed: it's remarkably clever the way you can throw different data types at it and it'll figure out if it needs translation or not. For example, the same printer can be used as an LPR device using a PostScript driver from RISC OS; an IPP device using Epson's own printer driver from Windows 2000/XP and a Unix printer from mutt etc. on the linux box itself.

Popped in to town for various bits and bobs and ended up making an appointment for a designer to come and design a new bathroom for us tomorrow night.

Spent most of the day writing an LPR spooler: it'll watch a file (ie. the output of !Printers) and, when modified, automatically spool it using LPR to a remote box. It works, but the LPR client seems to bomb out occasionally, which is rather weird.

Watched Stargate SG-1, new series of Smallville, last night's Jonathan Creek (which seemed a bit off), 24 and then Dilbert from yesterday evening (didn't tape today's).

Saturday, 08 March 2003

Mel's kindly shared her cold with me, which meant we got up slightly later than intended and didn't feel like doing the numerous jobs we had to do. Got motivated in the end: Mel painted the kitchen whilst I built a shelf under the stairs for the printer. We got a response from the CEO's office at Centrica (parent company of British Gas) - apparently they're now "investigating" the matter.

Got take-away from the Chinese at the end of the road - very nice; and then watched our spangly new Enemy of the State DVD.

Thursday, 06 March 2003

Watched Angel from last night's showing in the US - but it was something of a pain to get: why can't Warner Bros. set up a decent quality feed of TV shows directly downloadable at a good quality and high bandwidth? Instead of people paying for multi-channel TV packages for only one or two programmes we could watch exactly what we wanted, when we wanted and pay for exactly what we use. I think it's a pipedream as WB will be paranoid (possibly justifiably) about piracy. Either way, it was a really good episode - setting up the story arc which is going to end Buffy forever.

Wednesday, 05 March 2003

Problems with patents: Megan and I are submitting a patent - but the lawyer doesn't "get it". Fortunately, one of the evaluators is a Very Clever Person and seems to recognise our inate genious. After a couple of long emails back and forth, at about 16:45 we popped round to the lawyer's office (a good long walk through the rain) for a 10 minute chat. We left 2 hours later. This meant a late dinner and much hungerness.

Also, Kevin Warwick is coming to Hursley to promote his book^W^W^Wtalk about being "the world's first cyborg". Apparently, we're also paying him. Words cannot express my dismay at this - especially since it conflicts with a talk on pensions (mmm, Equitable Life) so I probably won't be able to attend with a sack of rotten fruit ;-)

Monday, 03 March 2003

Back to work - surprisingly things didn't break horribly whilst I was away. No, instead this time they broke at 1pm on my first day back. And then, on top of all this (and the 110% of work I'm also doing), I get a whole load more work dumped on me: redesigning the department website again - because last time was so much fun *cough*.

Bought the printer and Jo and Mark's wedding present - we shouldn't leave these things so late...

Sunday, 02 March 2003

Played with school's new Epson C82 - a very nice general use printer: handles envelopes OK, prints adequate photos on cheap paper and blasts black & white output straight out. Will buy one for ourselves tomorrow after work: strangely Argos have it at £99.99 which is only about a fiver more expensive than the cheapest online shops. One of which is Dabs, so I'd avoid them anyway.

Flicking through the channels in the evening, found that ftn (an otherwise entirely useless channel) was showing a double-bill of Dilbert.

Saturday, 01 March 2003

Still got a bad head, but managed to get out of bed.