Andrew's diary

Friday, 30 May 2003

Back to St. Malo which, because of the good weather and the end of half term, was jam packed solid - totally different to our first day here. Walked around the old city walls eating ice cream before boarding the boat home.

Got home shortly after 2am. Slept.

Thursday, 29 May 2003

On the hottest day yet we drove out to Gâvres - a small town at the end of a really long spit.

Then, looking at the map we decided that the standing stones at Carnac weren't too far away after all and so we set out to see them. The last time I saw them was in 1986 and since then they've put up barriers around the really large collections. It was still very interesting and we had a rest in the shade reading our books (I had moved on to another P.G. Wodehouse book).

Finally, we decided that since La Trinité-sur-mer was next door we'd visit the first place in France we ever stayed. Mel also wanted to go on the beach, but it seemed that everyone else in Brittany had the same idea and wanted to be on the same beaches. Eventually fought our way to Camping La Plage in La Trinité (the camp site we stayed at 17 years ago) and got down to the beach where I was once had a midnight feast. Even took a photo of me on the same wall where David and I were photographed and there's still a Eurocamp tent on the same pitch ;-)

La Trinité itself was full of tourists, yacht folk etc. After sitting on the harbour dreaming of owning a very expensive yacht we found a nice little creperie and had galettes before heading back to the hotel.

Wednesday, 28 May 2003

Another day of moving as we headed to Pontivy for the last two nights of our holiday. A lovely drive across some pretty high hills with spectacular views.

We stayed in a much nicer Ibis, with a restaurant underneath. Unfortunately, it didn't have a single vegetarian dish (unless you count the "goat dung" - though I'd guess that's an idiom for something else ;-)).

Pontivy's a much bigger town than Landerneau so after walking around in the sweltering heat; doing the castle and having a picnic we headed back to the hotel for a rest before driving back into town for dinner. We ate at a lovely French restaurant where Mel had a pizza (surprise surprise, yet another limited vegetarian choice) and I had the local speciality beef, gently cooked so still very red in the middle served with chips, some lovely salad and two butters slowly melting over the beef. "Lovely" hardly begins to describe it.

Back in the hotel room we watched Three Kings in French (although I admit to cheating and having the teletext subtitles on to aid understanding). Mel then carried on reading Harry Potter whilst I finished Michael J. Fox's interesting memoir Lucky Man.

Tuesday, 27 May 2003

Went to lots of ends, an abbey and then finally back to Brest for dinner at a creperie.

Monday, 26 May 2003

Off to Landerneau (just outside Brest); crossed the hydroelectric dam at Dinard but otherwise stuck to the roads.

Got their in plenty of time so drove through the town and out into Brest. Unfortunately, by the time we'd seen Brest it was still too early for dinner so headed back to Landerneau. It's a lovely little town, but it'd appear that the French reputation for eating out is greatly exaggerated: we only found two restaurants open and both were empty. We finally settled on the pizzeria but the waitress didn't exactly seem pleased to see us.

Sunday, 25 May 2003

Set off on holiday shortly in the early afternoon. The SeaCat had cool GPS tracking monitors which passed some of the time. The rest I spent reading a book my Mum leant me: The Dark Room, by Minette Walters. Looked a bit "girly" from the outside, but it's quite an interesting whodunnit revolving around amnesia and raises the question which has always interested me: if you have amnesia can you turn out a different person than the one you were before?

Got to the hotel in St. Malo and managed to use my French (the receptionist didn't have to resort to English, which made a change) to check-in. Then we wandered out trying to find somewhere to eat. The "centre" we were in was entirely shut and so had to walk into the centre of the old town were there were a number (but by no means all) of restaurants open. Not many had a range of vegetarian options and we both ended up having an omelette and a glass or two of wine.

"Nous somme plein"

Me trying to say "we're full" but actually saying "we're drunk"

Friday, 23 May 2003

Tom's last day so doughnuts, pub lunch and early leaving. Also left early to go to see The Matrix Reloaded. I won't include any spoilers but I was, on the whole, disappointed but still enjoyed it. It's nowhere near as good as the first one: the CG fight scenes often look incredibly fake (though the freeway sequence is very, very cool); the script is leaden in places with overly long exposition and Morpheus is rather irritating when he speaks in his trademark slow-drawl. This is fine when saying something deeply philosophical in the realms of his own ship, but in Zion - when it's something perfectly normal - it's just plain odd.

However, it does raise some interesting questions about choice and free will, but they get lost in pointless or overlong scenes (including the orgy, which is interesting from the point of view of showing how the people in the last, best hope for humanity act but goes on for just too long and is intermingled with, well, eugh). The same questions also raise incredibly large plot holes which will either be dealt with cleverly in the third film or will be ignored. These plot holes mostly go away, of course, if not all the characters are telling the truth all the time.

I do fancy seeing it again - but possibly not as many times as I saw The Matrix - if for no other reason than just to make sure I've got all the plot holes^Wpoints in my head for Novmember ;-)

Thursday, 22 May 2003

Watched the last ever Buffy - it was rather good overall: the ending left open the possibility of other spin off series and subtly tied up some of the themes which had been running through the entirity of the series. Of course, once again Angel is woefully misused and some of the script was a little dry in places.

Wednesday, 21 May 2003

Dr Wiseman is back - reperforming an experiment he performed years ago on television to explain ghosts. First things first: I don't (fully) believe in ghosts, however this research is laughable at best. Apparently when people said they felt something ghostly they recorded a temperature drop and some strange electromagnetic readings. This "shows" that ghosts are nothing more than draughts and odd electromagnetic fields. However, people seeing ghosts have always said there was a chill before hand, and couldn't the strange electromagnetic readings actually be a ghost? The volunteers also said they felt like they were being watched: which they were as video cameras were trained on them.

Treated myself to a new 128MB Compact Flash card for about twenty quid from NovaTech. Gives me lots of room for Infocom and other IF files using the EPOC port of Frotz

Tuesday, 20 May 2003

Worked from home whilst the carpet was fitted - it only took an hour to do from when he arrived. The finished bedroom looks very nice, and the kitchen floor looks good - but'll be better once the kickboards and skirting boards are finished. Had some "fun" trying to get the washing machine back without destroying the vinyl floor - it was less fun when the wheeled trolley it's on didn't fit under the worktop by about half a millimetre :-(

In somewhat lighter news, a bisexual American woman fancies Mel... it'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic. Who am I kidding, it's funny no matter what ;-)

Monday, 19 May 2003

Managed to apt-get install a working X setup (with a few tweaks which can be ironed out later). Uploaded a screenshot of this monumental occasion to which various people said "oooh".

Sunday, 18 May 2003

Added a freecd boot option to Salvare so, unlike other "Live CDs", you can unmount and eject the Salvare CD after booting without losing any functionality (although it does require enough memory to copy the cloop-compressed disk image to tmpfs - currently around 13MB). Then, for example, you can apt-get install a CD player or mount a backup CD.

Also installed Sabre (an SVGALib flight simulator) into tmpfs and played a few games: without modifying the hard disk :-)

Another nice feature is the fact that the auto-detected hard disk partitions are now mounted at /mnt/LABEL rather than, for example, /mnt/hda1 if the partition has a name.

Saturday, 17 May 2003

Got the lights fitted and they look very nice, even if I do say so myself - no more bedside lights for us, we're in the downlighter-era!

Friday, 16 May 2003

Semmlessly upgraded SpamAssassin to v2.54 (mmm, CPAN is great) and will have to start sorting spam and "ham" into separate corpora to train the new Bayesian filters. "Corpora" - what a lovely plural of "corpus".

Wednesday, 14 May 2003

Apparently, the north is more affluent than the south because although salaries aren't as high as in London, house prices are much more affordable. That sounds vaguely sensible, and some areas of Cheshire are rather well-off. The unbelievable thing, however, is that Macclesfield is the fifth richest place in the country. Even if you assume they're talking about Alderley Edge and Wilmslow, rather than Macc itself - it's still a little incredulous.

In much more interesting news, got Debian's apt-get working (albeit hackily) in Salvare: I booted off the CD, fiddled with various files and then managed to install fortune(1) and get a witty and pithy quote.

Tuesday, 13 May 2003

Woke up with a bad head so didn't get into work; however was woken up just after 8am by the postwoman ringing the doorbell to deliver my Psion. I'm very impressed with POS Ltd.: they received it yesterday ("before 10am" according to royalmail.com) and it was returned repaired and re-batteried today at 8am.

Took an Imigran and managed to move to the settee by 3pm and was dressed, but still muzzy, by 4.

Saturday, 10 May 2003

"Marriage Preparation Class": wouldn't have been too bad if, after each exercise, when we are supposed to discuss the answers with each other they gave us more than 30 seconds. The trouble with preachers is they're too desperate to preach and have to hear their own voice.

Friday, 09 May 2003

Finally got around to sending my Psion off to be repaired. Drove up to Southam and saw the car :-)

Wednesday, 07 May 2003

Had the day off work to wait in for the TV table to be redelivered and sort out the electrics in the bedroom. No-one seems to do corner-mount halogen downlights, so my immediate plan for eliminating the need for bedside lamps was shot down. Further investigation will be needed.

Of course, I could only go out to Homebase/B&Q to compare their lighting once the TV table was delivered. Given it was BusinessPost (who we had problems with with the microwave), I rang them at 8.01am just after they opened to confirm it would be delivered today. The answer was, of course, "no": the driver had noticed the packaging had been damaged (some point after they had attempted to deliver it on Thursday and Friday) and so decided that it shouldn't be delivered. Eventually they agreed to rush it round so I could inspect it and, if the contents were OK, to keep it. Shortly before 11, I check the door and find a "we tried but failed to deliver" card from 5 minutes ago. Quickly onto the phone the van drives by whilst I'm on hold. Finally, the thing's delivered but "damaged" must be some euphemism for "destroyed" of which I was previously unaware.

Sunday, 04 May 2003

Finished emptying/stripping/removing carpet from the bedroom - it's very bare and we wondered how we were going to solve the power problem without ripping up the floorboards. In a flash of inspiration involving the relative position of power sockets in the rooms directly below the bedroom Mel realised that there was probably a power socket behind the fitted wardrobe... which there was.