Category: Personal

Stuff happening in my life

Leeds film festival begins

Leeds Film Festival 2004 logoMy first film of the festival was Garden State, an amusing but pretty dark film starring Zach Braff and Natalie Portman. My favourite scene was the 5 second shot of the main character modelling the shirt his auntie made from room decorating offcuts, but that’s not to say the rest of the film wasn’t great, just that I was considerably amused.

My second run was the short film panorama containing a number of short films made around the world. My favourite’s being “The Best Of Lukas M.”, “Scherubel”, “Handicap” and “Plasticat”. I’m not rating the films as requested by the organisers, as rating *anything* on an entirely arbitrary numerical scale is, well, entirely arbitrary.
(more…)

Halloween

I’ve cable-tied my gate shut. Trick or treat.

The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.This story pokes some fun at war, religion and life in general. It’s certainly science fiction, but that’s hardly at all important to the story lines.

It’s co-incidentally linked to a number of other books I’m reading at the moment in that it strives to provide some perspective on life with a view to have us stop worrying about the larger ‘cosmic’ purpose of it.

It’s also amusingly written, in a style that perhaps influenced the late, great and inflated Douglas Adams.

It’s also utter insanity. Winston Runfoord is a space traveller who gets caught in chronosynclastic infunidbulum. He now mysteriously appears in certain places at certain times with his dog, can read peoples minds and knows the future. He works out a big plan to sort the world out, which seems to kind of work. I’ll just leave it at that.

The Meme Machine – Susan Blackmore

The Meme Machine - Susan BlackmoreSusan Blackmore explains the theory of memes; what they are and how they affect us. She suggests that memes are as intertwined with recent human evolution as genes, explaining much of our strange behaviour and our huge brains.

I’m sure this will upset a lot of people due to the suggestion we are at the mercy of the memes and that they basically control us. With a good understanding of memes, you see the modern world in a interesting light. You begin to see more clearly why people gossip, why everyone wants to have David Beckham’s hairstyle and why people waste their entire lives following an illogical, pointless and largely suspicious religion, like Christianity for example.


(more…)

yum/up2date suck, new job

I’ve come to the realisation that yum and up2date completely and utter suck. Why is it yum has spent the last 20mins downloading rpm headers from the dag repository? Why is it up2date can’t search properly? why does yum return search results in an unreadable way? why do both of them, at the mere hint of something going wrong, spurt out a big python backtrace that is very little use to very many people. Why are these tools SO BAD? How difficult IS THE PROBLEM? Debian have got it right with apt. Headers are downloaded in 30 seconds, search supports regular expressions! There is even an RPM ENABLED version of apt. Why wasn’t this used in Fedora? Why up2date with it’s crappy secretive SSL and XML and SOAP and crapness.

I can only imagine it’s due to RedHat wanting the world to develop their Enterprise updatering system for free. Well I’m not contributing until I at least see that either a) I’m doing something wrong and it can all be fixed with an option. or b) someone can explain the good reason why these tools exist.

Also, I have a new job. It’s lots of fun. I’m responsible for the security of some 30 million UK NHS patient records.

Sheffieldness

Here I am in Sheffield, stayed with James on the sofa bed thing. Very comfortable, they’ve gone off to a lecture so I’m sat here watching Neighbours, Libby Kennedy is being distinctly ugly at me, I’d love to punch her. I did once meet a girl from the hit oz tv programme “Heartbreak High” in McDonalds as she was starring in a pantomime at the local theatre. I walked up to her and asked “Hey, are you the girl from Heartbreak High?” and she feined coyness and smiled at her friends who were looking fed up of this kind of thing and answered “why yes”, expecting to have to autograph my penis or something. “I’ve got chairs that can act better than you” was my reply. A little harsh but I was young and rebellious, her friends giggled a bit and she looked a bit hurt, poor girl. She was Australian tho, so I’m sure she’d used to being slapped about and stuff.

Anyway, back to Sheffield. Whilst waiting for James to get his coat I met loads of cool people, one with big mad ginger hair, and a cool tall chick with a scarf who wouldn’t give me it (the scarf), it was pretty cold. James got drunk, which is strange cos he is a big lad and normally doesn’t get so drunk so quick (he did drink a bottle of wine, loads of beer, loads of vodka, some Captain stuff that was free, erm, and some other stuff, but thats not a lot to James.) I think being in America for a year with low alcohol crappy fizzy beer has turned him into a weiner (to use an ironically placed American word).

Oooh Oooh, and I got interviewed live on Hallam Radio too and managed not to swear, but I just dissed Sheffield curries as they have egg in, which makes no sense, and promised never to come back because of this single fact. I forgot to pimp geek-ware tho, I guess I was too drunkened.

Company Funding

WHOOP! Got the work I needed to get done on time, with the help of Scaramanga. I love him, all of him (and thats a MEAN feat in itself.)

Ok, had some cool news about the company I’m involved with starting, sounds like the bank is gonna give us the money! Wahoo. Loads too. So we should have offices by January, and me and Scara can set our Beowulf Cluster up (well most likely MOSIX now instead)

Off to Sheffied tomorrow to see my bestest mate James, and if all goes to plan (which it invariably doesn’t) meet up with Little Elf.

Broken pixels

I share Scara’s hatred of mobile phones, or more precisely people who live their lives with them. I dropped mine today and broke about 6 of the pixels on the screen, and felt quite good about it. That will teach it a lesson.

More geek-ware deadness

Today was WAAAAY too stressful. I have lots of actual paid work to be doing, and I’m behind, so today was a catchup day. Not if beefcake had anything to do with it, and it did. (beefcake is the server Geek-Ware runs on).

This morning something broke, so I went in to fix it, 1hr job I reckoned, until the Hard Disk also broke, losing half a day of geekware data, and about 2 weeks of configuration. “Why didn’t you backup?” I hear you chuckle, well that was this weeks task (for Rule). We had plans for a nice mirror system, where everything is backed up as its created. AND I had plans for weekly archive backups, but the hard disk decided to beat us to it. Its a new one too. We should sue Fujitsu.

I even tried a IDE controller transplant with an identical disk, and that didn;t help. While beefy was in bits I replaced the Motherboard and CPUs too, cos the other ones were shoddy too. So we’ll have backups in place by tomorrow, and coupled with the new hardware, will have NO PROBLEMS. Even tho beefcake is jinxed. I’ll write about it someday.

I apolise to anyone who lost any work (for example, Red, BobTheCactus, and Sporks 1 diary entry.) I do apologise, if our plans work out, we’ll NEVER lose anything again.

I exercised good stress management skillz today, with a little ego stroking from Little Elf, which was a nice gesture, shame nothing else got stroked.

Geek-ware downage

Ok, yes, geek-ware has been down, but we trouble-shot the problem to death by compiling many a linux kernel and rebooting a lot. We’ve had to drop one of the CPUs as it seems faulty, but all is well now. Beefcake (the server geek-ware runs on) has been jinxed from the start (3 years ago) and one day I shall write a history on it, but not right now as I should be doing some work.

Lots of diary stuff happened on Sunday, I even cried about something, but since geek-ware was down you all miss out :P

Memo to self: have a smell of Spork before she changes body spray

Coffee druggie

Love Apple is totally buzzed out now, dance music, mad drugged up people, but they still serve coffee, so I chilled and drank it all night, watching the pill poppers pop pills. Was quite amusing

In fact, one such girl chatted to me at the bar. She inquired what I was buying, and when I told her just coffee, she said “Coffee?? are you a druggie or something?” which was suitably ironic in itself, so suitably ironic in fact, it straightened out my collar. My response was “Well alcohol kills brain cells.”. She looked a little confused and stared into her red bull and vodka for a bit, then finally said “I only asked for one ice cube, theres two in here”. I don’t think she was in any danger of killing any brains at all.

Saw one big girl (who wasn’t SCARY big) but I was under the impression she had been ingesting something decidedly hallucinogenic so I left her alone.

I’ve been compiling kernels for 2 days for my laptop and my new gateway machine, and things are finally starting to go my way, even with the crappy AMD overheating and causing compile errors, such fun.

Beefier girls

I’m tired, but I’m off out again, but for a much more chilled evening at the Love Apple cafe, should be nice. Need some caffeine actually

Last night I met a cool girl. She was tall and big and warm. So warm I grabbed a big hug off her to keep warm, it was lovely. She seemed amused and not concerned, but then she had to go. She had cool spikey neck gear tho.

It ocurred to me most of the women I’ve been out with have been either pretty short, or pretty slim, and I gotta be real careful around them as not to snap any part of them, or sit on them. I think it would be cool to go out with a beefier girl for a change, it would be easier to keep warm anyway.

Got a quick 2mins relationship counselling session from Little Elf which chipped away a little of the hard cynical crust I’ve built around that kind of stuff. Well done Little Elf :)