Desperation
I think I've just discovered the meaning of the word "desperate". Good luck Allen...
NP: Parachutes, Cold Play.
Amazon Recommends...
Sometimes Amazon's recommendations are great ("hey, this band is great!"), sometimes disturbing ("I bought a great album, why are you recommending Blue!") and sometimes very amusing.
NP: Personal Journals, Sage Francis
GNOME Packaging
So Christian Marillat decided against working with the seventeen-strong Debian GNOME Team and orphaned all of his packages in dramatic style, spreading the orphan message across the changelogs of all the packages.
This is good, as the GNOME Team generally agrees on a way of working which Christian doesn't agree with, i.e. pushing GNOME 2.6 into Sid now on the assumption that there won't be any problems with it. We're currently building GNOME 2.6 into Experimental, and have his a nasty GTK+ 2.4 bug, where it crashes on startup. Eek.
NP: Stevie Wonder - The Definitive Collection
Ban(e)d Fish Water
Got back from work Friday evening find Griswald, one of our fish, laying on the bottom of the tank. No idea why he died, he was the youngest of the fish, so I hope the others (Talula and Sid) are not going to die soon too.
The band we've hired for our wedding reception also called Friday afternoon...
"Hi, this is Alex from Indigo Jazz. We've a small problem... the singer and her drummer husband are emigrating to Australia."
And up to now the planning was going so well... and now it starts. They are auditioning new band members now so we should be okay...
Finally, Coca Cola are making a right mess out of selling Peckham Springs. Fooling people.
Gadget Heaven
It's been a good few days for gadgets. On Monday morning I made my first Internet connection on my laptop via GPRS on my T68i (over Bluetooth) — which was surprisingly easy once I'd figured out rfcomm and the relevant PPP lines. Some day soon I'll document exactly what I did for others.
Today my new minidisc player turned up, a Sony MZ-N710 (my old one is so dirty it only works when it is upright). Ten minutes of poking at hotplug scripts and a quick patch of libnetmd, and the relevant device node has its permissions changed and I was finally adding titles to one of my disks. This is probably all I'll use the NetMD stuff for: I don't have large quantities of music on my computer to copy anyway and the libnetmd people are still decoding the DRM used by Sony. My hifi has optical out, so I already get perfect copies (well, before ATRAC kicks in at least) with track markers.
I'm now thinking about writing a small Rhythmbox patch so that I can title my discs there, but I fear the Wrath Of Colin Walters if I do that before I finish the CD writing patch...
NP: Brand New Second Hand, Roots Manuva
GOOD MORNING!
One of the pains of commuting into London is the dash past the people handing out flyers, samples and free magazines at the train stations (although I must admit it's not all bad). Today was a painful day though...
Past the ticket barriers, my mind is running on auto-pilot, set to Avoid Other Commuters and Get To Moorgate. All of a sudden, a number of incredibly bright suits (I guess there must have been people inside them too) shouted "GOOD MORNING!!" at me. Argh, you vision of hell, stop offending my senses! Begone foul being! It was only 08:15, people are not meant to be that awake, and frankly I don't want to be that awake either. I've no idea how Virigin Airlines (only God knows what a shouting man has to do with flying, but they did have women in hostess uniforms smiling as well) managed to get these people to be so awake at such an ungodly hour of the day.
NP: Simple Things, Zero 7. Note to self: find the other minidiscs.
Sedna a Planet?
John Fleck has mentioned the planet-ness (or not) of Sedna, the planetoid recently discovered. I consider Sedna to be a planetoid at a push, definitely not a planet, and best described as "a large Kuiper Belt object". Or "a big lump of rock".
My argument for Sedna being not being a planet can be boiled down to two points:
- Sedna is in the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is full of large lumps of rock, so if Sedna is a planet, how large does a lump of rock have to be to not be a planet? 1000km across? 500km?
- The 10th planet is called Rupert.
Weekend
I'm determined to post my weekend blog before Wednesday this week, so I best get writing!
This weekend was good fun — bumped into an old friend, Sarah Mason, in the shops on Friday night. I wasn't even home yet and she'd already been to the gym and got a bit drunk — some people seem to fit more hours in the day than I can. Saturday involved re-arranging the furniture, so I've now got a sore back from picking up the fish tank (and its many gallons of water...). That evening we met Allen and went down to one of the many local Indian restaurants. Wonderful food — must go again soon.
Spent many an hour with Allen and Vicky afterwards, lubricated with Bangla, chatting about the usual — disappearing socks, stag nights and profit-making schemes involving the Bible...
In other not-really-related-news, I noticed numerous
pigspolice men on the way to work today, and now
I know why. Someone has found an easter
egg in the BMW M3. Finally, an interesting blog entry by someone whose
daughter knows
nothing but Tivo.
NP: Personal Journals, Sage Francis.
Stalinist Plumbing
A totally irrelevant title for a totally irrelevant posting -- my good mate Allen Morgan has finally started creating a web site.
Why "Stalinist Plumbing"? Well, I just started reading The Kindness Of Strangers by the BBC War Correspondent Kate Aide. It would take to long to explain the context, but she said it and it made me smile.
Useless Java Tools?
At work I've spent a couple of days this week writing a tool to compare the public interface of two independent code bases. Yes, they should both inherit from a common set of interfaces in the common case, but this is not possible here -- we have two separate codebases which need to look identical to objects which subclass the relevant objects, and cannot share any code.
It's quite cool if I do say so myself -- you can mark members as being specific to a particular codebase (so are ignored), and I've even got a sweet pygtk UI with icons, treeviews and suchlike. I'm thinking about GPLing it (my boss is OSS-friendly, we've contributed to several projects so far), but will anyone else out there use this tool? I'm not entirely sure.
In more GNOMEy news, the Fun Bug Of The Day is the inability to open dot files with the new GTK+ 2.4 file selector. Obviously I consider this rather urgent for 2.4.0... Apart from that the interface is pretty sweet -- great work jrb and federico.
NP: Dub Side Of The Moon, Easy Star All Stars. This is a great album.
Amusing Snow
Snow has made me laugh recently, in different ways.
This morning it had decided to snow, great huge fluffy flakes coming down into our garden. Totally unexpected (but I didn't look at the weather report last night), and it wasn't settling at all, but it did seem rather out of place. From inside it looked just a bit cold outside, and the ground wasn't really wet, so these massive flakes were coming down and having no effect whatsoever.
Of course, I get to MordorCroydon, and the snowing has
stopped and we're left with sub-Arctic winds instead. Joy.
The other snow was Jon Snow, of Channel 4 News. Four of the British Guantanamo Bay detainees were released last night without charges by the US goverment, yet deal they did with the British government was that they had to be treated as serious detainees on arrival. This meant the police had to drive a van into the aircraft so they could be taken into custody straight away, without the opportunity to wave to the surrounding journalists. This is because (quoting from Jon) "...the US still considers them guilty of whatever they haven't charged them with".
Wonderful. Two years in a camp, without actually being arrested, and no charges bought against them but they are still guilty. Of what? After two years you would think they'd have something on them.
Who knows, maybe they have something on them and are not telling anyone but our government, who now has them in custody. My guess is that they won't actually use the Terrorism Act 2000 and only keep them for a few days, rather than the full 14 days they can under the act. After all, everyone is now watching like a hawk.
NP: When It Falls, Zero 7
W-e-e-k-e-n-d
Weeeeekend. Well, it was. I'm starting to really suck at updating this.
Saturday was good fun, we went down to see John's new flat in Queens Park, London. Very nice flat, lots of polished wood, a Smeg cooker and a resident cat who refuses to acknowledge the land lord has moved. We ate a huge amount of fresh bread and cheese, with huge amounts of red wine, followed by a huge bowl of veggie chilli and rice. Turned out to be very full, but I think "satisfied" is a suitable word.
Some interesting news for the day: MacDonald's new salads contain more fat than a hamburger and chips. I'll have to pop into a MacDonalds one day (that's a scary thought) and see how they are being marketed. After the recent claims and actions, I doubt they are actually saying "healthy" but letting the word "salad" imply it.
In a semi-related note, I was pleased to see Co-op pushing FairTrade coffee at the London train stations recently. However, they don't seem to have the pull for the commuters that the recent X-Box stand had... which might have had something to do with the fact that the girls were in CFM heels and skirts so short it was, well, shocking.
Finally, enraged to see that the stupid EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive is still stupid and going after the little man. It's a little late, but London's Metro (a free semi-trashy tabloid) has a positive (from my point of view) article on the front page:
It was originally intended to target big-time music and film pirates and organised criminals but was rewritten to target individuals.
...Critics say the legislation was hijacked by the record industry. It was put forward by French Euro MP Janelly Fourtou, wife of the head of Vivendi Universal -- which owns several record labels.
Parkinson
Last night Vicky and myself went to the good ol' BBC to see Parkinson being recorded. My suspicions that this filming would be airing this Saturday were confirmed — the guests were Patrick Stewart, Lionel Richie and Harry Connick Jnr. It was an excellent show, Parkie and Patrick Stewart were excellent together, both slowly regresssing into Northern accents and reminising about the poverty of their youth. Harry Connick Jnr played two classic songs, and is a very relaxed, amusing and shocking ("pile of buttons", eek) guest. Lionel Richie played his new single and was also good fun. Even the warm-up comedian was quite amusing, making the production team the butt of most of his jokes and learning how to chat up Harry Connick Jnr's band in Turkish.
Overall a great night out, and considering the cost of the tickets (nothing), great value for money! I shall be investigating into getting ourself on the very long queue for Have I Got News For You next.
NP: Simple Things, Zero 7.
Fat Celebrity Homes From Hell
Sometimes TV makes me scream "NO MORE!!", when we are treated to another program about the housing market or fat people dieting or fashion, or more normally two of the above combined with "celebrities" or "holiday". Grand Designs was a good program, but the relentless push towards Yet Another Program about moving home is driving me up the wall. Thank God we're finally past the garden fixation.
However, last night No Angels started, and it's not at all bad. A slightly more adult (and British) version of Scrubs, which will hopefully develop into a series as good as the seminal Teachers. Fingers are crossed that they don't have a themed episode about fat people buying houses and doing garden design.
NP: Dub Come Save Me, Roots Manuva.
