Older blog entries for Bleep (starting at number 67)

Oh dear, I have been neglectful! Must catch up on the whole week!

Monday

Rather a non-descript day actually. Work was a fixing day but nothing exciting. Lots of code problems with sites held me up doing the development work that I wanted to do on network filesystems for log storage and the building of the private networks. This has annoyed me as I really wanted to get on with this but the impotus is passing now.

Did spend some time hassling Dell about arrival of the Laptop. How long does it take?

Lots of bad things going on in the news like Foot and Mouth disease spreading around the country and what can only be described as a disaster in UK farming (Bryce'll have something to say about that I'm sure).

Tuesday

OK, only one event today. Laptop finally arrived. Hurrah! Fiddled with it a lot to get it to a state where I could work with it and it had all the software I needed. Ace!

Wednesday/Thursday

Yet more boring days. They don't seem boring at the time, busy and things to do etc, but looking back on them I don't seem to have done much! Strange.

Friday

Sorted out insurance for trip to Dublin from these people. They employ lots of cute woman to work in their shops. I do so like it there.

The inherited the penguin issue. Fun, fun fun. Sadly the zoo is currently shut to avoid them getting foot and mouth disease.

Had a lovely weekend of not-doing much type activities. Other that the builders next door who decided they didn't want me to get much sleep that is!

Hmmm, what have I done, well lots of OU reading (but I'm going to be doing a lot more than this), walked D&J's new dog, planning next weekend in Bracknell and various other odds and sods... none of it was worthy of writing about - which was nice for me!

Wel the fog's cleared and now we have roadworks. I think someone is trying to tell me that I'm not going to get a break in the mornings!

The weekend approaches. Lots of RPM and security work to do but otherwise work is the same old stuff.

Pub quiz on Wednesday night was dismal. We did very badly.

More fog! How annoying. Still managed an impressive time to work (so I was early!)

More RPM stuff today, built several smaller pacakges in the goal of getting all of our standard installs built as RPMs. Most of the fun is in post ./configure pre make stuff. A multitude of other exciting events people deemed appropriate for me to deal with/fix/know about i.e. UPDATE users SET password=password("blah") forgotetting the all important WHERE user = "username" bit. Oops. And on a live server and all! How I'm supposed to determine the nationality of a user from an entry in a CLF format web-log is a mystery to me!

More OU stuff - finished module one! Read my first assignment (long, but easy) and left it there. Did more Dublin reading. Looking forward to it now!

Fog! Couldn't see a damned thing! Shame as it's the first day of half-term and I should be able to get to work in no time!

Spent most of the day doing RPM stuff. This is a continuation of what I was doing before. The goal is to build an RPM of our build20 (Apache+SSL+PHP+libmm). Some more work on the RPM code is needed but most of all it needs some more work on it's speed - it's currently running at 75 requests a second over 1 million hits... which is OK for a PentiumIII with 128Mb RAM - needs to get to 120 though.

Did lots of OU stuff and caught up on lots of things. I'd been waiting for the laptop to arrive from Dell but they seem to have problems delivering it. If I've not heard from them by 5pm on Wednesday with a definate date of delivery there will be HUGE problems.

Grrr. If you type in the details of my laptop on the Dell WWW tracking system you now get an error telling you they've found the order but can't tell me what state it's in. Grrr! This is getting annoying. Perhaps it means they've sent it. Apparently they'll let me know in 24 hrs - so the auto-responder on their support e-mail address says.

Managed to spend quite a while this morning reading Linux User who managed to scan my tag at Expo last year and have subsequently sent me a copy of their rag every month. It's an OK read I guess. Interestingly I notice they have a mailing list and it's hosted on zenII - what are the odds!

Cleaned up under the futon! Cleaned up the bed-side table. Discovered lots of books I had been intending to read and hadn't quite gotten around to reading. I shall be busy! Went shopping for food. Food bills are definately falling and I'm sure I'm not eating any less.

Read the household insurance documentation and sent the pertinent bits to Mr C to check over that he was happy with them. Booked Dubin at Bewleys.

A quiet evening reading Rebel Code I think! Have updated the front page of new WWW site - keeping the upcoming events bit current. Managed to mangle the design into my GnuPG key block page today - this is good as it means that's another sub-page done.

Saturday

Today was a day for lounging. Lay in bed this morning listening to Home Truths on the radio. John Peel is quite superb! I was particularly taken this morning with the story about the homework... that sounds vary familiar to me!

Dragged Mr W down to the centre were we met up with Jess and went to the market. Caught up. Actually the market is quite strange and they sell a lot of crap there :) The penis candles were quite a sight though! Decided on a course of retail therapy that I can't really afford. Wandered off to Virgin Megastore where I bought Rafi's Revenge.

In Waterstones I engaged in a little bit more retail therapy. I now own a copy of Rebel Code. In preparation of the upcoming films I've bought a copy of Lord of the Rings - The fellowship of the Ring. I also bought a copy of The sciences good study guide. This is another of the OU books I need to read.

Set the desk up with the bed-side light for some extra light. Wonderful. Moved the ISDN hub and the phone onto the desk too. The only problem now is that I don't have the stereo sorted out :(

Found a wonderful site, Recycle More - very cool. I need to get going with this - we produce far far too much rubbish!

The laptop is still due on Wednesday. Grrr! It had better not slip any more.

Friday

I seemed to spend the entire day trying to build Apache, a task I can normally complete in my sleep, with my eyes closed, my hands tied behind my back and only using my feet to type. The Apache+PHP + gd+pdflib +SSL combination is something I would not be wildy overestimating if I said I'd built over 1000 times (333 times a year over the last 3 years of working seems quite low actually). The developers decided however that they wanted some new toys, so we bunged in pspell and a bunch of extra graphics libraries and a few extra bits of memory management.

It was apparent from the fact that Shift+PgUp didn't go back far enough to see what had actually failed first and I had to play with redirection that things were not all as healthy as one might like. By lunchtime it was looking like I might have cracked it but the code elves got at it while I was at lunch and mangled the pspell code. It eventually built into a binary at 4:25pm and I decided that I would leave any testing until Monday when my nerves were less jangled. Produced a patch file against what's called internally "Build 18" against the vanilla sources, repatched and built clean.

Wandered home at 6 for Mothers birthday. Amazing Thai food at a place just up the road from them. Lots of fun. Went down the road to look at the church which is now lit up by flood lights. It's looks much better than the picture. Very nice.

Tuesday

This morning did not start well. The request from Mr C to put his drying in on my out this morning met with a complication - our inability to open the washing machine door. We've had this problem before, in fact we had it on Sunday with some stuff of Mr W's. After much discussion we decided the best course of action was a new machine. Mr C removed his clothes by force thereby ending the troubled life of the old machine.

The morning was a blur. The afternoon involved trying to move the department planning to MS Project, spending three hours creating a task with subtasks, and the heading off to find the wall planner - it's easier that way.

Picked up Mr W on the way home. Went shopping for washing machines. Ended up buying one of these from here. Put it in car. That was fun. Cleaned kitchen, installed, plumbed. Everything is nice again.

Wednesday

The letter from Dell arrived today. The laptop did not. Grrr. The house insurance policy documentation did though. This weekend we need to sort that out.

Spent much of the day learning about, and setting up IDS software. It all happened very quickly (thankfully).

Trundled home where we were accosted by Nicky who arrived unexpectedly in her new car. This did mean she joined us for the quiz night at the local pub. We did OK(ish). 73%. People who got two more questions right won. We will try again next week!

Thursday

The laptop is still in Production. How long does it take? Grrr! On the subject of cool tracking I got to start tracking the package of books Bryce has sent me over. There's been lots of refreshing going on today.

Decided on a new network map today, and the implementaion of the DMZ as well as the private server network. Instigated the first of the new sendmail cf files to co-ordinate all outgoing e-mail via one hub.

Argued with the landlord about doing work on the house which involved me suggesting that he might be forcing us to move out, him suggesting that he might give us notice anyway, me trying to smooth things over. The problem is it's going to be inconvenient any-which-way.

Fell asleep (fitfull) and woke up at 1am remembering I have to go present hunting for Mum yet before tomorow. Sorted out IMDB account. Grrr!

There's something to be said for making major purchases at 9:20 in the morning on a Monday. I now own a laptop. Much money exchanged hands and I got some upgrades. It's a PIII 750, 256Mb, 20Gb, 3 year on-site warranty, DVD, case etc. Nice.

On the way home I had the displeasure to experience an accident. This was not so nice. Phoned the police who decided I should stay in all evening so they could come around and talk to me about it. So I did, they didn't. Grrr.

Dublin accomodation still needs to be sorted out. Bad news.

Oh, and I worked out I can save about 150 quid a month on my direct debits starting in April. This will be good, just need to write a few letters to some people. Oh, and I got a quote from my current car insurance people that's 160 quid less than my current one. Even assuming interest on payments monthly I should still be about 10 quid a month better off! Need to wait another month till it needs renewing and see what they quote me!

Did some OU work until I discovered I had to take some notes and I don't have my book, which brings me to my final point? Where is it? Bryce?

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