Older blog entries for MikeCamel (starting at number 36)

Happy New Year in just a few hours. Resolutions?

• more coding - particularly in C
• try to get that PhD proposal accepted
• work more from home
• new box + debian
• some other ones concerning my wife which are none or your business. (-8

I hope that you all have a happy and prosperous New Year.

life
This is probably it for a few days because, like others here, I'll be away from a decent network connection over Christmas. Off to my parents in Somerset, and then Catherine's, near Loughborough. Many Scousers expected.

machines
Why, oh why, oh why can't I get my Prism 2 cards working? Not on Win98 (not my first choice), not under Linux. I've just moved to 2.4.17, and there's supposed to be support, but I'm having problems with CardBus dependencies on kernel compile. Not the slightest idea. Heigh-ho. Need to get some sort of network sorted for when we knock through into the new house, and at the moment it looks like it might be a matter of drilling through. Not a good thing.

politics
I don't usually play politics too much, but for the first time in my life I felt strongly enough about something yesterday to write to (email) my MP (member of parliament ~= senator?). Under the new Terrorism Act which the UK government has just pushed through, the police can imprison foreign nationals without telling them what the charges are against them. I find this suspension of the ancient right of habeus corpus not only concerning, but also a disgusting move. I believe that the state has a duty to protect its citizens, but this is not acceptable. So, I emailed my MP - I feel quite virtuous for caring enough, and doing something about it.

Christmas and New Year
A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you. To those of you who don't celebrate the Christian festivals, or for whom New Year occurs at a different time, may you enjoy the season with your loved ones, and have a relaxing and fulfilling time. Advogato counts as family, now, so I'm sorry not to be spending it with all (well, some!) of you, too.

-Mike.

books
Finally finished Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It was a good time for me to read it (although it occurred to me that any time would probably have been a good time to read it), and I wish that I had a little more time just to chill and think about it. Unluckily, I've got an assignment for my MBA which I need to be getting started on. ZatAoMM was good reading: I've been doing quite a lot of work on "knowledge" recently (partly for the MBA), and it slotted some of it into place. If only it had taught me a little more about motorcycles, too. (-8

weekend
Office party on Friday night was good, and we didn't get to bed too late. Spent Saturday morning present shopping, and had a nice rest of weekend, including leaving Moo to do the wrapping (at her suggestion), doing a big recycle run (how do we get through so many bottles?), more MBA work, a post-wedding party on Sunday evening (ridiculous time for it), tuning my pppd on-demand settings (now connect at 50+kpbs, was around 19kbps), and stuff. Life seems good.

Pedantry
dwmw2 - the very suggestion that I, a pedant myself, would mix up license and licence. Ridiculous. Please reread my post and pay a little more attention this time.

Lovely Advogato
Advogato is lovely, isn't it? There's the trust metric, the diaries, the articles, and the community aspect, too. My particular favourite in terms of features is the "Edit" function on diary entries...

Office Christmas do
Off in a few minutes. 578 people going. Catherine's made it abundantly clear that if it's cold (it's not risen above freezing today) she is not going to be at all happy. Heigh-ho.

daniels: I was told today (over lunch) that UK licenses [sic] are just pieces of paper with no photo ID - true? If so, htf do you stop underage drinking?

Contrary to popular belief, the main purpose of driving licences is not to provide proof of identity or age, but to prove that you are entitled to drive (hence the name "driving licence"). In fact, the new UK licences do have photos on, but I believe that you're allowed to decide not to put your date of birth on it. So - how do we control underage drinking? The first way is to have a sensible age limit: 18 for spirits, 16 for beer, wine or lager with a meal. In some parts of the country (particularly larger towns and cities), there are schemes whereby the landlords won't serve people who look young and who don't have a special proof-of-age card. All explained, now? (-8

I've been running websites since 1994, which makes me one of the oldsters (userfriendly). Before 1.0 came out, which makes me feel old. One of the

great questions was "do we really need multi-threaded web servers?". I think we answered that question - or the rise of the dreaded Netscape did, anyway.

GET / HTTP/1.0

Life is good - Catherine's back tomorrow, and my Dad's here tonight. I wish Catherine were here today. I miss her.

It's good to have friends. And whether you like it or not, that's what you folks are. Well done: we're a community now. If we weren't, we wouldn't celebrate births and marriages. And we do.

dyork - congratulations. I hope that Lori has a better time of it as things continue. Engagement announcements, babies - what next on Advogato? A new Operating System? (-8

ianmacd - your life is truly over. However, there is one useful thing you can do. Get the Xb*x to generate a GSOD (it allegedly that it errors to green, rather than blue), and then get in touch with the maintainer of xscreensaver and get him a screenshot so that it can be added to the next release. You will then be forgiven. Of course, if you can get Linux running on it, you get extra marks. (-8

Today's a day for talking to people.

CryoBob - if you're talking to me (and you are, 'cos you're answering an email I sent you in your diary entry), then out with it, boy! Anyway - quit complaining: you've made it to Journeyer already, so that's cool. Also, you Jtrix folks need to stop posting at the same time - do you all have a deadline, or something?

I'm pleased that it's going well, and congrats on starting off. I have to say that it gave me a warm feeling to have suggested someone for a job which they actually got - that's two now (Mr Plant, if you need to know, CryoBob, the g*t with the Elise...).

Waldo - congratulations to you, too, you superstar, you!

Mulad - maybe Sarah likes spending time with you. Relax into it. The best relationships work because people like spending time with each other. It sounds like you've got some chemistry there from time to time, even if it's not the sort of chemistry you might like - yet, but maybe not ever. You're empathising with her about her job, chatting - sometimes you don't need to have something to say. People like being empathised with - guys and gals.

Phoon - nope, you're not a genius: that's the ephedra pills talk^H^H^H^Hsweating. (-8

Life
Spending money time. I got a new car today, and Catherine (who's away in Portugal at the moment, so I'm all on my lonesome) gets a new one just before Christmas. What's more, we're in the process of buying a new house - next door, which we intend to knock through, assuming that we can get listed buildings consent (this is like getting planning permission if you live in a listed building, which we do). This is good because (again, given that we can knock through), we'll have a larger kitchen (more money, as we'll need to refit it), and I'll have my own server room. Whoops - sorry, that should be "office". My own room, my own machine (which won't need to be dual-booting, as Catherine won't be using it), my own desk, my own armchair, my own bookcases. Bliss. I'm looking forward to it so much, and I've been speccing the box for weeks - it's destined to have woody on it, as I've been meaning to play with Debian for ages.

Not much about the new car there, so here's a bit: it's a Renault Megane Coupe, metallic black, and I'm currently running it in. Happy me.

PhD
Need to rewrite my proposal after some serious talks with one of my supervisors. Spoke to the other one today (this one is in the Computer Lab, the other is SPS - Social & Political Sciences), and they both seem positive. The problem now is getting a faculty to accept me part-time - a new thing for Cambridge. I'm hopeful. Once again, if anyone's interested, get in touch via p2ptrust.org. Rob - I'll get back to you!