Older blog entries for pjdowner (starting at number 37)

sorted out the home net access for a while. BT's Home Arseway is being installed soon which will give me 64k ISDN and my parents will have their phone line back.

I've been doing a lot of reading recently, all technical stuff and all Linux related. It's also all being done whilst I'm at work, whenever I'm not on a call I'm reading up on either the Linux kernel or GTK+ etc.

When I've not been at work my new web site is being played with, although it's not going live yet. I've also started to arrange a hosting deal with a friend, so expect a link to a new home page soon.

This Xmas thing is really bugging me, decorations went up in the workplace this week and it annoys me that I can't get away from this over-commercialised (is that a word?) holiday. Wake me up when it's over please.

ok, no internet access from home has meant I haven't updated this as much as I should have done.

distrowars: this was a cool event organised by the Irish LUG, Telsa + other half had told me about it a while ago and I had been looking forwards to it for ages. Kinda sucked that I didn't know until about 6 days before the event that I could actually go. This meant a rushed flight booking,

getting there the day before the event and a hotel 30 mins walk from the center of dublin but it was cool. I got to meet up with jf who I met at the UKUUG Linux event in Manchester earlier this year. I also spent most of the weekend with davej and another friend that I knew from university. I met mikegtn and a lot of other people whose names I can't really remember. Lots of beer was drunk and most importantly a lot of it was drunk in a brewery yay!

return from .ie was annoying due to a 3 hour delay, this had been preceeded by a 1 hour delay on the flight out. I had also managed to get rid of all my .ie currency (which seems to consist of strange moon coins) before finding out about the 3 hour delay and due to a dead cashpoint spent a distressingly long amount of time trying to find some place in the departure loung that would sell me food on my visa card, before finding out that a small cafe right next to my departure gate was the only place that would serve me but I had discounted it as being too small.

Not much else has been going on, new job is ok and I'm now trying to organise a talk for the SWLUG (no I'm not giving the talk).

hmm I am noticing that my posts seem to be coinciding with LUG meetings, obviously I havn't had so much to talk about recently.

Ouch: Due to a skating accident last night I can currently only see 1 knuckle on my left hand. It has been swelling up since the accident and whilst the Ice I put on it helped it has not helped enough. I also seem to have developed a stiff kneck (probably from when my face hit the ground), bruised knees, bruised right hand wrist, sore back and cut lip. nevertheless I'll probably be back out sakting again by next Friday but it did make todays task difficult.

Car Buying: This week has mainly been spent reviewing finances and looking at cars, lets just say a week spent looking at cars . finance packages, bank statements etc is absolute Hell. What was worse however was trying to test drive a car today with aforementioned injuries. Driving a car is bad enough when you're not used to the controls, but when you have difficulty using the gear stick due to a swollen hand and have trouble turning your head it can be quite dangerous, luckily the test driving took place in a largely dissused Industrial Estate. I struggled through however and eventually ended up with a White Fiat Punto which is the exact same car as my Mum's but hers is red. Lets just say that I am not pleased with the colour but it was necessary to just get any car ASAP for...

New Job: I start work on Monday for NTL's Luserphone, it's not actually for NTL but as tech support for Tesco/Virgin etc who have contracted their ISP support out to NTL. Not ideal work but I need the money and they let me wear whatever I want to work and let me surf the net whilst working.

Hooray, another SWLUG meet this week, this time in Swansea, should be fun as this time I aim to get there before 6pm.

I have been playing with GnomeICU this last week and tried to squish a few bugs before giving up and playing around with a tv listings app. Which ended up in me submitting a small patch, I'm now currently trying to get my head around Gnu/Gettext and the associated POTFILES although it's bewen slow reading because the Snooker LG cup has been distracting me.

Turns out the ISP that I may have an interview with this week is NTL, the interview I had this week was just with the agency which made me sit a test on MS Windows. Apparently I was the first to have scored 100% on the test. The other Interview I went for last week went ok, but the job (Windows NT Consultant) wasn't exactly what I was looking for and so far I haven't been invited back for a second interview. :)

The SWLUG meeting went okay, the pub was a bit noisy and the tables weren't really big enough for everyone as we needed to steal one from the other side of the room. This did however lead to complications when people started ordering food, what with the tables being carefully laid out and numbered so that the staff knew where to deliver food. Might have to look for a different pub for next time, although the position couldn't have been better for Trains and Car Parks.

I am getting increasingly annoyed with BT Openwoe and may switch to Demon this week which will at least get me a static IP. I won't go into details about openwoe and instead you can get details from the Register

The ongoing hunt for work may soon come to an end, I have 2 interviews this week, neither of which are for jobs that I actually want but I need the money which is resulting in me whoring myself to either ISP front line tech support or a Windows NT Consultancy firm.

Machine-wise stability is still good but SCSI is still borked.

hmm, not much has been happening recently, code-wise I've started playing with GTK again. Otherwise I've been hanging out on IRC more and playing with a couple of websites for people but I still don't have a day job.

Theres a SWLUG meeting tonight which I helped arrange and I have no idea what the selected pub will be like on a Tuesday evening so I'm hoping it all goes okay.

Machine stability has now reached about 90% the Athlon had it's longest uptime for a while (3 days) and was only turned off when I upgraded to 2.4.10-ac10 (from ac8)

I finally got fed up with my machine crashing/hanging every 2 hours (bad enough that there was no ping response) and trashing the filesystem. So I've upgraded from 2.4.8 to 2.4.9-ac14 and converted my filesystem to ext3 (which totally rules) and not only has system performance increased, but the hangs have apparently stopped.

with regards to devel I've just been playing around with libsdl for the past few days.

Been staying at davej's place for the last 2 days, went to a job fair which was highly profiled as an IT fair in an advert in computer weekly. It turned out that the "Science and Technology" section had been made/merged into the "corporate" section, which meant 0 people I'd be interested in meeting. So I spent the time battling through people in suits looking for anything interesting, left after having fun on the Army climbing wall and taking 2 squeezy phones from the One 2 One stand.

Ireland: I arrived home at about 5am this morning, the main event of the trip (Slayer/Pantera/Satic-X/Cradle Of Filth Concert) was postponed due to the tragedies in America. I was on the boat to Ireland at the time of the attack otherwise I might have abandoned the trip. All things aside though I did have a goot time in Ireland, making the best of the local pubs.

SWLUG: The Swansea meeting was yet another success, once again there was a good turn out. As an added bonus I also got to see the Swansea University Computer Societies computer room, which I was amazed to find out they use Tesco Club cards to gain access to.

Over the last week I've been playing with various things, been looking over the gnome-core and libs code as well as signed up to several devel mailing lists.

Managed to make the Visor dial out via the nokia last night, but found out that Orange doesn't seem to recognise BTInternet's number...

I'm now just getting ready to go shopping in Newport, then Cardiff and then finally ending up in Swansea for tonight's South Wales LUG meeting. From which I doubt I'll get back earlier than midnight to pack my stuff, get some sleep and then get a train to Fishguard and a Ferry to Rosslaire where I'm staying at a friends for a few days.