27 September 2004
I hear that William Barnes of Dorset wanted to rid English of words which came from other tongues, and would rather keep only words from Old English. So I'm told, instead of the impenetrability of matter he would have the ungetthroughableness of stuff! This gets 0 hits on google, which is bad[*], so I put that right here. Thanks, sparkwave four.
But, ill godswill, able has Latin roots so I fear he went wrong there... I put forward instead: ungetthroughfitness
* The Book of Words tells me that bad comes from a word for a hermaphrodite; a badling is an effeminate man, or sodomite! You learn something new every day.
6 June 2004
Kevin is writing a book
14 July 2003
Two updates in as many days!
My 30th birthday occurred a week ago on the 6th. Emma and I stayed overnight at a hotel in the Borders. We had planned to go to the wedding of a former employee at her work, on Saturday the 5th. Unfortunately neither of us was feeling up to it by the time we got there. So we checked into the hotel and wondered how to spend the evening.
We decided to get something to eat, so we drove into Galashiels and got a bag of chips. I had an urge to get a DVD player, as I had been considering the purchase for a while but hadn't done my usual level of research to determine a suitable model. Throwing caution to the wind, we went into the local branch of Tesco to see if they sold DVD players. We could take it back to the hotel and watch a film.
As luck would have it there were no DVD players, but there was a Sony Playstation 2 in stock, which plays DVDs! It's possible to run Linux on these, so I though I couldn't really go wrong. £300 later and I was a proud owner of a PS2, two controllers, a DVD remote control, an 8Mb memory cartridge, Grand Theft Auto Vice City and Season 3 of the fabulous Futurama, from the same stable as the Simpsons.
Well, it was a good purchase. Vice City is a great game and now I'm building up a DVD collection. I'm planning to make the PS2 the centre of my home entertainment system.
13 July 2003
I've put some essays up. They are clearly the work of a tormented subgenius.
14 September 2002, 00:38
Ummm... March to September... that's, what, six months and two days. I've left it too long.
What has the intervening time brought? Well, work has been busy, then quiet, then annoying as my job definition seems to have changed underneath me. Still waiting for clarification on that one.
I went camping in early August. Got the bus to Pitlochry then a local bus to Aberfeldy. Walked up into the hills to the north and camped out overnight. Got lost in a forest plantation as the sun went down which was scary... found my way out and made camp. Very sore feet! I'd been reading about 'ultra lightweight camping' but didn't put it into practice. I will next time!
Camping out was scary at first; every noise seemed like some wild animal trying to infiltrate my tent. Tiredness get's the better of fear eventually though so I did get some sleep, 11pm -> 5am.
Then a night at Tummel Bridge... don't.
Finally a night in Pitlochry, Ballinluig camp site. Very nice actually, except for the racket which started about 1am and continued through to 6am, some heavy plant in the distance. Christ alone knows what that was or why it had to be done in the middle of the night.
I've been getting green fingered with a variety of houseplants which has been interesting, and frustrating; germinating seeds of plants native to the Amazon and Somalia is not easy in Scotland... but good success with cacti!
Good trip with the Standard Life cycling club, to Keldy Forest in the North York Moors. A challenging ride in Dalby Forest followed by a more gentle escapade around Rosedale and the Chimney. Very pleasanty.
Spent a couple of months with no interest in computing at all, but have been rekindling that over the last few weeks. Finally having some success with user mode linux. Using it to host a Debian test/unstable distribution on my Woody server, to run latest Horde framework so I can run a web-accessible calendar / to-do list along with the IMP webmail I've been using for some time. What I want is a web-enabled 'project management' tool, I think I'll need to modify the Horde applications to get what I need, but it's looking good.
Stopped smoking early July, but I've been on-and-off lately... as Helen said in Keldy, it's a slippery slope...
And today I had my first dental fillings for at least 15 years. I was nervous in the chair, and I winced as the needle went in, but no pain now! None whatsoever.
Listening to Coil, Arovane, Dick Dale, Boards of Canada, and the wondrous output of Benbecula.
Over and out for now.
12 March 2002, 23:47
Well, Iain's funeral has been and gone. It was actually quite good - lots of people I've not seen for a while were there; the minister made a good job of piecing together the things that Iain's mum, his girlfriend Sharon, his brother Keith, his friend David and myself were able to say. The best thing was hearing people laugh at some of the things said about Iain. Clearly those things were familiar to them and struck a chord.
At the reception, at the Dean Tavern in Newtongrange, I had the chance to speak to some people I haven't seen for months, and others I haven't seen for many years. It looks like I'll be seeing more of them soon now too. Iain was often friendship enough for me. I don't expect anyone to replace him. But I now have more time to spend with other friends, and I intend to. A mixed blessing, but every cloud...
So my first major act in the post-Iain era is to go to Sweden to see James McConnell. James stayed in the halls of residence at the Jewel and Esk Valley college for a year, and many of Iain's social contacts grew out of their friendship. James teaches English to children who are not from a Swedish background. I used to work with James at an after-school club in Clermiston, and I know that children love him, and he loves them. The impression I got from working with him was he was like a big brother to the boys and girls at the club. But I think he is like that with most people, certainly in the way he cares for people; not to make him appear like Mr Responsibility - he's not.
The plan is to go over on Thursday 25th April and come back on the Sunday. Sweden should certainly be interesting.
Aside from all that, I've finally got round to install Linux on my HP 712/80 PA-RISC workstation, and I'm editing this page on it. I've put it in the living room, and I'm going to use it for my Open University work. It's not as quiet as it should be - the old SCSI disk is quite noisy now - but it's small, discrete and fairly fast so it does the job. Only problem is, I don't think the developers have sorted out threads yet, so Mozilla and other Gecko based browsers aren't ready yet, and neither is the old Netscape 4.x. But I have found Dillo, and it looks pretty cool.
Since Iain died I must admit I've been smoking now and again. I'm going to have one more cigarette tonight and throw away the tobacco - resorting to smoking during a stressful period is a sure fire way to being a smoker and I do not want that again.
2 March 2002, 02:54
My best friend Iain died suddenly in the early hours of Friday 22nd February 2002.
It makes me feel uncomfortable writing this, but I think I have to.
I had expected his funeral to be yesterday. But the Procurator Fiscal in Glasgow didn't release his body till yesterday. They were trying to find out what caused his death, they still don't know. Perhaps I'll never find out.
No-one expected this, least of all me. Since his father died almost exactly a year ago, Iain had complained of aches and pains, that he had cancer like his dad. I called him a hypochondriac. I still think he was. He complained of a headache just before he died. Obviously that was real.
He was only 28 years old and had started seeing Sharon several months ago. Iain had mentioned marriage to her. They were well matched.
What can I say. Not much of use. Iain liked action and getting things done. I'll try and do that now, though it's not easy.
His funeral is on Thursday 7th March, 13:00, at the Main Chapel, Mortonhall Crematorium, Edinburgh.
9 February 2002, 13:43
My server suffered a failure of the fan on it's Northbridge chip yesterday leading to a nasty electronic burning smell. I turned it off before it was completely fried and replaced the fan with one from a SCSI enclosure I had lying around. So it's back up. The question is, how long will it stay up? I'm sure the chip is damaged because it got pretty hot. Anyway, for the time being, I'm back.
26 January 2002, 15:34
Checked my stats an hour ago and wouldn't you know but google has decided to return my page whenever anyone searches for decent mp3s, so I've served up about 400Mb of tunes over the last couple of days...
To prevent visits from certain dangerous people I've had to secure my music area. Sorry :-(
It's interesting that the latest magazine of the Performing Right Society features such cutting edge musicians as Kylie Minogue and Cathy Dennis. Don't worry folks! I wouldn't be seen dead listening to anything you put out anyway!
My opinion about music and copyright goes like this: Music is art, not industry. I don't believe that good music is produced when it's done for money. I'd hope that any artist I listen to makes music because they enjoy it and they want others to enjoy it too. If not, well, I'd much rather not listen to them!
With the advent of widespread broadband internet access, the idea of buying plastic discs in order to listen to music becomes ludicrously inefficient, and the concept of middlemen distributors 'taking their cut' becomes antiquated and revealed for what it truly is - leeching.
Musicians can still get money. Live concerts! Donations! Hey, perhaps they could get real jobs, rather than being paid to have fun all the time!
So. I am not happy about revoking access to my music collection, but in the current reactionary climate I don't feel safe from the Music Industry Mafiosi.
There are options though - Check out Napigator, Mapigator and Gnapster for a start. The official Napster may be dead, but there are plenty of people running their own OpenNap servers, and you can use these clients to connect to them.
14 January 2002, 18:17
Today was my first day working for Standard Life. So far so good. The major stumbling block appears to be shower and changing facilities - there are none in the building I am in, and there appears to be a six month wait for lockers. I am told there are good facilities at Tanfield, which is about 200 yards away, so I've sent off an email to find out if I can use them.
2 January 2002, 23:48
The story and pictures of my bike ride up the Pentlands is now available for your entertainment.
2 January 2002, 19:07
Lego porn is very funny, but it's also quite rude.
31 December 2001, 20:16
Hogmanay. Waiting for Emma to get ready, then going for a couple of drinks at Montpeliers, followed by a house party hosted by one of Emma's former co-students at Edinburgh College of Art.
Should be in an interesting state by the bells, have a good one when they come!
29 December 2001, 17:47
Cycled up to the stables in Tranent where Emma keeps her horse, and I keep my cat. Took some photos (I'll be adding a photo gallery section soon). There's a good path down the hill from behind the stables to Wallyford and it makes a good cycle ride presuming no-one's coming up the way. Didn't get any photos of that because by that time it was bitterly cold and I didn't want to stop.
Today I have mostly been sitting on my arse, though I did nip out to purchase brackets so I can use my bike lamps on both my bikes without swapping brackets over, rechargeable batteries for my front lamp, a wedge saddlebag with a clip-on fitting to replace my velcro fitting one (it just takes too long...) and a thermal top so I can actually wash my other one.
I also had two pizza rolls at Piemakers in Tollcross (excellent!).
I installed awstats and now it's cron job keeps emailing me every 10 minutes! I didn't want that... I've tried to turn it off, but I've not figured it out yet... So now I have nice statistics, though I think I need to do a bit of config work.
*** UPDATE *** Of course, this is what I wanted:
carlos:/etc/cron.d# cat awstats
0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * www-data [ -x /usr/sbin/awstats-update ]\
&& /usr/sbin/awstats-update > /dev/null 2>&1
carlos:/etc/cron.d#
Well, I think I've made a good start on my site. Not too much here just now, but the structure is in place.
Now I'm going to read Slashdot and enjoy a whisky.
Happy birthday mum!
27 December 2001, 23:14
Perhaps you'd like to know what I got for christmas.
Well, I got:
27 December 2001, 22:52
Welcome to my new website! It's not complete yet, but I'm working on it. Check back regularly to see what's new.