At the weekend I completed the musical odyssey I started in 2008 and reported on last year. The last track to come out of the giant shuffle was Song For Shelter by Fatboy Slim, which was somewhat fitting and certainly a better finish than the penultimate track. This means all my digital tracks are now recorded in my Last.fm profile for freaky MI5 profiling posterity. Now, I just need to go back and look at all my vinyl…
Music odyssey completed
January 5th, 2010New year, new Ubuntu 9.10 Atheros wireless issue
January 1st, 2010Having finally got off my backside and purchased an external hard-drive to back up all our files, I thought the new year would be a good time to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu, namely 9.10. Everything went very smoothly until I rebooted and the wireless network card failed to initialise. I let out the customary howl of anguish of the Linux user faced with unexpected hardware issues. (I really did and Ben asked what was up. I snapped back at him; a great start to the year.)
Now this was particularly galling as I’d booted up on a USB memory stick to check for hardware compatibility and everything had worked fine. I was just gearing up for a complete rebuild of the machine when I thought I’d have a quick poke around /etc/modprobe.d to see if anything stuck out. And so it did: blacklist-ath_pci.conf. I tried sudo modprobe ath5k and up came the wireless. I then used sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ath_pci.conf to comment out the last and everything is back up and working.
It turns out that I’d tripped over bug 429595 because I’d previously used different drivers and this machine has been continuously upgraded for the last two years. Fresh installs aren’t affected, hence nothing showed up when I booted up on the USB memory stick. So… panic over.
I also encountered a problem with Gwibber (possibly bug 437562) but re-entering the account details cleared that up.
It lives!
December 7th, 2009I once read that your blog is “dead” if you don’t update it at least once every 3 months. Well, it’s been 3 months and 1 day since my last post and I’ve been meaning to posts for weeks months so I thought I’d better do something about it.
So, where have I been? Well, mostly on Twitter, as predicted. Also, I’ve been very much tied up getting the all new Fantasy Film League back up and running. This has sucked up pretty much all my spare time. (That at the bathroom demolition refit.) With that in mind, I’m going to keep this short so I can back to the grindstone.
I’ll see if I can keep posting here but past predictions have been laughably inaccurate, so no promises. One thought I had was that I might use this as a place to post things I’ve learnt on my FFL oddessy. For instance, I’ve been mighty impressed by the Ruby on Rails guides site. It’s a great place to learn or brush up on your Rails programming.
Anyways… hope to see you round here again in the not too distant future.
Holidays
September 6th, 2009We took two week-long holidays this year. The first, at the beginning of August, was to the south coast of Devon. We stayed, as we have for the last four years, in a caravan and spent our time on the beach and visiting local farms and the like. You could take the kids to just about any beach and they’d have a good time, the only requirement is it isn’t raining. This year, for the first time, our luck with the weather didn’t hold and we were subjected to a couple of truly miserable rainy days. This cemented the idea in our mind to try something different next year and go slightly further afield.
In the last week of August we went to Disneyland Paris. Overall, it was a very good, if tiring, holiday. The first thing I really enjoyed was being able to catch the Eurostar from London and within a couple of hours walk out of the station in France, turn right and straight into the park.
The whole park is a very polished operation and despite my usual corporate cynicism, I did find myself being excited by the whole experience… possibly contagiously from the children. More than any amusement park I’ve been is before they really due try to amuse you at every turn, not just on the rides. One slightly odd detail was the incessant music being played wherever you were in the park; sometimes this worked better than others.
We stayed at one of the (cheaper) Disney hotels, which was nicely themed and entirely adequate given that we really only stayed there when we were sleeping. One of our main concerns was that as we were all sharing a single room, getting to sleep was going to be awkard. However, we were up at 8am each day, into the park around 9am and not back home until after 10pm, so we all flaked out immediately as soon as we got back.
The queues weren’t too bad (with the notable exception of an hour and fourty minutes for Crush’s Coaster) and some judicious use of the Fast Passes allowed us to get on almost every ride in the five days we were there. Ben’s favourite ride was Star Tours, which we went on three times. It has a delightfully 80s overtone that fits very well with “classic” Star Wars. Jessica’s favourite the Buzz Lightyear ride because she loves the “Ooo! The Claw!” aliens. Again, that ride got three goes. By the end of the three days we were pretty worn out and it was definitely time to head home.
The only downside was the food. This was very expensive and rather samey, although we rarely ventured above the fast food level, so perhaps if you’re flush you get a better experience.
I’d definitely recommend going if you have young children, for them it really will be magical. That said, I don’t think we’ll go back for a good few years, partly due to the expense and partly because we feel we’ve really “done” it and going back wouldn’t live up to this year’s experience.
One thousand tracks and counting
August 16th, 2009Well over a year ago, I finished ripping all my music onto the computer and set about listening to every track. Today I passed the 1000 track mark. Clearly I don’t listen to music on the computer all that often. In fact, it’s about 1.7 tracks a day on average. My in-car listening is very much confined to podcasts these days.
Interesting note on the state of applications: I was about to fire up a spreasheet app to do the above calculation when I decided to see if the internet could do the necessary work for me. Short answer: Yes. It’s the future, baby!
Is Twitter killing this blog?
July 28th, 2009A couple of weeks ago I sat down to write a post called “Is Twitter killing this blog?” but in the process managed to hose the whole blog while doing an upgrade of the software. I needed back-end access to the server to fix something that went wrong during the upgrade only to find out that there was something wrong with the account such that I was locked out. Thankfully, it didn’t take too long for the nice folks at PlusNet to sort things out and I was able to get the blog back up and running.
However, it took me a couple more weeks to get round to writing this post, so… Is Twitter killing this blog? Well, perhaps not killing it but certainly slowing it down. I can certainly vent minor, trivial thoughts to Twitter, which I might have previously spun into a post here. Also, now that there’s a small band of friends on Twitter, I’m enjoying the banter there… far more feedback there already than here.
In addition, life is fairly settled currently, so there doesn’t seem to be much to write about. And then there’s Ben’s DS. I think I’m catching up for several years of missed computer games. I’m at 97% on Lego Star Wars Saga. I think if I can grind my way to 100% I’ll have definitely maxed out and be able to leave it alone for a while.
A stange thing happened to me this weekend
June 9th, 2009On Saturday, Louise and I were catching up on some TV, watching Jonathan Ross interview Hugh Laurie about the new series of House on Sky One. Now, I’ll admit I’d had a couple of glasses of wine by this time and something Mr Ross said — I can’t remember the exact details any more (telling!) — pissed me off, so I was right onto The Twitter whereupon I railed.
Just as we were getting ready to go to bed, I went to switch off the laptop. It was then that I noticed that Mr Ross had replied! Feeling slightly stunned and abashed, I responded, to which he graciously replied again. This gave me pause for thought, so I posted once more. I was about to call it quits for the night when, yet again, I got a response. Well I couldn’t leave it be by this point, so I thought hard and tried to sum up my position and then went to bed.
The following morning, with a clearer head, I saw there was a further response. I made a final response and that was that.
So, a somewhat surreal experience but perhaps one that illustrates the power of Twitter.
My first computer
June 1st, 2009Ben had his sixth birthday last weekend. Aside from a large assortment of Lego (awesome!) from the family, his present from us was a Nintendo DS Lite. It’s amazing the change a generation has seen. The first computer I used was a ZX81, complete with 1024 bytes of RAM. At the same age, Ben has his own computer. It’s the same size or perhaps a touch smaller but has built in touch screens (plural), sound, microphone, battery, storage, wireless… and 4 million times as much RAM.
Now if Moore’s law holds, this means our grandchildren will get computers with 16 terabytes of RAM. That’s something like 2000 DVDs loaded in memory. Err…!
My main concern was that Ben was going to do nothing but play on it, so we set him a daily limit. This can be confiscated for bad behaviour, increased for good behaviour and all those other parent-style tricks. I’ve been pleasantly surprised, however, that he’s got a very balanced approach and he’s yet to challenge over having extra time.
His favourite game is Lego Star Wars and now I have a whole new set of problems to face as a father, such as how to trip up an AT-AT with a tow-rope on the Empire Strikes Back level. It’s a hard life…
With the Lego sets, the Lego Star Wars game and a trip to Legoland, it was a “very Lego-ey birthday” in Ben’s words. I won’t go into how we lost Ben for half an hour in Legoland, suffice as to say losing your child at any time is one of the scariest experiences you can have.
#twitterfail
May 13th, 2009What do you do when Twitter goes offline? Spend 140 characters bitching about it on your neglected blog of course!
Bacchus Ale Festival 2009
May 5th, 2009Last weekend I attended Tim and Johnny’s Bacchus Ale Festival 2009. I think the best way of describing this is as a “micro beer festival”, as in a beer festival that’s micro — 20 attendees — as opposed to a festival of micro beers.
All in all I thought it went very well. I had a brief chat with Tim about it at the Wokingham May Fayre yesterday. He said he found it very hectic, with very little time to enjoy the event. That sounds similar to experiences I’ve had hosting large family get-togethers, where you spend the whole time worrying about all your guests and no time enjoying the occassion itself. As a festival goer rather than organiser, though, I thought it was great.
I thought I’d use my internet pulpit to make a couple of suggestions. Firstly, a simplified first-past-the-post voting scheme would reduce the paperwork and headaches, especially around the 15th beer when it all gets a bit hazy. Secondly, I was wondering about reducing the number of beers somehow as the schedule was pretty punishing — 19 beers to try in 5 hours! Tim was suggesting that perhaps letting people sample the beers in any order. I’m not sure, perhaps. Everyone trying each beer simultaneously certainly prompted a lot of conversation!
Anyway, those were small criticisms. I hope the Bacchus Ale Festival returns in years to come. You can see some of the pictures I took on Flickr, although you’ll have to be logged in and set up as my friend to see all those featuring real people… unless you badger me and I send you a guest pass.