Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
03 2006
I don't understand gyms. I pay them money - and they make me hurt! Ow!
posted at: 01:04 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
...are truly a thing to behold. The child has a new zebra coloured pencil and wants it sharpened. I, harshly and most unfairly, point out that she has two already sharpened pencils (Of the Pooh Bear variety) in her pencil box; so I refuse to sharpen another pencil until these are used a bit. Despite protestations such as "But I don't LIKE those pencils," I refuse to cave and sharpen the new one.
Cue small child running down the stairs wielding blunt zebra pencil and shouting, "Mummmm! Dad won't be my friend!"
posted at: 17:32 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
There's a bunch of lads in day-glo green flourescent jackets out the back stealing all my rubbish...
...Oh! Wait... it's just the binmen.
posted at: 13:57 | path: | permanent link to this entry
I'm glad to see that Norman Kember has thanked the soldiers who rescued him from captivity in Iraq. It's only polite - when someone does something for you, it's really rather rude not to thank them. However, I am astounded that the BBC managed to generate a full 24 hours of news coverage regarding the fact that Mr. Kember had not yet specifically thanked these people. He generally thanked various people and all involved in his rescue - he did not specifically NOT thank the soldiers or any other party - his wife thanked everyone on his behalf, including the soldier - he provided intelligence information to these soldiers regarding his captors and, as far as I can see, helped them as best he possibly could. There is a good chance that his mental state is not at its best and in fairness, he probably has more important things on his mind than to remember to thank each and every individual and/or group involved in his rescue within the first 24 hours of being released.
But yet the BBC see fit to create a news frenzy because the poor guy, having just been rescued from 4 months of captivity did not specifically thank the soldiers involved in his rescue. I hope the moron in the BBC who decided this was a newsworthy story never has to suffer through the mental anguish of a day's captivity - never mind 4 months!
I sincerely hope that each and every BBC news reporter, anchor-person and director who repeated this stupid piece of non-news to the nation is made to apologise in person to Mr. Kembel and his family. And perhaps in the future they will have the decency to find some actual content for their reporting.
I have lost a lot of respect for the BBC news team in the last 24 hours.
</rant>
posted at: 22:36 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Clearly there is some further problem with my fileserver than the stick of faulty RAM. After several years fault free service it has decided once again to just die. Looks like I'm going to have to take the whole thing offline and let memtest86 run through the remaining RAM (1.25GB - *cry*) to see if that's the issue. Alternatively, the only significant change made to the system between stability and instability was the addition of a PCI IDE controller, which I suspect might be faulty (given that only one channel works on it!) I'll order another from aria.co.uk and see if it works better - and then see about returning the faulty one to them.
My pathalogical hatred for computers that don't just work is coming along nicely...
posted at: 18:08 | path: | permanent link to this entry
The work I put into the template for Lilypond has clearly paid off. I was able
to put this together in about 20 minutes - it's another of the tunes I've been
learning on the whistle and is one of my favourite polkas, especially played
really fast.
I've written it out in G, which is the key I've heard it most usually played
in, though I play it in D on the whistle as well, which allows it to be used in
some other polka sets.
I've been playing with Lilypond over the past few days and have just finished writing up my first piece of lilypond music. I've been looking for a better, more powerful method of notating traditional music than Finale Notepad and abc. Further experimentation with abc2ly (a convertor that translates abc format to lilypond syntax) has been quite disappointing. It doesn't appear to respect key signatures and often generates lilypond output that can't be processed by the lilypond interpreter. I'll look at this in more detail in the near future, time permitting.
I've written up my first whistle piece for the year, Shoe The Donkey, using Lilypond. I'll add more pieces over the coming days and weeks.
It's fun to make musical scores with LilyPond. Given that I'm working through traditional music tunes at the moment, the abc2ly utility is hugely useful. Nice.
posted at: 02:23 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry
I've noticed that one of my main fileserver, neutron, has started to just crash / hang after a few days of uptime. This foxed me for a while, until today when I rebooted the RAM failed its memory check. If I recall correctly, neutron has 4 sticks of RAM in it, totalling 1.5GB - so I guess that's the rest of my day gone figuring out which stick it is that has the fault.
Fortunately, my distributed storage model in my hame network is paying off - even without the fileserver all the vital things continue running. Of course, backups have not been done and I'm rather glad I'm not in the middle of an audio project at the moment so I don't need huge storage right now.
Hopefully I'll have the server up and running later today, probably with a bit less RAM until I can grab a replacement - but I'm glad I now have a clue why it's been unstable of late.
posted at: 17:59 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
After completely failing to find some enjoyable and useful method of exercising here, I've finally given in and joined a gym. I've only been going a couple of days now, but the staff are really helpful and friendly, and I've actually been enjoying gently pushing my body back towards the limits I used to when I played regular sports.
I mentioned in a previous post that I'd stopped putting weight on a few months ago - well now I hope to start losing a few kilos (Raa! Up the metric system!) and get back into some sort of reasonable shape. It's going to be an entertaining ride... though possibly not always for me... ;)
posted at: 16:23 | path: | permanent link to this entry
...am I trying to make wireless networking work on an old laptop and writing a dynamic website at 3:51am? I mean, really - I should get some sleep or something...
posted at: 03:51 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
Ireland won the rugby, 15 - 9 - and now head up the table of the 6 nations (at least until tomorrow's England V France match.)
We had a most excellent session at the Cock and Bottle - thanks to all those people who turned up and played. I'll make some kind of website and put the photos up soon.
And we sampled the culinary delights of the buffet at Sunrise. Okay, so we had been there for lunch on Thursday, but we thought we should check that it provided a hearty fare in the evenings as well. We were certainly not disappointed. Any weight loss I may have accidentally come by has been completely frittered away through excessive eating of excellent curry.
posted at: 03:46 | path: | permanent link to this entry
... leads to much more than you'd expect. With Stan here to babysit, Sinéad and I were almost thrown out of the house on orders to have a good time while he took care of the small child. Deciding, as I am wan to do, that I fancied some kind of Oriental cuisine, I thought it would be a superb opportunity to sample the delights of abacus - a new(ish) Asian food venue that I've been promising to try out for months now. Sinéad and I were certainly not disappointed. The staff were excellent, the food was more than satisfactory and I'm certainly going to go there again. As a complete non-vegetarian, I had a superb starter of shredded chili beef strips, followed by a Thai Green Curry (Chicken) - which was a little mild for my tastes, though marked as mild in the menu so I can't complain. Sinéad pointed out that her usual complaint as a picky eater (sorry - vegetarian) is that there's not enough choice - but this place provided a whole separate section of veggie options - and thus almost provided too much choice for those of the normal vegetarian variety or the picky eater pursuasian. She had some fried seaweed (which was very tasty - I tried some) followed by a main course of Tofu Terriaki. It was a good as tofu gets, to be honest. I thought it was largely a waste of good terriaki sauce on what could have been some delicious chicken, or some honey glazed pork - but I guess for a tofu dish it was pretty good ;-)
After two hours of eating very good food, rather than go home, we decided to sample the delights of some Bradfordian comedy at the Alhambra. Dan Evans, an old friend who used to run the comedy cupboard at the Boat Race, was performing there and true to form made us laugh and groan in equal measure.
What should have happened is that we should have headed for home straight after that, but alas and alack (not really sure how to write that) we were co-erced into going for a swift half by Dan, Ben and Kevin, the trio largely responsible for the comedic antics of the evening (though I will admit that some credit must be attributed to the blonde lady who stated she was a low class lady of ill repute and the random bloke who clearly shared Ben's intense dislike for some arbitrary furniture shop in the local area.)
Through experimental process, we have determined that it's not easy to have a quiet drink on a Friday evening in Bradford - though it appears to be relatively easy to have rather a large number of loud ones.
But now - bed. nightol...
posted at: 02:18 | path: | permanent link to this entry
[bigbro@nexus bigbro]$ uptime
00:31:01 up 366 days, 5:18, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.06, 0.01
And yet another box racks up a year on the clock. I guess that means that this
time last year is when I rewired the electrics in my home office.
posted at: 01:23 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
...or does Thunderbird recognise individual items from RSS feeds and only make them appear once - even though the same items may be syndicated to multiple feeds? I'll be very interested to see which RSS feed folder this posting ends up in.
While I like the idea that it only presents each article for me to read once and only once, it's somewhat confusing that the feed folders do not appear to be complete when compared to the website representation of the same data.
posted at: 14:44 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Through the power of uninstalling the driver for the M-Audio Firewire 410, I appear to have hade my Edirol FA-101 work again. The OS X MIDI subsystem now no longer appears to crash for no reason - this is good. While I've been generally impressed with the quality of the Firewire 410 hardware, I have been stunned at how damaging its driver is. It literally crashes the entire CoreAudio MIDI subsystem. Impressively bad! You might want to fix that one M-Audio.
Róisín just arrived home from School so there's lots of background noise, including the TV - but this was just a test to see if I could record a couple of tracks and overdub with the FA-101 - It's all looking good to go (at last.)
Stan and I plan to do some recording tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.
P.S. For the record (and in case it's not blatantly obvious) I am not a mandolin player.
Today I had the privilege of trying to use one of Microsoft's own tools, SFC (Windows 2000 Windows File Checker Version 5.00) to try and discover why my Windows machine has started blue-screening about twice a day. I am pleased to announce that this SFC is one of the most retarded pieces of software I've ever had the disdain to mock!
Firstly, it asked for my "Service Pack 4 CD." Which one? I installed Windows 2000 a long time before Service pack 4 existed. I do not have a Service Pack 4 CD. I upgraded to Service Pack 4 using Microsoft's very own Windows Update utility. Surely they've thought of this possible eventuality?
Pleased to see that someone had put some thought into the usability of this tool, I was pleased to see that a "More Information" button was provided. I clicked it. My dreams and illusions of competence were immediately and painfully shattered. Helpful to the last, Microsoft usefully pointed out the following to me:
"Possible reasons for this problem:Thanks for that.
- You have inserted the wrong CD. (i.e., a different Windows 2000 product CD than the version installed)
- The CD-ROM drive in your system is not functioning.
"If you cancel, Windows might require you to insert a CD later. Are you sure you want to skip this file?"True to some Microsoft internal paradigm of great incompetence when it comes to system programs (i.e. We slapped it together, it works on our test system so we're shipping it. If anyone finds a problem with it, tell them to reinstall Windows and/or reboot more.) it has now asked me about a hundred times to insert the same two CDs I either don't have - or have but the software won't believe it - and I have the privilege of clicking [Cancel] and [Yes] to the same stupid unhelpful warning message every time.
I have an ibook. I use it extensively and find it excellent. It stands by when I shut the lid and restarts flawlessly when I open it. It has 802.11g wireless networking built in, which mostly just works, and with the addition of a few choice bits of software it does pretty much everything I want it to do - extremely well. Oh, and the battery life is still second to none after 2+ years of usage.
So what's my beef? What is the one, single most irritating thing about it that irks me to the point where I'll actually post in my 'rants' section? Answer: The keyboard. It has excellent action, good positioning, a generous space for wrist resting and is ergonomically more than acceptable for a laptop. Again, well done Apple on a fine product.
But why? Why did you have to move the keys about? I know there's lots of standards to choose from, but why can I not get a normal UK layout when I ask for one? The '@' (at) and '"' (quotation marks) are transposed. The '\' (backslash) and '|' (pipe) key is in the wrong place. The '~' (tilde) and '`' (backtick) are in the lower left hand corner of the keyboard with a superfluous '+- / paragraph marker' key occupying the top left. Where is the '#' (hash / pound) key? [Alt] + [3] will get it sometimes, though not under Chicken of the VNC I notice.
I guess I'm partially to blame myself - in my average day's work I use at least 3 separate computers with keyboards and mice attached. Often I use many more, along with various other miscellaneous pieces of kit with some kind of keyboard attached. Consistently, my biggest problem migrating is to the Apple keyboard. My e-mail client, were it capable of thought, could safely assume that anything in the To: line like blah"domain.com should be converted to blah@domain.com. I touch type (very quickly, though not always accurately - my typos are worthy of Eusa...) so I don't really care what legends are on the keys - but is there some method of setting a keymap? Not that I've found... I can disable the [Fn] key, I can swap things like the [CAPS Lock] key and the [Ctrl] key, but thus far I've not found any method of making the Apple UK keyboard work like an actual UK keyboard (except under X11.)
Please - someone rescue me from my fate slightly worse than being taunted by a Knnnnnnniggit! Until I put comments on this blog (coming soon!) feel free to drop me an e-mail at blog@signal2noise.co.uk with a solution if you've found one. Until then, my typing shall remain stunted on this Apple keyboard of moderate doom.
</rant>
posted at: 02:32 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Quite a lot. I guess due to government cutbacks the white Christmas has had to be delayed by three months.
posted at: 14:57 | path: | permanent link to this entry
[14:19] <Chimaera> 600cc motorcycle - it's a bit fast
[14:20] <moonbeam> cool
[14:21] <seb> yeah, pocket rocket
[14:21] <seb> not really a long-distance machine, unless you like backache
[14:22] <bb_laptop> seb: erm... a pocket rocket is something completely different... and not a motorcycle (though allegedly some girls do like to ride them) ;-) *cough*
[14:22] <bb_laptop> and guys... let's not be sexist / homophobic here ;)
[14:31] <seb> bigbro - it goes between the legs, and gets the 'rider' 'there'
quickly..... or..s....
[14:32] <seb> so..um..nice weather we're having then :)
...Google returns about 124 results for the search string "butter goat extreme tartan download midget".
For the record, I'd like to state that this has nothing whatsoever to do with molc... not at all... honest...
posted at: 14:33 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
I spotted this:
"...being a nerd, the www is one of my few forms of human contact."from Reilly's blog. Now, have I missed something, or has the very definition of 'human contact' changed to include IM, IRC, blogging, SMS'ing and the like?
Steve's blog posting referring to Colm's blog entry mentioned The Hacker's Diet, a book which I have also read about 6 moths back and learned from. Although I've only lost a little weight - nothing like Colm's excellent progress - I've very easily managed to maintain my weight at its present level - despite my penchant for lard.
For variation on the theme, I use OpenOffice Calc rather than GNUPlot or Excel to track and graph my weight.
Even engineers have to eat, and whether you are overweight, underweight or just right, I'd highly recommend a read through The Hacker's Diet. It's a very light read (honestly! Despite any references to averages, means and other such statistical terminology) and certainly helped me to put eating, weight, metabolism and my body in context.
posted at: 17:03 | path: | permanent link to this entry
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