TD Online

New Job

I got offered a new contract the other week at work which came as both a surprise and shock. The contract I was offered was for the Field Support Technician role that had been put out and advertised a month or two back and which, to be honest, I had never dreamed I would have stood a chance for and so didn’t apply for. I also didn’t think when it was offered that it would come about as quick as it seems to be doing – official start date will be in two weeks time.

Basically, the new role will involve being half a step up the support chain from where I am now, heading out to the sites affected to troubleshoot and fix problems locally. To little ol’ me it’s pretty exciting, more hands-on, but with a hell of a lot to learn.
I’m a little nervous about it, but also pretty keen to get the most out of it and take the opportunity to really try and sink my teeth into all the bits missing from my knowledge of the setup. It could definitely make for some interesting times.

Not much more to report there really I don’t think, but it should be fun.

End of an Instructor Era

I made a pretty drastic decision the other day. Well, I say drastic, to be honest it’s been on the horizon for a while and is in no way related to the previous topic.

At the end of this year I’m going to suspend my PADI Teaching Status as an Instructor and start to be Non-Teaching Status.
For those unaware as to what that means, the clue’s in the names. Basically I’ll cease to be able to actively teach scuba diving courses as the sole instructor. Which is a shame, as I do genuinely love the feeling of satisfaction that’s derived from teaching someone new skills. But it had to happen, and has to happen, for a number of reasons:

• I’m not actively teaching any more as it is, which means I lack confidence on the few times I do get the chance to teach and run portions of a class. This isn’t good for me, as it makes me feel incompetent, and doesn’t help the students, who aren’t getting the best education they could – and should – be getting.
• I’m not, realistically, going to start teaching more frequently any time soon because, quite simply, I don’t have the time to do that and be able to do all the other things I want to be doing. This is more closely related to the new job scenario, as there’s plenty to do and a ton to learn which means, when it comes to time off, such as weekends and the like, I want to be making the most of it, whether that be heading off out to see friends, visit different places, spend some time playing EvE, or simply diving for my own pleasure and to increase my own diving experiences. it’s no secret that I’ve barely done any Mixed Gas diving since returning from Egypt, nor have I managed to really hammer myself in training scenarios to improve my own skills. With part-time teaching, I don’t have that capability and, by the same token, I don’t do it often enough to improve my teaching either – it’s lose-lose.
• It costs. Many of us know the old jokes (PADI: Put Another Dollar In, etc.) which, whilst I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, is true – being an active member of PADI does cost (shock! Horror!) and, whilst it will also cost me to remain a member at a Non-Teaching Status level, it won’t cost anywhere near as much, and I don’t have to also cover Professional Liability insurance to the same level. Whilst those costs at the moment aren’t exactly crippling, there’s no point me paying them if I’m not getting the use out of them. I’d be better off putting that money saved towards gas, or equipment maintenance.
• I can still partake and learn by helping out with courses as an assistant without being in Teaching Status - which basically means, should I reach a point where I feel I have the time and commitment to be able to start teaching again, I can get myself back into it gradually, putting the time in to help with courses and learning from those other instructors around me that have served as role models for so much of my time diving. The important thing is that I don’t have to be put in the pressure situation of already being Teaching Status whilst trying to learn this.

And those are about all I can think of right now. It’s a shame, in many ways, because I do genuinely enjoy teaching, but I also loathe the feeling of inadequacy I get from knowing I’m not providing the best teaching experience I possible can, purely because I lack practice and confidence. It ain’t fun.

Anyway, that’s that said.

The EvE Fanfest begins tomorrow, as I’ve been reminded by a few websites.

I won’t be there, although I would have loved to like the last few years.

Maybe next year.

Jealous, sir? Me, sir? No, sir. Not jealous, sir.

Bastards. Those that are going, enjoy!

The evening is still (relatively) young, but already I’ve just sat listening to The Black Box of Jazz which, whilst I’ve owned it for at least 4 years, I haven’t yet listened through all 4 CD’s back-to-back like I did tonight.
Simply put, it’s brilliant, and there are some individual tracks on there that are simply outstanding. I’ve heard all the tracks off the box set at certain times before, but listening to it start to finish really highlights how good those tracks are.
Just figured I should share.

For the rest of my highly resourceful day, I’ve watched two films – Evan Almighty, and Blade Runner.
First up was Evan Almighty which, judging by the trailers I saw over summer, I thought could be a good laugh. Frankly, I was disappointed.
It was amusing at times, and probably in a group atmosphere there would be many laughs shared, but I just didn’t find it as funny as I guess I expected to. I was also struck by a strange thought – all the general impressions of what an Ark should look like strike me as fundamentally flawed: the thing has no apparent sails, and yet clearly doesn’t (shouldn’t) have an engine, which means the thing basically just floats. In a flood scenario, where there are potentially many hazards to hit, this strikes me as foolish to have effectively ZERO control over where it should be heading. Just a thought.

Second up, Blade Runner, a film I should have watched long ago but didn’t.
Again, to be honest, I found myself a little disappointed. Not too much, but enough to remember.
It has plenty of very good moments but overall it just seemed to fail to capture me in the way I thought it would. I can’t single out anything that’s particularly wrong with it, I guess I’d just leave it saying it didn’t do all I thought it could for me…
Still, I reckon it’s a film everyone should at least try, maybe it just caught me on an off-day, following so closely as it did to my viewing of Evan Almighty.

And that’s it really. I guess the subject line is a little off. It should probably read ‘One Good Thing and A Couple of Moderate-to-Pretty Good things.

Meh.

Well, it’s hardly breaking news now given that I’ve been back nearly two weeks, but I’m back home and finally decided to sum up what’s gone on so far. It’s been a pretty cool first two weeks back and should make for a fun (if depressingly gloomy and wet!) summer. I’ve been and done a few things since I’ve been back, although admittedly spent a lot of time at home either trying to get things to work, breaking them, or just playing Eve! Sad? Moi? Anyway, I’ll try and put this in more or less the order it should be in…

New Bits and Bobs

New Laptop! (well, kinda…) – I finally got myself an IBM T41, picked up for a steal at £200. So most of my time since I got back has been spent playing on that. I installed a Hitachi GST 160Gb hard drive in it (and shocked myself at quite how easy changing the hard drive is in one of these – big change to the old PowerBook!) and went all out with putting Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on it. The original drive that came with it had a legit Windows copy pre-loaded, but no disc, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a copy of Windows I’ll hardly use so I decided to stick Linux on there.

This is actually the first time that I’ll be running a machine booting only Linux, although I doubt it’s going to be too much of a struggle, seeing as I’ve been using it by and large as my main Operating System for quite a while. My only concern beforehand was how I was going to be able to abuse having an x86 Laptop by running Eve on it, but it appears WINE has solved that problem for me… .

The laptop itself runs great, and I’ve been hugely impressed by 7.04, although I haven’t yet tried the normal Ubuntu version. Everything seems to work fine, although, admittedly, I’m more than likely using restricted drivers (although I haven’t double checked) – the honest reason being that, at the end of the day, I have a lot of stuff to do on here that for work meaning being able to use things like YouTube fully and read different files and, in short, ‘Just Work’, and if that means using restricted drivers on my laptop for now then, I guess, so be it. Oh, and I hate freedom… obviously…

Either way, despite restricted drivers, I have to say I’ve been very happy with the laptop so far, and I’ve pretty much managed to get Eve running on it, although I think the lower specs of the machine are making it more difficult than it needs to be (my desktop runs it fine).

New Big-Ass Monitor – I sort of went a little bit wild with my ‘coming-home-spending’ this time and in addition to the laptop went and bought myself a rather tasty 22″ Flatscreen from Belinea. Simply put, it’s the balls. And, it’s perfectly positioned to let me watch movies easily from my bed, and probably even manage to play Eve in bed (* UNTESTED) – the possibilities are endless!

Oh! It also clears up my deskspace a little bit (leaving me with more space for random crap).

Monkey: Journey to the West

[WIKIPEDIA]I went to see this last week when it was on at the Palace Theatre as part of the Manchester International Festival. To be fair, when I went in to seeing it, I really didn’t know much more about it than Damon Albarn was involved with it and that the artwork looked cool – probably not the usual yardstick avid theatre-goers would use, but then I’m hardly an avid theatre-goer… Still, it seems it paid off. It was a lot stranger than I had imagined it would be (in a good way) and the stunts being performed were super impressive. I simply couldn’t do it justice by trying to describe it more than that, but would truly recommend anyone to go and see it if it’s on near you. Highly entertaining.

LUGRadio Live 2007

Something I wanted to go to last year but didn’t manage it, I made it this year and had a blast. Full Write-up Here.

And that’s pretty much it really. Besides that there’s been quite a lot of Eve playing, a fair amount of alcohol, and tonight is cheese and ale night, the somewhat ritualistic gathering of a few friends to… well… eat cheese and drink ale. Oh yes.

Nearly time for boarding the first of two flights that should (hopefully) allow me to land back in Manchester at just after 09:00 in the morning so I’m doing what any sane person with a wireless capable device would do and spending my last few minutes internet-whoring. I mentioned it in an old post along time ago, but the free and open wireless services Cairo airport provides is superb. Why more airports don’t adopt such a system is beyond me – all it takes is corporate sponsorship of the setup (read: the odd banner about the place letting you know who makes the service ‘possible’) and your away. Seeing as other airports already have this ‘other company’ tie in in the form of ‘Pay As You Surf’ providers this isn’t such a drastic change, except the role reversal is that everyone has the opportunity to have a greater guest experience within the airport. I know for me, the fact that I can sit and surf increases the likelihood that I’ll go buy a coffee and maybe some snacks, something I simply don’t do if I can’t surf (in those situations I just sit quietly in a corner listening to music and reading – probably more productive, but not as much of an earner for the airport services).
However, it seems to be a huge sticking point in the UK in general, the availability of open wireless points, and it still baffles me as to why. The extra benefits open to places offering free and open wireless connectivity seem to far outweigh any negative issues created by the hassle of setting it up / paying the bills.

But I’ll stop there before this turns into another full and pointless rant. If anyone has reasons why free wireless shouldn’t exist in all airports (and maybe even other transport stations as well) then let me know, because I can’t seem to find any valid ones.

I’m pretty excited about getting home this time, probably more so than on previous visits. Not exactly sure why specifically – got a few things lined up which probably form part of the excitement – but the flip side is that I also felt a little bit ‘bad’ leaving Egypt this time, something I never really got before. And, similarly, I have no idea why.
Don’t misunderstand, it’s not as if it was emotionally difficult (I didn’t quite break down into tears…!) but it just felt like I was really leaving another place I’m attached to, whereas on all previous trips my main thought was along the lines of… w00t! Good beer!
Maybe part of the reason is that, if all goes according to ‘plan’ then this will be the last time I’ll be leaving Egypt to go ‘on holiday’, as next time will be when I’m planning to return back to normality and the grind of ‘real life’… Maybe.

Looking forward to getting home and opening and playing with all the little gadgets I’ve managed to spend most of my wages on already, especially getting the T41 up and running – think I’m going to go all out and leave it untainted by the smell of Windows and just stick a linux distro on it – probably Kubuntu 7.04 as I want to see how it performs on i386 (my experiments with it on PPC were good, but could have been better). Hopefully most of the components will be as the internet reviews suggested and will work out of the box. Main thing I can see needing to get working properly is the Graphics card, at which point I can fairly comfortably give Beryl a try, as well as seeing if I can get Wine to play with Eve Online and maybe even an older copy of Championship Manager… glory days.

Anyway, boarding should have begun for my flight, so I’d best go try and catch it.

Sorry for this falling into the oh-so-stereotypical Blogosphere ‘This Is My Life’ type post, but that’s the kind of blog this is… so deal with it.

LUGRadio Live in a week, Eve-Online tomorrow… oh yes.

Well, not quite, but back to Wordpress at least.

I played with Serendipity for a good while and, whilst it is pleasant, it just doesn’t do as simple a job of blogging as I find Wordpress to do. So I thought I’d come back to what I know. It’s nice.

Still need to theme it and link it into the other pages yet, but that’ll be sorted soon.. honest.

Back in Egypt, in Cairo at the moment. Probably here for a week or so, trying to get the RSE Website in order a long with a few other bits and pieces. Don’t know where I’m going to actually get to do this yet though, as the internet here and in the neighbouring spots doesn’t seem to quite be working right. Also means I’m going to have to use OS X for a lot of it, especially the testing, as I still can’t get a workable Flash Player for PPC Linux that would let me test the YouTube Integration and other cool things we’ve got planned. Shame really.

The flight back was good with no real holdups or issues. Arrival in Cairo though soon told me that for some reason my Egyptian SIM Card is unable to make calls or send SMS Messages, so I need to try and get that sorted out later on. Also, I’m pretty sure the taxi driver robbed me blind on the fare, not as bad as I’ve been done before, but bad. Still, it was late and I was tired so I can’t be 100% sure of my accuracy there.

The one massive downside to my travelling yesterday was my shock and horror while I was reading.
For the last few days I have been reading Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia by Joesph D. Pistone – yes, it’s the true story that the film starring Johnny Depp is based on.

It’s a fascinating read, filling in a whole number of gaps the film could simply never manage to incorporate. I got through it at a rapid pace and then, suddenly, in Milan I hit a snag.

Two sentences didn’t quite match up going from page to page. I sat, staring, trying to work out what I’d missed when it hit me. Page 97. The page I had just read was Page 272. It had jumped back in time.

But, I thought, no big deal, it can’t be more than a page or two, just a simple printing process slip up, right?

Wrong.

What I have instead is 47 pages of stuff that I’ve read before, and it doesn’t simply continue at Page 273 after this weird interruption, instead it actually manages to omit the following 47 pages (273-320) and continue again mid-sentence.

Now, I probably could have carried on reading from there and filled in the gaps on my own, but I didn’t want to do that. Luckily for me, I had made an impulse by at Heathrow of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins which I’ve heard a lot about and thought it was worth a try. At first glance it seems pretty interesting, although it is set to be more difficult to understand than Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time judging by the first couple of chapters. But that’s not always a bad thing. I still miss finding out more about the Donnie Brasco story though – I am going to email the publishers (Hodder) later and see if I have any chance of a replacement at some point in time. But given that I’m not going to be back until probably at least June, even with a positive result it could be a while until I manage to finish reading it. Still, I’d recommend it, just double check all the pages are there and in the right order before handing over the cash!

Given a few difficulties that I’ve managed to stumble across in the whole process of trying to self-host my blog, I have decided to abandon hosting the actual blog on my home server for now (mainly because the connection can sometimes go down for quite a while when I’m not around) and have instead finally bought a slightly better package from 1&1 to host the blog on here for now.

In the process, I decided to try yet another different blogging system, and in the course of looking found this one I’m writing on now – Serendipity. At first glance it actually looks ideal as a blogging platform, with lots of usable plugins and easy to configure. This, combined with the ‘Embedded?’ option which shows pure content if you were running it inside a larger CMS – I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds exciting… if you’re a sad fuck.

The downside to doing all this, besides not being able to host the thing myself, is that it looks like importing databases into the 1&1 interface is going to be awkward, so until I can get easy access to my server again (which, judging by London, means when I’m not in the house) I’m going to struggle to move the old Wordpress blog across in an easy way. What will probably end up happening is I’ll just place a permanent link to the ‘Old Blog’ if I can’t find a workable solution before I go back to Egypt.

WARNING: In the current absence of my own working gallery, and a few things that have occurred, this features quite a few pictures. Sorry if they take a while.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything, and a fair few things have gone on that are worth writing about, so here goes. As to what the inspiration to write this is, the main reason is the simple fact that I’m on a train to London, anticipating much frolicking, and want to fill the time.

I have a feeling this could get quite lengthy, so here’s a quick summary of the main sections (in the order they will appear) so just head down to the appropriate heading if that’s what interests you:

• Diving
• Gadgets & Electronics
• Travel (Slovakia)
• Random Thoughts that aren’t worth the time of day

Diving

• Wastwater

  Last weekend (10th-11th) and the early part of the week saw me getting a good amount of diving in everyday, all of which was pleasure diving in every sense of the word, which was nice.

  On Sunday, myself, Rory, Jonathan Alder, and Sarah went down to Capernwray and got a couple of easy dives in practising some skills but generally just having a bimble. Most of those folks, for various reasons, hadn’t dived in a while and it was nice to get back in and dive with them all. The weather was nice (if cold) and I for one had a very fun day.

  On Monday, Jon, Sarah, my sister and I headed up to Wastwater for a couple of dives there, seeing as the weather was nice and Capernwray was closed. Actually, to say the weather was nice is a huge understatement. It was beautiful, as some of the attached pictures hopefully show. Myself and Jon did 2 dives, the first one in which Sarah came along whilst my sister was surface support, then they swapped roles for the second one.

  Being the only people there, and given the lack of rain, the water visibility was really good for Wastwater and made for two really enjoyable dives. I took a few photos, which eventually will be up in the gallery along with some of Jon’s.

  Tuesday just saw Jon and I get a couple of extra dives in Capernwray before he headed off back south. The weather every day was immense, cracking the flags yet still cold. Really nice.

  End of the Lake Shot When We Arrived.

  

  Sun Rising Over the Far Hill

  

  Me Taking Some Photos of the Gnome near the Pinnacles

  

  Pretending to Be Artistic

  

  Blatant Advertising

  

Gadgets & Electronics

• New Phone

  I’ve gone and got myself a new phone – a Motorola Razr V3i (not sure of the exact version number, but pretty sure it is a V3 – pictures below). I’ve wanted one of these things for a good while, as, basically, I always thought they looked the balls.

  Getting hold of one and actually playing with it helped strengthen this in my mind. Whilst I had to get used to the differences in button location between this and the Nokia, along with how the menus work, I’m pretty sure I’ve got comfortable with it now after a couple of days and certainly believe Motorola have come up with a much better user interface than the Nokia one. It’s intuitive, heavily customisable, and does things as it’s supposed to. Like using any new interface, it took me a while to get to grips with the different naming and terms used for odd functions, but by and large it works a breeze. I haven’t yet tried to Bluetooth or USB it to my Ubuntu installs, but if what I’ve read is correct, that shouldn’t be too difficult to sort out and get working.

  The camera, whilst I’ve not really used it, seems to be pretty decent (which, compared to the old, old Nokia I was using before, wouldn’t be difficult). Hopefully I’ll get chance to use it a little over the next few days, but at the end of the day I’m rarely going to use it except on nights out when I don’t have the digital with me. It also features a video, which gives me something else to waste time on. But, most importantly considering it’s a phone, it seems to have pretty decent noise-filtering and a solid mic on it so people can actually hear what you’re trying to say to them in a busy environment. Again, I haven’t been in a situation to really test this properly, but no doubt London will provide that opportunity.

  Overall, I’d have to say first impressions are a lot more impressive than I’d expected it to be, so well done Motorola, looks like I found a new mobile brand of choice for a while, seeing as I was getting tired of Nokia.

  

  

• Eve Online

  This last week saw T Dave head out as part of a small group of TGRADS under the leadership of Mark Weston in ‘Operation Teacake’ into the 0.0 systems of Geminate space for a prolonged 0.0 ratting session. The journey out was good and smooth, with some nice screengrabs I need to post. Once there, we headed out into the belts and went our separate ways. An hour in, TD gets ambushed and podded by members of The Arrow Project who are apparently trying to claim that region and clearly operate a NBSI policy. Fair play I guess, I should have watched local closer.

  So TD cloned back deep into empire and missioned for a day or so before getting the opportunity to jump back out (with the help of Mark) in to the region, where I’ve successfully managed to go ratting again over the last couple of days, personally favourite moment being my solo take-down of a 900k BS in my trusty Caracal. Considering I haven’t ever really flown the Caracal before, I’ve been impressed with what it can achieve on a cheap setup, but I can’t wait until I manage to bring my Dominix or similar out here to take on some of the bigger spawns. Had one or two close shaves with Pirates entering the systems, but largely it’s been pretty safe. It certainly is nice to be part of a larger organisation such as TGRADS and IVY.

• Borked Server

  I’ve somehow managed to break my home server’s ports access. The Apache server still runs, as I can access the webpages using http://localhost from the server itself, but external access to it seems to be borked, ever since I tried to install a Wildfire Jabber server on there. I’ve posted help thread to the Ubuntu Forums, but my thinking is I might well have to backup and go for a reinstall of the entire server to see if that solves it. That could take time, but I need to have it fixed before I go back to Egypt. I backed up the databases last night, all the filesystem comes when I get back from the Big Smoke. Not looking forward to seeing if my backups were correct…

  In the meantime, I guess I’ll have to do things in reverse and post this to Blogger and / or Facebook and transfer things when I get everything back online.

Travel (Slovakia)

I figured for this segment I would follow a similar line of though to my London posting of previous times, albeit with additions / subtractions from the original layout. See where we get to.

• Location

  Stunning scenery, particularly after the snow had come down. Very ‘local’ but nice. The house and accommodation is great, always nice and warm and with everything you could need for the week. Sledges were a welcome addition to the fun once the snow started to fall. Whilst there wasn’t any snow the night we arrived, by the next morning there was a good amount down and it continued to fall. We frolicked and walked around it was childish and… FUN. A lot of fun. Which is why I’m excited to now be heading south where the snow is falling!

• Skiing

  I hadn’t been skiing since the Second Year. That’s nearly 10 years ago. As such I wasn’t up for anything too adventurous anyway. Mike was in the same position as me, George had skiied about 5 years ago, I believe. Everyone else was new. So the first day, as the snow was all powder anyway, we didn’t even try to ski. We just played. Second day we went down to the local nursery slopes and the like to try and remember how to do it. I was amazed at how quick the basics come back. Then it was time for some impromptu teaching of the others, George taking the lead as the most experienced. Hopefully everyone had fun, because I know I did. Later on in the day things started to get a bit icy, which didn’t look good for the next day when we went up to the main resort in the area, which had some nice fun runs, although all quite short. I have a feeling there was at least one longer run but not enough snow had fallen to open it, but I could be wrong.

  Even so, as it was, the runs available were quite icy and hard work until I got used to working out where the icy patches were. After that it was easier, but not too easy. Still, it was fun

  As seems to be the pattern in the country, things at the ski resort were still pretty damn cheap.

• Transport

  Flights to Poland were easy, and the transfer to the house was good, although we didn’t know where it was. Still, we got there and it was entertaining. The journey back to the airport seemed rapid by comparison, but then it was light. It will be nice when the local airport accepts more flights though.

• Food

  Cheap, simple, solid, hearty. Pretty much as expected. With the exception of whatever Jo ordered being a tad strange by the time it arrived, everything I had was tasty and filled a gap. Salad is obviously not so important.

• Alcohol

  As with the food, dirt cheap. The St.Nicholas vodka was worth the extra pennies, although the vodka in general is quite harsh, certainly not smooth, and more like Absolut and some of the Swedish / Scandinavian stuff if comparing it to what I’ve tried before. As for beer, well, I had a slight revelation whilst there that I think deserves it’s own post. Fair to say, I thought that while Zlaty was okay, it wasn’t a proper beer-substitute Sorry, John. can’t argue with the price though.

  As it ties in – drinking games. I never played the ‘Who Am I’ game before, but it’s become a firm favourite. The rules are simple, the possibilities endless. Sorry again to Jo for giving you Hosni Mubarrak, that was tough, but if you hadn’t dropped and looked at John Cleese you would have been fine. And still, I had to guess Pee Wee Herman… Still remember Ewan McGregor….

• Music

  Not really applicable, seeing as it was just what we had on my laptop or folk’s digital music players. One piece of music of note is the weird, apparently Slovakian version of Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Bang Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’ on the first morning. Alternative

• Overall

  Brilliant holiday, many thanks to Mike for organizing. Could have been longer, but it was nice to get a taste for the place. Nice group of people to spend the week with, good to see George again after way too long. It sucked to be a bit under the weather the first couple of days, but compared to others I think I got off lightly. All in all, a lot of fun. Can’t wait for the next one.

• Photos

  

  

  

  Random Thoughts

  Word of Warning: This is just a collection of thoughts and is likely to contain items that may cause offence / revulsion / indifference. Read on as you like.

  • John O’Gaunt

    The pub, not the man. I’ve just been in there for a few pre-train pints and wanted to mention just how much I like the place. It has atmosphere… and balls. I didn’t have time to get anything to eat, but the food looked and smelled good, the beer is brilliant and has a few constantly changing pumps; and the general atmosphere is just plain nice.

  • Train Toilets

    Having just visited the train toilet (a news item I’m sure you longed to hear) it struck me whilst looking down into it just how fucking small the output is. Judging by the heavy loads I’ve been dropping down this week, I really doubt I would dare to drop a turd down one of these things. All I’ll say is I’ve blocked bigger toilets before.

  • UK and Weather

    We’re really not very good at it are we?

Good title, huh? Sometimes I even amaze myself…
Anyway, point is the title is fairly apt for the content – I should have written and posted at least parts of this a fair while ago, but for various reasons never did. So settle down and grab yourself a brew, this could get quite lengthy (if it helps, I’ll include some pictures on the way to wake you back up. Flashing lights and all.

Home

• Desk Space
  It occurred to me over New Year that my desk is simply too small for what I want it to do. I took a couple of pictures to prove my point, which will hopefully appear here:
  
  As you can see, even with the chair moved out of the way, the desk space is severely limited, especially when the laptop is out, making simple tasks such as mouse management or keyboard control a bit of a pain in the arse as I find myself with my arms at weird angles or without really being able to have any support or rest to lean on – RSI here I come! Not fun.
  Most probably, getting myself a flat screen would help create a bit more space, but that’s gonna be a while off yet as I’d rather wait until I have enough cash to get a big-ass wide flat-screen, mainly because it has more ‘geek penis extension’ power than two normal sized flat screens running as dual-monitors. So, in the meantime, and for general use anyway, I reckon a large desk is the way to go. Of course, with not being here, it doesn’t make too much sense worrying about it now, but it was one thing that occurred to me.
  On the plus side, I recently brightened up my old 15″ CRT Monitor with the addition of some of my – even older – Corinthian All Stars. For those unaware, these are the little charicature-style football players that were around a few years back. I amassed quite a collection and as I was looking through them the other day I decided to pull a few out and line them up along the top of my monitor. I quite like it and may bring more out in the next few days. For now though, here’s what I have:
  
• Drunken Purchase
  I was in Newcastle for a night last week with Mike. Obviously, that night we went out for a few beverages before going back to his.
  Mike’s house has wireless internet access. I was wasted. I had my laptop with me. Between the three of them, they made a bad combination, primarily as I woke up the next morning (ok, afternoon) to see in my inbox that I had confirmation that I was the ‘highest bidder’ on a picture… Not good.
  Fortunately, I had bid on an item that I’d been looking at when it had been posted previously, so at least it was on something that I liked, and it wasn’t too expensive, although it was money I could have spent elsewhere. Here’s what it looks like, seeing as it has since arrived (yes, I ‘won’ the auction) and is hung on the wall:
  
  Now, whether you like it or not, the saddest part of its erection (easy there, it’s not a penis reference) is that with it going up, Paul Ince had to come down. I am currently working out a suitable new location for the Guvn’r, who was understandably upset to lose a position he has held for at least 10 years. Don’t worry though, he still features in the team’s plans.
• Weather
  The weather at the minute is, in a word, bollocks. The last couple of days had some nice moments which, due to various prior engagements I didn’t manage to make the most of, but today and last night had horrible weather – lots of wind, near horizontal rain: FUN!

Computers

• Reconfiguring Smoothwall
  One of the tasks I set myself whilst I wasn’t getting any sleep was that of reconfiguring my Smoothwall setup on moenia at home. moenia, as the name suggests, is the firewall box on the home network, also at the minute doubling as the DHCP and DNS server, and a general gateway to the outside world.
  Previously, through lack of a spare network card and time / energy / desire to do it, the [real:ppl] Server has sat behind the firewall on my local network (Green Zone) with the routing simply punched through to it for the required ports through moenia. After researching things a bit more I figured it was time for a change and time to try and secure it a bit more by trying my hand at setting up a DMZ (Orange Network in Smoothwall) for the web server.
  In all honesty I was surprised at how easy it was, although it took a couple of re-reads of the manual and the similar forum posts before I realized quite how I needed to setup the DNS servers on the Server itself to gain it external access. The nice thing now though is that it’s back up and running (as you can see…) and I can actually access it using the external address, which saves a lot of the problems I used to have.
  My only remaining problem is working out the location (physical and virtual) of the local network server (onerus) which I haven’t decided upon yet, so currently that has to stay offline.
• SATA Blues
  Finally decided to install the new 200Gb Hard Drive that I bought a few months back, mainly because it was cheap, into my main Desktop machine, to give me a bit more space mainly for music and videos as a backup. Problem is, it’s an SATA drive, and my primary one is ATA. Not really being at the forefront of knowing what the compatability would be like and the ease of setup, I just whacked it in and hoped for the best, attaching it to the first SATA connection. Turns out it wouldn’t detect in either WinXp or Ubuntu. So looks like I need to go back to moving that around a bit more and seeing if I can get it working – or I have to leave it until I next build a new PC which is a bit of a bitch…
• New Website
  Having fixed the gateway / network issues I’ve started to work towards a slight change in the blog by running with a Drupal CMS as the basis to help me tie everything in a little bit nicer. In the meantime though the blog will stay in the same place, and I’ll just double-post everything whilst I transfer the older posts into Drupal.
  The main reason I chose Drupal over Joomla which I was trying previously is that from what I’ve looked at Drupal seems to cater more comfortably to the small, primarily Blog-driven approach that I want to go for with the site, along with fairly easy integration of Gallery2, or a fairly usable Drupal Gallery if all else fails.
  It is fairly different in its setup as a CMS when compared to Joomla, but it seems fairly useful and easy to get to grips with, so far anyway. Tonight’s task is reinstalling the Gallery and trying to get that setup properly. Soon see how that works out though.
• EvE Online
  This stretch of time at home has seen me play a good amount of Eve Online and actually manage to spend enough time to get some really solid playing done and get my characters to a fairly comfortable level in terms of setting them up for new stuff.
  No doubt many people will wonder what the hell Eve’s all about and the simple truth is if you haven’t tried it I doubt you can appreciate it. To try and explain what it is is difficult, but once you get playing it becomes extremely immersive and addictive and keeps you coming back to it. Lot of fun.
• Return of th’Ubuntu?
  The last few weeks I’ve been running Debian Etch as my OS of choice on the PowerBook, after going through some difficulties with updates, reinstalls, then re-updates of Kubuntu trying to move from 6.06 to 6.10, the main difficultie being that for some reason 6.10 seemed to struggle with remembering Gamma settings on the monitor, reason unknown. Basically if I went through the display settings when I logged in and tweaked the settings in any minor way, then hit apply, the monitor would go back to showing the actual colours on the pictures, desktop, fonts etc, rather than being all pixely and, well, wrong.
  So I tried plain Debian. And I have to say I have been very impressed. The updates are daily and work without a charm and everything seems to just work pretty damn well. All that is except the keyboard which, although it types quite well (I’m typing this in it now) it randomly ‘jumps’ to another point in the document / sentence / paragraph apparently at random and with no consistency. This can prove to be very frustrating, and confusing as I never had this issue in any other Distro I’ve used (even going back to Ubuntu 5.04 or YellowDog Linux 3.0). I mean, it’s manageable, but when writing longer pieces like this it gets frustrating having to undo things every time it does it and going back to finding my spot as well as occasionally making instant messaging posts illegible. So it’s basically something I don’t want to have to manage.
  Of course, I could just go back to using Mac OS X, but I really don’t enjoy it as much.
  So I’m thinking of going back. Sat in the CD Drive right now is the freshly burned Ubuntu (no KDE) 6.10 (the Edgy Eft) CD, ready to go if I feel like doing the deed. Problem is, I’m not sure if I really want to or not. Part of me wants to just go abck to using KDE still, which means I will have to use 6.06 and take the not-quite-cutting-edge packages for a while until maybe I try Debian again, or the next release of Ubuntu works properly. Of course, I may end up trying 6.10 with the Gnome desktop environment and find the exact same issues, although my little bit of playing when it last happened suggested it was a KDE error – why, I have no idea.
  I also think it would be quite good to get back to using Gnome again. After all, my main reason for using KDE in the first place – the tighter integration with the Amarok music player – is not so much a big deal since the development of Exaile provides all the same functionality designed for the Gnome desktop. More than anything else I think it’s fairly healthy to swap about every now and then, particularly at my low level of knowledge, to try and get a grip on how the different part works, and where they’re similar. I will miss some of the cool Konqueror features though. But we’ll see, I’ll have to write a decent write up when / if I make the change.
• New Laptop?
  Yes, I’m toying with getting myself another laptop, namely an IBM, either a T40, T41, or T42, to have as a more durable option than my PowerBook. Because, despite the PowerBook being a beautiful machine, and one that has served well and taken a fair amount of stick over the last two and a bit years that I’ve owned it, it has taken some knocks a little too easily, the biggest one being the ease with which the power port knocked out of shape, rendering it useless and therefore unchargeable. There’s also the obvious extra troubles with trying to get the Apple Hardware working as smoothly as it’s x86 equivalents under Linux that are a factor, as I’m using Linux more and more it would really be able to have a computer where those ‘little annoyances’ are ironed out. Probably if I manage to get myself the IBM I’ll revert the PowerBook back to pure OS X status, just to keep it ‘looking cool’…
  As to where I’m going to get it from, well, main port of call is eBay. Seeing as I’m after the new machine to be a durable workhorse, I’m not after getting anything new (in which case I’d have to get it through Lenovo now, and the T4x series have, I believe, been discontinued) and shiny, just something that’s hard-wearing and powerful enough for my needs which, looking at the spec I’m probably looking at a 1.5GHz CPU, onboard Intel Wireless Chipset (because it works easily in Linux) and about 512Mb RAM (which is easily upgradable). The biggest drawback is that all the T4x’s seemed to ship with 40Gb hard drives, which I’d have to upgrade so I don’t have to rely on my external drives as much. Having the laptop delivered with XP installed would also be alright, as I could at least then have an Eve Client tucked away inside that and then shrink it down as small as possible… Biggest problem is price, as I’m loathe to spend more than £250 on it. Back to eBay then…

Diving

• North West Emergency Recompression Unit, Murrayfield
  Sunday just gone saw me travel down to the North West Emergency Recompression Unit which is based at the BUPA Murrayfield hospital on the Wirral – but is in itself a NHS facility. I was there as a last minute addition to a trip organized and run by Adam Hanlon and Capernwray Diving & Leisure. Basically the chamber there runs ‘day trips’ whereby groups can go down, sit through an interesting (from a dive perspective) lecture, followed by a ‘Dry Dive’ in the Chamber to a depth of 50m, breathing air.
  Obviously, it would be wrong for me to detail what was mentioned in the lecture, as it would potentially ruin any unexpected statements and comments mentioned, but it was well presented, with charisma, although I don’t know if I quite buy all the lines fed. Was certainly interesting though.
  As for the ‘Dry Dive’, that is a definite must for anyone who still believes narcosis is a myth – or worse, that they can ‘handle’ it – and for anyone who just fancies a good laugh. Some very funny moments for both sides.
  So, apologies that isn’t more detailed, but an excellent day out, and thanks to Adam for organising it all, and for ‘changing the route’ so we would get to see the Sub…
• Drysuit Since I was going down to the Wirral anyway, it proved a perfect time for me to run my drysuit down to Protec in Wallasey. Really, I should have taken this down ages ago, but it’s a bit of a roundabout route if I’m not going anywhere remotely close… Still, at least it’s there now so I would imagine it’ll be done and ready by the time I get back from Slovakia so if I’m still not working, I can at least try and get a good amount of diving in! As far as what the suit needs (because I know you’re dying to find out), it’s basically in for a zip replacement, as the old zip had started to wear and leak mildly in places, and for seal replacements whilst it’s there. Which is reasonable enough. Most probably I will be leaving this suit home when I next go back out to Egypt as I have the Diving Concepts suit already on the boat, and it’ll be nice to not have to cart the damn drysuit bag with me everytime I head home . Obvious downside is that I won’t have my drygloves out in Egypt now, at least not without buying another pair…
• Diving in General
  Haven’t done enough of it (2 Dives since back).
  Simply not good enough. Must try harder.

Self

• Not in the Eyes
  I’ve realised in the past few days a major factor I’m lacking in general conversation: I find it difficult to hold a look at other people’s eyes during conversation, even on a topic I’m comfortable with. It seems to happen less with mates and people I know particularly well, but with strangers, and certainly strangers who are a few years older than me, I’ve become extremely aware of it.
  And it bothers me. Because I shouldn’t be like that. There’s no reason for it. No justification. I guess it comes down to nerves or some form of insecurity that I’m unaware of. But it’s annoying. So, please, don’t be alarmed if I appear to be looking extremely intent when I’m next talking to you, it’s more than likely I’m simply trying to concentrate on holding your eye contact (not lens) and to that end I may miss some parts of conversation. My bad.
• No Sleep ’til Belfast
  The last few weeks my sleep pattern has been, at best, nocturnal. But, I reckon it’s fair to say that the last few days shifted it into the realms of ‘fucked up’.
  Basically, with having no work to do and generally finding myself more active later on at night, I shifted from going to bed at ‘conventional’ times to going to bed in the early hours of the morning and using the rest of the night time to mess with computers, read, and generally be awake. The last few days though knocked all this by things turning up to do in the mornings, leaving me largely without sleep for more than a day. Maybe not a big deal in itself, but with things to do it means I’m now on my third such day this week, leaving very little recuperation time in between. I think I may well go sleep for a little while after I finish writing this. Not yet sure quite how long such a system will continue for… time will tell!
• Political Compass
  So, I retook the Political Compass Test again today, the first time I’ve taken it in a few years. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what my ’score’ was last time, but I know it was fairly firmly in the Libetarian Left section of the graph, and things haven’t really changed that much in that time.
  The Compass itself is quite an interesting idea as it attempts to dispell these theories of ’simple left and right’ by plotting on two axies. I can’t really explain it too well, and won’t try to, have a look at the site and the explanation is a lot clearer.
  It also features a rough plot as to where various world leaders and figures would lie on the graph, according to answering the questions by what they did / said publicly (I don’t think Gandhi actually took the test…). Back in the good old days I’m sure it used to plot your result on the graph along with the world figures, but now it seems you have to make that mental leap yourself. Times are hard, clearly.
  Anyway, as for how I did, well I scored an Economic Left / Right of -7.25 and a Social Libetarian / Authoritarian of -6.87 which fairly well buries me in the bottom left portion of the graph. It’s actually a tad lower-left than I had expected, but quite interesting to find out. See how you do. Enjoy.

And that’s it! That’s all I had to say. Apologies for my length…