| Django |
[12 Jul 2009|12:10pm] |
I woke up a bit earlier than expected this morning so I ran through the Django tutorial, which I've been meaning to do for some time.
( Framework geeking )
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| I believe that covers everything. |
[05 Jul 2009|09:28pm] |
It is far too hot at the moment. How very British of me to be complaining about this after months of rain and dinginess.
On Thursday I went out to the pub with colleagues after work, and ended up staying there for three hours or so -- I think that's some kind of record for me. My old project manager was there, it was good to catch up.
On Friday I worked from home with my lovely fan nearby.
On Saturday I went down to Bath to meet up with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) reaperfox, whose birthday it was, lazenich, ugerchucker, Blue from the MCM Expo, and yet another Sarah. We went to Pizza Hut, one thing lead to another, and I ended up covered in Coke. It dried off quickly. After that, we walked around Bath for a bit, and I ended up buying a Nintendo DS from a second-hand game shop, along with Sonic Rush. In fact I bought two Sonics Rush, because I like being ripped off by Sega that much Luke wanted a copy too. It seems reasonable, if a little lacklustre to be considered in the style of the first three MegaDrive games. All in all it was a good day! Sel had received a camcorder for her birthday so I suspect there will be YouTube footage of us acting like dorks soon enough.
Today I made Mutant Boy, played some Red Alert, discovered my HDR had run out of disk space and not taped last week's episodes of The Wire, bought series 3 of The Wire from Amazon as a result, and won Mario Kart DS on eBay for £2.62.
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[25 Jun 2009|10:39pm] |
I slept through the night on Monday night for the first time since my GP appointment, but now I'm back to waking up throughout the night. The one benefit of having terribly bad sleep at the moment is that some of my dreams are particularly wacky, and I'm actually remembering them.
A while ago I dreamt that I was getting lost around London and eventually found my way to Gatwick airport (which was laid out more like a hotel lobby), which was good because there was an underground mining railway line from there to Heathrow airport. I took a hand-car and set off down the tunnel, following a girl that in dreamland was apparently the Mario cosplayer I met at the London Expo. Eventually the track ran out and the girl wandered off, and I was at Heathrow. This was good because I was meeting Luke and co for dinner at a restaurant there. I went to said restaurant and had dinner.
A few nights later I dreamt that I was in the final five candidates of The Apprentice, and back in the penthouse we were all so tired that we fell asleep on the sofa. Yasmina slipped down from lying on top of the sofa to next to where I was, unintentionally little-spooning herself with me. Upon realising this, she got up and moved to another sofa to snooze. Rejected!
Last night I dreamt I was in some professional group helping out at some school's drama lesson - we were in a hall that looked like the assembley hall of my old secondary school. I was sent over to help out one group of students, where, for some reason, Yasmina was also helping out. (We didn't know each other from the previous dream.) Later, we were walking along a path somewhere, getting on well, and Yasmina leant over and kissed me. Later that night it appeared we were trying to get into bed together but for some reason had a third person accompanying us at that time, who we needed to set up bedding for on the floor, and was taking a long time to do so. I remember telling them they couldn't set up the mattress by the door because I'd need to get past part-way through the night when I woke up and needed to go to the loo (this is pretty much standard practice for me in real life at the moment, and yes, I've tried not drinking anything before going to bed!). I don't remember much after that.
So, in summary (anyone good at interpreting dreams want to have a better go?)
- I fancy Yasmina from this year's series of The Apprentice (well, I knew that anyway!)
- I'm even tired in my dreams, goddamit.
- I have no idea what was with the hand-cars.
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[21 Jun 2009|11:40pm] |
I've had a surprisingly productive weekend this weekend, which has made a nice change! Vacuumed the living room, cleaned the kitchen, made pizza bases from scratch, and got all my shopping done! I think that's mostly thanks to getting a couple of nearly-full nights' sleep at the end of the week, waking up less than half an hour before my alarms were set -- hopefully I won't jinx that by putting it here (Edit: fsfdksjgklfs). I've been trying not to worry about it too much as the GP advised -- I haven't counted the days since that appointment, for instance -- so hopefully that's starting to pay off. I'm only realising now how much it's hindered me doing stuff at the weekends though, in comparison to this weekend.
I'm still battling the plumbers to actually come back and finish fixing my shower, so daily baths have taken their place at the moment, and I've worked them into my morning schedule. I still can't run one at the right temperature, but I'm getting the hang of it! It's actually rather nice to have a bath in the morning, and aside from waiting for it to run (during which I eat breakfast) it doesn't take any longer than a shower.
I finished reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy last week and have moved onto The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The film is my main reference for the HHGG series, so it's a little strange reading lines from Zaphod that I can't imagine the dimwitted character in the film saying, and likewise lines that were obviously suited better to the 80's TV series' actor than Mos Def. Reading the entire book in Stephen Fry's voice was most enjoyable.
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| 90s |
[15 Jun 2009|10:25pm] |
This week I have inadvertently propelled myself back in time to the late 1990s, as I'm reading The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy for the first time since I was half my current age (which is pretty scary) and playing my way through the Allied mission of the first (and only good) C&C: Red Alert.
RA runs a little crashily in Wine but with the exception of the last mission I've played (Allied 7) not enough to hinder gameplay too much (In Allied mission 7 I rather had to save a lot as the game froze up often. Sometimes starting another app from a screen session on my Mac jump-started it back to life, occasionally it didn't).
I used Homebase's free kitchen planning service in store on Sunday, but the price of parts plus labour currently comes to more than I have in my savings account (and was about double what I was expecting), so I shall have to wait a bit longer before getting my (as the booklet calls it) Perfect Kitchen. Pity, the 2020 3D visualisation looked nice, and it totally had room for an oven, hobs and dishwasher. Maybe I'll try Wickes (although the expensive part was the labour so maybe I just need to save up for longer).
I forgot about Mutant Boy again last weekend. I must brainstorm strip ideas at some point so at least I have something to pad out into a comic each week.
This week at work I'm writing C++! I'm actually rather enjoying it; I must be doing something wrong. Play me off, Keyboard Cat
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| London MCM Expo |
[30 May 2009|12:20pm] |
So, last weekend I went to the London Movie Comic Media Expo. The Expo is gathering of geeks for practically anything you can see on a TV, computer or movie screen, and most things in print too. It's held at the ExCel Center in the Docklands, London. I'd arranged to meet lazenich, reaperfox and ugerchucker (or Luke, Sel and Sarah in that "real life" thing) for the weekend, and we also ran into another friend of mine, ciepher (Tori).
( More photos - Saturday )
( More photos - Sunday )
One of the nicest things about the Expo was that nobody was embarassed to be completely geeky, and everyone was really friendly too. I definately plan to go to the next one.
The whole set of my photos are here, and Sarah's are here. I shall prod Sel and Luke for their's when I next seem them online.
Edit: Sel's photos.
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[10 May 2009|09:59pm] |
Today I met up with the lovely ophe1ia_in_red in London. We went to the coffee bar at Snow and Rock first, which left me buzzing for the rest of the afternoon. For those who don't know, the coffee hidden in this outdoors shop in Covent Garden is award winning and also there are sofas.
After that we went through Covent Garden Market and had lunch outside at a sandwich place, before making out way to Trafalgar Square via Cyber Candy, where I picked up the two items below. We looked at the art piece on the forth column and the gigantic lions before heading over to southbank for a sit down and more chat.
 *
It was a gorgeous afternoon; especially considered it had been forecast to rain! Catching up with Natalie was great :)
Engineering works caused me to catch a train from Dartford to Charing Cross via Cannon Street, which was novel. On the way back, the rear four carriages were locked and I had to sprint to the start of the next block of coaches before the doors shut. Somewhere between CST and DFD we lost the rear half the train.
* For the Americans in the audience, Mountain Dew (or Slurm, for that matter, which judging from the ingredients appears to be a rebranded Red-Bull-a-like) isn't sold in the UK – a caffeineless one was around for about a year when I was at secondary school but I haven't tasted it since then.
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[04 May 2009|06:07pm] |
I walked a total of about 13-14 miles this weekend; on Saturday I went out to Dartford Heath again, where the glory bumps, rather than covered in snow like last time, were populated with teenagers on bikes (a rather good idea!)
I took several photos, I think the best ones are this one, , and this one (large) containing proof that the strange landscape bumps are in fact called glory holes. I ended up mostly following a mix of the green and red routes.
Or, if you prefer moving photos, here's a short video with me being a dork in it:
Yesterday I went over to my parents' place for din-dins; we had toad in the hole. Mum made a loaf of bread using the breadmaker that my brother and I got her for her last birthday and gave me half the loaf to take home with me. Mmm bread.
Today I walked over to Bluewater for the sake of getting some exercise (also I'd scoffed a 500cal bag of mini eggs and was feeling guilty about it), and that made up the last six miles of my walking for this weekend. While I was there, I grabbed some duck pâté (quack) to have with the bread.
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[29 Apr 2009|07:47pm] |
My new glasses arrived yesterday, and I picked them up from Dolland & Aitchison this afternoon. They had a 2-for-1 offer on at the time, and I'm still not sure which of the two pairs I bought look better on me!
( You decide! )
I've had quite a good day writing C++. I'm pretty sure that statement ought to be oxymoronic.
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| The Network Execubots are Coming! |
[11 Apr 2009|11:10am] |
Last night, for the second time, I just watched for the first time what will possibly be the last Futurama ever.
Into the Wild Green Yonder felt the most like a Futurama episode out of all the four films (and that's a good thing); it really seems the crew were getting back into it very well by that point, although the odd unnecessary reference to previous episodes narked me a bit.
I can't really comment much more about it without spoiling it for everyone but, like The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings, it was a very satisfactory ending to the series.
Now to hope Fox decide to bring it back again!
I think my order of preference at the moment is probably along the lines of: - The first half of Bender's Game,
- Into the Wild Green Yonder,
- The Beast With A Billion Backs,
- Bender's Big Score,
- The second half of Bender's Game.
Meanwhile, the new mini-arc of Red Dwarf is underway. As someone who stopped watching it after the third series disappointed, I can't say it's improved. There were long gaps between uninspired jokes and a plotline that seems poor, even for Red Dwarf. I'm not quite sure how Dave convinced the actors to get back together in the face of such a script, but they could have done with convincing a studio audience to watch it too – a laughter track might have at least helped bide the time between things happening.
Tonight is the Easter Doctor Who episode, starring Bubonic Bionic Woman, or "Michelle Ryan" if you want to use "real" "names", as Some Companion. I don't know if she'll be as easy to mock without AM I A LION? in it.
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[07 Apr 2009|11:38am] |
Over the last few days fuzzie and bz2 have been visiting. On Saturday and Sunday they were out all day visiting scary people in London, then yesterday we went around Dartford for a bit and then came home and played Mario Kart for most of the day.
On Saturday afternoon, some Olympic contructor managed to put a shovel through a 30metre-underground cable that turns out to be South East London's only connection to the outside world. As such, this is the first time I've had broadband connectivity for nearly four days. On Saturday and Sunday I had enough things to be getting on with to keep me from going mad, but on Monday I relented and paid Orange £1 for a day of GPRS Internet. Orange doesn't let me use IM though, so that was mostly useless.
Anyway, I'm on holiday from work this week, so I'm intending to relax for the rest of it, before my mum's birthday on Friday
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[04 Apr 2009|11:47am] |
I've been having some wacky dreams recently.
Last night I dreamt I literally moved my house (and I was living with my parents for some reason) five minutes closer to the train station so I didn't have so long a commute in the morning. We had to move the house back eventually because the council didn't like having a house on the village green.
AFTERWARDS (or before, whatever) I also dreamt that I was dating a couple of girls along a canal, we went to some science fair at the top of a grassy mountain, when I became Doctor Who and had to try to stop a crazy women from creating too many rivers down the hillside, lest places in the valley got flooded.
The night before I dreamt that I was having dinner with Obama and inadvertantly offended one of his aides while he was out the room (she claimed I was being racist). He decided his aide was overreacting when he got back, yay!
ALSO that night I dreamt I was whitewashing a railway tunnel/bridge in the snow with some unspecified friends after going out to dinner with them. We were painting the sides of a tunnel but it was also a bridge and there was snow on the tracks, go figure. I got an electric shock off the rail because I accidentally touched it while trying to cleverly hop over it. It was just a bad static shock, really, so I got on the the painting.
There we have it: my subconsciousness, ladies and gentlemen.
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[02 Apr 2009|08:57pm] |
After listening to the Revenge of the Sith score at work on Monday, I watched the film again that evening.
Then, finally, I watched the deleted scenes on the extras disk. It's probably the last time I'll ever watch any new live action Star Wars footage. This makes me sad.
I've been watching The Wire on BBC2, which has finally started showing the six-year-old first series. It's pretty good so far. I have learnt that drug addicts have dirty shoes, although I didn't quite pick up where the dirt comes from.
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[22 Mar 2009|11:58am] |
On Friday I met up with lazenich, reaperfox, ugerchucker, and some "Ben" person whose LJ I don't know. In the evening we watched Avenue Q, and on Saturday we went a-trawling London.
( Friday )
( Saturday )
( Japan )
( Dreams )
This afternoon I'm off to my parents' place for Mothers Day and a free meal!
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[08 Mar 2009|06:52pm] |
Zoidberg seems to be behaving itself now. I blanked on the disk with zeroes and reinstalled everything from scratch. fuzzie suspects I had overlapping partitions or something; I think it's unlikely I screwed up quite that much, but you never know.
At some point I need to put back in the bits and pieces I took out; notably the TV card and 1GB stick of RAM. I also need to reinstall nvidia's drivers.
I think from now on I shall be sticking to games available for OS X, Linux, and Wii. Perhaps TF2 will start working in Wine all magic-like, but I can't afford another week of pain and stress debugging hardware and reinstalling systems. I was going to try to install it on Leela's Windows install, but the graphics card is too old for it.
It's frustrating since TF2 presented an opportunity to talk to Luke, Sel and Sarah more frequently, but I suspect I shall just prod them to be on AIM or Skype more often.
I made a Thai green curry last night, which I shall eat some more of tonight! Aside from some trouble getting the ingredients (Sainsbury's in Dartford really seems to lack a lot of things that I have to pop into Waitrose for instead), it was quick to make, and tasted great (although I'd leave the garlic out next time). Using Thai Green Curry Paste still feels like cheating to me, but judging from the list on the jar's ingredients, saved me a decent amount of hassle.
Tomorrow, since I have the day off work, I shall be going to Bluewater to shop for clothes. I could do with someone there simply to forbid me from leaving without buying anything. I'm getting a little short, but I'm too picky. I may have to go into one of those "trendy" stores that play music inside...
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| Zoidy want go outside! Through the top floor window. |
[07 Mar 2009|12:39pm] |
For the past week-and-a-bit, I've been having trouble with my main desktop computer, Zoidberg. This Mutant Boy comic, drawn without the love of a vector graphics program as it's used to, sums up the problem.
Last Friday, after work, I tried to set Zoidberg up to dual-boot Linux and Windows so I could play Team Fortress 2 with lazenich, reaperfox and ugerchucker.
( Like a balloon and... something bad happens )
I should note that when I say "I", I actually mean "I, under fuzzie's advice and guidance," because I'm absolutely clueless about this sort of thing. Thankyou, fuzzie!
The next step (as far as I know) is to randomly start replacing components, which sounds like it could get expensive.
In the meantime, I'm using my MacBook as my main computer, plugged into my main monitor, keyboard and mouse. OS X is pretty, but I want ion3 back.
If Valve could release their games on Wii or OS X (or, hell, stranger things have happened, Linux), that'd be super.
At any rate, I have Monday off work and am planning to enjoy myself more than debugging computers!
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[26 Feb 2009|10:49pm] |
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Ruff. Backup made here.
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[21 Feb 2009|09:20pm] |
Today, worried that a sore throat this morning was indicative of me catching yet another cold from my lousy commute, I took a shorter walk than I'd planned and made a detour through Dartford's Central Park on the way to Sainsbury's to buy ingredients for a Thai curry.
Annoyingly, I couldn't find any Thai fish sauce anywhere, and we needs it. Does anyone know either what this stuff looks like, how to reproduce it (I have visions of wringing out a trout), or where I can get it from?
I have bought a LaCie 500GB USB hard drive for the purposes of backup. I don't know if I can use that with my Mac's Time Machine as well as backing up files the regular way (separate partitions would work, presumably), but the main purpose is for backing up Zoidberg after I proved that I can't be trusted with the delete command.
It also has the side effect that I can play around with partitioning for getting a Windows dual-boot up and running (there's something I never thought I'd be doing again) without being too paranoid about accidentally junking the filesystem.
In other news, my new Logitech G5 mouse arrived yesterday, which I'd bought as a replacement for the Microsoft Mouse I have at work whose button, just like all the other Microsoft mice I've had, has half-broken.
However, it's turned up and it looks very nifty and only a little bit like a slipper, and so I've decided to keep it at home and take the mouse I was using (the older G5 model) into work instead.
The great thing about the G5, which shouldn't be great at all but it IS, dammit, is the fact that it comes with a slot-in plastic holder and some weights that let you change how heavy the mouse is. That in itself is rather wacky, but when the cartridge is empty (which is always is because who bothers to weight a mouse?), pressing the eject button ejects it quite forcefully:
Is awesome.
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[18 Feb 2009|10:28pm] |
So, in an EXTRA SPECIAL move yesterday, I decided to delete some old files.
First set of files was in my home directory: a tarball of SuSE linux and the directory created by unpacking the archive. Naturally I decided to be clever and remove both the directory and the archive at the same time.
I meant to type this:
rm -r openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-i386*
I actually typed this:
rm -r openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-i386 *
rm asked me if I wanted to confirm the deletion of a write-protected file buried deep somewhere within one of the many subdirectories of my home directory. "Wh--" I started, and then realised my error above.
20:49 <Flexo> oooh boy, I very nearly did something very stupid
20:49 <Flexo> I possibly did.
20:51 <Flexo> apparently I have lost a GB worth of stuff
Now, I don't know what wacky undelete buttons you Windows users have (Undo Move To Recycling Bin notwithstanding), but on the Linux ext3 filesystem, the docs specifically say there's no way of undeleting files due to how wonderfully careful the filesystem is, or something like that. Filesystems boggle my little brain.
fuzzie, however, pointed me at a page where someone had decided to defy the authors around this time last year after doing something similar to me. Evidently they were a smart cookie because they actually managed to write an undelete utility providing certain conditions were met.
These are the necessary docs and a download button at the bottom of the page. After a couple of evenings work, I've managed to restore 407 out of 1323 I "needed" (although a lot of the missing stuff was cache files in .opera and .wine)
30% of files isn't great, but it also isn't 0%, so that's something.
Fortunately the file that caused rm to stop was pretty close to the beginning of the list it was working through. My home directory is considerably bigger than 1GB!
I mostly lost dotfiles in my home directory, but surprisingly my Opera settings and mail are intact, along with pretty much everything else I can think of right now, including (and this was a sigh of relief) my Nanowrimo novel.
Lesson learnt: I shouldn't be allowed near computers.
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