Quiet day in
Cold wet and miserable outside today, so I'm gonna have a nice quiet day in with Alison. Lycoris keeps locking up with a blank screen on my desktop PC, so given that I;ve had great success with Gentoo Linux on my laptop this week, I'm building it on my main desktop machine too. I'll probably set it up as a file server (and maybe even a web server) too, since there's a nice big 80Gb hard drive in there.

DVD and a curry takeaway later, snuggled up on the sofa - perfect!

Disaster in the house
Got home to find that a big chunk of the ceiling in the utility room at the back of the house had collapsed, due to water damage. This is due to the badly-fitted bathroom from Dolphin Bathrooms.

[Listening to: Frankie Bones - Fantasy Trance Side B (Wiggin Radio) ]

When Heaven freezes over?
Heaven would appear to be hotter than Hell :-

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that ... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C).

The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed ... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.

[Listening to: Barry leitch - Lotus 2 intro (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

And lo, linux didst work!
Well, after a week of fiddling with my laptop (no, not like that you pervert!), I managed to get a working Linux built on my laptop, with working power management at last (I think - more tests needed on the train home).

For the techies out there :-

Linux nicelaptop 2.4.20-gentoo-r6 #1 Wed Nov 26 15:43:59 GMT 2003 i686 Inrel(R) Pentium(R) 4 Mobile CPU 1.70GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

[Listening to: Ghidorah - Toilet Story4 (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Particpant at KKK initiation wounded after shots fired into sky
I've no sympathy for racists, even one dumb enough as this story recounts. Thanks to RAMDAC for that one.

[Listening to: gloom and satcom101 - amoeba soundtrack]

Sweet Home Alabama
Well, I had the last interview for my Group Study Exchange trip to Alabama, and I was successful. Looking forward to going there.

Comic of the day
I'm a big fan of Lore Brand Comics - I used to love them (and all the other content) back in the glory days of The Brunching Shuttlecocks

[Listening to: Meo / Studio One ^ ex-ABYSS - MAKE U DANCE]

BBC Learning comes to your rescue if you're bored at work.
See how many pieces of paper you can chuck in the bin. Click to play

[Listening to: Golio - Tired (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Linux Reloaded
Building a Gentoo Linux on my laptop now - I heard that its very customisable, which is what I need in order to get all the toys on my laptop working correctly. I'm not being totally brave though, still got my Windows XP partition :)

BlogRolling hacked?
Thanks to Hawk for spotting that my "Links to other blogs" section had been hijacked by someone (I won't give the link, they're not getting the free publicity from me!). I've noticed this elsewhere too, so I think some smartass has managed to hack the BlogRolling system. Grrr

Rugby? What Rugby?
So there I was, at a social function at the local rugby club, and some guy said to me "You watching the match on Sunday?" Not knowing what he was on about, I replied "What match?". At this point everyone started laughing. Apparently, there's a Rugby World Cup going on and England were playing....

I told ya before - I don't DO sports

Dispelling the geek myth
Not all game developers are nerdy men - girls can be geeks too! Check out Anna Larke from games company Argonaut

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Interesting variation on Sushi
Had some really nice sushi from Sainsbury's. I'm actually allergic to fish, so I usually seek out the vegetarian version, but was intrigued by a new selection they're doing. You get 6 California rolls - 2 filled with duck, hoi-sin sauce and spring onion, 2 with chicken tikka, and 2 with butternut squash and guacamole

Weird links
On one of my regular trawls through my site visitor stats, I noticed someone come in from www.mikesspot.com. It sounded like a blog site to me, so I popped over to take a look. It wasn't really my sort of thing ( being a blog about cars and motor racing), but I spotted he had added a link to my site. I looked for an email address to thank him, but found none. What I did find, however, I found a little confusing.

Basically, his links section seems to be randomly generated, and to completely unrelated sites. Quite a lot of them link to sites that are on non-standard http ports, and pop up a login and password for some sort of Control Panel. This seems to be the work of some program or script generating the links, and definitely looks suspicious to me..... More info if I find any.

More Linux woes
Now don't get me wrong, I like Linux, really I do. I've been on the brink of going Linux-only (ie, shunning Windows) for my own computers for some time. I've played with a few distributions (mostly Mandrake), but somehow things just never seem to work out.

My desktop machine is 90% of the way there. Its running the much-simplified distribution Desktop/LX, which is geared towards being a good Linux for beginners. I chose this one primarily because my brother uses that machine, and is still a newbie when it comes to computers in general. However, whereas the previous install (Update 2) could see my NTFS drive (where I back up all my files), the new one cannot see it, and there doesn't seem to be any tools to find it. Lycoris tend to hide away all the "this could break your OS" tools from the user, making maintaining it a frustrating task.

As for my laptop machine, I want to keep the pre-installed Windows XP on there, and have it dual boot with Linux. I'm not too fussed about which distribution to be honest, as long as it works - and that's where the problem lies. Linux is getting better at running on laptops, but its still got a long way to go. Much of this is due to the closed-source nature of drivers for new technology. I've been fortunate in that there are quite a few websites created by enthusiasts that detail how to get Linux up and running for my make and model, but it still requires all those things that scare off Windows users - downloading source tarballs, configuring and recompiling kernels, etc, etc. I'm going to have an attempt to build something based around Gentoo since I've seen some good documentation on building it for my machine. I also looked into Linux From Scratch, but even the latest version of that is woefully behind in version numbers for most of the packages it uses. I guess it will be a truly customised system by the time I've done with it.

All this depends on me backing up enough of the crap on my laptop to make room for Linux that is

Black screen mystery
Think I've figured out the problem with the black screen of doom on my desktop machine - looks like a loose connection on my graphics card, since the machine doesn't beep when switched on, and doesn't come up with the screen with the BIOS info on - so nothing to do with the OS then.

Beer of the day
Must find Sam Adams Utopias MMIII beer

[Listening to: Tao / Cream - UMD 8730 intro ]

Interesting variations on candles
Respect to Hawk for pointing out this amusing typo on the Debenhams website

Black screen of death
My new Linux installation at home keeps dropping to a completely blank screen with no way to recover. On rebooting, it returns to that same black screen. Blah

Amusing quote from my boss
My boss, Stu, looked at my t-shirt today and said "Why have you got a t-shirt with my name on it?" - guess he didn't spot the 3^rd letter then

Another weird Googlism
Bizarre Google search term of the week goes to the guy that managed to get to my site by searching for "demoscene porn". Not entirely sure what he was expecting to find - naked pictures of the farbrausch team?

[Listening to: Jeroen Tel - Cybernoid 2 (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Whoosh!
More bandwidth shenanigans - currently downloading a linux ISO at around 2500 4400 Kbits/sec - thats a whole CD in about 35 18 minutes....

[Listening to: Ganja - Delhi]

Playing games at work may be good for you
According to this article, playing games at work may be good for you. Can someone tell my boss that now?

[Listening to: Trancelestial Psychobabas - Blue Psychobabas]

Blog posting frequency
Just to assure people, I'm not part of the 60% or more that have given up on blogging - I've just been busy the last week or two.

[Listening to: Three Drives - Carrera 2]

Trying out new software
My copy of Lycoris Dekstop/LX finally turned up today, so will be trying that out at the weekend. I actually installed an older version on my desktop at home last night, and it seemed very good. I tried running the Update wizard, and when I rebooted, it wouldn;t come back up. Hopefully this retail version of the new release will fare better. Also upgraded to Microsoft Office 2003 on my laptop. Reports on how I get on with both of these new pieces of software will come in the next few days

[Listening to: Free Q.Sense - Before the End (Fungus Funk rmx)]

Crash Nitro Mini Golf
Cool game my mate Dal at work found - Crash Nitro Mini Golf

New phone craze - BlueJacking
Apparently Bluejacking is the latest craze doing the rounds. Not got BlueTooth on my phone, but my laptop has it - might be worth a try....

[Listening to: Trans - X - Living On Video]

Auction Man
Saw Michael Hogben, star of BBC's Auction Man, at the station this morning, with his wife Lesley. Got his autograph for Alison - he was very approachable, given that it was 6:55am. Apparently they were on their way to a guest appearance on the Terry and Gaby Show

[Listening to: Edzes - Beautiful dreams (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Pumpkin Pics
Well, Alison won the pumpkin carving competition at Vince's party - you can see her winning design here and you can see my not-quite-so-winning (bah!) design here