He’s Back

Well the housemate arrived back yesterday. Due to a colossal communication breakdown I went out to the Airport twice yesterday. And me with a hangover. I shouldn’t have… really.

Never touch another man’s graphics card

Hi Jim, it looks like you’re having problems with your display. Let’s see, the screen itself seems OK, so it’s probably a loose connection on the box.
Turns out that the graphics card wasn’t seated correctly on the motherboard, wasn’t screwed in either. All the jiggling had loosened it, and then it simply refused to work.
ten minutes of sweating and reseating later it was all up and working correctly, but by God I was sweating like a pig with the worry over having fried the card by jiggling it incorrectly.
Let that be a lesson to me… never touch another man’s graphics card. It reminds me of that sexist Harry Enfield sketch about cars and women…

Lookalike

Jonothan or Josh?Anyone from our group notice that Jonothan from the Guild in London looks really similar to Josh Ritter? I was just looking at the Hello Starling record and he seems quite similar.

Post handfasting blues

I am so tired at the moment. I was at John and Marina’s handfasting which was held on Friday evening so I had an 8 hour trip down the country to get to dingle. It would have taken 6 hours if I could drive all the way down the country, but someone in the car was ill with the ‘flu and wanted breaks in the journey.
The handfasting itself didn’t start until later in the evening (about 9.15), and was quite a bit of fun for everyone. I was shattered and fell asleep around the 1.30 – 2am mark. The journey and the long hours in the office all added up.
The Saturday consisted of a long walk (5 hours) in the intermittent sun. I had put on sunblock before I left the house, but surprise surprise I missed a few spots and got burned. Only noticed it the next day, but jeez I have to take more care with this – I never got burned as a child so something has changed with the sunshine.
Saturday evening was more beer and food and music until about 1.30 in the AM.
Sunday I had to get up and drive to Castleisland to visit the folks. Of course I forgot that they go to 10.30 mass in the morning so I messed up the arrival time until just 10am, so they left about 15 minutes after I got there.
Needing to pick some people up from Dingle again, I turned tail and headed back there. In case you’re wondering this adds up to between 2.5 and 3 hours driving for the morning alone.
We started the trek back to Dublin about 1.40 in the afternoon, and had an hour stop off in Castleisland so I could show the parents what a handfasting looked like as well as to put up the family face for that aprt of the month. It being hte third time I got to Kerry in the last month I’m getting really tired of all the trips up and down the country. It’s 9 hours up and back again which tends to add up on the shoulders and back.
so I got in the door of the house and pretty much fell asleep within minutes of hitting the pillow. I am still tired today and it’s two days later.
Then my portable Hard Drive died… less than 12 hours after it was loaned to one of the housemates.

Sun Hardware

Far Cry Server
I’m stunned at the places you tend to find sun hardware … in major banks, running evil corporations that mutate monkeys into something evil. Sometimes I have to ask myself am I working for a good company or have I been lulled into a false sense of safety by our cool and groovy features for making the typical Evil Genius’ program to control genomes run up to 50% faster, with added bling (dtrace), Or to encapsulate their servers into virtual containers so a lone hacker can’t take over the entire network (zones), of the ability to make sure that every byte of data that is stored in system is summed, checksummed and cross-checked (DynFS I think) in case an explosion damages some of your storage devices.
Yes, Sun Microsystems… we put the ‘Evil Genius’ into Far Cry 🙂

Blossoms

I took this picture a few weeks ago and didn’t put it anywhere. I suppose now would be as good as any other to put it up.
apple blossoms

Self Selection

Sometimes people tend to say something that seems quite innocuous, but it turns out to be quite insulting. How about this pearl:
It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus.” –Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, in George Tech’s campus newspaper after the Internet worm

How difficult?

How difficult is it for a music playing application to remember where the
hell I was during the last run? I have a pile of long running files (lectures,
audiobooks) and I can’t bookmark a piece within them.
Still not used to the ‘bring it back the way I had it before’ concept then
are we?

Alistair Cooke is dead

It’s merely a month after he retred and he’s passed away. I am not happy
that this has happened. He was the one true constant in the world.