Compensating?
I set up my 2 new 20 inch widescreens on Thursday. Having a nice, widescreen 3360×1050 desktop kicks ass.
That is all.
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Dark Liquid
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Dark Liquid
Don’t let the bus-tards get you down
This week has been pretty cool so far. Dru and I saw The Simpsons Movie on Wednesday (advanced screening). It was quite funny, but nothing special. Too much computer-assisted animation for my liking. CAA always looks more fake than regular hand drawn stuff because its 2D moving like 3D but without the depth perception, so it stands out really badly, while standard animation looks better because you don’t have this glaring lack of depth jump out at you.
I also bought myself tickets to go see Porcupine Tree and Anathema in Oxford come November. I’m not much of a concert goer, but the chance to see 2 of my favourite bands at the same time can’t be missed. I’m quite excited!
I also joined a WEG D6 Starwars roleplay on Tuesdays run by my friend Bill. I’m playing an Ortolan Chef with some extra skills that I wont disclose, though he is specced towards a scouting/recon role.
I think the best thing abut this week though is that it’s been fairly relaxed, there was only one minor down point.
After watching the Simpsons Movie, I went to catch the bus using my pre-paid for a month ticket, and got accused of being a criminal. The bus driver accused me of having a forged ticket, and he did with such an air of disdain towards me that I was really offended. Whatever happened to innocent before proven guilty? Also, he seemed to have some kind of problem with students since he made quite a point of telling me ‘there is a lot of forgery at the college’ as if I would know – having not been in education for over 2 years. Obviously my dress sense must have made me look like his conception of however a student dresses I suppose. Prejudice much…
What was even more annoying was that the only reason the ticket might be considered a forgery is because it was on a different kind of card than usual because they ran out of it. With forgery ‘at the college’ so rife, I’m surprised they didn’t have stacks of the proper card left due to all their sales lost to forgeries. Fucktards.
We found our receipt and showed it to him, but the driver didn’t want to know at first. Eventually the guy came back to look at it and after saying, grudgingly I might add, ‘alright’ he spouted some more of his anti-student ‘forgery at the college’ propaganda at us. No apology, no nothing.
So thats the Wilts and Dorset bus company. If you’ve gone to the trouble of pre-paying them you get treated like a criminal. That’s if you get a chance to use it. The bus service in generally unreliable anyway, they are rarely on time, often have busses missing entirely from the schedule and on Friday, I needed to wait half an hour for bus that was meant to come every 5 minutes. We must have had 3-4 busses ‘not on service drive past our stop, and 2 others full to the brim because the bus company can’t get it’s act together and organise themselves.
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Dark Liquid
Family Weekend
Over the weekend went to Worthing to see the rest of the family with my brother and Dru for my cousin David’s kid’s christening.
Ordinarily christenings aren’t really my scene but considering I haven’t seen most of Dad’s side of the family for (in some cases) up to 10 years, I thought I’d make an effort – and since Dru has subjected me to her family I thought it would be time for some revenge
Man, sitting through all the churchy stuff was crazy. It’s like every other bloody sentence is a reminder of Jesus is Lord, we are not worthy of God, blah blah blah. They certainly drum it into them. Makes me think that the only difference between cults and religions is that one of them has government backing… I don’t know how much of David’s idea the whole thing was, he seemed I little knocked of center by the whole thing and a lot of people didn’t really join in with the whole religious-y stuff, though some of them sung hymns. The most I contributed was standing up and sitting down at the right places.
The rest of the day was just spent eating and hanging out, catching up with people, etc. Dru and I were mostly pretty quiet though. I’m not much of a conversationalist and Dru was a bit shy I think
Well, I shall have to try and better stay in touch from now on.
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Dark Liquid
LUGRadio Live 2007
The hotel we stayed at this year was The York Hotel. It was really good, very nice staff and excellent rooms – compared to the The Fox, a back alley would have seemed like a palace, so at The York we felt like we were in heaven.
We were all chuffed when we got a big bag of free stuff at the door on Saturday. Cool things like OpenSolaris DVDs, Redhat fleeces, pens, a cool Google moleskin-style notebook and lots of other goodies.
There were some really interesting talks, such as Bungee Connect and Kamelia. Also, much respect to the Open Rights Group for all the good work they’ve done!
I spent a lot of time trying to play some Polarity and had a few people interested, especially when I started playing at a spare exhibitionists table. I got a few good games in.
I hung out with Cillian for most of Saturday evening. Being under legal age, the rather over-zealous security wouldn’t even allow him entry to the party and since I don’t drink I decided to stay with him and talk about various shit after playing some Polarity.
I spent about £200 on books (mostly MAKE magazine and some CRAFT for Dru) and a GP2X cradle (which has some annoying short-comings, such as no bundled power adapter and doesn’t actually fit the GP2X unless you remove the rubber bit attached to the EXT port on it).
I also remember talking to Aaron Seigo about KDE4 and from what he said he’s sold it to me enough to at least give it another go. I questioned him about the whole KIO-slave subsystem – which I have always had troubles with, but like any KDE guy I’ve ever talked too, my complaints were a mystery to him. Oh well, since so much has been redone, refactored, etc for KDE4 we’ll see what happens.
Alan Cox’s talk was pretty cool. It was nice to see one of the big kernel hackers in the flesh and see the unix-beardness
To be honest, I can’t really remember much of what happened that weekend, my memory being what it is. I just remember that this years LUGRadio Live was pretty cool, though I couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t as good as last years. Maybe it’s because things went a little too smoothly – it just didn’t have the same get-together community atmosphere as last year, it felt a little too professional. I guess it was probably more down to the social ineptitude of all us geeks
Overall, it was awesome and the LUGRadio crew deserves tonnes of praise for the fantastic job they did.