[ from the forever-young dept. ]
Well it had to happen eventually I suppose. I bought a proper coffee machine. This was on offer in Woolworths for a mere 34.99 of our English pounds and was reduced from several times that for some reason. It is stainless steel and makes coffee: this point needs to be made (people who know me know I have a caffeine problem). I have started to buy proper coffee too (first for a new cafetiere but now I will probably need to buy a grinder and get the ultimate in flavour). I have enjoyed coffee a lot this week while trying to identify hardware bugs.
I did some more doing rather than just talking. I have been going to the Oxford Go club for the last few weeks and am trying to improve my game, have been doing really funky hardware debugging using gdb and various hardware debugging support features on a particular micro, etc. I have started reading Elektor Electronics and am about to start playing with a motor controller for a friend who is building a robot. I wrote a hacky parallel port driver for Linux 2.6 which allows me to deal directly with the port without having to resort to using userspace tools all the time and this weekend want to continue with the password OTP PIC Micro project I mentioned before.
I finished two articles for the magazine, will be starting some teaching for a large Linux vendor, and went to the Hants LUG meet last weekend. Southampton was enjoyable but the fancy bus information screens failed to tell me where each route went, so as a visitor, annoyed me a little. Although I was delayed on the way back, I did meet a guy who went to college with a former professor of mine (he does various stuff with gas measurement using PICs and formal proofs when necessary). David Lightfoot recently reminded me of his book on Z and I really should buy that.
Today I am planning to do some reading and pop in to either the City or Winchester or both momentarily, try to find out where people are staying during FOSDEM 2004 and book in at the same hotel myself next weekend, and also seriously look at digital cameras.
Jon.
