[ from the please-insert-amusing-anecdote dept. ]
Photos (from left to right): Holly and Hannah at Holly’s birthday dinner outing, Christmas lights in Oxford, Wagamama opens in Reading.
This is a quick update until I get around to writing something slightly more substantial, perhaps later this week. In this blog entry we have musical tendancies, unrequited interests, kernel hacking and some forthcoming travelling.
Musical tendancies
I really like MUSE (shockwave flash unfortunately used heavily on their site). I really like them. This is a good thing – it proves that I might actually have some form of musical taste beyond 80s electropop, euphoric mixes and pre-1800 classical music. Readers should feel free to buy me any of MUSE’s music 
I also recently bought a Best of Accoustic album and Jamie Cullum’s “Twenty Something”. I enjoy Jamie’s music, but not all in equal measure. Today, I bought some more music from magnatune – Falling You are simply amazing to listen to.
Once again, I have taken an interest in learning the guitar – I especially enjoyed a recent impromtu session with one of the guys from work who has several electrics and an accoustic. Yes, Joe bought a guitar recently, but I don’t think this isn’t just a fad of mine – I actually have had an interest for some time. Additionally, I am going to actually examine the music theory material again properly too – I bought the Associated Board books for a second time a while back (Hannah’s borrowed them but she can probably keep those if I get yet some more – just don’t tell her I said that). I took grade 5 music theory a number of years ago, but never found out whether I passed or failed it and at this point don’t really care.
Aside from that, I’ve been trying to learn Pachelbel’s Canon in D for a while and have had a few breakthroughs. Firstly, I realised some fundamental problems with my rusty technique – my basic positioning and tuning are much improved now, in my own opinion (Hannah and Joe might disagree with me though). Secondly, I noticed that a fast fingering section didn’t actually want to be in third position on the G string (it really really didn’t), and once you get that right it actually starts to sound more like it should. I’ll practice it some more and then record it so that I can inflict it upon readers of this blog.
Unrequited interests
The Incredibles is a good film. In fact, it was as good on the second viewing as it was on the first (I originally saw it with members of my nuclear family, when it came out). All the more enjoyable for the company I was in at the time – I met a friend of a friend who really peaked my interest. Of course, as per usual, this was unrequited. A real shame because the person concerned is exactly my type – and about as interested in distant lands as I am, but not interested in me. Perhaps I’ll end up at one of these speed dating sessions in the new year – I think I hate being single. It has got its advantages since I’d have to be more organised if I were not single. Either way, it’s been too long since there was someone I could really talk to, I’m really mostly after companionship more so than anything else.
There’s nothing more soul destroying than telling someone how you feel and finding there’s no reciprication.
Kernel bits
I have written a couple of articles on Linux kernel development, with some example code available for 2.6 stable series kernels. So far we’ve done the general intro and char and block hacking examples, but I’m working on a UML debugging article and planning some more interesting examples for the new year. I had one guy call me up late one evening to thank me personally for the first article – that’s a nice gesture. Feel free to do that at any time of the day .
I’m going to test ac’s ite8212 driver code (having written a simple mode driver of my own a while back – it wasn’t very good, didn’t do dma or anything even remotely fun like that, but it was my first forary in to the 2.6 gendisk driver stuff). Alan’s much better driver is in 2.6.9-ac13 now (turns out this might actually be 2.6.9-ac12 as apparently they both have the same checksum so there might have been a problem with publishing the patches – I didn’t look in to that yet myself, it’s hardly that bad, but saw a list post about it earlier). The kernel’s BK was down earlier on today and kernel CVS has apparently been unresponsive lately – don’t know if anything’s up with that stuff in general. Probably not.
Travelling bits
I am going to the Canonical Ubuntu conference in Mataró, Spain. The conference itself runs for the next couple of weeks, but I am going along to the final few days. I am also planning a few other trips but I will have more to say about those once I have worked out the details. Flights costing only 30quid return make it more financially viable to fly abroad than to go to another part of this country for a weekend – enjoy it while it lasts though, the oil’s running out. I should pay a carbon tax. Perhaps I will have a look at one of those websites where you can buy trees as a way of coping with such moral turpitude (update 05/12/2004: donated a tree to offset C02 emmisions via Future Forests).
Paris was really enjoyable. I especially enjoyed walking along the Champs-Eleysees in the rain and a Sunday stroll along the Seine. It’s this side of a trip that I enjoy especially – but of course I was fascinated by the scale of the Louvre museum and the cultural sophistication of the city in comparison to others. Rue Saint Germain is an excellent place for small coffee shops and I enjoyed a few cafe au laits while there. I visited the Paris Travelbug hotel and dropped off a travelbug from my Canada trip which had been in my possession for rather a bit too long at this point – still no Fuzzy Wuzzy geocache of my own to rival my friends’ efforts, but I’ll get there.
Random bits
This week featured quite a few visits to the latest Wagamama. It’s at the Oracle Riverside in Reading (near to GC402A The Oracle Microcache – but can I find the damn thing? Have I looked several times now? Too many muggles to really look for it during the day and too many bouncers in the evenings standing outside the Bar Risa). There’s also a Strada pizzeria opening in a week or so – so I hope that finally there will be some good food choices at the Oracle Riverside now, rather than a majority of Americanised rubbish, with the odd exception.
I spent all of Saturday messing around, but this time actually got out of bed before lunch and felt more productive than is usual for Saturday. Building various UML test kernels and compiling up a few other bits to experiment with is fun. I got my mol installation to boot a Linux kernel (by noting that someone else had had to replace the current “new” oftree.linux with the original oftree.linux_old in the latest releases) and figuring out a few other things – the pseudo-disk filesystem doesn’t like symlinks but doesn’t really like to tell you that, the debian/rules build script does a very simple configuration job which doesn’t build the debugger in and I’m not sure whether it should or not for production use. Probably it should not, but then, if there’s very little overhead it might be worth having it, as many of us want to use it from time to time. I need to get somewhere with this OF stuff I had been putting off, but today (it’s Sunday now here – the times reported on this blog are in need of adjusting for timezone locality) mostly should be spent working on the duck as it’s quite behind now.
Jon.
* Joe’s influence is rubbing off on Hannah – my sister Hannah recently started blogging (scary! but good reading).