Part of Prospect Park was sealed off this morning, after a teenage girl’s body was discovered. I was in the park just over a week ago doing some geocaching, I’d hate to have been the person who found something like that. My family drove past the park this morning and saw the area was indeed pretty much taped off. It’s a little disconcerting when such things happen where you live.
Jon.
Photo: Windsor Castle, Windsor. A nice day for a walk around Windsor and a boat trip and ice cream along the Thames.
There’s a Victoria in B.C.
Interestingly enough, there’s a place called Victoria in British Columbia (Vancouver Island – sounds like it’s just about feasible to visit, given a few hours), in addition to the one I knew of in Ontario. This I learned from some travelling Canadians I met on the train today. They’re over doing the Europe thing during a long summer vacation from college (which I took as a N.A. reference to University rather than an attempt to adjust vocab to my local context). Cool. They told me the places they were planning to go and I was able to point out a few useful bits of information – like the fact that “Barcelona Airport” with Ryanair is over an hour from Barcelona. It’s about as much in Barcelona as any other similar airport and the bus costs almost as much as the flight. Still, I was able to tell them about the bus service and recommend it over a taxi. I also recommended taking water if they go in search of historical landmarks like the Acropolis while they are in Greece (well, Athens) – it really can be quite hot indeed at this time of year and heat sickness is not something you want to have, if my firsthand witnessing of others (I presumed it was heat sickness) is anything to go by.
I spent the day oscillating between Reading and other places. Some of that time was in Bracknell (where an interesting concept was being discussed – yes, I’m being vague, if you’re a close friend then I’ll probably explain it to you) and some of the time was in Windsor/Eton for a lunch meeting with the folks at a post relational database company (magazine stuff). There’s only so much excitement to be had over the ability for millions of objects to persist peacefully (no matter what database, but it was a reasonably interesting conversation). Meh. Anyway, I took a few photos of Windsor Castle – since I’m not sure I’ve ever actually been to Windsor itself (or maybe I did when I was a kid, but I can’t recall). I didn’t pay to go and look around since that might be conceivable as an indirect endorsement of the Monarchy 
I didn’t take the GPS along, so there was no geocaching on this occasion. A pity, JP II still needs to find a home. Couldn’t find the microcache at the Oracle this evening, even though we had a reasonable look where I thought it might have been.
So, I’m still up, ostensibly doing some writing and planning this presentation for Sunday. I’ve got a lot of random bits of junk here that need to be ready. The fan started to screw itself over in apogee’s power supply and so I swapped out the PSU tonight. Only to find that the CPU fan was also fscked – and borrowed the fan from another machine as a stopgap to get online again. I need to rationalise a lot of this kit over the coming months as I prepare to move – all depends upon what I decide I want to do next. We’ll see.
Jon.
Recording: Playing with the ipod recording gadget I bought in Portland: A quick violin practice of Pachelbel Canon in D. It’s not to concert standard by any means (several obvious mistakes there), and my first real attempt at sitting down and preparing Jesu joy of man’s desiring for Hannah and Joe Wrigley.
Thanks to dsaxena, I’ve taken interest in the 10,000 Maniacs. They’re pretty cool. I think I’d heard of them ages ago but until now ignored them. I’m listening to “Eat for two” as I write this. It reminded me to mail one of the girls who recently left the office to check on how she’s getting on. A friend just went off on paternity leave, hope he’s getting on ok too (for USians: this is probably a very British/European legal thing, but men can take limited leave too here – which is obviously pretty cool for my friend whose wife gave birth last weekend).
dsaxena amused me with his latest blog entry about picking up a random hitchhiker, that’s cool. Unfortunately, we live in a world of such mass hysteria and paranoia that it’s also probably a pretty rare event by now. We mutually distrust everyone and think everyone is a witch (terrorist) who is out to get us. Did you know that less than 2,000 people died as a direct result of a terrorist incident around the whole world last year, according to U$ government figures I saw cited on American TV*? (around 700 were in Iraq – and they only choose to “account” for certain limited incidents). So, on the one hand we have millions dying from hunger or from AIDS (not helped by certain religious nuts’ views on contraception – would you rather people died from AIDS as some kind of curse then?) and on the other, a few random people – equivalent to statistical noise – are enough to get George and fellow morons ripping away at an otherwise mostly peaceful society we live in.
Photo: One of the ML300 development boards, hooked up to a hardware debugger.
I’m at home this morning, having gone to bed at a more sane hour of the day. Lo and behold, I’m up at a sane time without having to cut short on sleep and without having to smash too many alarm clocks for once. This place is a mess, so many receipts, invoices and other assorted bits of paper. My receipt for the Amsterdam flight turned up in the mail yesterday. I need to check everything’s good with atp as I’ve only received an email confirmation (which might be all they generally send).
Today, I need to get articles wrapped up, start planning for the next set, and go through some proposal documentation for Debra, in collaboration with Frank. I’ve got some ecos work that’s ongoing, must go out and vote at some point, a talk to write and assorted other stuff. I’ve switched from Nutella to Cadbury’s chocolate spread for my breakfast (due to someone else’s acquired nut allergy) and realised I don’t really care, just so long as the spread on my morning bagels/toast is very chocolatey. I also recently sent my old driving instructor an SMS (around the time that I finally bothered to check the DSA website – UPDATE: test now booked for June 21). Although certain “schools” of motoring won’t get you a test within a million years of your desired time, it is actually possible if you are prepared to use the DSA website at the last minute. I’ll get onto that, it’s silly that I’ve learned to drive but don’t yet have the paperwork.
Jon.
* But did they bother to point out how small that figure was? Nope. US TV really fascinates me. It’s generally so unbelievably crap that you wonder how any civilised nation could tollerate it. Finally, I realised that it’s so crap that the smart people don’t watch it any more or end up having to have PVR type equipment just to make it bareable. At least they get BBC World, sometimes.
Anyone interested in hiring an Embedded Linux engineer with practical experience in board bringup, kernel porting, device drivers, toolchains and related technologies? I’ve practical experience as outlined at about me and have recently worked extensively with Xilinx PowerPC platforms as well as some ecos development thereon. I am also the editor of Embedded and Kernel features at Linux User & Developer magazine, have served as an instructor for Redhat on their RHD248 (Embedded Linux Engineering) and have extensive community involvement. I have given presentations on various Embedded Linux technologies and am in negotiations with at least one publisher at present (I recently also contributed to the hardware hacking section of Linux Desktop Hacks).
I am presently employed in the UK but would consider moving to an appropriate environment and travel is certainly not a problem (in fact, relocation to North America would be especially of interest to me). Mail me, if you want to talk, or for further information (serious inquiries only please – no generic agency requests).
Jon.
I met some local political activists in Reading town center on my way to catch a train to work. There were three or four Tories and one Lib Dem handing out flyers. Since one of the former four decided to approach me with a piece of paper, I decided to take one from the Lib Dem instead – and then turned and told the Conversatives: “I hope you lose, I hope he wins, and I hope you have a bad day [of campaigning]“.
Who am I going to vote for? In an ideal world, I’d vote for something more radical – like the Green Party (but at this time, I don’t know enough about their policies and don’t want to deviate much more from the mainstream so as to add myself to the statistic of protest voters) – but this time around it’s likely to be the Liberals. I can’t in good conscience vote in Tony Blair, since he seems to support the George Bush school of politics – first a war in Iraq, then privacy invading legislation such as the current ID Cards bill before parliament (actually, they already introduced really evil privacy invading stuff long before that).
No, there’s virtually no risk of the Conservatives getting in to power in my local constituency and so I’ll send Tony my protest vote in disgust against a slew of bad policy decisions. Unfortunately, enough people buy the drivel fed to them by the other parties that my vote won’t count for anything, but maybe I’ll feel just a little bit better with myself for having had my say on Thursday.
That’s it. Now let’s think about issues that really matter. The election’s only a diversion from the current problems which need fixing. No matter who wins on Thursday, there are far too many legislatory idiots who feel a need to regulate every aspect of our lives – just you wait until the new session opens in the commons.
Jon.
Ok, I’ll go with “psyched”, since it’s what several emailers seem to concur over. It’s not that I disagreed per se, but more that when I specifically looked for a definition of “psyched”, I couldn’t actually see something valid. I’m worrying too much about this, only because I find it bizzarely fascinating. It’s part of my compulsive personality to care about this too much – as one of the engineers I work with pointed out (he’s also very obsessive), it suits certain people.
Anyway, I’m still up finishing bits off. Had a few late night calls, considered calling someone over in the States, but I can do that another time. I’m annoyed I didn’t try harder to work out a cunning way to make it to Portland, but the reality is that I need to keep a few days of holiday this year in the case that I do manage to go to my friend’s wedding over in India. It’s for this reason that I probably won’t be in Nevada for DEFCON this time around (annoying also). Anyone want to offer me a job in Ontario/California today?
Eric, Matt: Thanks for the emails. I’m going to arrange to be in Anaheim next time I’m in LA (not for a few months but who knows what I’ll do after the summer). I’ve mentioned your LUG Radio interest to various people, since I find it really cool that that show is reaching a worldwide audience.
Jon.
P.S. Listening to Enigma currently, it’s pretty cool stuff. I also seem to be around 13.5 stone again – that’s 189 pounds (originally, I made a typo here, due to multiplying by the wrong factor. Bah.) for those who aren’t British. Although the UK is slowly becoming metric in many ways, we still have “pints” and often refer to body weight in stones (where one stone is 14 pounds, but in North America they don’t use stones AFAIK). We also use gallons or litres for petrol (gas) but a British gallon is more than a US one. Anyway, I’m potentially still losing some weight even despite my regular meals.
Ok. So today is the day to get copy finished up for Richard, finally. Yes. I will get that done today. Must. I can also increase my level of motivation through load music and coffee consumption (my music now being more organised on my ipod, which I finally hooked up to a shiny newish regular old PCI Firewire card that I have had kicking around the place for a while). Seems I’m using almost 30/40GB at the moment, but not all of that is music.
Is it “psyched”, “psyced” or “psyked”?
UPDATE: General preference is for “psyched”. Original quandary is below.
So, after the last blog entry, I got an email which asked whether I meant to write “psyched” instead of “psyced”. I’m not sure. I had hoped this wouldn’t come up Having looked online for a few minutes before writing the aforementioned word, I came to the conclusion that the only online slang reference I could find favoured the use of “psyced” or “psyked” rather than the other spelling. Which should it be? Someone with a degree in slang, please do tell me, and I’ll “correct” it in the previous posting (alternatively, a link to a dictionary definition will do).
Photo: Geocaching in search of GCME6C, but finding only this rather empty looking tree stump.
Hussein was here in Reading yesterday, after staying over on the previous night. We had been out to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy on Saturday evening. That’s a pretty cool film, though since I’ve not read the book, I can’t really pass more comment than “it seemed reasonably ok”. Hussein and I went Geocaching yesterday, looking for a cache near to my house. Looks like someone managed to get there first and trash it (or the co-ordinates we had were somehow completely wrong, and the obvious cache spot with bits of wood covering an empty hole wasn’t in fact the only remnants of a missing ammo box). Annoyingly, it would seem we have lots of flat bike tires here too.
Anyway, I just got a reply from sven about sailing on the bay. Since he’s up for it, I’m going to book yet another flight to San Francisco (this time from Vancouver), so that we can spend a day doing something I’ve wanted to do for some time. Yay! Yes, it’s a little excessive to go to the US for just a day – but then – if you don’t do these things when you get the chance, you never will.
The only flipside of my summer trip to OLS is that I won’t be able to make Hannah and Joe’s PnP on the 23rd of July (the last day of OLS) – had I known the date was going to change, then I would have said that I was over at the conference, but meh. They can now at least invite others who couldn’t come before, so it’s “swings and roundabouts” in the sense that more people might make it on the new date.
Would someone please find whichever Debian Developer (DD) decided to hide wherever gdm is forced to start an X server with “-nolisten tcp” and put me in touch with them? I’ve changed my gdm.conf and gdm-factory settings to allow tcp connections, but still it’s starting an X server with paranoid parameters. Yes, that’s real nice (thanks guys), but sometimes – in the real world – we have certain programmable logic vendors who don’t seem to know that, in the civilised world, we fallback to connecting to a local UNIX domain socket instead. Do they do this kind of thing intentionally? Perhaps I should add a copy of this book to my Christmas list for this year.
Jon.