I tried to get tickets for Glastingborough and failed. Fresh from the failure, it was time to seek out another festival that might be good for the summer. A search of the electrical interweb came up with the Roskilde festival. So three days off work booked, and we were off…
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Roskilde Festival
July 9th, 2007An email from Tony Blair. To me!
February 19th, 2007I discovered the governments e-Petition site last week, in all the hoopla about the national road pricing plan petition. A site like that deserves slightly more than a cursory look, and I found a petition relating to the proposed ID cards. This closed, and garnered 28,000 signatures. Enough, it seems, that the PM needed to reply personally.
Here’s his response, with some annotations from me…
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Spam, spam, spam
February 18th, 2007There’s been some progress in the SPAM fighting department this week too. A few old tricks, and some new ones have been tried this week.
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Demise of the floppy disk
February 18th, 2007Only recently, PC World announced that they were no longer going to sell floppy disk drives. To be honest, I stopped building floppy disks into my computers years ago. It’s a fair point that in the era of multi-gigabyte datasets, the usefulness of a 1.44Mb plastic disk is rather limited.
Still, I do have a large number of little plastic floppy disks lying around from my university days, and it seems a shame to throw away all that data. There’s some emails there that I’d quite like to online at some point. So, before the disks are consigned to the bin, I’ll back them up.
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Backups at last
February 5th, 2007Salon magazine, a few years ago, had a competition to write computer error messages in the form of Haiku. There were two winners; one by David Dixon
Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
and one by David Carlson
Everything is gone;
Your life’s work has been destroyed.
Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
It’s interesting that both of these little ditties concerned the subject of lost data. More and more of my life is getting archived in computer files. It’s taken me a long time to put this amount of data together, and I really don’t want to lose it now. Life would become pretty awkward.
The solution, of course, is to back up my data. But how exactly do I plan to do that?
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Bringing work home
January 30th, 2007I have made a resolution this year. I will only work on three projects at home at a time, rather than my usual trick of starting lots of things and finishing none of them.
NFS Kernel Server to the rescue
January 19th, 2007Quite a successful evening was had there. One of those really pleasing days when all sorts of things start to work, without you doing very much.
Back to work
January 3rd, 2007It’s been a long time since I last held down a proper job, which was most definitely by choice rather than enforced unemployment. At last, though, I’ve returned to a job in the big city, and after 18 months galavanting around the world, it’s a bit of a shock.
The home server..an introduction
December 31st, 2006Many things sit on the todo list at home, but I think the first place to start is by cleaning up and sorting out the main server at home. Yup, raistlin ( all my machines are named after characters in the Dragonlance saga if you are interested ) needs a little titivation to ensure it is up to scratch.
The Road Ahead
December 28th, 2006Now that I am back and living in London properly, it’s time to consider the various projects that I’ll be taking on over the course of the year at home. The list is, of course, subject to change at times, as I whismsically head off on a new tangent. If I’m good though, I’ll try to run each project to completion before starting new ones. Otherwise, I’ll magically start 75 things and complete none of them…