All Change

The weekend’s involved a lot of moving around – the office at home has moved into the second bedroom, so that we’ve both now got desks and the like. Of course this has also meant moving computers, and the bed out of the bedroom and in to the garage for a while ’til we get a decent second bed for the (smaller) new second bedroom.

All fun – and of course sorting out a wireless network etc. as well as everything else really made life fun.

Still, it’s all done now, and everything seems to be (so far) running smoothly. No-one is more amazed than me. *grin*


Shuttle

At some point in the next couple of months, I’m going to be building myself a new PC to replace the creaking 1Ghz Athlon that I’ve been using for the last three years. The intention is for the new box to be pretty quick, and fairly close to top-spec in the stuff I need. This doesn’t include shit-hot graphics card, as I really don’t play games on it, or anything that seriously needs top-notch graphics.

I’m thinking also that I’m going to go for a small form-factor, and probably use a Shuttle box rather than the hefty great tower box form-factor.

So what I want to know is this : has anyone else been using one of these, and are there any issues I should beware of?


Flipflops

I have to say, I’ve decided that I really fucking hate the current fashion for wearing flip-flop type shoes. It’s the noise they make as people walk that really grates with me, that sort of sloppy scraping noise because the shoe doesn’t come of the ground properly, and instead just scrawps along the path.

I can’t see how they’d be comfortable to wear for a long time either, but there we go, that’s just me.

Grrr.


As Time Goes By

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been with the new company for a month already. And things are still going well.

Over the last month I’ve managed to get so much done, and sorted – all the demo pages have been completed, all the CSS works, everything is cross-browser and cross-platform, and everyone’s really pleased with it. Over the next couple of months I’m now going to be transmuting it from a bunch of demo pages into a working proof-of-concept, which is going to be – well – interesting, to say the least. I’ve a lot of ideas on stuff I want to add in and get working, so there’s still going to be shedloads of stuff to get on with.

I find it amazing how much my mood has improved simply by leaving CrapCo and starting to do the work I enjoy again. The last month has zipped past at an unbelievable rate, and I still feel optimistic and generally cheerful about what I’m doing. Well, unless it’s “rebuilding the PC”, but that seems to be OK for the moment. And if I really need to run Linux at the moment, I’ll do it off a CD. Actually, that’s something I may be playing with next week – we’ll see.

I’ve stayed in touch with one person from CrapCo, and happily it sounds like they’re still the same bunch of incompetent bastards. Recently they’ve double-paid a bunch of invoices from last year, to the tune of £250,000 or so. To coin a phrase, “Oops”.


The Big Question

The BBC asks “how can you make the Tube safe?“. The true answer, when taking into account that you’re dealing with individuals is “you can’t”.

In the end it all comes down to luck.


Shot

It’s hard to know what to say about the man shot dead by police in London today. Was he a terrorist planning another explosion? We don’t know. Was he “acting suspiciously”? We don’t know.

In fact, we know so little – and, I suspect, nor do the police, or anyone else – about why this happened. Personally I find it worrying that there are armed officers on the tube (and thus likely out of radio contact with the Outside World) who are prepared to shoot to kill on this basis. But then again, is one death better than several, had there been an explosion?

It’s hard to say.


Fucker

Updates may be in short supply today, due to technical difficulties yesterday.

In short, I tried installing Linux, which a) didn’t recognise my hard drive, and b) the partitioning utterly fucked my entire PC. So I’ve lost a month of work (well, I haven’t, because luckily I’d backed it up to a remote site – thank god) locally, plus I’ve got to download and re-install everything.

Windows XP got done last night, but the rest is being done today. And they still want me to do Linux on here too. Optimistic I ain’t.

But, as you can see, I have my priorities sorted. Firefox first, then extensions to Firefox, then d4d™ Then I’ll get on with the rest.