Time for another monthly placeholder entry#

Mon 01 Aug 2005 01:44:28 AM UTC

Time for another monthly placeholder entry. No Lisp lately; my employers have been making me actually work for a living for the past few weeks, and my non-work time has been occupied with stuff I can't talk about yet. I'm sure that wasn't in the contract...

Round up for the month of July:

• July 3rd: 24 heures du Mans rollers: a relay race around Le Mans Circuit Bugatti. Entered as part of the LSST Team 2, came 137th of 595 starters (or 138th morally, if you accept that the Team Bont disqualification was a con). It's a 4.3km circuit; my average lap time was 9:20 and best was 8:45 or so, which I'm pretty happy with. More here (registration may be required, I've had cookies for that site so long I can't remember which bits are public). Next time don't buy the £10 Tesco Value tent, it's pants.

• July 7th: not killed by terrorist attacks. Not able to get to work either: so it goes.

• July 9th - present (something of an ongoing process still, this) : moved house. New flat is in Bethnal Green, which is near enough work that it's an easy skate and near enough central London that it's also a pleasant skate. (Skating in Leytonstone was mostly an exercise in being beeped at and pulled out on by car drivers who'd clearly never seen a skater before). New flat is still however looking a bit bare, as too much of my stuff is still in boxes in the old place waiting for an opportunity to move it (see "work", above)

• But at last I have internet at home again (ADSL from ClaraNET: staff deal) and almost have wireless to go with it. I got a Netgear DG834DG bcause it looked cute and cheap and is supposed to be quite hackable (it runs Linux) which I thought might be fun. However, in the two or three days since my adsl service was actually switched on it's frequently stopped wirelessing for no apparent reason, forcing me to plug my laptop in using a cable in order to find out that there's nothing in the logs to indicate why. Gah. Looks like some amount of hacking may be a necessity, then, not just a fun spare-time project. As if I have any spare time right now anyway. (Yes, I've already tried a firmware upgrade: no joy)

• On the other hand, it could equally well be the laptop at fault, I suppose. Since I upgraded every part of it at once (Debian from a version old enough to have XFree86 to current unstable, the kernel to whatever I could find, then some abortive mucking around with pcmciautils and udev which I later had to revert because it doesn't actually work usefully yet) I have no hibernation support and the machine is prone from time to time to spin the disk continuously while refusing to respond to M-C-backspace, M-C-F1, Numlock, or anything else that might usually be a "hey!" signal. I can see why people buy Macs: because Apple don't have an "unstable" version for public release ...

• Today: (or technically yesterday). Registered and booked flights for the Berlin Inline Marathon. With any luck I might actually have some speedskates by then and will be able to bend my ankles more than Crossmax usually allow.