leaving party

I'd kind of hoped my leaving party would be a huge affair, with hordes of people slapping me on the back, pressing drinks into my hand and saying things like "I'll never forget that day you installed those SIMS updates, saved our bacon and no mistake".

Thanks to Alan, Kathryn and Nick for coming out, hope you enjoyed yourselves. I had a great time, starting in the Pev and moving on to Big Hands till closing time.

Kept Alan up very late playing jenga and drinking tea

I'd like to thank my erstwhile colleagues for the very generous whip round they had when I left which funded my new digital camera. And thanks to Alan for his gift of a bottle of Irish whisky

Fruit & veg today? - tomatoes, mushrooms, lettuce, cress
Exercise today? - hardly at all
Hours of sleep I'm going to get tonight? - 4-5 hours

mmm, delicious dots

in my new job, I don't have Internet access from the machine on my desktop. it sounds harsh but I suppose it does reduce non-work browsing. actually it makes it more difficult for me to look work things up too. swings and roundabouts I suppose. there is plenty of distracting stuff out there. I loved playing pacman (though never while I was supposed to be working.

metric

recently I was reminded of how bloody useless imperial units are. so I'm through with them, it's metric all the way for me from now on

For the record I'm about 1.87m tall and I have a mass of approximately 67.6 kg.

currently listening to...

"The Last Temptation Of Reid" by LARD. Kind of a punk/industrial supergroup with Jello Biafra and some geezers from Ministry. here's a sample

Bozo Skeleton

moving pictures

went to se a couple of films this weekend, with my lovely gf. last night we saw "Lobo" which is a film about someone who infiltrates ETA. Went into town bybus, which was an adventure in itself. I noticed that the bus in front of us was rather discourteously pulling out in front of our bus, but our driver took exception to this and when the buses drew level at one point he gave quite an earful to the other driver. After we'd gone another 500 yds a cop car flagged our bus down, and since it looked like it might take a while we walked the rest of the way. The last time I spoke to the cops it was to ask if they wanted to check out a neighbour's house where the burglar alarm was ringing. They weren't interested, but I'm glad they can pull out all the stops out when bus drivers are swearing at each other.

We had a drink in the cornerhouse bar before the film, which was pretty good. I like films with a proper story, and well developed characters, and a plot which makes sense. and at 124 minutes it was great value for money

but then, we noticed in the cornerhouse catalogue, that one of my fave films of all time was showing at noon the next day - "Withnail & I". Which required us to get up early the next day and return to the cornerhouse.

The film was excellent on the big screen. I'm not sure how many times I've seen it on tv/vhs/dvd - and some of those times have involved the drinking game - but it seemed like I "got" more when it was bigger with better sound.
Trivia - author of W & I (Bruce Robinson) played Benvolio in Franco Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet
Fruit & veg today? - tomatoes and 'shrooms
Exercise today? - none likely
Hours of sleep I'm going to get tonight? - 8

mountains and dinosaurs

Went up Cadair Idris today, which was steep and sunny. After a huge curry, played "Rapidough". Team Red won a crushing victory against Team Blue. I don't like to blow my own trumpet - but my dinosaur was tremendous. I wish I had a picture of it before a jealous opponent crushed it, anyway...

a view of wales

my camera has a panarama feature. I'm not really sure how you put the photos together when you've taken them though

my final days of network managering

I'm finding work quite strange at the moment. In my previous job I found out I was leaving - and then I was out of the door - like that <clicks fingers>. It was a shock but it was over quickly. Now I'm wandering about, thinking about the people I'll miss. Even whistling sometimes. And while they are mostly unatrractive the surroundings (not the people) are at least familiar, like the Ally McBeal-style mixed gender toilets

I'm a person who likes to peel a plaster off slowly and carefully, so I guess that metaphor doesn't apply to jobs.

incidentally, RIP my blue o'neill t-shirt. It has served me well since 1997 but now has a big rip aquired during my martial arts lesson. A silver lining to this cloud is that I can replace it with something black, but on the other hand the current line of o'neill t-shirts is pretty insipid


vegetables today - tomatoes and two helpings of vegetable soup (another slow cooker winner)
exercise today - one martial arts lesson and 9½ miles on my bike
sleep tonight - 7 hours

new threads

actually this is just an exercise to see if I can mail in rich text posts to my blog

Faltown Skateboards have a sturdy looking black shirt

And Akro do t-shirts as well as other catering supplies

Vi for Windows

Windows notepad isn't that bad, but for grown-up text editing (and assorted linux stuff) I decided it was time I got to grips with Vi. strangely the correct pronunciation is "vee eye" though I've never heard it referred to in this way. There is a free (as in beer) version of Vi for windows (link above)

anyway, how does the thing work? I've got a quite nicely laid out cheat sheet for Vi here, which looks good pasted above my desk. It tells you how to move about in a file and delete stuff. The Introduction to Vi written by the author (Bill Joy) is recommended - I havent read much.

What I wanted to know to get going was how to copy and paste text, and this was in Mr Joy's guide, in section 4
"yy" copies a line, and "p" pastes it. "dd" deletes a line. Easy enough and should help me get this HTMl written. I'll need to practice, and at some point find out how to copy individual words

vegetables - ate loads in some "Monk's Broth" from Umami on Oxford Road
exercise - maybe do some later

friday night food

went into town on a friday night, searching for that place where we were meeting Dan. Saw the Bargain Booze blimp moored in withington

Met Dan for a chinese meal to mark his birthday. food was good - plenty of beancurd. also aubergines. Took a picture of the chinese arch with my new camera - not entirely happy with the picture quality

Fruit & veg today? - aubergine
Exercise today? - nil
Hours of sleep I'm going to get tonight? - 7 ish