Christmas shopping and crowd density
So yesterday I wandered into town to try and get my family some crap for Christmas, and to try to spend as little as possible and still be able to claim I had made some sort of effort.
I failed, miserably.
If you go into town when it is empty, you're fine. There's loads of room, you're never worried that you're getting in people's way or vice versa.
On the other hand if it's really, really, astonishingly crowded everywhere, you can push and "excuse me please" your way around with impunity, simply due to the crowd density being so high that people are going to be expecting it.
The problem arises in the window between these two extremes. When there are enough people to get in the way, but not enough that excusing yourself around and constantly bothering people isn't going to get you lots of dirty looks and set off all your paranoid self-consciousness phobia neuroses. When there's still plenty of room to walk around, except for where you want to be.
|***============*** | window at shop front \ shop front door
| PS S S S S S S* = the one rack of christmas cards
| QQQQQQQQQQQ - - various racks of birthday cards * other crap
\ C------------- - C the till
| ------------- - Q queue of people waiting to pay for stuff
| - S people looking at Christmas cards
| @ * P some woman's bloody huge pram
|***------------*** @ me
#aaw
So today I suggested renaming aaw's IRC channel from #warwick to #aaw (As usual you'll have to wait a few hours before the first link starts working... Not my fault I'm way ahead of Google)
Logical enough? It is if you call #warwick "aaw's IRC channel", but that is stretching the truth. #warwick has existed in one form or another for a lot longer than aaw. It's just turned out that its users are mostly graduates, alumni, etc. For this reason and also the recent emergence of the rogue #warwick on QuakeNet, I reasoned that the name change was a good idea.
I cannot deny that there are good arguments for tradition and keeping the name everyone knows. I think the success of the idea comes down to whether or not enough of the regulars, in particular those who administer the channel bots, can be convinced to make the switch.
...at least, this is what I'd like everyone to believe...
The truth
The real reason is completely, totally and utterly selfish! I don't like it when there's two channels on different servers with the same name. Heh, how am I supposed to go troll the rogue #warwick with accusations of fraudulenticity and counterfeitness while remaining connected to the real one? Two connections writing to the same log file! "Ray, whatever you do, don't cross the streams!"...
"phunf, fucking say something" and other humourous quotage
While we're on the subject of IRC retardedness there's this guy phunf from Filmsoc who has this habit of joining #warwick and then leaving within 2 seconds before anyone else can react. We think it's because he's looking for other people from Filmsoc and when he sees there's none there he just leaves again because he doesn't know the rest of us very well, if at all. We got fed up of this and so we (well, really just Amy, although the rest of us helped) rigged ChanServ so that he'd get a shock!
17/12 23:25 - 17/12 23:28
--> phunf (~phunf@dsl-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.zen.co.uk) has joined #warwick
--- ChanServ gives voice to phunf
<ChanServ> .:{phunf}:. phunf, fucking say something!
<RjY> hahahahahahahaha
<Matt> What? That's er... surreal.
<RjY> we have waited for this day
* phunf blinks and takes a step back.
<graham> wot?
<RjY> we got sick of phunf joining the channel then quitting 2
seconds later so we rigged chanserv
<RjY> because none of us could react fast enough and type something
before he quit
* phunf smirks
<Matthew> I thought he had to be authenticated for it to work.
* Matthew shrugs
<RjY> Matthew: yes
<RjY> but we put his hostmask into the auto-authentication list
<Matthew> Ah.
<Pete> !kick Pete
<Pete> Hmmmm
* Pete raises an eyebrow
<Pete> I can't kick myself
Sorry I couldn't resist leaving in another Peteism on the end there. We would put Pete on the access list but the last time I gave him ops he banned bisc which you can't do because it is a program and so won't see the funny side, i.e. be able to recover. We had to crash it and wait for its crontab entry to restart it. After a more recent loss of service (the one that took out webnewsstats)
22/12 00:00 - 22/12 00:00
<RjY> bisc your downtime has made you even more retarded than usual
<bisc> RjY: what?
<RjY> hahaha
Well I thought it was funny. Anyway #warwick's other bot, itsrbot, is simply a relay between the old #warwick on efnet and the new one on astrolink. One day a long time ago I sat down and thought about how itsrbot would always make certain responses under certain circumstances, and given how you could tell bisc to do the same I wondered "Could you get them to feed off each other..."
<RjY> bisc: unknown command !heh is <reply>!heh
<RjY> bisc: unknown command !heh
<bisc> !heh
<itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
<bisc> !heh
<itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
<bisc> !heh
<itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
<bisc> !heh
<itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
<bisc> !heh
<itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
......
Before I start I feel obliged to link to The Campaign For A Real Christmas Number One (although I can understand that merely posting a link won't in any way directly help them...)
Yesterday, you (RjY) typed...
> PS Something interesting might be about to happen, at the start of next month.
Unfortunately, rather than leaving this as a mysterious comment for a couple of days, I blew the gaff on #warwick last night, so, here's the deal: I am going to have a job interview. It's about typing stuff into computers and the advert mentioned Unix and I won't have to travel too far from my house so I figure it's worth the risk.
I'm not going to say who it is for. I don't want to then hear someone telling me "hey ive heard of them theyre really shite lolololol!" I don't want to be put off, thank you very much. Furthermore I am aware that I'm supposed to be a goodfornothing layabout with no future or prospects. This is why I'm not getting excited; after all I don't yet actually have the job. I could still very well perform miserably in the interview and end up more depressed about getting rejected than usual.
Following on from yesterday, no-one's yet complained about my new darker colours for hyperlinks but I must say I wasn't aware when I wrote the piece that you were talking about your company's uber-rich chairman. Oh well everyone makes mistakes I suppose. I like the new colour scheme:)
Anyone who uses webnewsstats might notice that it hasn't updated for a while. This is because of a power outage. Other casualties include bisc, #warwick's modified InfoBot.
(that's the real #warwick, on Astrolink, not the rogue one that's recently appeared on QuakeNet. When I heard about it I thought, for some reason, of the medieval church and its rival Popes. Except that no-one really cares. Anyway I think given its use by mostly graduates the real #warwick should give up its unholy past and rename itself to #aaw)
I've just had a heart stopping moment in which I thought "Oh my god I've broken Felix's server!" when a security upgrade of MySQL packages hung. When I tried to rectify things manually the machine spontaneously rebooted itself. Oh well. It seems to be okay now, at least I hope it is.
From Doomworld: John Romero's site has been updated with, among other things, a copy of Lee Killough's Classic Doom site. I've always wanted to see this, but it had been taken down before I'd discovered much of Doom's presence on the internet. As you might imagine I'm quite pleased - it almost makes up for Romero having all his hair cut off...
PS Something interesting might be about to happen, at the start of next month.
PPS I like posting cryptic remarks. Sometimes they are explained, sometimes not. That's the fun!
Proposition: People who brag about the size of their Christmas tree are clearly compensating for something.
I don't know what is implied by bragging about how yours has 150 coloured lights wrapped around it! It's also a good opportunity to post this:
06/12 01:00 - 06/12 01:01
* Pete strokes his 3rd leg
<RjY> freak
<RjY> you have three legs
* Pete scowls at Rob
<RjY> you should be in a menagerie
<Pete> Yeah, I have three legs
<Pete> One of them is only about ten inches long though
<RjY> so you have a deformed third leg?
<RjY> cripple
<Pete> One could say that
<Pete> IT doesn't have a knee either
<Amy> just stop, now
I'm slightly surprised that as opposed to saying "freak", I didn't make a bad masturbation joke. I suppose that would have been too predictable.
Additional: People who suggest that no-one should spend more than £20 on a Christmas present deserve the same fate as the goatse guy.
If the goatse man (don't click on that) is unemployed, then maybe he too feels unable to splash out more than twenty quid on Christmas presents.
Darker links
On a whim I decided to darken the colours of visited and unvisited links. This is a change to a design decision made nearly two and a half years ago, so may take me some getting used to. I hope readers fare better; every so often I'd get a complaint. Feel free to send me any comments if you are sufficiently troubled or pleased enough by this miniscule change.
(They're still colours from the old 16-colour RISC OS desktop palette, but at the time I'd decided the darkest grey was too similar to black. However most browsers will by default underline links and change the appearance of the mouse pointer; also many sites define both colours to be the same or at least so similar it takes you six months to spot there is a difference.)
I've already told most people who I know read this site but I figured I'd put in a note about our dog Sue, who sadly died on Monday. She was a happy and playful creature, in particular whose "balloon keepie uppie" skills were second to none. She will be missed.
OMFG it's only nine in the morning!
Welcome to the wonderful world of having an internet connection that works at 9am on a Tuesday morning! Yes, cable was installed yesterday, and it is good. I've hardly exploited the possibilities of the connection speed yet, unless you count downloading Alien Vendetta (from gamers.org, txt) in only two and a half minutes (on my old connection it would have taken around fifty) or running an ssh session on triv.org.uk for which the delay between keypress and response wasn't annoying to the point of hair-pulling insanity.
How cable was set up
First of all, I had to get up early and take my desk to bits and move it into the back room. The engineers turned up later, and performed the installation, they were here for about an hour and a quarter. During this time one of them had to go off and get an enormous length of cable, so we stood around for half an hour drinking tea. They were quite friendly people with many humourous stories about previous installations, walls falling down etc. They also told me that if I get a cable splitter I can get the free channels on cable TV from the line, apparently just go to Maplin, they have all the bits...
After they'd gone I put the room back together and eventually arrived at the point where I could try to get the thing to work. Completely ignoring the instructions not to connect the cable modem to the computer until the broadband installer program told me to (well, if I'd obeyed that, I'd've never plugged it in at all, since the installer is for Windows, heh) I blithely stuck the ethernet cable into my network card, causing a load of lights on the card to turn on. Then I installed dhclient, placed the line
iface eth0 inet dhcp
into the file /etc/network/interfaces and typed in the command ifup eth0 to bring up the interface. Typing ifconfig then reported that I had an IP and it turned out that dhclient had rewritten my /etc/resolv.conf to point to ntl's nameservers, so I could do DNS lookups. At this point I was like "woohoo"
The penultimate step was registering the account. I'd quite deliberately copied that URL into IRC the other day, so that it would be in my log file for when I needed it, so I typed it in and followed the instructions. I was happy to see the "modify" button when it went "your username is rob.young2", I was like, no way, I'm not having a number on the end...
So that all went smoothly. When it was done, I was briefly concerned to note that I still couldn't get to any of the usual sites but I vaguely remembered reading that you needed to reload the cable modem's configuration so I did ifdown eth0 then ifup eth0 again, and it worked. So I went on #warwick and shouted about it.
Thanks to Iain Thomas, the guy who really does know everything, for telling me a lot of useful stuff about cable modems and networking and stuff over the past couple of weeks and before, and also to a guy called Robin Walker for the cable modem troubleshooting site (but guess who I originally got that link from, yeah...)
The telephone
One of the advantages, or, depending on your point of view, disadvantages, of this shiny new connection, is that it doesn't use the phone line. However, yesterday in all the excitement something was discovered about the way our phones are wired up that is hilarious.
When we first moved here there was only one phone socket and it came in through the wall above the front door, so the only phone was in the front room. A year or so ago, we had this guy come round to put in some extensions. It turned out that the easiest way to put extensions in without destroying the coving in the front room or having to run cables up the stairs or whatever was this:
- Phoneline comes from the telegraph pole, half way down the side of house, into my room, upstairs
- Line comes back out of my room, the rest of the way down the side of the house, and back through the wall to the first extension, in the same area as the old single phone point
- The second extension by the kitchen is reached by laying the cable under the edge of the carpet along the wall
Here's the good bit. Note the first phone point is the one in my room. Yesterday, I took the room apart, which included unplugging the modem from the socket there. Later on we find we've missed some calls. But I wasn't on the internet then! What's going on? It seems, if there's nothing plugged into the socket in my room, the phones downstairs on the extensions don't get incoming calls! Heh, so I can still stop people phoning up if I want to, I just pull the cable out the socket in my room. Fantastic, and extremely funny:)
