10/05/2003 @14:25:46 ^17:04:05

hardware upgrades

This was my backups plan, which I made about a year ago. Get a big hard disc onto which to copy the current one and a CD writer for the important stuff. My current disc is a 20 gig disc, so I thought, 80 gigs would be enough to keep two copies and still have tons left over for some other ideas I have (like a local copy of the idgames archive; the mirrors at gamers.org and sunet.se are the ones I use the most) Then I have a CD writer, which would have other obvious uses, as well.

It takes me ages to actually spend any money though. The number of times I searched out products, made shopping lists on various websites and then failed to click the "buy now" button was quite astounding; that is, until last week, when in dire need of cheering up, I told my mum the whole thing and she said I should do it because spending some money for once would be good for my soul. I'm still annoyed that I had to tell her about it before I did it though. It's like I still have to ask permission before I do anything.

So the other day, all the stuff turned up and yesterday I installed it all. Yeah, for some reason I didn't mention to anyone that I was going to get the hard disc as well but there you go. I haven't partitioned it yet, I'm still wondering how to do it best. I don't want partitions that are too big, fsck takes too bloody long to check them. I shall tweak the number of times the partitions have been mounted to stagger their checks across different reboots.

The CD writer, on the other hand, is known to work; as usual thanks to Iain for telling me a lot of helpful stuff. The CD Writing HOWTO was useful too; I decided to build the CD support as modules in my kernel, so I needed to screw about with my modules.conf, as well as all the symlinking in /dev/, mucking about with /etc/fstab and putting myself into the right groups so I can access both my CD drives without needing to be root. But it reads discs and writes them, I made an audio CD last night with a couple of tracks on, as a test, and wiped it afterwards.

snafu updates

I was rather enjoying being right at the bottom of the table, but of course this update will screw all that over.

Welcome to the owner of its newest tracked site, Merlywerl aka Catslave aka... (he told me he didn't want his real name listed. Shame about the address, then...) On the other hand it seems Nelis has given up doing Robo Blog again, and Lllama, Inc. is about to close due to real life (Felix is having to move house) I thought if it ever did close, it'd be because the server it runs on isn't powerful enough to run what Felix wanted to do with it. Anyway, it's sad to see two of the original tracked sites go, even if it might only be temporary, but, life goes on.

There was a weird bug that made it fail to detect certain types of site changes. I fixed this, but made a mistake in elementary logic, which made it even worse. But that's been fixed too. Thanks to Matt for pointing out that updates to Pete's site were no longer being noticed; I simply assumed he simply hadn't been updating his site. But this would imply that I believed snafu to be infallible, which I find odd.

However, apparently for some the page has problems with web caches. I suppose I need to put some cache control headers in but the current way the site's code is organised makes that non-trivial:(

Finally, Dave from Link of the Day emailed me asking about its source code. I had always planned to release it, I just haven't got round to it yet. You know how it is, you can't just release it, you have to comment it, document it, etc... I hate writing documentation:/

meeting people

One. Elliot came back to Coventry for a party last weekend and dropped in to see me. The usual thing happened, played records, talked a load of nonsense, played Spheres of Chaos and Marsquake, and took the piss out of each other. I'd forgotten how much he makes me laugh sometimes.

Two. Later that day I went to another party, the one which I mentioned briefly in the previous update. Other than failing to tell my story, I managed to continue the running gag of taking lumps of wood to Matt's house by dragging along an enormous branch that was taller than most of the people there. Also Nelis was there, so I was able to talk to him about stuff from the SA forums ("STOP! HAMMERTIME!") and we went round bursting the balloons with a big knife (yes you may remember I did that after my party as well) Yes I know there was other stuff going on. Alcohol, bringing estranged couples back together since 1862.

Three. The rogue #warwick had a meeting in a pub, so I decided to go to it. I was feeling confident right up until we got to the pub, then my natural cowardice in the face of strangers took over and as usual I failed miserably to talk to anyone I didn't already know. I made a whole load of those flower things out of PostIt notes and there were some interesting drawings made of all present. I believe they are being scanned and uploaded somewhere, but I don't know where yet. Also a list was constructed of everyone's greatest exam failures. Yes, thankyou, I am so funny. In fact I'd forgotten about the stupid joke I made here so seeing it again made me giggle, which was nice because as usual I need all the cheering up I can get.

Four. Just this afternoon Bex, Rich (I'd link to his "Things I've Done Today That Bex Thinks Were Wrong" page if he finished making it) and Julie came round my house for an hour. Bex, who was in the area to see her favourite dentist again, wouldn't tell me from whom that quote came, only that it wasn't who I thought it was. However I did hear some funny gossip: e.g. apparently having a weblog can get you a girlfriend!

(Speaking of the site that quote was about I might as well throw this in here, as it's got nowhere else to go: I was quite pleased to hear about Amy getting her interview, because I wrote the covering letter. Seems she forgot to mention this, in fact in her 3rd April update it says "Rob phoned up and more or less invited himself round", well that's why, heh. The long delay isn't so surprising, companies often collect together all applications and don't look at them until the deadline has passed, so you don't hear back until a couple of weeks after it; at least, this is what happened the one time I got a job interview)