It's been a long long time since I last posted anything at all, so this is a post to warn of impending doom. I've switched from a static html website (well, it was statically generated when I edited source files I then ran a bash script that fired off a perl script several times...) to a fully dynamic, django 1.0 backed website - this might mean that I manage to update things more often!

I've also taken the opportunity to convert the previous content in to ReST, so it's actually easier to edit too. There's still work to do - but it's now "good enough" to be used, and I'll split the code out in to better chunks later on.

So, anyways - that's what I've done with my day - so I expect all the aggregators to now break on the new feeds...

Been watching the snooker - Selby was playing really quite well yesterday, and started the early session this morning looking promising, he seems to have lost it this evening though, which is a shame - and at 12 to 4 down starting tomorrow, he's got a hell of a lot to make up tomorrow.

Higgins isn't playing to his best, but he's being more consistent than Selby, it'll be a hell of a final if they both dig in tomorrow.

That is all.

Happy birthday David, you old git you ;)

We're at 5 minutes to midnight, and it appears that Joost is the new TV - it appears to be getting some reaonable coverage at the moment, but looks far too much like another closed app using proprietary protocols - the world has gone DRM crazy - someone stop it, I want to get off. DRM is a myth, if you can play it, you can copy it (not neccessarily easily, but it's still possible). The NewScientist article is quite interesting in the claim of "piracy-proof"... if you can play the video, you can capture it, if you can listen to music you can record it, when is the media industry going to realise that DRM is a very dumb idea that shouldn't have been allowed to get this far - pirates can (and always will) find a way, how about going back to trusting your users rather than tarring them all with the "you're a pirate" brush. The Register's article appears to have a typo in it... well, unless you really do need a 500mbps line in order to use Joost - seems unlikely, I think they meant 500kbps. Anyways - nice idea, not sure that it's better than anything else though, I'll continue buying DVDs that let me play back when I have no interweb connection.

Back to being at 5 minutes to midnight, eeep! We're all going to die! Maybe it's the introduction of DRM that's led to so much terrorism, or maybe just that the media industry appears to be out to shaft everyone. Bah.

Only one other article has caught my attention this morning, it's another look at the Apple iPhone, it appears that no one is actually getting a reasonable amount of time to play and review this device, and it brings up a number of my issues with the iPhone.

So, yes, that's the morning covered - maybe more this evening.

Just finally got round to watching cars (bought it earlier in the week, just watched it, damned glad I bought it). I'm a pixar film fan, so when cars was announced as the last film last year before moving to another distributor I was a little pessamistic as to what the quality of the film was going to be, I must say, I'm still very happy with pixar - now, let's see what happens now that they're owned by the evil giant that is Disney - hopefully they'll still leave the pixar team as is and we'll get lots more quality films with lots of imagination behind them. (Yes, OK - I'm a big kid, and I also like most of the stuff that comes out of dreamworks studios, though they tend to have less story line - shrek is rather good though).

So, yeah - just thought I'd post to say... If you haven't seen Cars, go get a copy, watch it, it's fun :)

In case I totally avoid mentioning it tomorrow (quite likely), Merry Christmas peeps. Have a good one, don't drink too much :)

Fantastic beginning to the weekend - was in Norwich from Thursday, saw the Dave and the Becca on thursday night - many many thanks to them for floor space thurs and fri and for generally just being fantastic people (with tea and coffee, no less - and a silly beepy tivo box for even more fun - and for introducing me to the american chopper type show thingummy - and for letting me watch the a-team!)

Then, serious amounts of thanks to Noodles and Kathy (who I appear to not be able to find a link for :( ) for inviting me to the wedding and the reception - was fantastic - you're both such absolutely lovely people! Pictures so far appear to be available from Dave and Becca's Gallery, Burly's Gallery and Steve McIntyre's Gallery - hopefully more soon... specially from Dave Noble (can't find him bah he needs more google juice the damned slacker ;) which should be cool! Saturday was absolutely brilliant - including talking about atmosperic physics, failing a-levels, and random universities doing questions (hey, I can't entirely remembere - someone bought a half barrel of nero and some port, and lots of red wine... I wasn't entirely sober ;).

Saturday morning was a bit of a blur - I remember watching the A-Team and then food in the Glass House with Dave and Becca (thanks guys, you rock!) then I wandered to the Fat Cat and met with Eli and Dave Noble, a while later Rob and James and Kaz arrived and we played Munchkin, which was a very very silly game but quite fun (thanks James and Kaz - you're both mildly insane - but it's always fun when you come to the pub!).

Went home with Eli, tried to escape because of the annoying giggly evil students from hell, started wandering back towards the train station and a random bench to sleep on, then got emotional black mail and ended up back at Eli's - ho hum.

Went to catch train at around 10am Sunday morning - discovered trains from Norwich weren't running - replacement bus service from Norwich to Diss left Norwich at around 10:25am, got to Diss, had a 10 to 15 minute wait there (mmmmm, bacon roll and a coffee!) then straight to Liverpool Street, wandered straight off to the underground and got the circle line to Victoria, got to Victoria around 13:40 ish, wandered to look at the boards and saw a 14:17 from Victoria round half the planet to Brighton - thought to myself "not in any rush" and wandered off and found food and then wandered round the WHSmith in Victoria station.... got out of there, glanced at the board again, Victoria to Brighton train had been cancelled - wondered what to do - announcement over the tannoy that to get to Brighton the best idea was to travel to East Croyden and the train would meet us there. So, grabbed that train, got to East Croyden, jumped on the train (first 8 carriages Brighton, back four Plymouth... so, jumped on somewhere around the 7th carriage from what I thought was the front - turned out to be the back - wasn't entirely sure what was going on so when it stopped at Gatwick wandered further to the front of the train a lot, found an empty pair of seats and sat down. Got to Three Bridges and there was a delay, it was announced on the train as "We're waiting for the conductor, he's missed a train and is currently in a taxi, there's at least a 10 minute delay before he gets here", so a load of us bundled out of the train on the basis that that was very much long enough for a cigarette break - just as we were finishing the conductor turned up, so we all got back on the train for the "scenic" route to Brighton (yay for going round the coast), finally got in to Brighton at 17:05, so wasn't too bad, only about 6 and a half hours for a 3 and a half or 4 hour train journey ;). Grabbed chinese on the way home, watched some Morse - all was well with the world.

Lots of beeping this morning around 8.30am, ignored it, finally re-woke up at about 10:30am (ish) - watched some more Morse, grabbed some lunch and then watched more Morse until going to the pub quiz tonight.

Charly, Julius and Pieter turned up for a quick drink and then all left me to fend for my self at the quiz - I came in my usual place - very last (by over 20 points, no less ;) - but had fun, so who cares :)

Anyways - it's now tuesday morning, so probably time for some good ol' fashioned sleep type stuff... might put on the next episode of Morse for the hell of it (might even manage to stay awake through it!).

Tomorrow is probably more Morse, some work on the django packages (just got the first bug report in for those) and possibly applying some of the patches to the scrobbler packages to close some of those bug reports too. It appears that upstream for xmms-scrobbler has disappeared a bit, so might have to look at that a lot closer over the next few months - have some time off work soon - last day this year being the 15th (also happens to be when work are planning the "christmas do").

Wow - that was a ridiculously longer post than I though it was going to be! Night all!

1. I'm not attractive (OK - so less learned, more reaffirmed)

2. Not all hills lead back to the flat

3. See 2. (OK - so I left $club which I can't remember thinking "tired, home time", wished people good byes, and looked for a hill, usually any going up are back to the flat... wandered up the hill, carried on wandering, discovered pizza shop that I normally order from, said "Oh bollocks" and started heading in the right direction, down the hill, across the road, back up the other hill. Sucks to be on the wrong side of London Road.)

4. Sleep is good. That's what I'm just about to do.So, what have I learned today?

EDIT: OK - writing an entry in vim at nearly 3am when you've been to a club results in the unfortunate side effect of somehow managing to put several copies of the post in the entry - BAH!

It's all gone, I have not beard... bring it back!

There are photos.

It's been an odd week at work, and I've started doing rather more Sudoku puzzles than most sane people - I've found that currently the guardian Sudoku puzzle takes me the longest to get through, though I'm slowly getting better at it... I might actually start being able to see the patterns more quickly soon!

Anyways - in other news JD resigned on Tuesday, so we've only got him at work for another few weeks before he disappears in to the ether (well, not so much in to the ether, but I won't be working with him anymore, eeeeep - this means more work for me!), which also prompted a pay rise (hooray!). Now just to keep up with the good work!

Oh, and on Monday we won the Hop Poles pub quiz! Yay! Where in this case "we" is me, a guy that I'd met in the pub a couple of Mondays before and some of his friends. Was much fun! Tomorrow being Monday again I'll be back in the pub for the quiz and see who turns up this time :)

So, today was "interesting", but aside from the working part of the day, I was in a pub... Now, this isn't a new experience for me, as most people will know... but anyways - the subject came up about "religion" (kinda), as I don't actually believe that anyone exists, but do believe in the fact that I find myself in this environment that I can't actually prove does or doesn't exist, and that I then deal with that on a day by day basis of "shit, it's time to go to work..." my view on the world may be "a little" skewed by other people's standards...

So, anyways - it came to a point where someone was saying that "animals" don't do "xyz" and so they can't be as intelligent as us... now my view on this is that animals may have already done xyz and decided that "survival" in this environment is the key to sucess, ergo basic instinct assuming that they all know mortality (which if they didn't the wouldn't reproduce) is that the only thing in this world that actually matters for any given species is survival of the species.

Now, that being the case, and the general case being survival of the fittest, why on earth did we invent this medium (the internet) for talking to each other - do we really need to know what's happing several thousand miles away? If we ditched the technology and went back to our roots, what seperates us from the thousands of other species on the planet?

Isn't it possible that other species have already been through the stages that we are still going through, come out the other end and worked out that, actually, on balance, it's better to hunt/gather and survive than mess with the delicate balance of nature?

So, get out the way the messy politics, the correctness, the complete stupidity that is current human nature and go back to the basics - eat, sleep, hunt/gather... we've ended up making the world a much more complicated place than it actually needs to be... and, at the end of the day, what do we actually gain from this?

Anyways - just a random brain dump after a potentially stupidly long chat in an establishment that is setup purely to intoxicate it's customers...

Night peeps.

Brett.

That was a fantastic evening out, went to the beach around 7ish, met people around 7.30ish (Matt, Sarah and Charly), watched the world go by whilst waiting for Chris, then had a fantastic picnic courtesy of Sarah - that was really nice... Back to Matt and Sarah's when it started to get "a bit chilly" on the beach, then poker! What more could you want from an evening out? Was absolutely fantastic - many thanks to Matt and Sarah who both went to bed before the Poker had finished (incidently, I won, so... err... Matt, you owe me a tenner ;)

Now there's talk of setting up a semi-regular poker night - should be fantastic fun :)

bounce

(now I think it's time to collapse in a heap, maybe after a cool shower though - it's just too damned hot!)

I wish when people made critisism they made it constructive rather than destructive.

So, that was Saturday then... I managed to get nothing at all done, but I did manage to watch some snooker, Taxi, Taxi 2 and Taxi 3... So maybe it wasn't wasted?

Apparently it's St Georges' day tomorrow... Hmm... I think that means that I shall find a pub sometime after lunchish and have a few celebratory pints for the old, somewhat dead, bloke!

Some people don't like opinions. Especially ones that might actually finally get us somewhere near a standards compliant web. Oh well, never mind, their loss. (Oh, and I really do not advocate the use of line breaking, either you're in a paragraph, or you're not - why do you need a manual line break? Is it because you can't write?).

But whatever. Thanks huggie for your frank opinion and whining about me.

I've just finished reading Excession - started slowly, got good in the middle, then sort of dropped off a bit at the end, which was a shame. Enjoyed it though :)

Next to read is A Song of Stone

Then there's a list of other books that I'll be working through... one step at a time, eh? ;)

I had gone outside the flat to let the handbrake off for sunflowerinrain and on the way back to the flat I decided to stop for a cigarette - I mean, this is literally just across the road from where sunflowerinrain parked (just opposite the flat), I was standing there for, oh, about 30 seconds when a police car pulled up right next to me. The guy got out of the car and said "We're looking for someone matching your description, what are you doing out here? Just out for a smoke?", so obviously I replied with "Yes". He then proceeded to take all my details, and check my ID and phone in to check that I wasn't known/wanted. Apparently I'm not the scruffy person they are looking for!

I'm still boggling. Today has been weird.

Here goes a quick summary of this week... Monday + Tuesday, looking through lots of bash and perl, trying to find a nice way to fix it, still not found. Lots of other things needing doing, mostly a busy start to the week. Wednesday - good start to the day, stuff started to make sense. Then I get The News at about 11:00 (I hadn't been keeping up with LJ, and when I was looking at it, it turned out I wasn't logged in, so when I got the news I nipped over to LJ and logged in and felt sad, lots). Lost half the rest of the day thinking about it. Managed to get to a state where I was alright again, stopped reading LJ for the afternoon. Came home. Slept. Today - mostly productive, still not over the shock.

Maybe I can get some coherent words and thoughts tomorrow?

Must get back in to doing my NM - sorry Myon, I've been distracted for too long! I'll get back at it, erm, soon!

Tomorrow, well, it's Friday - a whole weekend to come and think about things.

Right - so things that have come up this week... I appear to not understand the world - or it doesn't understand me - I'm not sure which but either way it doesn't really matter, the world doesn't really exist (just how can you get something from nothing?). Apparently, according to people, I have a version of other people stored in my head that is not what those people really are - and my version of people apparently differs from other peoples version of the same people - I don't understand this - I base everything on what people say - I try not to extrapolate other information, and I'm quite used to being entirely ignored. I tend to see patterns, and believe in the patterns more than what's actually said, though - maybe that's where I go wrong?

Anyways - this weekend - work permitting - I might finally get round to answering the e-mails that have been sitting in my INBOX for an age that I've been meaning to get round to for, well, months - especially NM questions - they really need answering, and I should get to that - so tomorrow morning, that's the goal - assuming that nothing break horribly between now and then!

Today I've mostly been looking at some nasty SQL, it did however finally make total sense to me, and I think that it should now (mostly) work. There's some extra ideas that might be worth looking at, but nothing too taxing.

Quite tired at the moment - which is strange as it's still before 10pm. That's not usual for me. Maybe I need to take up caffeine again, I actually really miss the taste of good coffee - which I wasn't expecting... but I refuse to drink decaff coffee on the basis that it's not what coffee should be - it's kinda like diet, caffeine free coke. Pointless, tasteless, boring.

Anything else? Hmmm. Not at the moment - but I can tell this is going to be a strange month.

Well, the laptop has decided that it doesn't like power... doesn't like it much at all... appears to be an issue with the socket on the back of the laptop so I get to send it back again... that's always fun :) This time, however, I've moved... so I suspect that I better give them a new address and things when I call this time!

It's currently leaning against the wall with the power plugged in so that it gets enough charge for me to back things up from it tomorrow and send it back, after phoning the nice acer support lot, again... hopefully, though, it should only be gone for 3 days when I send it off :)

This does mean that I have to sit infront of the other machine when I'm at home though... maybe it's time to purchase a cheap laptop for general abuse... or emergencies... or taking places... hmm... the current laptop is more of a desktop replacement type laptop... I could do with one that's more suitable for lugging about. So if anyone knows of cheap, functional laptop with reasonable specs and a >2 hour battery life, I'd be interested :)

This week I shall mostly be not drinking caffiene... next week I might add to this with mostly giving up nicotine. Beware those around.