Older blog entries for Bryce (starting at number 905)

Tuesday

Stayed at home and played chess against the computer rather a frivilous task and I got beat each and every time. No surprise there. I was hoping it would become a little less disheartening than checkmate in less than 5 moves.

Watched some anime videos.

Rather a quiet day.

Monday

It's a reasonably dry day, so set out for Castlewellen to go wandering around the castle lake. It's a nice nature trail with some rather daft sculptures strewn around the walk.

Castlewellen forest park is currently boasting about it's new hedge maze as being the largest in Europe so mum and myself went to have a look and a dander through it. Well, at the moment, the hedge is trying to grow and seems to consist of only yew trees. I'm sure when it's got maybe 5 or 6 years growth in it it'll be very nice. There is an 'incentive' to the maze which is to work your way to the centre and ring the bell. Umm yes well... solved the maze and gave the bell a ring. 2 wrong turns. Not bad.

Nipped into Newry to run a few messages and sign for a couple of items. Bought a couple of magazines covering linux, digital photograpgy, financials and home theatre equipment (specifaly DVD players). Actually come to think of it, my DVD order hasn't arrived yet 8/ I better poke the appropriate people about that.

*Sigh* Another two days to go before the BT engineer appears and installs a 2nd line. I'm betting that he'll find some excuse that he can't even do that.

Sunday

Woke up gloriously late (11:30)

Fiddled with Zen* for a while balancing out FS space contraints then read though the local build it yourself trade rag for computers. Prices have fallen a good bit and I considered building not just a new development machine for myself but a new ZenIV box as well. I'll think on that a while

Popped into town to do some shopping. I'd expected it to be fairly quiet but not a bit of it.

Bought a number of magazines covering linux, digital photography and shares. Also added a couple of books to read to the pile.

Dandered across from the newsagents to Dixons and bought a couple of USB extension cables because I'm fed up fiddling with USB connections behind the back of my machine where I can't clearly see the connector. Hellishly expensive (11UKP ~17USD).

More kernel module writing which has been similar to playing Russian roulette. <tap> <tap> <tap> <boom>

Watched a few episodes of Blackadder.

Saturday

Went to Belfast with Keith for the afternoon/evening. Headed into Shaftsbury square and went shopping. I was intrested in looking around for a copy of Micro Mart ( a trade rag for computer components) as I couldn't find it in eason's back in Newry. Oddly, I did find it in Eason's in Belfast but I need to tackle some of the staff back in Newry and see if it's a case of them not carrying it or simply being sold out.

Keith wanted to go get some presents for his brother so we walked on around to look into WH Smiths, HMV and Virgin Megastore. One thing I noticed was that DVD does not appear to have taken off much in the provance. I can see that I'll be doing lots of online ordering in the future 8/

Having had a look through a few HiFi/Electrical stores it seems to be some unwritten commandment that all DVD players will be silver. Can't find any that are black. Again this looks like someting I'm going to ahev to order up. *sigh*

Towards the evening we headed over to get pizza from a slightly upmarket restraunt. Nice place a little slow though. Unfortunately having been somewhat spoilt with refills being free in North Carolina, it's somewhat of an annoyance to suddenly be charged for the refills. (1.30 UKP ~2.00USD a glass)

Went on from Shaftsbury square across the westlink to the Odessey village which houses 12 cinema screens, an ice rink and a number of restraunts. Got a coffee from the Hard Rock cafe and mused over various happenings during the week. Headed on upstairs to sort out tickets for 'The Bourne Identity' which was playing about 50 minutes later, so we just strolled around the complex. Eventually stoppedand looked over a railing to the floors below where we could see some woman and her friend being refused admitance to a nightclub below making a huge scene about it for about for ages. She'd still not given up trying to get into the nightclub by the time we went to see the film. Silly woman.

Film was fairly good, though possibly they had cranked the sound up a little too high.

Left the complex at 23:55 and drove on home. A good day out.

Friday

Still raining but mum wanted to run a few messages down in Armagh, so I tagged along for the ride. I used to go to the collage in Armagh so I was curious to see how much it had changed since I'd last been there. There are a few new shops and a new supermarket on the Mall. The main high street has been converted into a pedestrian precient but alas every car in the city was parked either side along it. It's still open as a throughfare for traffic which is an abysmal mistake given the massive traffic jam that I saw there. I think Armagh council are just going to have to bite the bullet and annoy all the car drivers by errecting bollards to prevent traffic (except delivery trucks) from travelling the pedestrian precient.

Newry sort of has the same problems in the Buttercrane and Monaghan/Hill street locations. They need a massive traffic warden zero tolerance crackdown otherwise the City is going to choke to death on it's own transport problems. I see no reason why peoples thoughlessness in parking should be tolerated. Especially when I see people parking in disabled parking slots who arn't eligable to park there. Sometimes you gotta be cruel to be kind but traffic in both Cities is out of control.

Noticed a number of places that I used to be favorite haunts have now closed which I was a little upset about as they were excellent tea houses/cafes. Overall Armargh hasn't changed that much.

Back home contimued ploughing through books. This is really the only time that I have time to increase my skills as RHAT didn't exactly have an employee education program. I think Havoc will eventually have to conceed that I was right. Unless you keep your skillset current, you will fall by the wayside and never be able to control your own career path as more skilled people close you out of the marketplace.

Thursday

Rained heavily today so didn't go anywhere.

Spent most of the time at home reading POSIX, IPC and kernel books.

I wonder what the folks back in the engineering dept are scapegoating onto me. (It's traditional to blame the last person who left for all thats wrong in the universe) I wonder if they're still playing Unreal Tornament.

Wednesday

Rain stayed away so we tripped off to Tullymore Forest park and went walking around the forest trails there. I highly recommend the forest trail there as it's very well maintained. Very scenic. Spent a few hours hiking around the park.

Went on from there to look at Newcastle as there was supposed to be a high nap tide today and I was curious to see if there would be any flooding as a result. Seems that Newcastle will survive a good while yet.

Back home, did a bit more Zen* tidyup. I'm a bit perplexed that we've run out of space on ZenIIIb already. nm is having a little look at ZenIIIa atm so we'll see what he's got to say on the matter.

Tuesday

Whee. Heavy rain. Rained all day. It's been so long since I've seen a decent downpour. NC is fine if you like near endless sunshine, but that gets horribly monotonous after a few months.

Picked through the Linux device drivers book. Wrote a few test modules without upsetting the kernel too much. Theres a number of USB devices I have that I'd like to get up and running under linux.

Poped online and started taking stock of the shape of the Zen* cluster. Lots of jobs to sort out 8/ ZenII only has a couple of weeks to go to pass the 'been running continously for a year' mark. I've promised _rmk_ that I'll update the kernel then, though there is a running concern that because ZenII hasn't been rebooted for such a long time we're unsure if it will reboot ok or not. Ummm...

Rearranged some of the weblogs which were somewhat large and tidied up the ftp archive space a bit. ZenIIIb seems to be out of disk space for ftp use. I think I'll subject it to log analysis and work out whats being mirrored that people simply arn't downloading and nuke it.

_A_ managed to tread into hot water by nuking mum's Zen account and a few others. He made the clasic mistake of believeing lastlog which is notoriously broken. Especially with Zen having been up and running so long many active accounts have simply dropped off the end of thelog. Corrected the problem before mum found out. Actually a number of accounts went the same way and I spent a while ressurecting them.

Monday

Walked along the towpath at Pontzpass. The council have seen fit to bury about 5 million of EU money into restoring the Newry canal. So far they seem to have managed to erect some Millenium signposts complete with engraved phone numbers for some business. Can't say that that impresses me one bit. 1) said phone number will probably not work as I noticed that the area code has already changed 2) you don't go around to some ancient monument and find an ancient advert for "McManus the elder's pork pie, only 1 groat" chiseled onto it.

I believe they are supposed to clean out the canal and have some tourist canal rides running up and down it, however, looking at the canal, I can see that that could take quite some years to do as it's heavily overgrown and silted. EU money hard at work. <pfft>. Well at least the towpath itself is in good repair.

Went home a few hours later and sorted through a load of paperwork that I needed to organise. Still trying to create space in the bedroom for items that I brough back from the US. Fortunately there's nothing in it that I'm desperatly needing so the status quo suits me fine. For the moment.

Arranged for to have BT install a second line for my internet connectivity. Unfortunaltely they can't even give me ISDN out here, let alone broadband. Worse thay can't come out for *9* days. I feel somewhat let don by a company thats going all out to say how wonderful they are at giving people broadband. I guess I'm going to be looking at satalite in the future but satalite is expensive so I probably won't be able to aford that until January. *sigh*

Sunday

Clamber over the Cloughmore stone and Sleive Martin. Much unwanted exercise. Naturally, my heel started to play up and got quite sore about 3/4's of the way up the main climb. <mutter>. Explain how this is supposed to healthy to me again please?