Older blog entries for Denny (starting at number 5)

Someone (hi Fare) asked for certificates on #linpeople, so I wandered over to see if my login woes had been fixed... astoundingly, I got in, so I thought I'd better update my diary while I was here...

Of course, I still haven't done anything useful with my life, so there's not much to say!!

Work stopped me coding under perl-gtk, an excellent toolkit/language combination, and moved me to wxPython, which is nasty nasty nasty... still, I'm still working under Linux, so I guess I'll survive.

Meanwhile, my personal life is a raging disaster :( Here's the deal - if you don't ask me, I won't tell you (in excrutiating detail) :)

My home PC is long overdue an upgrade, mainly in need of RAM I think, but a new CPU beckons (unfortunately this requires a new m/board and case, so finances decree that I ignore the beckoning for now). I am putting the upgrade off atm due to the almost constant lowering of prices...

Nothing else of interest to say right now... worship perl, die foul wxPython, etc etc blah blah...

I've been trying to get on here to post a new diary entry for so long, I've forgotten most of what I was going to say... kept getting some server error about Auth fields...

Let's see, what have I done recently... I went to the Linux Developer's Conference run by the UKUUG here in the UK, got to meet Telsa and Miguel (energetic guy - now I understand how GNOME as a whole manages to move so fast - he's behind, pushing it!), as well as saying a brief 'hi' to Alan... I also met a lot of other people whose names I never remembered (a weakness of mine, sorry) but who were almost all very interesting to chat with, especially the guys in the bar afterwards who were discussing various networking things... thanks for letting me invade your conversation and learn some stuff from you!

Highlight of the conference for me was Miguel's speech - apparently "Unix sucks" :) which went down well at the UK Unix Users Group conference, obviously... *grin*

I also went to the OSE seminar recently, that was very interesting on a personal level, although not hugely relevant to my work, so it was nice of them to pay my petrol to get there... shortly before I went to that, I had helped one of my LUG members install Linux on a few machines at the school he teaches at, so it was interesting to hear a lot of different people discussing exactly this sort of thing, on scales ranging from one machine in a corner somewhere, to county-wide networks...

Today I had a kind of performance review at work, I didn't get fired, but I don't think anyone was that impressed either... I think I need to prioritise my work over my hobbies a bit more often! (I'm sure plenty of people here know that old song). On the bright side, my work is coding under Linux, so it's not a terrible fate...

Wow, I haven't done anything for ages...

No, really.

Oh, I did buy a house... the amont of hassle (and lawyers, if that's not synominous) that surround that little bit of life sort of accounts for the inactivity elsewhere in my existence, maybe...

That and my incredible laziness of course.

Oh, there was the amazing brain haemorhage thing as well - I got a really bad headache, went to see the doctor, got diagnosed with a possible brain haemorhage... that was nerve-racking... turned out to be some nasty viral thing, sort of like meningitis, laid me out for a week, made me feel fuzzy for a month...

Code? Free software? Linux? Hrm... I did pop into my LUG's last meeting (2 hours late) and offer encouraging smiles to all the newcomers... I guess I could be more active if I tried a bit :)

Highly irrelevant to almost everything and everyone, but I thought it was amusing...

This morning I had two emails from www.WebsMostLinked.com saying that they had ranked two of my domains in relation to the rest of the Internet, and if I visited their site I could check out where I stood...

Obviously this was a ploy to sell banner adverts, and it worked on me, but what really amused me was that according to their ranking system, my company website at www.ConcreteCow.com, a site which has only generated two leads in the year and a half of its existence, is ranked noticably higher than slashdot.org.

I think their metric must be screwed up :)

Today someone certified me (it was only a matter of time ;) ) so I got to post some replies to articles that had interested me yesterday... I also certified a couple more people who I didn't notice yesterday (is the order of the 'people' list randomised? If so, good idea).

Speaking of which, yesterday I was starting to think I was missing something amazingly obvious, because I couldn't find the reply button/link on the articles... I didn't initially think this was because I wasn't certified because I had read somewhere that I could not post articles, and the explicit phrasing didn't imply that I would also not be able to post replies to articles... or maybe I'm just dumber than I look (scary thought). Anyway, what my ramblings are leading to is that perhaps that phrase should be revised to indicate that you can't post articles or replies until you've been certified at least to Apprentice...

Interesting to see the article on naming projects turn up today, after I mentioned (briefly) yesterday that I was only rescued from my own cleverness (i.e. my terrible taste in puns) by the timely intervention of my girlfriend...

Created an account here and dutifully certified all the people who I knew or whose names I instantly recognised and whom I held an opinion on...

Spent quite a bit of time today hanging out on #linuxuk, discussing new ideas for the site...

I hope to start a coding project soon (like I don't have enough to do). It's a GNOME compliant typing tutor program, called Fast Fingers (my girlfriend thought of the name and I liked it - better than the terrible puns I was labouring over at the time), written in Perl-GTK. I won't bother mentioning it again until the code gets over its present 100 or so lines...

I managed to miss a meeting of my own LUG last night, which was pretty sloppy, but I was busy... I'm sure they managed just fine (probably better) without me, they're a bright bunch :)