Older blog entries for riggwelter (starting at number 71)

Catch up for Advo readers, my full blog for the last few months is of course at swamprat.

  • Been selected for training for ordination within the Church of England, handed in my notice at Pinnacle yesterday, trying to sort out hosting for usr local bin and my personal site now
  • Car insurance paid out more than the outstanding finance!
  • Building GNOME 2.7.x packages for usr local bin
  • Going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight

Did I already mention that I'm going to see Kill Bill tonight? :)

After work yesterday, I was heading towards Hitchin, where I was supposed to be meeting with a retired priest to talk about some theological stuff. En route on the A1, just out of Borehamwood, I was involved in a Road Traffic Accident, first time in my life (either as the driver, or a passenger).

I was driving at about 60 in the left hand lane, observed that the van ahead was going a lot slower than I was, so checked my mirror & blind spot in order to overtake. When I looked forward again, I realised the van was a) stationary and b) just about right in front of me. I applied the brakes, but the road was wet, and I skidded, glancing the rear-right of it with the front-left of my car.

Thankfully I wasn't badly hurt, just a slight pain in my side, which has pretty well passed by this morning, but I was rather shaken by it. Now waiting to see what happens with the insurance. Hoping that it's going to be repairable, because of the finance on the car, if it's written off, I could end up out of pocket.

The police who attended the scene (from Hatfield station, in Hertfordshire) were very professional, did their job with the utmost consideration for the people involved, and I cannot commend them enough.

BT engineer is coming tomorrow, hopefully, I might have a phone service, and more importantly DSL back by the end of the day. I dread to think how much mail is queued for the various domains that swamprat deals with.

Kill Bill tonight, nearly three hours of Uma Thurman kicking ass should help me unwind, and take my mind off the accident for a bit.

It's a very strange thing. Once I'd left Chez Dave on Saturday night, his DSL stopped working under Linux. now, I suspect it might be related to the kernel update that APT sucked down for him, but I'll check it out on Wednesday ahead of cell group.

One thing I didn't mention on Saturday, because I was hoping to have photos for the gallery was the fact that I've had a haircut. The ponytail has gone, it is no more. It's been replaced with a rather nice short hair do which apparently makes me look "younger and slimmer" (not my words, nor those of the hairdresser). The photos should be in the gallery tomorrow - I forgot to bring my USB lead for the camera with me to work today, so in the meantime, here's one I took with my webcam (the online version of which is offline along with the DSL). Compare with what it looked like beforehand.

</w00t>
Having succesfully had an error detected on the line by BT, the entire line has now died. That's no phone service, never mind DSL! We're still waiting on the engineer on Wednesday, and in the meantime, they're redirected calls to our landline to my mobile, and are refunding us for the line rental.

Have had curry and risk with Dave & Catherine this evening (and am now using their DSL), it's been a great evening. Regular readers of my regular (hosted on the DSL alas) blog will know Dave as the owner of the Binatone DSL500. Have been ironing out a few issues with my insserv headers to bring up the line, and will now get around to publishing it real soon on Rubber Turnip.

16 Apr 2004 (updated 16 Apr 2004 at 15:48 UTC) »
w00t!
Just had a call from BT, they've detected a fault on the line (which is good because it means I'm not losing my marbles, and I don't have to buy a new router. It also means I'm not going to be charged for the escalation), and an engineer will be sent out. Now, I could have had one first thing on Monday, but alas, work commitments mean the earliest I'm able to be in for it is Wednesday. Still, at least a resolution is in sight.

In other news, Kill Bill Vol II tickets should be booked this evening, to go see it on Tuesday.

15 Apr 2004 (updated 15 Apr 2004 at 21:31 UTC) »

Nnnng, looks like I spoke too soon about my DSL working again, it was up and down all last night, and is currently down. have to run some tests this evening, and get back to Pipex. How annoying...

Update
Went home at lunchtime, and tested the router with BT's test account, it still lost the sync with the exchange, so it's now been escalated to BT. Meanwhile I'm going to contact Netgear to see if they have any solutions up their sleeve, given that it was they, not Pipex or BT who sorted it last time I had problems.

Update 2
Netgear not a huge amount of help, although they did mention that since I'd upgraded the firmware (anyone else using a DG814 - 4.10 is out now - go get it), I ought to do a full hardware reset, which involves holding the hidden reset button for about 40 seconds. Well, you never know, it could make a difference(!)

In other news, I've had a really productive afternoon, I've been knocking problems and issues off like there's no tomorrow, whittled my INBOX down from over forty emails to a mere seven, which is a real result. There is a tomorrow of course, in case anyone was wondering, and that tomorrow is FRIDAY!!!

Out for a curry with Nick & Rosie tonight - w00t!

14 Apr 2004 (updated 14 Apr 2004 at 15:21 UTC) »

DSL is down (hence blogging on Advogato). Pipex won't do anything until I've verified that the router won't bring the link up when it's the only thing on the line, and with a different microfilter. What fun.

Hamsters
In addition to having to do that tonight, we also have to sort out the living room, because last night our female hamsters escaped (only a few days before they go to pet shops annoyingly). So for, goodness knows how much of last night we had eight hamsters loose in the house. We managed to recapture them all and re-cage them this morning, but the living toom is a real state. I have a certain amount of grudging respect for hamsters that manage to open the door of their cage though.

The annoying thing is that if Tia (mother) hadn't been running across the floor when I went downstairs, we probably wouldn't have noticed, would have just assumed they were all asleep (as they should be at that time of the morning).

Hacking
Work on GST::Network is progressing slightly more slowly than I had anticipated, just got to iron out some probs in the profiling at the moment I think - the tool SEGVs when it's run. When I dump the output to an XML file, it all looks fine apart from the <profiledb> section, which to me looks like a bit of a giveaway as to the source of the problem.

America
Seems like the various strands of the US government are getting themselves into a real pickle in the 9/11 commission. Somewhere in there you might find the truth, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

8 Apr 2004 (updated 8 Apr 2004 at 10:04 UTC) »
company: allow me to introduce myself :)

I run a couple of sites, usr-local-bin.org, which provides up-to-date builds of various GNOME apps for SuSE, as well as a replacement GNOME desktop to the one included in SuSE by default, and planetsuse.org, which is, well, Planet SuSE, in the same vein as Planet GNOME.

I also hack a bit on GNOME System Tools, doing SuSEfication, and also a bit of SuSEfication on gnome-themes-extras.

It certainly is weird when people you've never heard of certify you, but in your case the work you do on GStreamer is why I certified you as I did.

Replicated from my real blog for Advogato
Added Nat to Planet SuSE today. Reminded me of a conversation I had with jdub a couple of weeks ago. Planet SuSE seems, in addition to being a contact point for the SuSE community to keep in touch with what's going on, and the Ximian monkeys are more than welcome. We love you guys, and the work you do rocks hard! But, in addition to that, is filling void left by the (apparently) defunct Planet Novell (link offline).

This is therefore a call to anyone from Novell, who feels they would be at home with a blog appearing on Planet SuSE to get in touch. If you contribute, we want to know how. Anyone from SuSE too who blogs, or wants to, to keep the community informed, drop me a line, let's make this the biggest and best planet there is.

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