Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

Something seems to be screwy with my SIM card — with it in, the phone freezes at the boot logo; with it out, it gets to the desktop, and I can access the service menu, but trying to do anything useful gets an “insert SIM card” message :(

It’s suddenly occurred to me that I no longer have an alarm clock, a mobile calendar, a to-do list, a camera, a notebook, a mobile IRC client, or a games thing to pass the time in lectures. Not being able to communicate by phone or SMS is also a problem, but not the first thing that comes to mind…

2pm) Breakfast at the Corner Cafe. I was under the impression that breakfast came before work, whereas other people had been up since 10…

3pm) Garden work; I spent ~3 hours digging a trench. After I let go of the hoe, I stretched my fingers out, and was able to feel the layers of skin separating — I now have some nasty looking blisters…

5pm) Barbecue; much eating of meat was done, and much setting things alight. Notably: bricks, plates, and petrol. Tea lights were also thrown into the fire — the wax boiled pretty quickly, and then the aluminium melted into the ash… Also of note: the ash from yesterday’s fire was still hot enough that Mike was able to start today’s fire without matches \o/

Sometime between these two, I bet Mike a pint that it was Fahrenheit 451, not 423, and won \o/

11pm) Sharing tales of complaint letters; Mike, Kitty, and Wfk are really not the sort of customers one wants to be on the wrong side of…

1am) Misc geekery: Tales from the jargon file, and sharing of things that are sick and wrong; like storing 16 bytes of data in 8 bytes of memory, and “#define f(x) (x)++ – (x)++ ; a = 5; b = f(a)”. I think it says something that pretty much all of these horrible hacks came from C…

5am) Bed

12pm) Awake. Mike asked me what you stick a golf ball on, and I answered v_v Then to The Goods Shed for locally produced meats, and to claim my pint~

12:30pm) Fryup for breakfast~

1pm) More gardening… Some slabs got laid, more trench was dug, and a bouncy ball was found \o/ Although the others then proceeded to one-up me by finding a small, unidentified body… Having finished, Mike asked me what the original Star Trek captain’s middle inital was, and again, I answered v_v

5pm) Mid-term meal; traditional roast dinner. Yay for beefs~

11pm) Home~

During this time, I also spent pretty much every spare minute voluntarily washing up or hoovering; there is something very, very wrong when a teenage male student nerd walks into a house and says “dear god, this place needs cleaning…”

1) Akismet — I’ve been using it to stop wordpress and trac spam for the past ~3 months, and I only just remembered that it exists, since it let one through (as opposed to the 20 a day I was getting before)

2) OpenID; which has been around a while, but might actually get somewhere now that microsoft have said they’ll be putting their weight behind it (although they may well end up doing their embrace / extend / extinguish thing…)

I shall add support for them to my webapps once I find APIs and time…

3 meets, none blogged :O For background: KLUG is the kent linux user’s group; a bunch of linux users who meet to talk about random things, and occasionally do something productive together.

Firstly: A brief social meet in The Old Bev, just down the road. Drinking was done, penguins were hugged, and talk was mostly about jobs in the industry~

Then: The day after was a more official meet, in Dover, in the port’s immigration office. People actually brought computers to this one. Mostly talk was admin stuff, about what the LUG should be doing, how to be doing it, events we should travel to or run for ourselves, etc. There were also lightning talks; Mike did beer related analogies for various types of routing, a guy I don’t know talked about working in a school, and Kitty did a very brief overview of the history of computing~

After the dover meet Mike, Kitty, Allen, and myself went to a local town for food and beer. On the way we also stopped off at The Bunker, a datacenter built inside an old RAF base. It seemed pretty deserted on the surface, except for the security guard + dog who appeared once we started poking about…

Recently: The Maidstone meet. Which was a lot like the Canterbury meet, except that we managed to get kicked out of two pubs in one evening… First was the society rooms(?), where we were told we weren’t even allowed on the site without proof of age (and not any proof of age — it had to be specifically a driver’s licence or passport); then we moved to the druid’s arms for pizza and beer. The meet carried on there quite happily for a couple of hours, until Kitty got fed up enough with people leaving the fire exit open (letting the cold in) that she slammed the door and exaggerated one of the cracks in the window… By that time most people were ready to leave anyway, so they did. A couple of us went to KFC while waiting for the train back, had one last conversation, then went our separate ways~

Kitty’s Garden is progressing nicely; much digging of holes and burning of dead trees~ Attempts to cook with fire mostly failed though :(

I spent most of the afternoon digging through mud to get at bits of trees, then pulling up bits of trees to get at concrete slabs…