Yeah, so you've all been waiting with bated breath for a post on the weekend. Unfortuantly, that was a long time ago, and all the posts I've been writing in my head and not actually getting round to posting about appear to have vanished from my head.
On Saturday is was Summer Party day. Very exciting thing. Live on stage there was Alan Fletcher (of Karl Kennedy from Neighbours fame) and Lucie Silvers.
Karl was just about as good as he in in the show. Lucie was rather good, even though her cover of Nothing Else Matters brought tears to my eyes.
On Sunday I was just sitting around after getting up quite late talking to Chris. He'd decided to go to London to pick up his server which had died earlier that week from Telehouse.
This is was quite an exciting and interesting experience. Mainly from the security aspect - walking around the many corridors of building with our RFID swipe cards, with Chris on the phone to an engineer, directing him to his box made it seem something you'd find in a James Bond film, or an episode from Bugs.
The cards are programmed (yeah... I know in reality it'll be the other way round and it'll be the locks) so that they will only open the doors you need to open to get to your final destination. Quite a complex system you'd have though. What makes it funny is that the secutiry access list appears to be a folder full of emails with names saying add this person to the access list... not a printed table or even a database... this seemed quite off considering a very large percentage of the UKs Internet is terminated within the buildings walls.
The enterance pods are quite interesting too. To get in you've got to go into an ickle cylinder with rotating doors on each side. You step in one side. It the locks you in... thinks for a bit and then opens the other side.
After we'd got the box we decided to drive randomly around London. Why not!? We had the woman in the box to direct us if we got lost. Then we had food and came home.
In the pub later on some guy stuck up for the landlord for not serving the guy who'd turned up 5 minutes after the bar had closed. It was all quite worrying. We thought it'd was all ok when the people had left. But then one of them came back in and whacked the guy with a crutches - stating "I'm sorry, but, I've been ordered to do this." :-(
Then was the drinking of vast amounts of beer in the garden and meeting more of the people who live down my street. All in all a well random day.
Monday... what happened? Erm, well I was hung over to buggery! Then got a phonecall asking if I'd like to host another BBQ social. After some persuasion, agreed.
So yeah, we had a BBQ and managed to burn even more of the rubbish in next doors garden. I'm sure everybody there really enjoyed themselves, which is cool - with my cock1.
All of these events were interspersed with me trying to get Linux installed on my new laptop. It doesn't appear to like it much :-( That said last night I finally managed it. Woo woo woo... and all that. Must have wasted about 36 hours doing it!
After having issues with bootloaders, initrd images and lilo, eventually one of the final problems was making it not all come up in German! Did you know that the German for 'about' is über. Well now you do.
Luckily, I'm good at guessing what it means. The most annoying thing was the Y key being a X! Oh well - it's all English execpt for OpenOffice at the moment.
I'm glad it's on now though. Unfortunatly I need to work out how to get the video card inside it to work nicely with X - currently everything is stretched flat - if that makes any sense.
And today... well. Not much has happened. The landlady phoned up the house at about 2pm to tell us that people were looking around the house today at 4pm. Nice of her to give us so much notice. She asked if I could tidy it up. "I'm at work"... "well how did you know I called" Heh... I just said I got an email with the voicemail in it. Didn't tell her all about the ins and outs of the magical VoIP system I have set up so I could dial 1471 from work!
I'm tempted to go home and the house more of a mess before they arrive. Serves them right - although it's a bit vindictive I suppose.
I wonder what I've forgotten to tell you about. Hmmm... probably nothing.
Updates should be happening more frequently now I'm not being distracted as much by the laptop - photos might appear on the Gallery sometime when I get home.
1 That was an in joke, so that's why you don't understand.