Month: April 2003

Just in case anyone wondered whether I really set foot in television studios or have faked the whole thing, here’s me standing in a plausible mock-up of a studio the other week. That’s Carol the floor manager mugging disgracefully in the background. Picture taken by Richard the director, which is slightly worrying since the implication is that he wasn’t doing his actual job at the time.

Oh, and I’m wearing a dinner suit and red baseball cap because… oh, you work it out. Answers on the back of a £20 note, please.

…that the troops who just attacked Jack and Nina were Sherri’s own honour guard. I also predict that George will turn out to be suffering merely a nasty cold; Kim will have spent the last year being trained by the CIA and it will, in fact, be she who defuses the nuclear bomb; Jack will admit that he always preferred Nina to the sappy Teri; Despite the attack squad, Sherri will turn out to be acting completely altruistically; Nina will reveal that she set the whole thing up because she still carries a torch for Jack too; and right at the end, as they all live happily ever after, and Kim and her boyfriend drive off in a car that for once doesn’t have a body in the boot, Tony will… will… smile.

Hmm. P’raps not that last one.

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when ex-Oxbridge types try to justify why they’re glued to the telly. Sod that, it’s just terrific drama.

Trinity Hall man at 6 in the Cambridge boat. Updates online at the BBC, of course.

1631. They're off. Excellent start by Oxford.
1632. Cambridge striking slower to my eye, on the outside, but holding Oxford well.
1633. M&S have an offer on teacakes. Rather different to Tunnocks, but very pleasant.
1634. Cambridge a canvas down, but more-or-less holding Oxford. Looking good for the Hammersmith bend.
1635. Wish I'd brewed some tea. Level going into Hammersmith, Cambridge gaining perhaps a gnats.
1637. Cambridge half a length up through Hammersmith bridge.
1641. I've now eaten too many teacakes. Horrible overlap, Oxford stroke side rowing in Cambridge bow side's puddles, but Oxford not giving up.
1642. Advantage down to half a length. Uh-oh. Actually, it looks like less.
1643. Cambridge bladework a little splashy, which it wasn't five minutes ago. Boats about level.
1644. Oxford ahead by a quarter-length, maybe a half. Blimey, this is tense. I really should have made that tea.
1646. Oxford three-quarters of a length up...
1647. Down to half a length.
1647. Quarter of a length! Sod the tea.
1648. Oxford holding.
1649. Oxford by about a stroke. Bloody hell.
1650. 'Best race in history' already. Oxford have it. Feckin' close. Storming.

Closest race in history; there was apparently a dead heat in the nineteenth century, but the judge had been in the pub so it was a dead heat by about six feet. This was ‘Oxford by one foot.’

I think I might go down to watch the 150th race, next year. I’ve only been the once, and it was a hoot.

My chum Alan’s fiancé Jules (er… so ‘my chum Jules’, then) had eight hours of brain surgery the other day. As you, by and large, don’t. She no longer has a tumour filling a quarter of her head and by all accounts is doing marvellously. And that does seem to be ‘doing marvellously,’ rather than ‘doing marvellously, considering.’

Before she went in for the op, Alan asked her what she wanted to do when she gets home again. Nothing much forthcoming at the time, but ten minutes after she came round, she said ‘Big plate of chips, mayonnaise, cup of tea, Fawlty Towers. That’s what I want to do.’

Which, I tend to think, is a rather good sign.

I kinda missed all this while it was happening, despite following many of the weblogs involved (via NetNewsWire) – my attention was somewhat elsewhere, I guess. Still, it’s an interesting moment – and Orlowski’s writing style is, for once, appropriate rather than irritatingly smug. The Reg: Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed, and Googlewashed… in 42 days.

I have new glasses. Oh yes, I can see again, and it’s a slightly disturbing experience. My right eye in particular, having strained for a year to compensate for incorrect astigmatic correction, is clearly confused by now not having to do so. It’s going to take a few days to adjust. The new frames, however, are wonderful. Retro chic indeed.

Meanwhile, my Mini no longer has a little collection of scratching and scuffing where someone broke a bottle on its bonnet. In fact, you’d never know it ever had. It does, however, now feature the most amazing deep rattle at high revs, and a graunching sound at low revs, both of which are new. Hmm. Back to the garage with it, I fear.

Saturday is brought to you by onion bagels, marmite, cheesy scrambled egg, and the word ‘paralepsis‘. All at once.

Now that that nasty computer stuff is sorted, this blog will return to its scheduled programming of… er… pretty much geeky ramblings, I guess.

Wait, wait… no, I’m moving cardboard boxes in a vertical fashion tomorrow. That’s not very interesting.

Umm…

Oh, hell. Obviously, my attempt to recover from studio enough to actually get a life hasn’t quite borne fruit. Yet.

I should report, however, that The Big Bang edit is mostly going rather well. The giant meringue is a little disappointing (and how the hell did I miss the horribly large safety problem in it? Yowser), but there’s plenty that simply sings, even at crappy Avid quality. Oh, and I’m dead happy with the new titles sequence. We have some sound/vision sync problems to sort, but they should be simple enough.

Happy, happy.

Mandrake 9.1 is booting on my old K6 box, and running surprisingly nicely. GNOME’s Nautilus is far from snappy, but it does work and for the most part isn’t ugly. For the first time I now have font antialiasing on Linux, as a result of which OpenOffice is actually useable. That is, it’s possible to read the type in Writer. All praise the GPL.

Linux on the desktop certainly does keep getting better and better, and on cursory examination this is the best distribution I’ve seen. Looking back over my install logs for previous Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE distros, more of this one worked without tinkering than ever before. That said, I’m not entirely confident that this will continue as I play more. What, for example, is the MySQL root password? Is PHPNuke still installed by default? What’s the admin password for that? Dunno. But hey, I’ve not got there yet.

But there’s still a nagging problem. However polished this system is – and it stands up pretty well against Windows XP, which is slicker but far more patronising – it still looks to a Mac user as a pretty naff hodge-podge. Take, for example, the ‘OK’ button swapping sides all the way through the installation. Come on, this is really basic, noddy stuff! OS designers have been getting this sort of thing right for twenty years!

So, I’ll probably play a bit. And at least I have a spare gash PC I can pull out, which is potentially useful. And apps like Mr Project really have come on dramatically since I last saw them (heck, the last time I launched Mr Project, it failed to completely start up). But that’s about it.

However, there is one really significant change I can report; for the first time in my experience, installing Linux hasn’t been an exercise in frustration. This is partly because I have more of an idea of what I’m doing, but mostly because it’s genuinely getting better. If I wasn’t a Mac user, I might even like it. Now that’s progress.