Today is the first day of a conference I am attending here in sunny Mallorca. Muct to my surprise, the weather is actually quite pleasant and the room’s aircon is very good. There is something exquisitely debauched about sitting by a swimming pool writing a blog entry.
Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008Bleurgh
Monday, March 31st, 2008Am ill. Head hurts. Sun is bright. That is all.
Obligatory earthquake post
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008Yes, in bed with Saf. The earth moved. Ha!
More interestingly, even if you didn’t feel it, the BGS has an online questionnaire that you should fill in to help map the extent of the quake.
Eventually my laptop returns
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007Readers of the blog blessed with long memories might recall that the hard drive in my laptop died recently. It transpired that the repair was not as straightforward as I imagined. Firstly I forgot that, whilst my old laptop had an IDE HD, my new laptop had a SATA HD. A straight swap wasn’t on the cards then. Fortunately an interim solution was found involving an iRiver and a USB cable. Running an entire OS off of an old external hard drive MP3 player is not pleasant.
Fortunately I discovered that replacement SATA 2.5″ hard drives are relatively cheap. I promptly placed an order with a local firm which promised same day delivery. Not wishing to embarrass them, let us given them the pseudonym “Kingdom of Calculators”. I placed an order with KoC’s brand new online order system and sat back in the warm glow that comes from knowing that new toys will arrive soon.
Unfortunately their new ordering system appeared to have a bug. Changing your delivery address in no way altered the address to which they attempt to deliver orders. Oh bugger. Indeed they had attempted delivery to my old workplace. My old workplace which no longer exists at the address I gave them. “But Rich,” I hear you cry, “surely they would not succeed and therefore have to phone you!” Oh, dear reader, if that were the case. In fact they managed to deliver a parcel to a non-existent company address to someone who does not work at the company. Needless to say I was surprised.
They promised to sort it out speedily. Which they might have done for all I know. Of course, having taken receipt of the package, stores decide to email the wrong R. Wareham (despite me having given them a piece of paper with my email address clearly written).
Eventually one and a half weeks after placing the order, it arrives. To add insult to injury, it has a PostIt from KoC proudly bearing the slogan “Don’t do it nextday. www.koc.example.com sameday!” Oh, the irony!
After getting said HD out from the packaging and removing the old broken one, I discover that the HD mounting bracket for the computer is screwed to the old HD with TORX screws. Needless to say that required a little journey around the department to find some suitable drivers.
Eventually I got it all together and am now installing the OS. Fingers crossed…
And it bites once more
Friday, September 28th, 20074 months out of warranty and my laptop HD dies. Joy! Thankfully it is easily replaced and I can try reseating tonight to see if the magic HD gremlins just pulled the socket out. Now I’m glad I saved my old laptop so it can be a donor of a 2.5″ drive :)
A good deal
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007The BBC news has a piece on a couple who have stayed in a Travelodge for more than 20 years. By booking 12 months in advance they get the room for £90 per week or roughly £390 per month. That is a lot cheaper than my current rent and in the ball-park of my friends’ average rent in Cambridge. Not that this couple also get a maid to come and clean for them every day for that price! Perhaps there is something to be said for staying in a hotel permanently.
A week of work
Sunday, September 9th, 2007I started going into my new place of work last week. For those that don’t know, I resigned from my former employer to have a bit of a wind-down over the summer. At some point I’ll probably post a write-up of what I did then but for the moment let’s concentrate on the future.
Last week I mostly spec’ed out my new machine, did a bit of literature review and started tidying up some software I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks this holiday.
Yet again I am amazed at the cheapness of hardware. Four hyper-threaded cores of execution (i.e. 8 logical CPUs under Linux), 4GiB of memory, 1.5 TB of HDD and a GeForce 8-series graphics card all for under £1,500 — incredible!
Of course I’m left using my laptop at work until it arrives but that gives me time to port my OpenGL toolkit to OS X. I’m getting pretty impressed at the new Intel GPU in this regard. With its hardware support for programmable pixel and vertex shaders, I’m a happy bunny. The one problem is that I can only get Cg to use the arbfp1 profile. I know that the hardware should be capable of ps_3_0-level stuff, I just can’t find a way to get Cg to believe me :). I might be able to persuade GLSL to work I suppose.
Stress
Sunday, February 25th, 2007I am so stressed at the moment. I just want it to be this time next week :(