The life and times of a saggy cloth cat
Archive for November 2004
Spent a weekend in Dublin with Maggie and her mum. Had a fantastic time. I’m still useless at describing events, but needless to say it was a fantastic weekend. Really glad to have seen Maggie again, and it was lovely meeting Jean as well. Got around to visiting Malahide Castle & Park, Dublin Castle, The Foggy Dew, Frazers, and The Saw Doctors at The Olympia Theatre. Wicked time, don’t want to lose the memories ever. Photos to come when I offload the camera.
Just over a week ago, I bought two cheap Canyon CN-WF513 802.11g wireless cards for £8 each. I thought it was a good deal, even if they didn’t work under Linux. They duly arrived and didn’t work, until Scott at ScotLUG kindly lent me his laptop for half an hour and let me dig around in the drivers that were provided…
Lo and behold, it’s just a rebadged Ralink RT2500 card, an up and coming cheap wireless chipset vendor. Not only do they do cheap hardware, but they also provide Open Source drivers for it 
A pretty decent howto is provided right here, which I’m in the process of going through at the moment.
Oh, and btw, the price has now gone up to £16.79 on their site – still a good deal for a 802.11g card though
I went to pay NTL last night over the phone, but was told by their automated telephone system that the lines are only open during office hours. So, quietly seething, I hung up and tried again today…. Now, shortly before 9am, I can get through – to their _automated_ payment system. Why on earth does this have to be closed when out of hours?!
Gordon discovered this link just earlier today – How to Cook With Lava. Maybe it’ll come in useful one day
Steve Smith has written a detailed set of instructions for all of us wishing to use Xorg on our Debian machines.
It’s arrived, unfortunately it’s official. I was at the gig in George Square to celebrate the turning on of the lights. It was a nice event, with some rather good fireworks at the end.
Followed up the celebrations with a trip to the cinema to see The Incredibles. Absolutely fantastic movie, brilliantly done. Go see it.
Maggie arrived in Scotland last night! She stayed at her friends flat last night, and I met up with her this afternoon. A lovely hour or two was spent with her and some of her friends in Tchai Ovna. After an hour or two, I departed in order to meet Charlotte as she finished work at 6pm, and we headed back to meet Maggie at Charing Cross. Shortly after it was time for a lovely dinner at Cafe Cherubini with some GUSCDC people and Maggie. Time was short after the food, and we got time for a few drinks at The Three Judges and to sing Happy Birthday to Gordon as the clock struck 12
The other day I wrote a quick email to Steve Ballmer asking him to quickly verify the contents of the Wikipedia article about him. Just today I got a response from ‘him’ – no doubt one of his minions saying _precisely_ “Sorry time does not permit”.
It’s a shame really. I appreciate that he is probably quite busy, but it takes all of 5 minutes to read the page. It would also be quite nice if he could write an email that used proper English, but I guess certain liberties have to be allowed for the CEO of the worlds richest company these days…
Save yourself hours of hunting for the Veritas BackupExec UNIX Agent, and download it from this link. Well, not quite hours, but it felt like it
I’ve been hunting through the Google caches of my website, and I’ve managed to reinstate most of the content on it. Ever since I had a wee accident with the rm command and my database directory, the site has been mostly empty. Not any more! (and yes, I do have regular backups now… well, sort of… urrrm, kinda…)
<fires up another terminal and dumps the db to file for the first time in 3 months>