Archive for December, 2012

What a grand prix season it has been – almost certainly the best in memory!

We started the year with half a dozen different winners in as many races, tyres went on and off like lightening and if you didn’t manage them probably – you could lose it all at the end. Exciting, wheel to wheel racing continued all year.

After all that, we came down to the final race of the year – and the championship race was still open with Vettel and Alonso only a few points from each other! We couldn’t have asked for a more exciting ending. Well, we could have, but it would have been entirely unreasonable.

It did get better though! The first lap, Vettel finds his car facing backwards, but he is able to keep the engine running and now he is on a mission to get right through the field, and catch Alonso to stop him tacking the title away from him.

In the end, he did, and what an amazing end it was. I hope 2013 is just as exciting, even if we are going to have to mange without Jake Humphrey.

If you want a service to start automatically when Gentoo boots up, you need to tell Gentoo to start it. Gentoo looks at /etc/runlevels/boot to see what it needs to run, so all you need to do is add a symlink in here to your init.d script. In this example, I’ll use exim.

cd /etc/runlevels/boot
ln -s /etc/init.d/exim exim

Next time Gentoo boots, it will see exim in the boot directory and run the script. This isn’t just limited to boot either – /etc/runlevels also has directories for shutdown and system initialisation.

Last week, we headed up to Headingley for the Finnish Christmas Carols concert.

It was held at the Lutheran Church in Headingley, and there were around twenty people there, mostly Finns. Mixed in with the hymn, which had an organ for the first time this year (in previous years, they have just sung, without music), they had a short play as well, about how you should be dishonest in order to achieve personal gain (not quite why you would include a play with such a message, but there you go).

I’m not sure about the idea of getting a nation of people famous for being rather introverted to sing, but Elina seemed to enjoy it, so job done I guess.

After, everyone headed into the church house in which there was some Finnish food laid on. There were also feedback forms, in which I suggested it would be great if the church could get wifi installed.

As many of you know, for weeks now, it has been my dream to be the starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. So, last week, me, George and Matt headed down to Yorkshire Rams training – a Leeds based American Football team.

It was rather intense – a three hour training session, roughly consisting of an hour of fitness, an hour of technique and an hour of practicing plays. None of us could walk for days after!

It was always going to be an interesting train to London as we went down to attend GRAM. It was a 7:30am train and by 8:30am, the speaker had announced that they had sold out of all beers and ciders!

Who is drinking at that time in the morning? A quick bit of research told me that Leeds were playing away at Millwall today. Leeds and Millwall have a long time rivalry with whose fans can be the biggest hooligans, so it turns out they were going to stop serving all alcohol on trains from 10am anyway.

Not fancying returning in the middle of a large crowd of angry football fans, and given it was only a mere £15 extra (of which I did not expense, of course), we decided to upgrade to first class.

Overall, I’m not sure it’s worth the upgrade cost. The seat is very nice and big, and the complementary food is good, but being on a weekend, isn’t hot, nor is alcohol included. It was also very quiet though, and you do get unlimited wifi included, so maybe it wasn’t too bad.