Life isn’t ever going to slow down it is? I hoped it would when I graduated, that it wouldn’t be quite as hectic. I didn’t want it to slow down too much, I would have settled for just a bit. But I’m not sure I’m actually going to get that.
Having had our house warming on Friday at which I managed to work my way through a bottle of spirits without being too worse for wear on Saturday we headed down to the Deer Park for some recovery steak. Having eaten that I headed off straight to work for an interesting night of watching smartly dressed Opera in the Park goers look very out of place and made it home to bed for around 3am.
Once again dragging my ass out of bed a little earlier than I would have really liked to we headed back to the Deer Park for Sunday lunch. Having got back from that I then spent the afternoon battling through a week’s worth of freelancing work I needed to catch up on before heading to the pub quiz.
Friday saw our long time coming (though possibly not so awaited) house warming.
I never really put much thought to it, I’m not even sure I got round to inviting people and was quite suprised when quite a number of people began to tell me throughout the week that they would see me at the party on Friday.
Still Friday having arrived it was all but dead until 10:30. Still with Kieran having turned up all the way from London, a few other select guests and there being plenty of alcohol in the house, we had sufficent company and drink to make it a good night anyway. Not that it was a problem was once the night drew on the guests began to flood in.
The party ended up going on till around 5am before the approaching daylight sent us running for cover. Not too bad for a group of suburbian based OAPs ;).
When you use Windows, disk space randomly disappears.
When you use Linux, disk space randomly disappears just as rapidly. Luckily, when you are using Linux you can use the disk usage command to see which folders are eating up all the disk space. Chances are you won’t be able to do anything about it, but you can at least look at it.
I’ve wanted something similar that I could use on Windows to give me an overview of my directories and tell me where all the disk space was actually going. Recently I found a tool called WinDirStat which scans a drive and gives you a breakdown of the space, files and sub-folders of each directory as well as a graphical representation of where all the space is going.
For example, on my system the fact that half the map is blue suggests I really need to clear my WoW downoads out while the amount of green suggests Windows comes bundled with too much crap. More importantly I can see at a glance that Program Files is using 42% of my disk space while My Document is using 31% and I can then break it down into the various sub-folders and find the offending files.
It uncovers some interesting things – for example Thunderbird is consuming a crazy 4.3GB of space simply storing my emails! World of Warcraft uses 8GB. Windows by comparission only uses 4GB.
One feature of Firefox I’ve just found about is smart keywords. If you hadn’t heard about them easier it is basically a way to run searches on any site you like from the address bar.
Basically, you go to a website you want to be able to search without visiting, select the search form and select add a keyword for this search. For example, on Amazon (I’m using Amazon because the stock example is IMDb and I wanted to do something different :p), you could enter “amazon” and then to search via your address bar you would just type amazon digital cameras and it would bring up said page.
A lot of obvious sites to do this with are already in the quick search bar on Firefox but I don’t find I ever use this even when I’m searching these sites because you have to change it away from Google before you search and then change it back to Google after you’re done and in the time you have done that you could have just typed in the URL of the site, especially given that can be done via keyboard shortcuts and if there is one for selecting a different quick search engine, I don’t know it and can’t imagine it would actually be much of a shortcut if it does exist.
While I don’t think it’s particularly useful to be able to search Amazon or IMDb this way as I don’t actually visit them that much, the more I got thinking about it the more I started thinking of sites that it would be useful for. Notably, Wikipedia, Mininova and eBay – all of which I go to one of my recently visited pages at on that site just so I can get to the search bar. I mean, who ever really wants to look at the Wikipedia homepage? I’m guessing it will also work with the search on Facebook too.
Much like the way that Christian gatherings are mostly dominated by discussions of the latest episode of Neighbours, A-Soc meetings run along similar lines with Doctor Who. It’s massive, it’s conference-going (perhaps even in full custume) and it’s at the point where people brag about a friend of a friend who once new a guy who had a friend who did some paperwork for the show.
With that in mind, I had been meaning to catch up on my Doctor Who for ages and given my life is now without point nor purpose it seemed an excellent time to get caught up. It’s been quite a while since I’ve last watched it so I’ve started re-watching it from the start of the revival.
My initial critisism of the revival was that it’s too over dramatic – the world is in mortal danger every time. Which I think is true having re-watched the first season though not quite as much as I thought. It is certainly too over-dramatic though. The whole thing about The Doctor and Rose kissing, and looking into the heart of the TARDIS and such, it’s just a bit too Hollywood-ised. Still, I guess that is the modern world.
Christopher Eccleston made a fine Doctor. Hopefully David Tennant will be equally impressive.
A few days ago I swapped round the way I sleep on my bed so that my head is now closest to the door rather than my feet. Since then, I’ve never looked back.
It works so much better this way round. Most notably because I am now at far less of an angle when watching something on my computer and I’m closer to the screen and the sound too, about twice as close which is quite an improvement.
Also it means I’m closer to be bed side table which had to go at the end of my bed and it seems to make it easier to get in and out of bed without stepping on things as well. So there you go, the best way round to sleep is actually the wrong way round.
It occured to me as I filled my basket with a mere 3 items at Co-op yesterday to and then pulled out by extra big credit limit credit card to fund the purchase that I am back in suburbia.
Having spent the last 3 years living in student accommodation it feels strange to be back in, for lack of a better term, “real” house. I mean, I have an oven! A working oven! That’s so good. It’s taken until now for me to really discover a way of heating food beyond microwaving it.
And a shower. A proper shower that doesn’t just trickle out a bit of water if you give it 5 minutes. It doesn’t actually output hot water but at least it outputs mildly warm water with a decent force.
Still, I’m not convinced the trade off is worth it. I watched TV the other day. For most of us, we simply stopped watching TV while we are at university. Unless they had TV on at the pub. Now we’re back to watching TV in our own homes. It’s all very depressing.
Not to mention the fact that all the pubs and takeaways are closing at like 11 in the evening.
Finally the distance is starting to bite. Due to so many of us being graduates, nobody other than myself has rushed out to buy a car and start boy racering it around (well, you’re missing out, having a car is suberb) so whenever we’re planning events it’s a case of, “well, how is everyone going to get here?” That’s not to say there aren’t good public transport links because there are – but it’s not quite the same as just living 15 minutes walk from each other.
If there is a moral to be gathered here it is that everyone should buy a car and then we can all go dogging on Thursday nights. Trust me, it feels less weird every time you do it ;). The other problem though is that we are off to Wendy tomorrow – but how? I mean seriously, we all want to drink because opportunities are limited these days but that means arranging some kind of travel. Not just walking down the road. And if we want to leave at different times, what then?
Not to mention the bitching that is going on about parking on the street. Silly little unimportant problems that seem to mean the world – welcome back to suburbia. Still, guess my email address makes more sense now :D.
20:57
It’s true, we have your money!
Regards,
PowerVPS Hosting
21:07
Hello,
A few minutes ago a member of our Engineering staff crafted an email to test email templates on our PBA system. This email was destined for internal use and was never meant to be sent out to our customer base.
Unfortunately, the mail template was misconfigured, and was sent to all current customers on our PBA system.
These people are responsible for keeping my entire business up and running :D.
I went down to Leeds’ Cafe Scientifique last night to check out what it was all about as it comes highly recommended by Paul. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a monthly event where you can go for a coffee/beer/etc and there is a talk and discussion on some kind of scientific topic.
It’s all very laid back, the topic of yesterday’s meeting was “psychotherapy – science or religion?” which involved a 25 minute talk, an interval so we could get another round of drinks in and then a general discussion session where people could ask queations.
The talk wasn’t bad though I wasn’t overly impressed. While most people there seemed to have a fair grounding in psychotherapy, I felt a bit lost not knowing a whole lot about it. Having said that, it was fairly glossy, which is to be expected in a 25 minute talk but I thought there could have been a lot more complex detail for some of us to try and get our head round if we so wished to try.
It was all very middle class though the age range wasn’t too bad, there were plenty of “young” people there (people aged below 40 shall we say). It is hosted by 7Arts in Chapel Allerton which is a lovely new building that, I noted, would make an excellent venue for a fledgling Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that needed to hire a venue until his noodliness blessed us with huge amounts of finances.