Chris Worfolk's Blog

How hard is it to get an internet connection?

A lot f***ing harder than it should be!

You would think that in London you get get an internet connection but apparently not. The hostel, which we picked because of it’s wifi access, didn’t have it’s wifi access working and none of The Cloud’s wifi hotspots would give me an IP address despite many, many attempts.

I had to resort to getting my emails at 9.6k using my phone as a Bluetooth modem which I had the pleasure of paying for which took half an hour of fiddling with to get it to work including disabling G3 and this just failed to work all together on Sunday during my repeated attempts.

Then I finally got home to find UK Online was down AGAIN and it took me 15 minutes to get that back online just so that I could finally get an SSH connection to get my server back online!

Having given up on getting my £25 KVM switch working I then spent more than double that on getting a new and better one. Does it work? Of course not.

It all plugged in file and seemed to work. The lights light up on the front when I eventually got it plugged in (it look me hours as I had to go to the Riley Smith Hall to reclaim a multi-socket) but when I began typing I noticed that it was dropping key strokes.

Try and write a sentence when connected to a Belkin KVM. You’ll have trouble. 20% of the letters will be missing. What are you supposed to do with that?

It also suffers from Windows thinking you are connecting and disconnecting hardware each time and making annoying noises because of it as well as failing to do whatever it does with regards to my Razer software that normally appears in the system tray. Oh it doesn’t work with half of my function keys just in case I wanted to use them which I will when I get back into WoW too.

I called Belkin and they said what they always say. Try rebooting your machine. Genius. That is what you get for employing non-English speaking idiots in your call centres. They said check if the keyboard was recognised by the BIOS when in the KVM which it was as it obviously was when I plugged it in or it wouldn’t have booted. It was still dropping keys though. They had given me a reference number to ring them back on though. So I did. “Belkin is closed” said the automated voice on the line.

Having had Michelle storm out on me I headed to The Refectory with Jack to grab some food and our conversation left me with a few things to mull over.

As a general rule, I won’t respect irrational beliefs regardless of the discourse. The problem with this is that it generally doesn’t get people to engage in debate with you (with the exception of perhaps Muslims who tend to respond far more to conflict than friendship). if you start being honest about what you think of people’s beliefs they tend to close up and become defensive which means a) you’re not going to get through to them at all, b) they are going to find a way to disagree with you even if you are right and c) may not even engage with you at all.

The alternative approach is to grant irrational beliefs credibility and respect so that, hopefully, people are a little more open to ideas, which, you would hope would eventually bring them round to a rational viewpoint. This has the drawback of having to grant irrational beliefs undeserved respect, to give in to the religious privilege that theological ideas undeservedly enjoy.

So the question comes down to this: can i ethically justify granting unfair religious privilege to irrational beliefs in order to engage with people on a more open level?

An important aspect of democracy and voting is that my vote is private. Anyway, here is how I voted…

• Motion 1 – plastic bags. I voted no. Paper bags are rubbish. We already pay for our plastic bags so people use them responsibly anyway. Plastic bags can be made bio-degradable. From what I have heard from union insiders, the union simply don’t want to foot that bill.
• Motion 2 – Jack Straw. I voted yes. His honorary life membership was removed because of a personal disagreement with his politics. Personal disagreement? We’re a union of 30,000 students, how can we have a personal disagreement? Stop being so petite and give him is life membership back.
• Motion 3 – 99p sandwiches. I voted no. Face facts, a 99p sandwich isn’t going to be a very good sandwich.
• Motion 4 – Nestle boycott. I voted no. For many, many reasons. Read them on Facebook. As a quick summary, we’re old enough to make our own decisions we don’t need the union dictating to us. It’s hypocritical as we sell Coca-Cola products and we’re not even preventing Nestle products from being sold on campus so it’s pointless as well.

Is anyone else having problems with Facebook’s AJAX? Not that it isn’t working and this doesn’t just apply to the AJAX, it applies to pages as well but you can’t just click refresh with AJAX, the point is, I end up on clicking things like event confirmations and poke back links and the AJAX isn’t loading in the details, presumably because it lost the connection with the web server. As previously mentioned this is a much bigger problem compared with normal pages when you can just click refresh. Generally though, I just think Facebook’s servers have been a little unresponsive lately.

Feel the burn baby, feel the burn!

It’s 3am and I’m still not in bed yet and I have to be up at about 8ish. I’ve been busy. Yet interestingly enough my to-do list is now running at 6 pages – 3 pages for the main list and 3 sub-lists coming off that.

So who else is feeling the pressure from third year?

One thing that does occur to me though. We have another 3-4 weeks of uni and then we have a month off. It happens again at Easter. And then we have 3 months off over summer (or at least we did, we don’t this year). So why are we ramming all the stress into like half a year when we could spread it out over so much more time.

I mean sure, we’ll get some FYP and revision done over the holiday but not as much as term time. There are no deadlines over the holidays. There are ones for the end true but you don’t have the pressure of term time. You can probably make a case for needing it to work full time to top up the old bank account and there are probably other reasons too, but still – personally, I would trade a little of those 5 months of holiday for a little less stress during term time.

So looks like CompSoc is going to have another stellar year. Attendance for Monday night’s “computing night” at The Old Bar has actually gone down since it started getting plugged as a “CompSoc social.”

There is a more important point here, though.

As Norm mentions on his blog, last Thursday we went bowling which was good to have some kind of circle activity which we haven’t done in a while. I actually had quite a good time and it was a shame I couldn’t get there for the start.

It got me thinking about a few things, though. Circle events have been very much down recently. I’m not entirely sure why. It’s probably a number of reasons. These including the fact that the key organisers of circle events just haven’t been organising events and that people have generally been too busy to turn up. For instance how many people come down to Monday nights at The Old Bar anymore?

This is disappointing because, when it comes down to it, most of us are third years and going to loose contact with each other next year. We’re going to be off doing our own things and if we drift apart now, what hope have we post-graduation? It would be good if we could get some kind of regular Circle social going again beit Monday nights in The Old Bar or perhaps in The Terrace on Tuesdays as me and Norm are there will be loads of us down there anyway. Stop being such hermits people, if I can find time for the pub so can you :D.

Group work is always both difficult and flustrating with meeting deadlines being a particular problem in the case of PD31. That in mind, I decided to make a point. Nobody noticed.

Last week we had set Friday as when I should have had the report compiled by to send to Ben so that he could write the executive summary. Half of the week’s deadlines had already been missed though so in order to make my point I compiled the report and elected not to email it out. Nobody said anything on Friday or Saturday indeed it wasn’t until Sunday night that somebody said something. Not mentioning the deadline but just asking what we were going to do with regards to getting the report finished.

Then when I turned up to the meeting today (fashionably late to make another point, I spent a good 5 minutes staring out of the window on staircase 2) and everyone was like “oh awesome, you got it compiled then.”

Does nobody else think there is some form of urgency for a report due in tomorrow that nobody has proofed? Is this not quite important to, you know, our degree and therefore our entire future? The answer would seem to be, no.

Aztec is now in bits on my floor having had the floppy drive taken out of it. I plug it into Olmec and boot up this time using my Ubuntu Server 7.10 alternative install CD in it. It goes through the normal stages. I manage to find a floppy disk, stick it in my desktop, stick my USB pen in the desktop and copy the driver over to the floppy disk. I then take the floppy disk out and put it in the floppy drive now attached to Olmec. Meanwhile Olmec decides it can’t find any hard drives and asks me if I want to load a driver. I say yes and trawl down to the bottom of the big list of drivers it gives me to inform it that the driver isn’t on there. It then attempts to load from the floppy drive but in fact just stops with a blank blue screen at this point.

I’d actually given up on it loading and started blogging when I suddenly got a message saying it had failed to load any drivers from the floppy disk. It wasn’t like I was being impatient – we’re talking a 10-15 minute wait here. I tried it twice with no luck. I also tried loading the HighPoint drivers that come with Ubuntu (though not for my RAID card) with no luck.

Next plan – I insert the CD into my desktop and the floppy drive so that the setup program can create a Windows driver disk. I’m sceptical about doing this on an XP box for a Windows Server 2003 install but it doesn’t seem to make a difference as the program will create drivers for any OS including Linux distros and only had one option that seems to cover all versions of Windows. Except that now Windows can’t read my floppy. It says it isn’t formatted. Even though it was when I copied the file over 30 minutes earlier. Even worse, it says it can’t format the disk now.

I install a fresh floppy disk and this time Windows reads it. The CD however can’t. It just brings up an I/O error message. I insert the original disk and Windows brings up a formatting box. But then gives me a nerror saying it was unable to complete the format. I take the original disk out and but the second one back in. Having re-launched the HighPoint software it allows me to continue this time. It also appears to complete successfully.

Turns out the floppy drive in Olmec wasn’t actually working. I manage to get it working and go back to Ubuntu. This time Ubuntu detects it. But instead of loading the driver as it should have done it decides that the floppy disk is a hard drive and suggests I partition it to install Ubuntu onto. I eventually find a way round this but Ubuntu then just says there aren’t any drivers and refuses to do anything.

Back to Windows. I get as far as it asking me to load the extra drivers and insert the floppy disk in. It can’t find them. I try it again and suddenly it can find them. It finally picks up my hard drive and begins partitioning and then installing Windows. Finally we might be getting somewhere.

I have no money. I actually have way less than no money. And my credit card bill has to come out with that.

So I’m confused. Does that mean I can justify spending £60 on the complete series of Jonathan Creek on DVD?