eggfriedrice.com

Turns out I still have a working Wordpress install!

Merry new year etc. It’s a bit odd looking back over a blog I haven’t posted to for over a year. I never really got the hang of blogging but I always liked the idea. In the last yearish I’ve discovered a use for the Twitter account I’d forgotten about: blogging without the giant empty textarea to fill.

I’m not going to put a to do list of things I intend to do this year, it’s not something I’ve found helpful (turns out it doesn’t make me any more likely to do stuff). Instead I’m going to go with a vague concept for the future as I like the upward trajectory kind of change rather than some temporary change which doesn’t stick. Oddly, despite me being an engineering techie type and liking black and white solutions, on a personal level I’m quite vague which I’ve never really figured out.

A while (maybe a year or two) ago I decided to make a conscious effort to close the gap between what I say I’ll do and what I’ll actually do. It’s really hard for me to do but I think it’s kinda partially working. I think I’m over-promising and under-delivering less. Still not as much as I’d like, it’s working more for work stuff rather than personal things but it’s a start.

I had a minor epiphany earlier which leads to my next self improvement concept: consume less, create more. I don’t mean this in the eco-stop-using-carrier-bags-pish, but in a more general way. I figure I spend (I’m loathed to say “waste”) a lot of time consuming blogs but no time blogging myself. I read about cool projects and come up with great ideas but never quite get around to doing any projects of my own.

So that’s the plan, I’ll see how it goes. Man, that turned out to be a serious post! Here’s something I heard tonight that is awesome:

It’s very simple:

1. Print this recipe out
2. Stick it to somewhere handy in your kitchen
3. Follow it to the letter
4. Enjoy fabulous pancakes and excuse to use that new Jamie Oliver frying pan you got in the sales

Thanks Delia!

Note: Be careful using non-milk type spreads instead of butter, oil based ones float on the top of the batter. It doesn’t taste bad but it does make the pancakes a bit slippy to hold.

Tomorrow night: How to enjoy pancakes the year round and on days other than Tuesday.

(Man, this is so seamless nobody will notice I haven’t blogged for about seven years!)

Wikipedia is a dangerous game. I think it’s actual proof of six degrees of separation, it’s possible to get from anything to any other thing in less than six steps. Without resorting to All articles with unsourced statements. And lo, someone has created a tool to do just that.

This all started by looking up Office Space which I just watched. Before you know it you’ve read articles on staplers and somehow ended up Star Trek TNG. Funny how it works.

Most importantly, I’ve discovered the importance of (Stephen Root’s) makeup…

It has been a truly thrilling weekend of mostly vacuum cleaning and tidying. It turns out that 1.4 metric tons of dust can accumulate under a bed in less than a year. A chat with Sarah’s Dad went a bit like this (I’ve skipped to the bit where he was told about the dust):

Sarah’s Dad: You know what that means?
Sarah: What?
Sarah’s Dad: You should be ashamed of yourselves!

I think he has a point. It’s amazing how much crap I’ve accumulated in a year and crammed into a fairly small flat. It’s not a good habit and I’m going to try and sort out what I have. It was actually quite a nice feeling to offload some of my Sussex junk on the Sussex Linux geeks.

In my defence the furniture I have here to store and use my junk is, well, suboptimal. With a lot of sub and not much optimal. So tomorrow I’m going to try and modify an old desk in an Ikea Hacker style. Only with an old desk, a jigsaw, copious bodging and probably a substantial amount of swearing.

If it works we’ll have a server desk that’ll fit in better. If it doesn’t we’ll have a pile of broken chipboard (or “firewood” to the people at the back who tried to barbecue with an old bed frame…). We’ll see!

Today was a better day than yesterday, I still have a todo list as long as my arm but stuff got done. I’ve got another fascinating “forum” website nearly set up. These “forums” aren’t forums as you’d know them on the internet, they’re boring mailing lists with archives for boring PDFs. You’ll have gathered that it’s not the most interesting work but it does help the bills a bit.

In other news we wandered by the central library today where I got the It’s Not Easy Being Green book. This is the spin off book from the TV series where Dick Strawbridge and family buy a house in Cornwall and ecoify it by building a water wheel and that kind of thing. I saw some of the series and it was really good. To be fair, you can’t go much wrong with a series fronted by Strawbridge, I think it’s the ex-military stiff upper lip attitude that even if you’re up to your arse in mud everything’s going to be just fine that pulls his shows along.

I’ll maybe review the book for this very blog… I bet you just can’t wait now!

Righto, I’m missing the right key most of the time now so I’m off to bed!

Sup!

OK, so Teeny rumbled me.  Dammit!  Blogging took a back seat for the past couple of weeks, I seem to have been busy.  The problem with todo lists is there are always things on them…

Stuff that I’ve done in the past fortnight:

• Attending a family wedding in some tidy place near York.  Or “getting pissed and calling it a gathering”.  Being locked in a hotel for a weekend with a bunch of family I don’t really know could have been quite a painful experience.  Luckily they’re all properly barmy so it was entertaining enough.  On the down side I’ve discovered that all of my family heirlooms are from the pound shop.
• Attended a Dorbot Alba Workshop.  WTF?  Dork what??  Good question.  I’m still pretty unclear as to what it was I actually went to, I’m not even sure where it was (I was definitely under the Forest Cafe but possibly also under a Uni building of some kind).  The workshop was a nice gathering of odd people who either understand a bit of electronics and mechanics or want a hand from those that do.  It started out with introductions (hello I’m Al, and I’m an LEDaholic etc) and then the people who wanted help with their projects brought out what they had and said what they’d like it to do.  The art student girl sat next to me opened her bag and got out a toilet roll holder.  Then a small motor and gear box.  Then announced “I’d like this to spin”.  Now that’s my sort of project!  Between us and with some guidance from a guy called Gandalf we got it to work.  Self dispensing bog roll, the sort of project solved in a basement in Edinburgh.
• Did Highers Prelims.  Joyous they were (Maths needs work, in case you hadn’t already guessed).
• Saw Hot Fuzz.  An awesome moving picture.  Gets 10/10 on the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost comedy small town violence scale.  I’ll never be able to shop in a Somerfield with a straight face again.  Not that I’d want to though…
• Got attacked by a blood sucking vampire dressed as a nurse (photo credit SUB Photography, it’s surprisingly difficult to photograph your own arm).
• Went to Ikea.  We managed to buy stuff that we actually needed rather than just picking up the nearest piece of useless junk or buying the thing with the stupidest name.

And that’s about it.  Doesn’t sound too much when it’s written down but it seemed busy at the time!

Tonight I screwed our new Rationell to the inside of a kitchen cupboard (it’s a weird combination of over and under engineering but it does work!) and listened to A Night at the Opera very loudly (hence the title).

See you in a couple of weeks…

Argh!  Wireless networking is stupidly complicated and Linux support for it is rubbish and it’s been driving me nuts all night!  It’s reached the point where only playing Doves loudly is going to help.  That’s never a good sign.

I haven’t updated for a while because I still haven’t got the hang of this blogging lark.  I keep thinking I should wait until I have something to say, and then I come up with a Great Idea for a post and then forget what it is.  But just now I realised that I don’t need anything particularly to say, other people waffle incoherently and get away with it.  And only about three people read this crap anyway so what the hell!  Haha!

I can tell you all just how crap Wifi is and why having to install something as stupidly named as “wpa_supplicant” is really annoying, especially when it doesn’t play nicely with my ndiswrapped driver (it’s a pile of crap is the conclusion).  The most irritating part of this is that I can’t figure it out.  I like a challenge as much as the next challenge liking person, but I like my challenges to be solvable and, preferably, have some usable documentation.

OK, enough of all that.  In other marginally less interesting news I missed my maths NAB on Monday because I had a stinking cold.  Which was probably for the best because I hadn’t revised much and everyone seemed to fail an outcome or two anyway.  Today I read up on Polynomial Synthetic Division and the discriminant in anticipation of actually taking it.  I say “anticipation” like I’m anticipating my eventual mortality.  All pretty dull, but I managed to actually get right answers for some of the example questions (I can tell you’re fascinated).  We were in The Southern on South Clerk St for a revision/working and avoiding the internet-blogs-time-sucker hour or so.  Nice pub/bar, good food and quite quiet for sitting about in during the day.

I’m threatening to type up and blog my notes on Synthetic division but I’d get sued by some poor suckers who failed because of them.

An aside: I’d forgotten how good J Mascis and the Fog’s album More Light is.

Not much else has happened recently really, I made a little LED widget for Sarah.  It was a simple thing really but I was quite chuffed that considering I only had a cordless drill and basic tools it didn’t look shite.  And the spaghetti code in the PIC did actually make a couple of different patterns work.

I also did some work on an old site someone else bodged together years ago for which I had to use Frontpage.  I still feel dirty.  Evil stuff.

Things I have recently discovered that are useful:

• Ubuntu has an /etc/rc.local file like Redhat’s, it’s bugged me that not enough distros copied Redhat on this so well done Ubuntu.  Nice.
• If you press [Ctrl] + [1] or [Ctrl] + [2] etc in Firefox you jump to the first or second tabs (etc).  Mmm.
• Gnome’s Nautilus (the file manager) has a really simple little timesaver, if you press [F2] to rename a file it highlights the file name for you to type over (ala Windows) BUT not the extension!  No more having to type “.jpg” after renaming!  Smooth.

So there you go.  Tune in soon for another fascinating instalment of Al’s Life!

The first of January always seems like a nice round numbered day to start things, diets, exercise plans, organising socks, that sort of thing.

So it’s time to start a blog. This can go one of two ways, either I’ll become a blog geek installing all the extensions to WordPress, spending hours fiddling with layouts or, more likely, turn into the subject of this User Friendly.

Of course it’s important to know what you’re doing when starting something new and luckily I’m greatly experienced with blogs. I’ve been regularly reading some for at least a month and I’m had a Google Reader account for about two weeks (I finally sold my soul to the evil machine and I still feel dirty).

I’m really having to start a blog to keep up with the Jones’s because Sarah’s had one for ages in one form or another. She’s currently faffing with Photoshop and pondering the colour of her button bar. One day this could be me…

So who am I and what might I waffle about here? I’m Al, I’m 23, I’ve lived in Edinburgh since August 2006, I like shiny things, lighty up things, PICs and LEDs, Linux and open source, making stuff, junk, food, music and other stuff.

Man, blog posts take a surprising amount of time to write. This one has sort of run it’s course, see you later Internet!