Monthly Archives: September 2002

At present, things are good. In fact, every day since thursday has been good. Cool! Oh my god – I’m having a good time!

Thursday was pretty fun. Not only was there a massive unison strike on thursday which really messed things up at G********s, but there was a pissup that started at 4:30 (pm). Dear John from the Maths department (as it used to be called before the twats took over) was leaving. John is one of the very few people that make G********s a good place to work…and he’s been forced out.
Also leaving were Bill and Cho-ho..two interesting, talented people….

A night of joy and happiness (apart from the extreme violence, tequila, broken glass and blood). Despite the outrageous amount of alcohol consumed, most of us made it for Friday night….again…a good night. It is ten years since I started at the college, and ten years since I met one of my best friends, Ben. Ben came to London and helped make Friday fun – depsite us all ending up in the Tavern – a shite place to be for many, many reasons.

On saturday half a million people (or 100,000 people if you believe the coppers) (or 250,000 if you believe the news)… took to the streets of London to protest about the imminent war against Iraq. Not that we like Saddam, we just hate the fact that George Thicky W Thicky Bush Thickcunt thinks we should be dictating the way the world should be run by flexing his cock muscles. In fact I too believe that we should do away with fascistic vote-rigging bastards who try to rule the world with hardcore religious doctrines and who have no care for the innocent… Saddam is pretty shitty too but why punish his opressed people by bombing them ? Espcially since it was the U.S. that put him in power in the first place ? Also considering that the U.S. told the Iraqi revolutionaries that they would support an uprising…and then fucked-off after the ally-royals were restored to power in Kuwait leaving Saddam to kill and toture them.

It was the first time for ages I’d seen Alex, despite the fact he lives about 20 minutes walk away….I just don’t see him often enough – A peculiar thing about living in London…

Ben, Alex and I met up with Ray, Pete and Susie from G********s) and we marched (walked /stood still/ waited/ danced) together. After the massive march, in which the Police had seriously underestimated the numbers involved, resulting in a total collapse in police control leading to a really quiet and peaceful demo, we went to the pub.

Nice day. Nice, nice day…

Now, Sunday night, it’s TV time. Red Wine, a lovely evening with my parents in which we ate roast pork, drank wine and looked at lots of Auntie Betty’s pictures dating from the early 50’s.

BTW – according to the “News Shopper” in 1966 there was just as much, if not more, violent crime in the borough then as there is now. The only difference is that nowadays razors are seldom used…and that really is the only difference.


Now come on…Brian bloody Aldrige is really pushing his luck…they are dragging the life out of this story line…


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A really nice day yesterday. Did some work on the PIC project which worked nicely and then decided to attack a really irritating Winblows problem.
GEEKBLOCK
After my last Athlon motherboard blew-up I bought a replacement, the chip was fine so I just used that. The hard-disk was dual boot Linux/Windows. The Linux partition booted fine – no problem, everything working fine….but the bastard windows 98 partition (needed for a couple of things unfortunately) would not find the network cards. Believe me I tried everything, moving the cards about, removing the entire ENUM key in the registry (which sorted everything else OK), 3 different NICs. Using the ‘Add New Hardware’ wizard to add the cards explicitly caused me to shout the words “FUCKER” and “CUNT” on several occasions as it told me that the card was plug-and-play and so didn’t need installing…..just plug the card in and reboot! Arrrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh!
So yesterday I switched hardware – ‘teapot’ the Linux workhorse/music-player/firewall/router switched into the athlon box, and ‘parrot/blackbird’ the winblows/linux disk into the K6-2/500…and it worked!
Had to zap the ENUM key and get it to redetect everything, but after about 50 reboots all the hardware was detected! Woooooohooo! So Everything’s working and my dear teapot is now on an Althlon. happy happy.
EOGB
In the evening we went to see some friends, Jackie and Mike, for dinner. Jackie did a curry and it was fantastic. All vegetarian, but superb. A spinach and prawn dish, and a butternut squash Rogan Josh. It’s totally inspired me to try and cook curry – I’d love to be able to knock up something like that.
Mike has an enormous record collection and we even got to listen to a bit of Gong before it got turned off due to public (female) pressure.


When oh when will Brian Aldridge get his comeuppance ?


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Just heard on the radio that the new re-vamped Tory conference is going to
have….oh god…..
a chill-out zone
….cringe..

They’ll be advertising it on pirate radio next.

DJ Duncan Smith spinning intelligent garage
The Blue-rinse ravers room with right-wing drum’n’bass
Ann “Wheels of steel” Widdecombe
Ladies and Pensioners free before 11
Guest Appearance by “Mad Mags Death-Camp-Techno Sound System”
etc etc


The end is in sight for the excessive workload – nice feeling…however I’ve already ruled it out as the reason for my poor sleep; every night I wake up at 4am and can’t
sleep. When I finally get to sleep (several hours later) it’s total dreamsleep – and the dreams are more bizarre than ever before in my life.

Monday is the start of the registration season at work. The mellow peace of the college is shattered to make way for thousands and thousands of students. Freshers filled with nervous excitement and the rest filled with yawn-a-minute stories of how they spent their extrodinarly long summer holiday going travelling around some exotic country or other.


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Admittedly the last blog entry was a tad on the negative side. However tonight’s mood is leagues away from the mood that night. Despite having to deal with a disk failure in an important firewall until about 7:30 tonight.

ADSL is back in action, one of my jobs coughed up a grand taking me back to within the overdraft limit, Michele is working, done a fair amount of work, listening to some nice tunes, good telly, a pizza-express “american hot one” and a plentiful supply of wine.

Also, our Thai-Chi started up again today which is definately making me feel better with the world. Amazing what a bit of gung-jing(sp?) can do.


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Despite spending the last month of my life working so hard for nearly
20 hours a day, to the point where I stopped believing in anything but
ASCII, we’re still not making any money.

Today we reached our 2000 pounds overdraft limit.

It is two weeks after I got paid, and thus two weeks before I get paid again.
OK I’m owed money for several jobs…but the jobs aren’t technically finished
yet so I can’t get paid for them.

The infection on the inside of my cheek wasn’t frightened by last weeks course
of antibiotics and is flourishing to the extent that Dr Livingstone (
it really is his name poor fucker) has not only prescribed another course,
but has referred me to a specialist at the hospital.
Of course, I can’t fill the prescription because the bank won’t give me any moremoney.
On leaving the surgery it started to rain in a spectacular fashion. Were I not
a devout atheist it could possibly convince me to start work on building a
large wooden boat.

As I was feeling ill, tired and depressed (and also because I had washed my
hair today for the first time in two months) walking in the rain seemed like an
unbearable prospect. The 10 quid in my pocket would have covered a cab
home but would mean a night without lovely alcohol. The only period of joy in
my days at the moment.

So I walked. I got soaked. I got blown about by the tempestuous wind and I
got a couple of bottles of wine.

Dripping, I came home and relished the thought of letting out a huge, bitter
blog. Of course the ADSL is down. Of course. Of course it’s down. Look at this shit:

traceroute to denzil, 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  rewter (192.168.254.254)  0.768 ms  5.206 ms  0.688 ms
 2  freeserve4-hg2.kingston.broadband.bt.net (217.41.134.73)  14.516 ms  14.221 ms *
 3  freeserve4-hg2.kingston.broadband.bt.net (217.41.134.73)  36.61 ms  13.801 ms *
 4  freeserve4-hg2.kingston.broadband.bt.net (217.41.134.73)  15.112 ms  15.778 ms *
 5  freeserve4-hg2.kingston.broadband.bt.net (217.41.134.73)  16.172 ms *  22.477 ms
 6  * freeserve4-hg2.kingston.broadband.bt.net (217.41.134.73)  15.442 ms  17.673 ms
 7  * freeserve4-hg2.kingston.broadband.bt.net (217.41.134.73)  15.911 ms  13.907 ms

But it won’t win while I have vi…
Fuck British telecom.
Fuck Connex (another story).
Fuck Everything.
But hey – don’t look on the down side. Think happy! Remember all of the things
we’ve got to look forward to:

  • The death of your parents
  • The death of close friends
  • Chronic and serious debt
  • chronic and painful illness
  • A slow deterioration in health towards death
  • Incontinance
  • senility