Tip of the day: “never reheat food in a microwave for less than 4 minutes”. If only I had read this in my blog before I wrote it, perhaps I wouldn’t have spent so much time puking on things today.
After a couple of dignified projectile vomiting sessions before work, I foolishly decided to go in regardless. In fairness, I managed to hold back the stomach flinches for an hour, a long phonecall, and the recovery of a crashed finance server before deciding to bail out and go home. Sadly, that five-minute walk proved two and a half minutes too long and I capitulated to the will of my wretch muscles: all over the shrubs at the front of the college. Hey, it was either that or over the passing pedestrians.
This is most ill I’ve been for a long while, and I’m still feeling rough as a badger’s arse.

Life seems scary at the moment. My dreams have been very, very distressing as a result. Some mornings I wake up feeling like I’ve spent the last eight hours being abused and beaten up by everyone from close friends to Michael Caine.

After a long delay, mainly spent waiting for the first bugfix release, I’ve installed Tiger on this iBook. The joy I experienced going from Jaguar to Panther was absent and replaced with a sense of irritation that Apple had been messing about with shit without asking. It was slow, buggy and had incorporated some really tedious extra features. I also had to recompile a bunch of stuff we use at work for the open access machines.

But, after a weekend of mucking about I’m now using a system I’m happy with. You have to turn off all of the bloated crap they put in for the boy-racer dimwits (dashboard/spotlight) and I had to replace a bunch of old plists with some now ones, but it’s working well now. In fact it seems to be a tad faster (after turning off that spotlight bilge anyway). OK they’ve decided to ditch ‘init’ and ‘cron’ in favour of some trash called ‘launchd’ but for a workstation this doesn’t bother me – now if this was a server I’d be setting fire to effigies of Steve Jobbs but thankfully not. It’s still a pleasure to use compared to the alternatives, and I can still compile and run Gimp and Xephem.

Talking of Gimp, I downloaded a superb Gimp script that lets you put lightsabres on photos with almost no effort. Sad I know but it really does it for me 🙂
The new Safari’s pretty good too! It spotted the atom feeds on this blog and sandwichselector!
er…that’s it for now. Loads of news, none bloggable.

This is BUI so I apologise in advance. If you’re reading this then you’re either not out on a saturday night (BST)/(Sad as Me) or I didn’t delete this post on sunday. We all lose!
Thanks to all you wellwishers and apologies for being such a crap correspondent – this weekend is payback time 🙂

You missed Zap’s Birthday! BTW…

After the departmental meeting on Wednesday I handed in my resignation. Every time I’ve ever made a decision that’s on a similar order of personal magnitude, it has resulted in a period (albeit brief) of mellow feelings. This was no exception, and the joy of resigning after my last ever CS departmental meeting was wonderful. Whatever happens from now on is going to be gloriously DIFFERENT! Woohoo! Some dice-shaking is what we needed!
The gorgeous people who manage our flat have also suggested that we may be able to continue our tenure! This is great for so many reasons, not least of which is that it’s bloody convenient for just about everything!

Today we went to Woolies for the first time in years…for me anyway. We were there to buy “baby” Peter a present. As “baby” Peter is now 5, I was given the perfect opportunity to wander around the toys section with verifyable credibility! What a joy! If I were 5 then Woolies would be a wonderland; a place of wonderful things that my mum and dad could and would deny me owing to physical, financial and logical constraints. So, being a grown-up on a mission to actually buy a cool toy was almost too much to cope with. We bought this wicked set of “spy” binoculars (with a built-in torch/spy-scope natch) and green coated lenses to give that psycho-stalker effect. Peter was so absorbed with all his new toys (mini-golf clubs with caddy pack, proper binoculars, a world map jigsaw, Lego Star Wars figures with lightsabres that REALLY LIGHT UP -yeah – none of this crappy yellow slide-it-down-lukes-arm shit, this is serious warsstuff!) that he didn’t notice the hours tick by. I can’t believe that little man is the same person as the little pink ball Michele was cuddling in a certain photo we all relish.