John Malcolm is, in my opinion, an impotent tosser

For some reason, suprnova has packed up. A typically ill-informed Guardian article quotes someone called “John Malcolm” as saying:

These people are parasites, leeching off the creative activity of others. They serve as traffic cops connecting those who want to steal movies with those who have a copy and want to provide it.

In my opinion, the only thing Johnny-boy has to worry about losing is his job, when people realise they are being ripped off by the industry. When the day comes that the RIAA, the MPAA, the BPS, Dr Dre and Lars Ulrich end up on the scrap heap, I will join with the masses in dancing in the streets…to music that has been produced by people who will be earning more than they would have done under the fascistic control of the record company scum.
Anyone wishing to discuss any of these topics with me would be:

  • Most welcome to join me in the pub at some point
  • Ill advised (I’m an argumentative mf)
  • Probably the sort of person to take Lawyers seriously…and therefore a very foolish individual
  • A tragic character, as my opinions are totally worthless

A great night at my parents. My mum is the best cook in the world, and they are both the best entertainers. If Christmas is half as much fun, it will be the best of all time. If only my sister was there too…
But I’m happy as I type, especially as I’m watching my second favourite film of all time: Jabberwocky. The only sad aspect of this is that it reminds me of a lovely person called “Andrea” who died too young. The good do die young you know. As far as I can tell, nothing in life is fair.
Good night.

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Aftermath

The final file restore really hurt – it was only 134G but it took nearly 48 hours! Mainly because of one particular pillock who had over a million messages in one mailbox. Yes a million. And as the mailboxes are actually stored as directories with each message a file, it meant that poor UFS had to keep adding files to this million inode directory. The one folder took about 20 hours. I haven’t looked up his photo on the stalker^H^H^H^H^H^H^H user database in case I should happen to bump into him. If I recognise him, the bump might result in bloodshed.
But mail is now back, more or less, and we survived it, more or less. We also managed to have a staff party and two birthday drinkups in the mean time. Now I have to get back to my project….arrrrggghhh

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Rollercoaster

The last two days have inflicted the highest and lowest possible emotions on me. From working out how to top myself, without distressing relatives, to wanting to dance through the streets naked, with a santa hat on. All related to fucking work. Working from 6am to 9pm really does make it difficult to separate oneself from one’s job. It’s been going like this: tape restore. Hours of pacing and coffee followed by a read error and having to start again. Tape restore. Hours of waiting…it worked! Change to next volume…read error….fuck we’ve got to start again! Arrrrrrrggh. My life is ruined, I’ll never work again. Tape restore…hours pass…it worked! Wooooohooo! Tape restore….hours pass….it worked! Wooohoo! One more and we can get “aries” back! Tape restore…arse…it’s all going pear shaped and it’s nearly 9am…fuck..start again…tape restore…it’s working! Yay! It worked! Bring aries up…people can login and use their network filespace. Phone rings – when’s the mail going to be back ?

One of the biggest problems facing computer people (note that I didn’t use the phrase “IT people”; there is a difference) is that we have had 5 years with minimal interruptions. We regularly used to have uptimes of over a year which were interrupted by deliberate reboots. Nobody ever says “thanks!”. Actually they do…when they move jobs and go to some Microsoft based hellhole and then they realise what a good service we do (did) provide. But when the shit hits the fan now, people think it’s “unacceptable”.
Millionaires out there please send me some money so I can spend my days at home with Michele, Humph and red-wine. That’s all I ask. Is that too much 🙂

Jif’s birthday today.

Good night.

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Thanks

Skip this entry..it’s a miserable dirge of a blog…

After another shit night’s sleep and a massive amount of stress about work. I dragged myself, through the greyest of grey winter mornings, into the office, early, to do some urgently needed systems work [switching the main external web server from an old Ultra 1 to a scarily desirable V20z dual Opteron – Phwooaar]. I knew it was going to be problematic…these things always are, and this has so many dependencies that something major was bound to go wrong.
But it didn’t. In fact it went really quite well and afforded me time to explain to John, my project colleague, why I was behind on the current deadline. He was extremely good about it and made me feel marginally better about the state of things.
Just then, something bad happened. Bad in the sense of the worst possible systems catastrophe I could imagine. My room 101 of technical nightmares. As it turns out, this is the worst technical problem I have ever been involved with, in any job, ever. For the geeks: Our RAID5 array which was, ironically, purchased to provide redundancy, had three concurrent disk failures. This means that the two systems using it, that are also the core of all of the IS Infrastructure, were totally fucked. No option for recovery except….backup tapes. Experienced geeks will be crying in sympathy. Thank you. So after many hours of extreme stress and struggle, we still have no computing service to speak of. Believe it or not, I do have a considerable amount of professional integrity. And, together with my pride and sense of self-worth, it can’t take much more of a bashing I can tell you. Leaving work at 9pm, with everything still busted, another long day of stressful misery ahead and a bank account the colour of a Routemaster did make me think

for gods sake make it stop! I’ve had enough! Please, please, please! There must be more to life than this!

So, if anyone out there has a million quid or two that they really wouldn’t miss, I would be very grateful if you donated it, and you might even save a life. I’ll even draw you a nice thank you picture and write you a lovely song.

P.S. apologies to flurble. You weren’t supposed to see that…well not that soon anyway.

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Sports personality of the year

Don’t you sometimes think that the stimulating, insightful observations sportspeople come out with during post-match analysis should be rewarded somehow ? Not only are these people athletes, but they’re also philosophers. We, the listeners, wonder how it felt to have lost the match, and they explain that, at the end of the day, they did their best but it wasn’t good enough. Obviously they’re sad about it, but they’ll just have to go back to the drawing board and make up for it next time. We, the listeners, now have an insight into the game, deeper than we could ever experience first hand.
Fortunately, the BBC annually award a prize to The Sports Personality of the Year, which isn’t an oxymoron, but a serious award to recognise the importance of these great people. Congratualtions to Kelly Holmes for winning this year and proving that, apart from running faster than some other people earlier this year, she also has a great personality. Here are some examples of why she was the obvious winner:

“I hope to take part in the indoor season, and that really will depend upon how much I train and my progression,”

“The hardest thing was focusing on the race and pretending that I hadn’t already won one.

“Every single year I’ve said ‘oh, if only I hadn’t had that injury I’d have done even better,'”

“The most important thing now is to enjoy my sport and appreciate all the things it gives me.”

There’s just not enough of this inspiring stuff on TV and Radio.

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Kernel promiscuity

A stupid little anecdote, probably not funny to anyone but me…
A friend of mine was telling me about how he recently tried to get all facets of his laptop working under Debian, and hit a couple of brick walls. A couple of Googles later he found someone who had successfully got Debian installed on exactly the same model laptop. He was slightly shocked to discover that it was a woman at least 20 years his junior 🙂 Swallowing any vestiges of macho-pride, he contacted this “girl” and they had a geeky exchange during which she agreed to send him her .config file. For the uninitaiated, the “.config” is the file that describes how the core, or kernel, of your operating system is to be built. Everyone struggles to perfect their .config, and it can be a very personal, time-consuming journey. And let’s not even start on the XF86Config….shudder…
He told me that he felt there was something slightly uncomfortably intimate about being sent a strange girls .config. In his own words, “it was a bit like asking someone to send you their dirty knickers in the post”.
I nearly had to change my own pants laughing.

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Sunday morning

Ignore last night’s rambling blog. You can usually tell what sort of rubbish you’ll be reading by the time of the entry. Well this is sunday morning; give up now.

Owing to the close proximity to The Archers omnibus, I’ve accidentally become a regular listener to Desert Island Disks. Even when it’s someone I dislike or have never heard of. And it’s not just the freakshow style curiosity of sampling other people’s musical tastes, although Bobby Robson following “Is That All There Is ?” by Peggy Lee with “The Lady in Red” really did make me wonder about the state of his mental health. Freak!
The vastly different backgrounds of the guests highlights how strong the class divide still is in Britain. There are two type of guest: the rags to riches, and the rich to riches. The latter has the option of including a “low” period in their life story so as to earn themselves some strength of character.

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Tough

It’s been tough recently. The Gsmiths party season notwithstanding. In the past few days I have be 0wned by Gsmiths for every hour of the day, with the exception of a couple of stolen hours in a bar at some point during the day. Even sleep doesn’t spare me. The “research project” into which I have fully become esconed doesn’t leave me for a second. Work, debt and an impending sense of doom have marred every aspect of my waking life.
But, despite what you might think, I’m feeling ok at the moment. Maybe some sort of end-of-the-road type relief, maybe a moment of clarity, maybe a moment of realisation that the 1.5L of red wine, that we bought with our Nectar points, has mysteriously fucked off. Who can tell ?
Well – the LRC christmas pissup and the Gsmiths Ball have now passed, and jolly good fun they were too, except for:

  • The stupid amount of self-destructive drink consumed
  • The near fight with someone whom I would have described as a close friend…until it became obvious he was nearly all the way to becoming a total tit
  • The jaded feeling of ennui that comes about from experiencing that same-old-shit-for-another-year feeling
  • The fear of moving house again
  • The fear that by the time my Visa appliction reaches the US embassy the US will be yet another fascist state.

But, on the good side

  • There are lots of work colleagues I’m really feeling close to
  • My “old” friends I really miss and look forward to seeing over christmas
  • Humph is on the back of my chair as I type and Michele is sitting nearby and I love them both
  • I worked at Daydream today and achieved one or two minor things that make me feel better about my abilities. Good to see Ralph too. Refreshing good company
  • my dreams are becoming more bizarre and thus more entertaining
  • this album my dad gave me, “Mailbag Blues” is superb. Ranging from blues to the avant-garde via funk and Gong-style story-telling. I love it!
  • A good friday. Nice pub visit at lunchtime with the usuals + Lucinda, Patrick and Brian, followed, later in the afternoon, by Sacha’s leaving do.

Merry Christmas folks.

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Urban art

This was a low weekend to accompany a low year. Apart from feeling miserable about the general state of our finances, the whole shebang looked pretty bleak. To top it all, our knackered old server packed up of Friday night (worst case scenario) which means it’ll be down till monday mid-morning. I managed to move over a chunk of stuff to dormouse but the blog is going to be 403 until monday. This entry is written offline. I hate computers.

Despite being a Microsoft-programming-ex-Israeli-para,
Joel manages to describe exactly how it is when it comes to writing code. The guy is alarmingly together. I wish I was the same. It’s gratifying to know I’m not alone with that sort of “programmers block”. Thanks Joel.

Well, following tradition, I’m not going to concentrate on the down side of life and instead attempt to describe the good bits:

  • We’ve been trying to find an excuse to go back to Madras(q.v.) since the last visit. So we took my mum and dad there in the hope they would also dig it. Which I think they did. Such a nice evening: good, cheap food, wine, chatting and so forth. Life affirming stuff. If only the rest of life could be somuch fun.
  • Humph. No set of bologs can be complete without me
    expressing how cute this bird is. Last night we took the laptop and the bird into the bedroom to watch Bridget Jones: The edge of reason… “Beyond the realms of reason” would be a more accurate title. Absolute crap, without any vestages of wit, realism or pleasure to be had. Luckily Humph decided to watch the film from the vantage point of the top of my head. He crapped in my hair twice, which was more stimulating and enjoyable than anything the film could provide.
  • Talked a lot of embarrasing bullshit to total strangers on Friday. Sorry Mira.
  • Lots of parties coming up. Sadly I’m not looking forward to any of them – but they usually end up being ok.
  • Two nights ago we were rudely awoken by the sound of the sky falling in. Once I got
    my senses together and fully extracted my conscious mind from whatever sick, twisted, dream was being projected in my sleepyhead, I got up and looked out the window. Our little courtyard had been blessed with the addition of two new shovels. Either they were a gift from the heavens or some drunken wanker had seen them laying about on the street and, being a creative motherfucker, recognised their artistic potential. Being such an aesthete he/she also recognised that the noise created by throwing them over the wall would add to the artistic whole. Tosser.

New Cross…it’s just so raw and vibrant!!!!

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Avian intercourse

Last night was pound-a-pint night at the Union. Foolishly, a bunch of us went along. The only comment that matters is from the head-dude there who complained that whilst he expects disgraceful behaviour from the students, he doesn’t appreciate it when it’s staff rolling around on the floor. At this point I feel it necessary to point out that I was not one of those involved in the bundles. Instead I was too busy talking obnoxious bollocks to complete strangers….
Anyway, a bad night’s sleep followed, during which I managed to get rid of any offers of a hangover by imbibing near fatal doeses of water. Don’t knock it; water is nature’s favourite detoxification treatment.

So today I tried to piece together the vague memory traces from last night and then decided that life is scary enough without doing that sort of thing.

This evening I think I might have, indavertantly, had birdie sex with Humph. She was getting all excited by my hand and wedding ring, as is natural 🙂 But then she got all low on the lap top, raised her wings and started doing these odd chirps. I took advantage of her trancelike state and stroked her neck. To understand why I would do this you need to know a few very important things:

  1. Humph is normally way to wary to let us pet her. She’ll rub herself against us when she feels like it but she has to initiate it. Attempting to be physically tender will usually result in couple of warning bites.
  2. In the wild, the back of the neck is the only part that they have trouble preening and so rely on other birds to do it for them
  3. She has a lovely, fluffy neck.

I received a lovely email today from an old friend, Denni, who knows about these things and reckons Humph is “coming of age”…and I think she’s right. In birdy years she’s around puberty…


Being the sort of stay-at-home mid-30s, lacklustre, cosy couple we are, Michele and I watched Hard Spell. Very emotional watching these insanely brilliant, bright, young spellers get torn apart because they got one letter wrong in “Friesian”. They’ll all end up being destitue and miserable as a result of this experience…Although I do have to say that the winner, who successfully spelled “onomatopoeia”, deserved to win and confidentially expect that she will soon become President of the entire WORLD! Apparently Bush can’t even spell “fraudulent”.

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