Well, for the first time ever, I bought an MP3 the other day. It was only £1, I thought “what have you got to lose?” It was a good buy actually, a tune I don’t think you can get on vinyl (the Hybrid remix of REM – The Great Beyond, in case you were wondering).
So, here we are … moving into the digital revolution. Will it last? Will it replace vinyl and ‘hard copy’ media? Phill will answer these questions and more… in ten years time 😉
… in that order: I went down to London on Saturday to meet up with some fellow Essex graduates. Philippa and I travelled down on the train with Simon, Matthew, Sarah and Jon. The first thing we did was go to Hamley’s and have a look round all the toys – that was great fun! Unfortunately, it means that I now really want to play with Hornby train sets. I used to have one when I was younger, although I think it was more my dad’s than mine…
After lunch Andy B joined us and we went to the National Portrait Gallery, and the Tate Modern. I was quite impressed with the Tate Modern – the building, that is! I really like what they’ve done with the old power station. In the evening, Naomi and Ranald joined us and we went for dinner at Yates in Leicester Square. Then, most people went off to watch “The Woman in White” – as I’m not massively rich at the moment, Phil and I headed off back to Colchester. It was a good day out though!
Yesterday, Phil and I went to Fordham in the morning, and then went to the rectory for lunch. In the evening, we went to see “Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit” at the cinema. It was absolutely brilliant! I would thoroughly recommend anyone to go and see it, especially if you’ve been a fan of the shorter episodes (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave).
Anyway. This morning, there was a thick fog outside. Probably the thickest fog I’ve had to drive through! You could hardly see anything! Although, I don’t know where the expression “pea soup” fog comes from – it didn’t look anything like pea soup! It did look pretty thick though – very low visibility. First time I’ve ever had to use fog lights!
That’s all folks 🙂
I have to say, I am liking OpenOffice 2.0. The beta version shipped with Fedora Core 4, and I haven’t really used it much. Anyway, after my mammoth update yesterday it would appear that it’s now out of beta, and onto Release Candidate 2.
I decided to do a bit of work on my CV today (not that I’m thinking about changing jobs, I just think it’s good to revise once in a while!). I had previously edited it using Microsoft Word, and it was saved as a Word document, but I managed to open it up in OpenOffice Writer without any problems. It actually displayed… well, pretty much exactly as I’d layed out in Word!
One thing I really like about OpenOffice is the ability to export directly to PDF format. This means that I’ve got my CV saved as both OpenOffice’s native format, and PDF – so if I ever need to go onto Windows, I can at least be sure the PDF will display properly.
It seems to be generally smoother and have better functionality than 1.x. All in all, I like it.
So what are you waiting for? Go and download it!
I’ve been having a few problems with the ol’ blog system recently. Basically, it was archiving things in a funny order. I’ve changed the code slightly and it seems to be working now (as soon as I say that I know it’ll break, but still – you’ve got to try).
Ah well… whether this thing will ever get around to being released I very much doubt! I think it needs quite a bit of work done first…
I finally managed to update Fedora Core 4 last night. I’ve been having problems since I upgraded from version 3. For some reason, up2date doesn’t want to work… looking at the files, I think it’s still got a couple of the repositories from version 3 there. So, when it wants to update, it can’t, because it can’t find the Fedora 4 RPMs.
Yum wasn’t much better… it started updating, got the package list, said that it had resolved the dependencies – and then failed with an error that libvcd needed something-or-other for the whatchamecallit.
It turns out all I had to do was remove the package that was causing the problems, and was then able to download all 600MB worth of updates (it took some time, I can tell you). Still, at least I have a nice up to date system now.
Still, this does show the good and bad side of Linux: The bad side is that sometimes problems are… well, they seem really stupid. Windows does work… most of the time. Sometimes with Linux you have to make it work. Still. The good thing with updates is that – there are a lot of packages on my machine. When I do an update, I get (for example) updated system utilities, updated kernel, updated OpenOffice, updated games… basically if there is a newer version of a package I have on my machine, it’ll automatically be updated.
That’s pretty cool!
Well, I haven’t put up a ‘The Weekend’ post in a while, so I thought I’d do one!
On Friday evening, Philippa and I went to the Rose and Crown in Wivenhoe, as it was the Fresher’s Week “Walk to Wiv” event. We didn’t actually walk from campus, but we did meet up with people at the pub and meet a couple of the freshers. It was a good evening, I enjoyed it 🙂
On Saturday I didn’t do all that much during the day. In the evening, Philippa and I went onto campus for the RED AM 1404 evening. A couple of friends from the DJ Soc were DJing there. It was great – although very, very loud! I think my ears are still recovering. Ah well.
Yesterday, I went to Church in the morning, then met up with Philippa and her parents for lunch. We went to the Rose and Crown – but not the one in Wivenhoe, this was one just outside of Great Horkesley. In fact, it might even be in Great Horkesley. But it was good regardless of location – unfortunately there was quite a large number of people on some kind of party there who’d arrived shortly before we did, which meant that we had to wait about an hour for lunch. It was good when it arrived though! I had a nice steak… mmmmm.
In the evening, we all went to Sunday @ 7 (the evening service) at Fordham. I was playing the piano, my first time there! I think I did OK, although it was good experience – I now know where to leave pauses! Not always something you think about when playing on your own.
I think that’s just about it… all for now!
Well, something is not right. I’ve added a couple of blog entries recently, and nothing has happened. Upon further investigation, it turns out they’ve been archived but haven’t appeared on the main page. Grrr.
I feel like re-writing this blog system now, might make it a bit easier to manage… ah well. C’est la vie…
Ok, I don’t usually mention this, but I’ve recently noticed a lot of people are mis-spelling the word “ridiculous”, instead choosing to spell it “rediculous”.
Now, I know that the English language is fairly organic, but the dictionary.com hasn’t got around to including the new definition yet, and they usually include synonyms like that, so please… let’s all settle on spelling it the same way, shall we?
Honestly, it’s redicu ridiculous…
Hmmm. I’m not sure about this one. Apparently the Met Office are going to Simplify Weather Forecasts. I think I’ll just let the last paragraph from the article sum it up:
…we have to wonder how much spin can possibly be put on the weather, or how useful it might be.
For one thing, a forecast is just that: a calculated best guess about what the weather is most likely to do. For another, the forecast has absolutely no bearing on what the weather actually does. And finally, when was the last time you looked at a miserable weather forecast and decided that that kind of weather was not for you, and that you’d go with the competitor’s brand instead?
Interesting. One of the things that I learnt about last week was ADF (Application Development Framework) and Struts. Well, I say that – basically all I learnt was that what we were being taught on the course was being phased out and replaced by ADF, and we should go on the next course… anyway.
I noticed yesterday that Barclays Online Banking is using Struts. Interesting indeed… I think I’m going to have to investigate it a bit further. I’m really getting into J2EE, it seems an age away from writing those ASP based websites in the late nineties — scalability? What’s that then?