Turn and face the strange

There are a lot of things going on at the moment, a lot of potential and certain change.  For some people change is great, for some, and that includes me, change is unsettling at the least and very stressful at worst.

I’m on the verge of finally starting to learn to drive.  Maybe I’ll pass my test before I’m 40.  Just need to get a photo signed (got them taken today), get the ID back and actually arrange the lessons, but I’m in the right place mentally which I’ve not really been before.  Mostly it’s thanks to Grete for sorting out the hassle that I can never be bothered to deal with.  I’m actually, if I let myself think about it, looking forward to it, but let’s keep that a secret for now.

My employer is currently going through a round of redundancies.  I’m included in the ‘in scope’ pool.  So there’s a fair amount of uncertainty from that.  Won’t really know where I stand personally for another few weeks.

Add in to that mix that I’m changing roles at work as well.  It’s not been formally announced yet and so I’m not going to give any detail here, but I’m staying in the same bit of the company and hence still ‘in-scope’ (see above), but moving to a different role.  No definite timescales as of yet.  That’s the big change I tweeted about a short while back – once it’s been formally announced at work, I’ll provide an update.

And of top of all of that, and I’m not sure how many folk will understand / care, I’ve taken on the role of Control for the uk.* usenet hierarchy.  Voluntary position, and different people probably have different views about how much of a concern it should be, but for me it’s a big deal, and I intend to carry out the role as well as I can which brings it’s own level of change and stress.  I’m proud to have been offered the position.

A couple of other minor things, and there’s a big stirring pot of change going on right now.

The Third One Never Dies

Is this a trope?  I couldn’t find anything obvious on TV Tropes although I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on there.  Here’s the breakdown.  Criminal drama on television, usually in cases of multiple crimes (so serial killers, that kind of thing).  The show starts with either the discovery of some victims, or the killer killing their first victim(s).  Then, the good guys get in on the case, and start investigating it.  Then, the killer strikes again, only this time we see some of the build up.  The good guys work harder.  And then, the killer moves in on their third victim.  But, now the good guys are on their tail, and they rush in and save the day.

Doesn’t always work out that way, sometimes they break the formula, but it’s pretty reliable.  Certainly the case in Criminal Minds, definitely the case in the CSI cross-over piece that they did recently, sometimes the case in Fringe.

Take this evening’s Criminal Minds for example.  Usual terrible horrific subject matter.  Serial killer targets a family and kills them – this starts the show and the team get involved.  Later we see another family killed.  Finally we find out a third family is being targeted but by then the team know where they are and rush in to save the day.  I’m sure it’s to do with the duration of the show, otherwise there might be more victims, but I’m sure it’s also because we like the format of 3 acts.

Opening Act: Horrific murder, the killer strikes, the team are baffled.
Second Act: The team beat themselves up because they couldn’t save the second victim, but wait! A clue!
Third Act: Can the team save the 3rd victim from the evil killer in time!

All good stories have a start, a middle and an end.

This is probably no revelation to anyone, but I started using the phrase ‘The Third One Never Dies’ whenever a serial killer story starts up in a TV Crime Drama and I liked the phrase so much, thought I’d blog about it.

Car and Body MOT

March was the month of MOT’s.  The car failed on the usual wear-and-tear stuff and we got it repaired and serviced and that set us back the neck-end of £400.  But then it’s the only time in the year we do actually fork out for the car unless it’s actually broken, so I can’t really complain.

I passed my MOT.  HbA1C result was 6%, which is a little higher than the last one, but still well below the 7% warning level and close to the 5-5% level in non-diabetics.  So that’s good news.  I need to work on it a little more, I liked the look on the nurse/doctor’s face when they see I’m diabetic but have an HbA1C of 5.7%, so a few points off the 6% would be nice.  Usual advice from the nurse, lose weight, do cardio exercise, eat properly, take care of my feet.  Can’t blame her for trying with the advice, and I think she doesn’t blame me for not being able to achieve it all.  It takes me a lot of energy to keep my sugar levels down to below 6%, mental and emotional energy, and cutting out all the other stuff required to lose weight as well would probably be the end of me.

Maybe I’ll try and start walking again at lunch times now the weather is picking up.

So, another year with diabetes, another year with good control, but no rest, have to do that every year, every time, for ever.

DIY

I think DIY might actually stand for “Disaster Incoming, Yes?”.  I have a perception of myself not being any good at DIY.  It may or may not be true, perhaps I’m just below average rather than not very good.  It stems from a lack of practice, a lack of knowledge, a lack of confidence and a lack of skill.  Other than those four things, I’m totally set though.

Which is why owning a house (car / object-which-requires-maintenance) is a bit stressful for me.  I can’t really afford to pay other people to do this stuff for me, and I’m crap at doing it myself, catch 22 (yeh, I’m a whining old bastard and should just shut up and get on with it like everyone else has to).

Half the problem (99% of the problem?) is that I have a very ‘what could go wrong’ mindset.  I’m good at spotting risk, understanding consequences.  This is great if you’re trying to stay alive somewhere dangerous, it’s stupid if you live in a warm house in the middle of a quiet town where the biggest risk is you might get wet from a rain shower.  But there you go – that’s what I have.  It comes in handy in my job sometimes, but in terms of DIY it’s a major stumbling block.  If I was stupid, or didn’t understand the consequences or risks, I’d probably do a lot more DIY.

We’ve got a set of vertical blinds installed over the sliding doors at the back of the house.  We put them up ourselves when we moved in, pretty sharpish since that bit of the house lets in a LOT of light.  I was pretty pleased with the effort, because there’s a lot that can go wrong putting up a rail for blinds, trust me.  Anyway they’ve served us well for 5 years, but in the summer, they still let a hell of a lot of light in.  Enough for it to be uncomfortable being in here using a computer.  Last summer we hung a blue throw from some paper clips and string behind the blinds to block the sun out.  Yes, we did.  MacGyver would have been proud.  We talked about replacing the blinds with some curtains.  But that means another rail.

Grete was really patient, and eventually, with a sulk the size of a 10 story building, I went to Ikea with her and bought a rail system and some curtains.  All I have to do now is hang it.

Which is where the fun starts.  What’s the material above the door made of?  Is it a metal lintel, or concrete, or is it just hollow plasterboard or something else?  Will it be strong enough to mount the three fixings?  What screws do I need?  Why is the plaster all cracked (hidden from our eyes by the blinds).  Is that bad or just annoying?  What if I hang this and make it worse?

What if I make it worse.

And there’s the crux.  There’s why I don’t like DIY.  It’s not a fear, that’s too strong a word, but it’s a constant doubt, what if I do this, and fuck it up so badly, that we end up having to pay someone more than we would have to do it right in the first place?  But hell, it’s only three holes and three screws, how bad can it be?  Well, my mind paints some pretty bad pictures.

And I’m sure you’re sitting there thinking ‘you pussy, just get the fuck on a set of ladders and mount that rail’.  Some people can just do it.  Some people have a lot of experience, practice and innate skill with this kind of thing.  But not me, and that means I have no confidence either, and if you have no confidence, you’re skill level is halved again.

But we’ve bought the stuff, so I will mount this rail and take down the blinds, and I’ll give it my best shot.  And somewhere, in the back of my head there’s a little voice saying, ‘it’ll be okay, it’s only a rail, you’re worrying about it far too much’, and I know it’s right, but at the front of my head, with a loud hailer is the big voice shouting ‘Remember when you tried to put that shelf up in your bedroom when you were a teenager?  Yeh.  Remember that’.

Stay tuned, I’ll post pictures as I go!

Spring cleaning

We’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning while I’m on holiday.  Grete’s been selling some stuff off on eBay (listed here) and today we dragged some boxes out of the loft and I threw away a lot of old paperwork (bills from 10 years ago) that we need to shred.

Also found a bag with a lot of stuff from my university days, mostly letters from friends during university or in the year or so afterwards.  Really brought back some memories (can’t believe it’s 20 years ago).  Would love to find out how some of the folk I knew back then are getting on (I know a few of them through FaceBook and while we don’t chat every day, or even once a year, it’s sort of nice seeing how they and their families are doing).  On the off-chance that Linda Shaw, Jane Shephard or Joy Elsender search the net for their own names (assuming they’re not married), then drop me a note!  Let me know how you are!

In fact, anyone I was at Sheffield Polytechnic / Sheffield Halam University between 1989 and 1993, drop me a note, let me know how you are (how egotistical is that – ah well, have to start finding people somehow!)

So the other thing I found was a bunch of invoices for various bits of computer (these are different to the ones I found here), can you believe these prices from June 2000?

  • 17GB Seagate drive – £66
  • 20GB Quantum Fireball drive – £96
  • 8-port 10BaseT hub (yes, 10BaseT) – £37
  • 15″ CRT – £119 (why do monitors always cost ‘around £120’?)
  • 4x4x20 CD Writer – £139
  • 40 speed CD drive – £30

Crazy!

Flirting with Ubuntu (again!)

Anyone unlucky enough to have read anything in my blog before knows I’ve been a long-time Linux user.  I’ve had various Linux servers and now have a couple of Linux virtual machines on the ‘net hosting these pages.  I’ve flirted in the past with Linux based desktops, but for various reasons never made a solid effort to give up Windows.  Mostly that’s because there were a handful of things I wanted that I could still only really get from Windows.  Games primarily, and that’s still the case today.  Lord of the Rings Online might run on Linux under WINE, but since I have a valid XP license and my machine runs it quite happily already, why go to the bother?

However, the list of apps that I do need and only come with Windows has shrunk considerably.  I made the switch to OpenOffice a while back (both at home and work), and although the paragraph numbering pisses me off a great deal, I’m happy enough with the applications.  I don’t play any other PC games any more (other than Flash based stuff) because we got the PS3 and so that has removed a huge chunk of Windows reliance.  Just about anything else I do is either a web app (mail) or there are plenty of Linux apps that cover it (Usenet, browsing, etc.)

So I thought I’d make a solid effort to use Ubuntu and see how I really get on with it.  But I don’t really want a dual boot system until I know for sure I’m going to migrate my data to Linux and only boot into Windows to play LOTRO.  So I’m running Ubuntu in a VirtualBox VM, running Full Screen with Bridged Networking and ignoring Windows in the background.  The VM has ~1GB of memory and plenty of CPU (especially for Linux) so performance isn’t an issue.  The only question is really can I find the apps and a way of working that I’m comfortable with.

I’ve been setting this up for two days and already there’s been some pain.

  • Looks like NAT networking in VirtualBox 3.1.4 is hosed.  I started browsing and downloading various things yesterday and every now and then a web page wouldn’t load, and I’d need to click refresh a few times.  Then I installed a Usenet client (XPN, very nice) and it would randomly hang getting headers.  Took me a while to realise there was a problem, but since this is a Debian based distribution the investigation was trivial – sudo apt-get install wireshark; sudo wireshark.  Tracing the network traffic it was obvious the client was losing packets and there was a lot of bright red ACK’ing and re-ACK’ing going on.  I checked online and there were reports of VirtualBox NAT being broken a few sub-releases ago but being fixed now.  Well, it’s clearly not fixed, however Bridged networking seems (so far) to work fine.  Sadly, this caused me serious frustration yesterday and earlier today while I was trying to download and install various apps.
  • Finding a replacement for Twhirl (Twitter Client).  I could of course, still use Twhirl which is an Adobe AIR app and so runs under Linux.  However, support for Twhirl has been dropped and I hate the replacement (too big!).  So I scouted about and found Gwibber.  Sadly, it suffers from the major problem with a lot of open source apps, crap documentation.  Yes I know, it’s open source and so I can fix this myself, but it doesn’t help when you’re first trying to get it installed and working.  So, the current package is buggy, but I worked around that and got it running, then I couldn’t get any themes to work until I found they’d changed the theme system and none of the ones found by Google worked.  Then I found there was a theme package you could apt-get install and it was all okay.  But now in order to run it, I have to launch it twice from the menu, I’m sure I’ll get that worked out.
  • USB support – not critical, but I did manage to blue screen my entire machine today trying to get USB devices to show up inside the VM.  I might try again later, would be nice if I ever need to move data around (although I do have a shared folder, so I can leave stuff on the Windows partition).

Some things worked really well,

  • Pidgin, it’s just excellent.  The plugins are great, and GFire especially useful since I can hang out in the XFire channel with friends.
  • I loved apt-get the first time I used it, and I still love it now (even if it’s called something else ;))

Some things are okay, but could be better,

  • Picasa works under Linux, but only because it runs with the WINE libraries.  When I first ran it, I had some issues but that might be due to the network problems I was having at the same time.  Annoyingly, because it’s running in WINE it looks like a Windows XP app, which bugs me because if I’ve switched to Ubuntu I want it to look like a Gnome app.  But hell, at least it runs; Picasa was the one major app I would miss other than LOTRO.
  • After being a Windows desktop user for a very, very long time, a lot of the shortcut keys I’m used to (such as shift-num-pad-1 to select everything on a line) don’t work, and those are going to be the things that take me longest to get used to.

I’ve promised myself that if I’m just sitting at the computer, I’ll use the Ubuntu VM.  If I’m playing LOTRO I’ll close it down to free up resources, but return to it once I’m done.  I have a couple of other options.  Wubi looks very interesting, it installs Ubuntu into a single file under Windows, and adds a boot option for it on the Windows boot menu.  It installs like a Windows app, and you can uninstall it again afterwards.  When you boot into Ubuntu the Windows partition is mounted so you can share files.  The other option is a straight install and dual-boot into it’s own partition (but I’d need to do some partition shrinking to get there).  Until I know for certain I want to move, I’ll stick with the VM, since it gives me the quickest way to get into LOTRO and back out again.

I suppose the only question I haven’t answered is why I want to move?  Unlike some, I don’t hate Windows (although I still use XP so maybe that’ll come), and I think that Microsoft is no worse that many major software vendors.  I think I just like the idea of software being free and available for anyone to use, improve and share.  Certainly in the next 10 years the face of computing is going to change radically and I’d rather the stuff I use be driven by the people who use it, than the people who want to make money selling it to us.

It’s a nice day!

Bright sunny day.  Wouldn’t say it was warm, but the sun is pleasant if you’re out of the breeze and not in shade.  More importantly, it’s dry, so I finally got a chance to get back into the garden and finish up what we started last year before I had the hernia.

Time to get rid of the deck (once and for all!)  It’s been piled up at the bottom of the garden since last year, so the wood’s in pretty bad shape now.  Some of it is still too long to go into the car though, so this morning I’ve been moving it to the side of the house and sawing the bits that aren’t going to fit.  I’ve moved about a third, and since this is the first physical exercise I’ve had since winter set in, I’m taking it slow!  Here’s how we left it in 2009.

Moved around a third of it to the side of the house, and cut some of the longer beams.

But it doesn’t look like that much has changed yet in the garden!

Total number of amphibians re-homed during this process: 1 (running total)

March

March.

Time Marches On.  March brings a few things.  It adds another year to both myself and Grete as we have birthdays.  And it brings a round of diabetic checkups (my yearly assessment).  As always, I’m expecting the worst from the blood glucose numbers, and assume I’ll be blind and missing limbs in a few months due to bad sugar control.  We’ll see what the numbers return.

I’m trying to remain upbeat about being almost 40, but with the all crap going on at work, that’s never easy.