Present Perfect

I remember a girl named Hula. She was a hoop to have around.

I remember a girl named Hula. She was a hoop to have around.

Watched two more movies on Thursday - Baise-moi (acceptable but disappointing) and some other I can't even remember. Went to work for the afternoon on Friday to quell unrest, still feeling a but squeamish but better.

Kristien convinced me to tag along for the ski weekend, so I took a lot of books (didn't even take my laptop, so I must have been some kind of ill) in case I wouldn't feel well enough to ski. But everything turned out fine. First day gave us good snow, the second was a bit more icy and the day ended badly because lifts closed suddenly on account of violent winds (it wasn't me), forcing us to do a fifteen minute uphill climb and then a bunch of flat slopes. Snowboards and flat slopes don't mix. I also had a small accident at, of all places, a ski lift. Some guy that had more balls than technique managed to fall down getting off the lift blocking everyone else. Instead of looking out for myself, I tried to not hurt him and ended up landing on the edge of his board with my face and my ungloved hand. My face is sort-of-ok - or not much worse off than before - here's the result.

Yesterday I called my father the doctor and explained the situation and he sounded very gloomy and depressing when I described the details. I was starting to get the feeling that he was going to suggest amputation, but apparently I had woken him up. My dad never goes to bed this early, I wonder what's up. Anyway, first he suggested getting a special solution that (Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs) was used in World War I to treat infected wounds. Then he said I might consider going to an actual doctor. So I put the picture online so my dad can see if I really really really have to see a doctor, which I'd like to avoid.

When you move to some other country where you don't speak the language you build this perfect bubble around yourself in which everything is fine. This works for 99% of the time. When something is not fine, it's hard to deal with it because your common knowledge of the language that you get by on is completely inadequate for these situations and the emotions that come with it. You feel like a toddler making up new words to convey what you're going through, you're not able to get angry or sarcastic at people because you spend most of your brain cycles understanding what they're telling or asking you in the first place. It probably takes a while before you're fluent enough in a language to handle the 1% of your life that is not in the bubble...

In other news, a little girl peed in my couch. I am watching the Sopranos from the edge of my couch now.

Watched two more movies on Thursday - Baise-moi (acceptable but disappointing) and some other I can't even remember. Went to work for the afternoon on Friday to quell unrest, still...

Struck down by flu yesterday. I really tried to focus and concentrate on some things but I couldn't keep anything in my head for more than a second. Read some books and watched some movies instead - good opportunity to watch all those movies Kristien never wants to see.

Watched Pitch Black (nice visuals, nice plot ideas, but Vin Diesel is not a very good actor), The Punisher (the one from last year, pretty good all things considered) and Death Race 2000 (hilarious movie, clearly the inspiration for the PC game Carmageddon), as well as two Sopranos episodes. By the evening I already couldn't remember what movie I saw in the morning, that's how shot my brain currently is. It feels like pudding.

Still ill today. Started out by watching THX. Nice movie, but maybe too much to handle for my pudding.

Struck down by flu yesterday. I really tried to focus and concentrate on some things but I couldn't keep anything in my head for more than a second. Read some...

weekend

Had a very productive one, for a change - I decided not to worry about my broken desktop computer for a weekend. I took a poke at the yum patch for mach but I was still lacking some things apparently, because it didn't work quite right yet. I thought some more and worked some more on the design I have planned for mach3.

We went shopping for some stuff I had been wanting to get for some time: some speakers for the kitchen, a new headset (for the time being - I'm looking for an insanely small screw so I can fix my expensive ones because they are incredibly good), some books, a saw, and a ticket for Interpol who are coming in April, yay !

I also tried the latest release of Skype on Linux. They've come a long way, I was very impressed. A simple install of the package on two machines, creating an account, and it Just Worked. We called up Kristien's brother, who has it, and it worked fine as well. Impressive. With Skype's for-pay setup for calling to actual phones I'm sure they will continue to make huge steps in terms of installed userbase.

Went out for dinner at some friends in the evening. Sunday we took on the plank with the small saw we bought. When we got the plank we thought the alcove in the kitchen was rectangular, but when trying the plank it turned out not to fit, and when taking up measurements again I realized it was trapezoidal. Finally I know what to say when some kid asks me why mathematics are useful in real life. It was a pain though to realize I had to saw off chunks at both ends. Anyway, a whole lot of sweat later we had the plank mounted and could make some room for other stuff.

One of the things that qualified was the old IA1 appliance I still have lying around. These are 800x600 LCD computers with wireless keyboard and a 16 MB sandisk, and 32 MB memory, and a 266 MHz AMD CPU. Just enough to run a music player over the network. Last time I set this up I never quite got a good working mode set up to tweak the disk image and add my own stuff. I remember having to fiddle with finding a Win98 system to make the flash card disk bootable and get the image on it. This time, I didn't have win98 and I didn't have the flashcard writer anymore, since Peter stole it for his trip to Asia.

Well, taking some time off from projects can be very enlightening. I took a step back and looked for ways to transfer images more easily. Hm, Kristien's camera has flash cards and acts like a disk under Linux. And dd with a bootable image seems to work fine, and the machine boots with it. And after that, I can nfs mount a server share and use dd directly to transfer an image to the machine's sandisk. That already takes away about 9 of the 10 minutes the change-build-install-test cycle used to take on those machines...

Some tweaking later, and I had the machine set up to boot, mount the music share, get a playlist with wget and start playing. So finally - great music in the kitchen, and more motivation to spend time in it cooking...

Next plans:
- get a chroot environment going on the nfs server with an oldish distro that matches the midori kernel and glibc version running on the machine
- check if FILO and Etherboot can do PXE boots yet with usb network cards (that'd be *sweet* - everything would just be on the server and the machine would just boot the kernel and system from the network, allowing me to work with newer kernels easily)
- set up a cross-compilation environment to finally start coding for this machine
- write my GStreamer audio player that mixes and levels

We'll see if I can make some time for this little project...

weekend Had a very productive one, for a change - I decided not to worry about my broken desktop computer for a weekend. I took a poke at the yum...

The last month I've been feeling at a very low energy level. It started with getting ill for a week, and from there I never really recovered yet. Nothing very definite as a symptom. I sleep enough, but I wake up dead tired. I feel as if I've had only six hours of sleep continuously, and my productivity is a lot lower than it should be. Kristien thinks I have the kissing disease. Well, my gland is surely swollen, but not alarmingly so. Just have to wait it out I guess.

New kids on the bloc

After a long wait, Bloc Party will finally release their debut album sometime this month. Sadly they're not coming round here for a show, and the Brussels show is the week right after FOSDEM :/ Anyways, I "found" the album on the internet, and I haven't listened to anything else for a week straight. It is fantastic. If you like your rock prickly, chaotic and echoed, get the album now.

I guess I'm not a typical use case, but being able to download an album is clearly not going to stop me from buying this album as soon as it comes out. Part of the reason for this is that mp3's you find on the net are pretty bad quality-wise. Another part of the reason is that I encode all my music in ogg at a higher-than-average quality, and I want to keep my collection virgin. I wonder what would happen if I could find online music in high-quality ogg straight-away.

The last month I've been feeling at a very low energy level. It started with getting ill for a week, and from there I never really recovered yet. Nothing very...