IMS_Blog

OK, one more go at getting this silly thing to republish the post so the
category will actually show up.

Just watched the live coverage of shuttle Discovery’s return to flight launch. All went smoothly. I don’t think I’ve actually watched a live launch in an awful long time (it had become that routine). Certainly I haven’t watched one with so much tension in a very long time. Now, let’s just hope it returns safely in a little under two weeks time, so we can get on with the space programme proper.

Thanks to Ed’s help the emergancy replacement desktop is now up and runnning. It should dual boot Windows XP and Linux (Kubuntu) but we didn’t actually completely finish off so currently it’ll only boot to XP (this was caused by forgetting to write down the XP product key then having it sent by Rachel via SMS only to discover the middle part missing. In the end we had to walk from Ed’s back to my house to find it out). At some point he promises to finish it off, and give me the files (recovered form laptop drive once I realised I hadn’t got ‘em first time round) which are on his file server still.

So the laptop fell over. Turns out it’s not getting back up. Apart from the still unresolved upgrade issues, it seems to have developed a habit of running crazily hot. That means that before the chance to do anything recovery wise happens it shuts down. Not good.

Much kudos to Ed for helping me, initially in an attempt to get the thing running, then in rescuing what was needed from the drive. Further kudos will arrive when he helps me hash together the mess of a system being built as a replacement (maybe a linux box, maybe XP, maybe dual boot).

For now I’m sharing the one box with Rachel, which isn’t good. I’ve just about got everything I currently want on it from backup though, which is something. Remember, always backup…

Ahh. On a security buzz I finally attempted to upgrade the laptop to Windows XP SP2 (this is the machine I mainly use while Rachel has the desktop. I’d held off updating because I wrote my thesis on it and didn’t want to risk problems while that was going on). The upgrade did not go well :-( The laptop now can’t successfully boot into windows (even in safe mode). Technical support (Lexitus) has been called.

I wasn’t going to mention the events of London but inspired by this post I thought I’d just say this. The bastards who set of bombs in a cowards way, realise this. This is Britain. We don’t do terror. You may believe we’re essentially the US extended but your wrong. Where as the States would spend months introspectively whining about why them we, in the end, essentially ignore you. This is the country which has stood since 1066, which faced the Nazi war machine alone, which had the IRA opperative for decades. We do not frighten. We stand for what we believe in and terror does not work. Oh, and John Simpson talks a lot of sense at the BBC.

Sometimes living in York feels squeezed. It seems to me that at times the city feels so small, so constricted. Sitting here I can actuall feel the edges. In a true city I’ve never had that. When I used to live in Newcastle I wasn’t even certain where some of the edges were. The situation is probably emphasised by the city walls, encircling its historic centre as if to continually define it and prevent escape. Yet it is more than that. Even outside the walls, from side to side—for want of a better phrase—, it seems a tight circle, as if further walls invisibly imprisioned us. It’s not a feeling that is easy to attribute. It’s not like everything isn’t here—but perhaps that’s partly it; everything is right here. It’s also partly that everything isn’t here, in some sense hard to define without standing in the centre of a large city and feeling the everything around it, so much more than here. I suppose I’m just a ciry boy at heart and York occasionally only just cuts it.

Or “Does Google Listen to Me?” Google calculator now offers currency conversion. Just what I wanted. Woo!

So somehow we managed to convince people that we’re actually capable of holding the Olympics. Woopie. As far as I can tell the only good thing about this is that we got to beat Paris. In case you haven’t gathered from that, I personally can’t tell what all the excitment is over. Perhaps it doesn’t help that I don’t find many Olympic sports particuarly attractive (and I loved the argument that ran something like “nobody here does these sports, or plays these games, so we should host it). The whole regeneration of London thing seems to me to be something which should happen anyway, not be linked into some overly expensive circus act (we could do the whole regeneration a lot cheaper if we didn’t have to bother with venues and the like). I certainly don’t see how it helps the country outside of that overly pampered city, though we’ll probably all be expected to pay in our “enthusiasm”. The sudden appearance of training camps is a stupidly transitory event, and they’ll appear where everything they need exists already so they don’t help in the long term. I’ll just have to work even harder to avoid it, and concentrate on Euro 2012, a proper competition.