jump to navigation

Heanet, network planning, guitar stands, linguists, gmail 2006 March 21 0:29

Posted by diamond in : Random, Skynet , add a comment

After 6 hours sleep last night, today encompassed a little over 8 hours and 270 miles of driving, at least 3 hours of which was in dublin traffic. On the bright side, i got to go on the skynet tour of heanet. For the record, here’s a quick rundown of the top 3 places in the world that i’d like to work for (in no particular order):

After the tour, i called into the main office area and chatted to davew and ann. Dave was furiously scribbling some network topology diagrams. I remarked that i’d seen a flash game on the net recently that looked very similar, but neither of them had seen it. A mail i sent them earlier:

Subject: important network planning tool we were discussing today
http://www.planarity.net/

Expect the productivity of heanet to take a slight nosedive (i wonder if that’ll show up in mrtg..).

I also had the opportunity to do some guitar-browsing in Music Maker. Noirin was with me, and when asked managed to suggest some truly awful guitars (though she will no doubt claim that they were just out of tune). At least she didn’t try to make me buy one of the bright pink flower-shaped ones. *shudder*. While there i decided to pick up a guitar stand. Having 3 guitars (2 in normal use) and one guitar stand isn’t a winning forumla. This is what i bought, the coolest guitar stand ever. You probably won’t appreciate it’s wonderfulness from that link, i’ve made a short video demonstrating it’s best feature.

I realised something about linguists today. I know three of them (that i can think of off the top of my head), and they’re 3 of my favourite people. I’m wondering is there some kind of correlation. Perhaps i should try and link a field-study on the subject into my masters…

I’ve been trying out gmail for the last few weeks (specifically, hosted gmail for nonado.net). I’m impressed at how well it’s coping with the amount of list mail i receive. From a quick check, i’ve gotten 1079 mails since march 6th, which is when i started using it. Once i set up the labels (17 currently) and filters (12 so far) i wanted, it’s been amazinly easy to keep up with all the mail. I’m really liking the way it does things, and it’s really hard to believe that it’s webmail a lot of the time because it’s faster than most email clients i’ve used. At this stage i’ve switched over to it for all my nonado mail. It’s a useful way to test it before i tackle the mammoth task that is taming my normal gmail account (which has had a copy of all my skynet mail for the last 2 years forwarded to it. that’d be 10932 so far).

And now this colourless green idea goes to bed to sleep furiously.

A long long day 2006 March 8 23:16

Posted by diamond in : Random, Skynet , add a comment

So. Yesterday i got up at 8am, drove to roscrea. From there cheez drove us the rest of the way to dublin, and dropped me off at the allergy test centre in charlemont clinic. I currently have 50 tiny patches on my back. They get removed tomorrow, and i get told if i’m allergic to any of the substances.

From there i walked over to google and lurked suspiciously for a while. I got to have (free! -) lunch (mmm, mexican), play foosball (oh so very badly), flump into a budda bag (massive happy comfy softness), shot by various nerf weaponage, visited the vaunted 4th floor (that of the sys admins and suspicious glances), feel oh-so-tiny in the presense of the people that work there, and have a go on a segway (no limbs were lost or damaged -). All in all, it was a very interesting visit. Really must polish up CV and submit.

After that i found myself a cheez again and we went and met up with a noirin for some pretty decent hot chocolate, and some amazingly large surprisingly good chocolate cake. The plan was to then head back into town for sushi with dredg ‘n toaster (yay!). It didn’t go _quite_ according to plan.

While killing some time in tower (i bought ‘the hours’ on dvd. yay), i received notice from pron that there were some assorted rack bits that he’d like to donate to skynet, if i happened to be around dublin city-centre at the time. I said ‘yay’. There were then various attempts at communication, which mostly failed. The end result was that myself ‘n cheez ‘n noirin ended up walking a considerable distance, half of which involved carrying some rather heavy metal bits. I had understood the parts were light. Pron had understood i was bringing a car. Neither were correct ,-) Doh. Apologies and much thanks to both cheez and noirin for the assistance.

Once we had finally delivered the items back to the car, it was time for sushi. Mmmmmm sushi -) Toaster was unable to make it (*cries*), but we had an aussie reaplcement, dim (no really. short for ‘dimitria’. she ruled). Sushi was really good, though sadly lacking in salmon slabs. *drools*. Hooray for all-you-can-eat-in-55-mins -) Noirin kept count, i managed to rack up about €45 worth of sushi, which is about €10 short of my record, but still quite respectable. Dredg has photo evidence which i hope to wrangle out of him.

I managed to make it home by 2am, after stopping at cheez’s house for a while to watch him play fable which he’s been raving about. I think i even managed to get to sleep for 3. Oh for the sweet sweet touch of slumber.

*Update*
Evidence has arrived.

Talk! 2005 October 22 18:00

Posted by diamond in : Random, Skynet, Cycling , 5 comments

Took the last 2 days off work to try and catch up on sleep, and hopefully get some work done at home. Hah. Well, the catch up on sleep bit was a success, but to no avail (see later). Got up late on friday, watched The Bourne Supremacy on dvd with molc (quite a good movie. nothing at all like the book(s), but good nonetheless). Then i happened to notice that colmmacc logged onto irc looking for some skynet committee people, turned out the 2 heanet speakers had arrived in limerick and were vaguely wondering where things went from there.

Kidnapped them, took care of them for the evening, watched some Bill Bailey before the talks, went to Luigi Malone’s etc. Mild concern then arose as to the location of the google talker, but he did indeed turn up in the end, to my relief -) Both sets of talks were excellent. In my tortured mind, it was my two of my three most desirable-to-work-for companies (the other being canonical, the company behind ubuntu) vying for the top spot.

After the talks we all retired to the sports bar on campus and i had to drag thomas (of google) in particular out of there at the end of the night as he was quite committed to discussing various topics all night -) The heanet guys were getting the 9.25 train back to dubin this morning, and i toyed with the idea of providing liftage for such, but i eventually wimped out due to the late hour and the fact that i had work today from 10 till 5.

As it was, things worked out worse than i hoped (no, not for the heanet guys, they got home fine ,-). Got to bed around 2, tried to sleep. Couldn’t. Figured out around 6am that i’d forgotten myself, in the pub, and had drank 2 glasses of coke -/ Caffiene is a bad idea when you’re trying to sleep at the best of times, and has extra unwanted sideeffects for me related to my existing non-sleeping condition. Finally conked out around 6:30, giving me a little under 3 hours sleep. Not good for someone who has to get up and wash dishes for 7 hours.

Survived surprisingly well in work, had my lunch break around 10:30 which gave me some much needed fuel for the rest of the day. Afterwards, myself and dan went for a cycle. Took a bit of convincing dan to get him to go as he hadn’t slept well last night either, and was feeling stiff tired and sore after work. The plan had been to cycle out to daly’s cross (a 21.3km round-trip), which would be the furthest we’d done together. Instead, we were feeling much better than we expected when we got to daly’s cross, so we continued on to birdhill and back. 35.8km @ 24.7kmph. We’re both delighted at the progress. This is only the 2nd cycle we’ve done togther over 10km in length. Hoping to do the same again tomorrow (birdhill and back). Woo to progress -) Seriously considering buying a decent racing bike in 2 weeks time (when i get paid basically). There’s a very very nice one in town for €750, including carbon-fibre forks. Mmmm tastylicious.

There was an secondary motivation for me for the cycle today. Yesterday i ate more food than i think i’ve ever eaten in one day. For breakfast yesterday (around 2.30pm) i ate half a box of Kellogs Start (i’d eaten the first half the previous night while watching The Exorcist), and was stuffed. About an hour later, molc cooked a pasta bake (the dish holds enough food for 4 decent meals) of which i ate 2/3rds, and was stuffed. Then, the heanet guys were hungry, so i went with them to Luigi Malones for company and decided i’d have the nachos grande to nibble on, of which i ate about 2/3rds, and was stuffed (yes, i did actually leave food behind -P). Then, after the skynet talks, we got served 2 massive platters of food in the pub, of which i ate a small mountain’s worth, and was stuffed. I weighed myself yesterday morning (before breakfast, before getting dressed): 76.6kg. Weighed myself this morning (same deal): 78.6kg. Oops. I should really stop doing that.

Mini-poll: are my blog posts too long? I seem to write these really rambly ones that go on for ever. I’m wondering if people even read this far before getting bored. Comment welcome ,-)

And I shall rule a very small part of the world! 2005 October 4 20:33

Posted by diamond in : Skynet , 2 comments

Tonight we had the skynet agm, which went really really well. We had a good turn out (i reckon about 30 people), all of whom were interested in skynet. A whole bunch of them put their names down as being interested in getting involved in adminning, i haven’t looked at the list yet, but it look like about 7-10 people, which is also excellent. And on a side note, i got voted vice president/head admin. Wooo! (yes, hence the title of this post -). With advice from various people, i’m hoping to be able to turn skynet into a professional reliable monitored documented service. So it’s been a good evening. And now to relax. *relaxes*

Some kind of plan 2005 October 1 20:18

Posted by diamond in : Random, Skynet, Cycling , add a comment

Here’s how it goes:

I’m hoping a bit of mental association can be built up so the two activties mutually encourage each other ,-)

Went for a cycle today, first time in about 2 weeks, did 22.5km at an average speed of 21kmph, which i’m quite happy with. If i manage to keep this up regularly for a couple of months, i’ll probably reward myself with a racer. No point in buying it now before i know i’m going to stick it though. Made that mistake far too many times in the past. Any bets as to how long this will last? -)

Got back from athlone yesterday, will probably go back to work on monday. Things are mostly fine, though i did get stressed yesterday while rushing to get the bus, and started shaking all over, which is somewhat concerning.

So much skynet stuff to catch up on. There’s been a couple of database admin requests sitting in my inbox for the last 2 weeks, just didn’t have the time to deal with them, which is a bit bad from a service point of view. Hopefully i can figure out a solution to both tonight, and reply with an apology for the delay.

And that’s all. I should say something here about not taking care of myself to see if i can get another comment from ducky berating me ,-) But i’ll be good. For once.

Addendum: removing pedals from a bike is surprisingly challenging. Managed to break a spanner attempting it last night. A higher quality one purchased today, plus a lot of brute force, with the help of cheez, sorted them out today. Thanks mark! -)