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Brookes years beat Nottingham ones

Sunday, October 20th, 2002

[ from the ok-whats-he-on-about-now? dept. ]

Brookes years beat Nottingham ones…or did I just get old?

It could be me, I might have some distorted memory of the past but I’m certainly convinced that I enjoyed CMS a lot more than CSiT. Sure the courses are different and things have changed over the last few years, but things used to be more fun and interesting…now everything’s too boring and plain dull. Someone please remove the e-bullshit surrounding me on a daily basis.

Yep, this is a rant. I’m in the right kind of mood for one. Fuck, there used to be “The Sun Room” and friends – places of interest. Now there’s Micky Mouse bullshit luserland Microsoft shite named after Harry Potter characters – sure, some people enjoy this rubbish, I don’t. Three fucking machines, three. Three useful ones not running Windows. But that’s not the reason I’m ranting – if it were just that a laptop would suffice. It’s an attitude, it’s the approach, it’s something completely different and nauseating.

Time to do something else I guess.

Jon.

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Returning to civilisation

Saturday, October 19th, 2002

[ from the homeward-bound-jcm-style dept. ]

Well, I’m in Reading for the weekend again. This is what I call an escape – a chance to go in to London for the 50 zillionth time of late, to buy shit, to meet people…and to aimlessly waste time writing long diary updates. I’m also working all weekend which probably does rule out most of the above.

Did some admin today, showed people around and got a wireless demo going. Plan now is to install a load more points and get phase two of the masterplan going. We are needink da link in Nottingham and soon that will happen too. This is defined as the wireless link between houses in the Dunkirk area and the resulting cool factor of being able to stream data and waste free bandwidth with pointless shite…in other words, fun.

I’ve been playing with airsnort a bit of late – fascinating software, along with all the other tools one can obtain. Not for evil world domination purposes, but mostly for interest and novelty value…it’s funny how many APs you can detect merely by leaving a passive scan running on a highspeed train! The funny thing also is – that does actually work, even at ~80mph or however fast these things go (someone doubtlessly will now tell me exactly how fast that is).

Speaking of travelling at high speed – I went gokarting last Monday with hussein (pics are up at his pics page) and a bunch of other guys. It was fun and I actually enjoyed it, which was kinda surprising really.

The train journey last night was a bit of a bitch. Went to Wagamama to get standard jcm food (number 42, though sometimes I have a 41 instead) for on train consumption, except it never worked out (AGAIN!) because Midland Mainline fscked me over and I missed my train (thanks guys…I really appreciated it, as did the other 2 blokes trying to get to London on the 20:46 last night). So I finally got to home in Reading at 02:00 – but it didn’t matter because this is civilisation. I have escaped from Nottingham for a weekend. I’m not badmouthing the place really, I’m just not fond of the academic environment shall we say (as many of you know).

I need to do some work on the project – it’s making slow painful progress as I learn more and more about what makes Motorola engineers tick (or learn about the MPC7455 depending on your point of view on dry documentation). I like PowerPC as an architecture in the same way that POWER and SPARC take my interest too. I should hopefully get somewhere by Christmas, I hope.

Hmmm…what else? Oh, I’m after old UPS’s at the moment as the University (kindly, thanks very much) are now not going to allow me to plug my laptop in to their precious power sockets and won’t test it for electrical safety. So the solution is portable UPS units in rucksacks – I’m using this machine all day every day one way or the other

Jon.

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Multimedia and Virtual Bullshit

Friday, October 18th, 2002

[ from the can-they-bore-me-any-more? dept. ]

So I went to another boring lecture on Multimedia…but why would this annoy me? Well, I did get to see a load of videos of people using Netscape 2 from 1997 but I’d hardly call that state of the art. No H323 discussion, nothing particularly useful – in general I’m wondering whether it was really worth choosing something so lame.

Jon.

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Welcome to the diary

Friday, October 18th, 2002

[ from the did-you-update-your-diary-yet? dept. ]

It’s Friday, I felt like some change. Here’s a new diary. Perhaps this one will be more up to date than the previous one (which will eventually be archived or something…perhaps). It’s “under development”, etc. etc.

Things will change, things will break in the process but hopefully for not too long. This is not perfect but it’s better than it was!

Comments, accounts and so forth are all disabled until I decide otherwise – this is to counter the obvious abuse some will otherwise try

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