Ben Shephard

I had a comment today about my blog at work. Someone noticed a theme with my recent posts and said I seem to be tired rather a lot recently. They suggested I cut down on certain nocturnal activities I’ve not really been up to much of that stuff recently. The main factor has been the issues at work. It’s not so much that it’s been busy but we have had some software issues and certain systems that I as a help desk technician use regularly were running extremely slowly. I’d have one tab open in FireFox with my jobs on and then open another to look at a job, then another to create a new job, then another for something else and so on. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for the first page to finish loading and by now I’ve forgotten what I opened it for in the first place. When you work with a single piece of software as much as I do a few bugs can really spoil your week. It’s still not brilliant now but it’s better than it was last week. So the cause of my tiredness is mental stress from multitasking because of crap software and not due to exciting things happening at home.

I’m really looking forward to my week off next month. I’ve got some decorating planned and a few new toys to play with. This weekend I want to make a start on decorating my back room. It’s a strange shade of yellow at the moment and has been like that since I moved in. I want to put some of the original features back the way they used to be. I want to put a picture rail and coving up. I’ve never done any coving before and I’m not looking forward to it. I’m guessing this will be pretty difficult to do on my own so hopefully I can enlist some help from someone. I’m going to paper the walls with textured paper to hide all the dodgy plaster and paint it magnolia (same as the front room). I’d quiet like to replace the doors with some with windows in as it will allow a bit more light to get through the house. I’m also ripping up the carpet and replacing it with a laminate floor. The back room is a fairly high traffic part of the house so something that cleans easily and doesn’t show up the dirt too much will be a bonus. If I get time I’d also like to give the kitchen a lick over with a tin of paint as that’s looking a bit tatty now too but we shall see what time allows. I have got Easter weekend and a week off work in which to get it all done.

As for new toys I’ll be getting my hands on a Google G1 I’m really looking forward to this because it’s based on open source software. Granted you can’t change the operating system and customise it exactly how you want but it’s a step in the right direction. The only phones available that are totally customisable on that level are aimed at experienced programmers rather than the likes of myself. I hope a day will come when the hardware phones are based on will be as standardised as that of PCs and we can all do what we want with them. It seems a big factor in that is the networks themselves. They don’t like people pushing the boundaries with their networks. All I want from my mobile network provider is decent coverage and an IP address and the freedom to do as I see fit with that. I have T-mobile web and walk on N95 and this comes with all kinds of limitations to say its supposed to be unlimited Internet on your phone. You can’t use Skype or MSN and probably all other main stream instant messaging systems. You aren’t supposed to use it with a laptop… (cough cough) and using a laptop and SSH tunnel so you can use instant message apps with it would probably get you cut off straight away but would I do a thing like that I just want a connection to the Internet I can carry around in my pocket. Leave me to sort out my own phone services and text messages all I want is a public IP address and no download / upload caps. Is that really too much to ask for in this day and age.

My other new toy will be Ubuntu 9.04. I’m really looking forward to this as I’m getting into things a lot deeper than ever before now. In the past few weeks I’ve learned so much and I think I’ve reached a point where with a bit of concentration I can achieve anything I want with Linux. I’ve had ideas floating around in my head for months and now I seem to be getting them all put into action. Since I ported the server onto the new (actually older) machine I’ve got Samba file shares set up. I’ve got it recording and streaming CCTV images from my house. I’ve created a bunch of custom scripts that do all kinds of funky stuff and automate mundane tasks. I’ve got my backup routine running like clock work. The only thing I’m really lacking in at the minute is documentation of how I did it all which I aim to put right when I move everything back to the newer machine under Ubuntu 9.04 over the next six weeks or so.

So it’s looking like being an exciting few weeks so I’ll have no time to be tired anymore. I just hope things run a little smoother at work so I’ll have the energy to get home and do all this

Ben

= 6.4

last weekend was a pretty busy one and the last week has been pretty mad. I’ve been glad to have a bit of a rest this weekend. I’ve not really been anywhere special or done anything exciting. I’ve just been chilling out really. I spent Friday evening over at my friends house. She talked me into watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I’m not really into horror films but I really enjoyed watching this. my friend fell asleep and snored her way through most of it. I was really impressed It’s a really well put together film. It does feel quiet dated now as it’s almost 30 years since it was released but in contrast we spent Saturday night at mine and we watched Broke back mountain. I felt pretty let down with this film. For all they media hype and awards it won when it came out it was absolutely dire. It’s almost three hours long with the ad breaks thrown in and almost three hours of my life I will never get back. If you missed all the hype it’s a film about a pair of gay cowboys. That’s really all you need to know as there is nothing more to this film than that. It’s predictable and boring, there is very little said and it’s a very quiet film. If it hadn’t have been for the good company I’d probably have done something useful and cleaned the kitchen after the curry I cooked just before hand instead. I did a Chicken Korma with Basmati rice. It’s not often I do Curry’s but this one turned out pretty good.

I spent today tidying up and ironing. In between all the ironing I downloaded the beta of Ubuntu 9.04 and set it up on my laptop. It’s looking pretty good. there are some nice dark themes in this one and some funky new toys and eye candy. I tried installing KompoZer as it was always a bit flaky under 8.10 and crashed rather a lot. Once I knew what was causing the crashes I could work with it but it was still a bit buggy. I installed it on 9.04 and it wouldn’t even run. Looking at the bug reports the lead developer hasn’t had much time to spend on it recently from one of his posts. There is a new alpha version for download but I can’t be bothered messing about with it. I’m learning more and more about the code behind my web pages every day and I’ve been using Blue Fish for bits of stuff which I think I’ll end up using more often. I also couldn’t get FileZilla to install but I expect this will be fixed in the release version. All in all it’s looking pretty good. I’m going to have a play with the server version and try out some new ideas. I want to set up a VPN so I can get into my own network form the outside world but I’ve never done anything like this before and I wouldn’t want to break networking on my live box and not know what I did so that’s my mission for the beta on a spare box.

It seems while writing this my CCTV cameras have picked up something interesting. I wish I’d got some decent IR emitters because the footage is a bit dark. The recording quality is set pretty low due to disk space limitations. When I move this to a new box with a bigger disk I’ll jack this up a bit. Hopefully I’ll be able to get hold of some decent IR kit to improve the images soon too.

Anyway I better get some kip in anticipation of the week ahead. Hopefully it will prove to be a better one than last week but I’m not holding my hopes up.

Ben

= 6.2

It’s been a rough few days at work. I’ve had to take on more work which I wasn’t expecting to be doing. There have been teething problems getting everything set up and this has meant extra stress for me. I came home today and went up stairs to get changed and just flaked out on the bed. I’ve not felt like this for a long time but I know it should all be sorted soon. I decided to sit and watch TV and do some surfing. I’ve not seen the news for weeks now but it seems nothing much has changed. It’s still all money worries so nothing much happening really. I’ve been doing some thinking about my plans for the summer but I decided against trying to book things as I made a big enough mess of things last year. I need to have a clear mind so I can read through all the small print. Last year I went to Ireland and I flew with Ryanair after seeing a really cheap flight on their site. I made all my other plans around that, when I came to book it they wanted to charge extra to take a  suit  case and then extra to check in at the airport and then it was extra to pay by credit card. I think charging someone to pay for something is a bit silly and if I’d have seen the full cost to begin with I’d probably have made different plans and took the ferry instead. I flew there and hired a car in Dublin. I thought the car was all paid for in advance but then there was an extra insurance to pay when I got there and still there was several thousand euros excess on that. I really wish I’d read the fine print better before I booked. If I remember correctly the car and flight ended up costing around £300 for the week and I could have gone over on the ferry for about half that and had to comfort of my own car too.

I’m off to bed now so I can get plenty of sleep for tomorrow. I just can’t wait for this weekend now.

Ben

= 5.7

I wrote a post a few months ago saying how I had to make some important decisions in April regarding my summer. Well I’ve already decided what to do and started making plans. I don’t want to post too much on here as yet as those who know me well enough already know what this is about but all will be revealed at a later date. I’ve got lots of paperwork to get through over the next few days to so I’ll be busy shopping around for things on the net and reading legal stuff.

I’ve been tinkering with my site again this last few days and I’ve chopped and changed a few things. I decided I didn’t like the white Facebook banner on my home page so that’s gone along with my Linux counter banner. I’ve left the Ubuntu countdown on there as that should start counting down to the next release pretty soon so it should be nice to keep an eye on it. I’ve been looking at the possibility of adding a Google search box to my home page but I just can’t seem to make it look the way I want it to. I need to delve into the code a little bit and work out how to change a few things. If you haven’t already noticed I’ve added a favicon to my site. (That’s the little BS icon next to your address bar) I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and it was no big job but that hard part was working out what to have as an icon. I decided on my initials on a black background. It’s reasonably clear and pretty individual too. It also goes rather nicely with the theme I’ve used in my blog. I might be tempted to make a few more icons and favicons for different bits of things. I have some apps on my mobile that don’t have proper icons so it would be nice to make some for them if I can.

Anyway time for get some sleep now as I expect it will be a long hard day tomorrow.

Ben

= 7.3