Ben Shephard

Once again I’m not well. It’s not been a good few months as far as illness goes. I left work early today because I was feeling really tired and cold. People have been coming to work ill for the last few weeks so I’m not surprised it’s going around the office.

On a more positive note I’ve not had much time to sit down and write for the last week or so because I’ve started seeing someone. I met Janine on Facebook but we went to school together not that we knew one another really well back then but we just got talking on Facebook and it went from there. It’s going really well. There are a lot of new changes to adapt to. She has two kids from a previous relationship  and so things are a little less straight forward than I’m used to. I’m looking to the future but I’ve got a lot to learn. She’s a brilliant mum and the kids have taken to me pretty well. We’ve spent most of the last two weekends together and were very happy when we are together. I’ve had to start giving some thought to the future. It’s going to be a big change for me and there will be a lot I’ve got to sacrifice. I really think this is going to work out and I really don’t mind giving up the way of life I’ve become used to. I can’t wait to feel better so I can get back to Janine and the kids.

Time to get back to bed. I don’t know if I’ll be back at work tomorrow but I’ll see how I feel in the morning

Ben

= 7.8

Sometimes you want to express something but just can’t find a way how. It’s not something you can put down on a page. When this happens to me I find the best way is to find a song with the right feeling and lyrics that say what I’m trying to.

So here it is

The last few days have turned out to be pretty interesting. Sometimes I don’t see much of the world beyond the nine inch LCD panel of my net book. This can be a bad thing and a good thing depending on what’s on my mind. When it’s been a pretty rough day at the office I don’t really have any way to get things off my mind unless I can immerse myself in a project but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it.

I don’t want to talk about the details of what happened but I found something else to think about and all of a sudden all of life’s little niggles fade away into the back ground. It’s safe to say I feel like a kid again

One of the reasons I started my blog was to record patterns in my mood which I normally put at the end of a blog post in the form of = a number from 1-10 with 1 being so unhappy I’m a risk to myself and others around me and 10 being so happy it causes negative problems for me that in turn make me unhappy again. I use decimal places to make it extra fine. Today is one of the rare days I manage to get to a number higher than 6.5 and that’s really my only reason for blogging tonight so…

= 8.3 possibly the highest since starting my blog. I’m extremely happy but no problems as yet and all is well with the world

On a side note I noticed earlier it’s world toilet day tomorrow which is something created by one of my favourite charities WaterAid They are a very worth wile cause so when you go to spend a penny tomorrow why not donate one to WaterAid too and improve the lives of people who aren’t lucky enough to have the same access to fresh water and sanitation as you might be.

Ben

Dear Santa

Christmas is getting ever closer and if there is one thing I hate about Christmas it’s trying to think up good presents for people that I know they will like. If I’ve been good enough this year for anyone to want to buy me a present I don’t want them to get me pointless Christmas novelty stuff because they couldn’t think of anything decent because I’ve done that when I’m buying for other people and I hate doing it because I know they will open it and say “Ohh look Ben got me some deodorant and shower gel. He must think I stink.” I don’t but everyone buys those kind of things when they have no idea what to get you and you pay a small fortune for some bits in a gift box you could have bought as individuals for a fraction of the cost.

This is why I think we should all write an open letter to Santa. Not as a list of things we want but as a set of gift ideas to make Christmas shopping that bit easier for one another.

There is no denying the fact that I’m a bit of a geek but how does the non geek know what that means if you need to buy a geek a gift.

One good place to start is ThinkGeek.com They do all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff but there may be one slight problem in that they are in the USA and shipping my be costly and take a while. I find when buying from somewhere like this I get several gifts at once to save on shipping. They do toys an T-shirts with funny slogans and stuff on them but well worth checking out.

One thing I’ve always wanted as a big Linux fan boy is a toy Tux. Tux is the mascot of the Linux Kernel and he’s a little fat penguin. I like the image of Tux I think it’s a really good mascot and you will very often see Tux stickers on my laptops and stuff but that said I don’t have any decent case badges or even a fluffy toy like they sell at Linux Emporium. They are based in the UK and from my experience they are nice people to deal with. I bought a laptop from them a couple of years ago and they were very helpful and reasonably priced.

Another good gift that I’ve never gone for before is a charity gift. You know the kind like you get from Oxfam where you donate money to charity and they send you a card you can then give as a gift. I like this kind of idea because it’s for a good cause and not just wasting money on some tat that’s mostly packaging that had to be shipped all way here from China creating a massive carbon footprint in the process. There are a number of organisations that do things like this but for something that I’m particularly interested in as a lot of people who spend an unhealthy amount of time on the Internet you could give the Open Rights Group a go. They are a non profit that fight for digital rights and freedoms that perhaps a lot of people haven’t given much thought to yet. You may have heard something on the news lately about the new three strikes law that the government is talking about. This is great for record companies and big film companies and the like but no good for us the people. If they think you have been sharing their stuff illegally and you are accused of that thee times or more they can cut off your Internet without any hard proof or a trial. That would be devastating for someone like me who’s Internet connection is fundamental to the way I live my life. They have a shop where you can buy Open Rights Group T-shirts and stuff like that and the money raised goes towards their campaigns which is all good in my opinion and I would really appreciate something from there.

There are some other more normal gifts I’d also like such as clothing. I’m dreadful at buying clothing so if anyone buys me clothes they always go down well. Jeans are pretty hard to get because I’m such an odd shape so unless you know my size as well as my mum does probably best avoid jeans. T-shirts are always good I’m an XL – XXL kind of person so there pretty easy to get. One gift I never seem to get is a good pair of slippers. I’ve got some novelty Scooby Doo slippers I’ve had since I was about 13 now and they are quiet literally wearing a bit thin. Socks are always good too I’m a size 10 in foot ware if that helps.

One type of gift I like to get people is house stuff. and by that I don’t mean a bog brush or a sofa but rugs go down well. I’ve bought lots of people sheep skin rugs over the years as presents and they are great because you can use them almost anywhere, they go with almost anything and you never get bored of their soft warm feel. I think they really make a house feel cosy. Pictures are good too but you have to know a persons tastes and I can be a bit finiky when it comes to art so perhaps best avoided with me but it’s always something I try to think of when I’m trying to choose a gift.

Some times musical gifts can be good as well I’m really into music and film so CD’s and DVD’s are always good but there are also other things that would be nice to get like a set of guitar strings or bass strings. I don’t play in a band or anything any more and it’s been years since I’ve restrung any of my guitars.

I hope I’ve managed to ease the pain of Christmas shopping and I’d really like it if other people did this. It’s fine if you have your own ideas on what to get someone but sometimes you can spend hours wandering around shopping centres looking for the perfect gift but it just never materializes and you end up in Boots or BHS getting the multi-buy gift sets that are generally a waste of money and pretty boring and ordinary as presents go. Some times it’s not a matter of knowing what someone likes it’s knowing what’s possible as a gift for that person and where you could get it from. Home made gifts are also really good in my opinion but if we all bought less rubbish just for the sake of getting something we would all enjoy Christmas so much more. If you really are stuck for ideas I’d sooner you just send me a card and say happy Christmas than waste your money on over priced novelty tat from the big high street places that are just trying to make a quick buck out of the big man’s birthday.

May you all have a good Christmas shopping season and an even better Christmas day

Ben

= 6.2

My weekend has been pretty much devoted to upgrading Ubuntu installs to 9.10 (Karmic Koala) I’ve been using it on my laptop and net book for a while and I’ve reported a bug with the new power management system used in Karmic on Launchpad. There seem to few a few issues with running on battery as the figures reported by the battery seem to get messed up every once in a while causing sudden shut down of the computer. Also it doesn’t recognise when you unplug the power.  I can’t test this on my laptop since the battery is dead anyway as it wont charge at all. I’ve using Karmic on my work pc for a week or so and it’s fine on there. I decided it was time to roll it out on to everything and see how it went. Friday night I went to see a friend who uses Ubuntu on both their laptop and desktop. I kicked off the desktop upgrade straight away and let the laptop battery discharge while running on a live cd to see if there were any blips in the battery measurements. It did OK but by the time it had gone flat it was a bit late to kick off the upgrade on that so I’ll get back to it another day. The PC went pretty smoothly as I expected.

I decided it was time to upgrade my server but before I did I wanted to make an image of the hard drive so I had a backup if it all went wrong. I’ve had a problem with this machine that seems to have been there since I’ve had it. It’s got a VIA chip set on a custom MSI mother board and the SATA controller seems to cause a few issues with Linux. When I first got the machine I couldn’t install any Linux distro because the installers couldn’t see any hard drives. One day it just started working so I installed Ubuntu and set it up as my server. I’ve usually rebuilt my machine from scratch when upgrading but that isn’t really realistic now since it’s doing so much it would take days to get it all set up and working. Now I can’t do this even if I wanted to because newer Debian based distos kernel panic as they boot as per my last post. I think this is down to the dodgy SATA controller but the only way around it is a new case and mother board which I can’t afford right before Christmas. Perhaps I’ll invest in one for my birthday just before 10.04 comes out. I had a few new ideas on how to get things working and managed to make an image this afternoon after removing the extra drive containing my mp3 and video collection and tinkering with the bios. I made an image and kicked off the install. When things rebooted there were a few things that had gone a bit strange but I managed to correct most of them within an hour or so. The one I’m struggling with is my CCTV video feed. My video input card seems to be having a few issues but I’ve got other cards I want to try anyway so I’ll give those a go first.

I’ve only got two issues so far. The battery on my net book and my CCTV video input but the net book battery isn’t something I can do a great deal about and I’m at the mercy of the people who maintain the underlying power management software but I’ll see how it goes for another couple of weeks yet.

For now I’m pretty much finished for the weekend but I’ll be keeping a close eye on a few things just to check out new features and look for any new tweaks I need to make.

Ben

= 6.1