Ben Shephard

Yesterday I headed down to Wolverhampton for Lug Radio Live 2009. I used to listen to Lug Radio quiet often but they stopped doing it just over a year ago but they decided to do another live event so I decided I should go since it’s not far away and we don’t get a great deal of Linux events in the UK anyway. I intended on setting off for Wolverhampton pretty early but I’ve had a pretty long week at work and was starting to get really tired and the darker mornings aren’t helping much either. I over slept and didn’t leave home until about 9am (doors were at 9:30) so I had hurry up and get there. I set up my Co Pilot sat nav on my G1 which worked pretty well for the drive down there. When I got there I parked the car and put the postcode into Co Pilot for the venue but for some reason I was having little joy using it for walking directions. I tried google maps too but that was just as crap. I think it was because I was bang in the middle of town amongst reasonably tall buildings so the GPS was a bit flaky. Eventually I managed to get Google maps to kick in and I was on my way. I found the building which was an arts college building and they were using the theatre box office entrance for signing in. I paid my fiver and as proof of payment my hand was stamped with the high tech stamp made from half a potato with the letters LRL carved into it.

I’d already missed most of the morning but I just managed to catch the tail end of Gervase Markham’s talk abut the first program he ever wrote which was in BBC Basic. It brought back a few memories of my first experiences of programing on my ZX Spectrum. I remember we had a big book full of games and stuff which you could just type in for yourself. The code for Harrier Attack was in there somewhere so me and my sister stayed up really late one night typing it all in but we must have missed something because it never did work. My most recent programming experience was with Visual Basic 2005. I wrote a lottery number generator but that never quiet worked properly either but at least it ran without crashing. It had a tendency to generate the same number twice because I was lazy when I wrote the code but it wasn’t as if I was ever going to use it anyway since I don’t play the lottery. It was just something I did to keep me entertained on a train to London one day. I keep saying I’m going to learn Python but I can’t think of anything useful to write so I haven’t got around to it yet. Anyway for what little I saw if his talk it did seem interesting. Shame I missed most of it.

I hung around to watch Matthew Somerville’s talk about government websites but for some reason he had some crappy flash presentation running on a windows laptop which didn’t want to play with the projector which was rather embarrassing. He was a bit late starting because of it but I really wanted to see  Fabian Scherschel’s talk about Linux in schools so not long after he started I hopped over to another stage to see that. It wasn’t the most exciting talk I’ve ever heard but it was reasonably interesting. From my own experience kids seem to find Linux exciting because it’s different and because they can do stuff like have brightly coloured themes etc if they want to rather than having a choice of blue green or silver in XP. Also if kids use Linux in school it makes computers more accessible to the less well off kids to use at home because they don’t have to fork out the Microsoft tax for a usable computer for home .

Then I went off to see Des Burley talk about the law regarding the licencing of software. It was much less interesting than anticipated and didn’t really tell me anything I dind’t know already but there were a few interesting questions at the end. He was very dry and to talk about a subject such as law you need to be able to entertain your audience because it’s not an exciting subject to begin with. I have to admit I was struggling to stay awake at one point.

Next up was Andy “blackadder” Robinson’s talk on Open Street Map which was a little more interesting. I’ve been thinking about contributing to open street map for a while but it’s one of those things I’ve never really gotten around to doing but his talk was pretty interesting so I’ll try and make the effort to grab my etrex and map my street and a few more close by when I get time.

The rest of the talks I saw weren’t very exciting until it came to the live recording of Lug Radio which was as comical as it always used to be back in the day. That over and done with I decided it was time to head home and picked up some chips on the way back to the car. I set off forgetting I’d set Co Pilot to walking routes so ti decided to take me up all the little back streets of Wolverhampton thinking I was walking very quickly back home. The option to set this is hidden deep in the settings menu so it’s easy to miss when setting up your journey.

I got home eventually. I managed to pick up a few freebies one of which was a mug from Bytemark hosting so I made myself a cuppa and sat down to read my free copy of Linux Magazine. I had also received my new hard drive I bought for my net book while I was out so I opened it up only to find I’d bought the wrong one. I needed one with a ZIF ribbon cable connector and this had 50 pin connector on the back so I’m now talking to the company in Hong Kong I bought it from Via eBay to see if I can swap it out. They didn’t state which interface it was and thinking there would only be one kind of 1.8″ IDE connector I ordered that one but it seems I was mistaken but the listing could have been a little more descriptive.

I’ve spent today trying to catch up with jobs around the house but I should have also gone to my sisters to finish fitting her burglar alarm but I just didn’t get time. Perhaps I’ll go up one day in the week and sort it out but I need to turn the power off to put a new socket in for the control unit so I’ll probably end up working by torch light since the clocks went back this morning. It’s going to be dark when I leave work from here on in. Roll on 2010 I say

Ben

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