Football Supporter Supporter

I honestly don’t get why people like football, but people do, and to some of them, it really matters. They dedicate a lot of time and energy to supporting their club, they get a lot out of it, and that I can appreciate.

Some of my mates are heavily involved in the Notts County Supporters Trust, who have recently decided that they’re going to pursue a majority share holding in the football club they love so much. This would take a small corner of something that is very much about community out of the hands of the big, bad corporate world and put it into the hands of the people who genuinely care about it. It is therefore an idea that I intend to support, and I shall be heading across to their paypal account shortly to transfer the cost of a round.

Russ’s response to them mentioning it was even better, and I wish I’d thought of it first. He offered to donate money in return for them trying out new Free Software programmes. Dave is now addicted to Battle for Wesnoth, and the Notts County Supporters Trust are now a little bit closer to their goal (no pun intended).

SatNav Stupidity

Since my other half got interested in the Open Street Map project, he went out and bought both a GPS tacking device and a GPS SatNav device. Both of these are lovely little toys, and the mapping of Stoke-on-Trent is coming along nicely.

However, having borrowed the SatNav the other day, I found that it does something really, really dumb. When you switch it on, it brings up a long message saying “Do not operate this while driving or you’ll crash and die” or some such. Fair enough. Until the battery starts to fade, at which point it automatically switches the voice off (presumably to preserve power), so I no longer get audio directions, and pops up a message box on the screen, so I no longer have a useful little map to glance at. So it instantly leaves me utterly without the function it’s supposed to be for, and the only way to get rid of the message box so I’ve at least got the map to glance at is by leaning across and pressing a button. In other words, unless I’m lucky enough to have somewhere to stop to sort it out very soon, I either hope I’m going the right way, or commit the crime of “operating while driving” and risk a “crash and die” scenario. What’s even more annoying is that the message box has too much text at too small a font size to read easily without taking my attention off the road for longer than I’m comfortable with. What’s wrong with just announcing “battery low” by both voice and a message box that disappears after a couple of seconds?

For Donkey

As promised, photos of our new spodroom:

Our nice shiny new 19″ flat screens, and the laptop all synergied up to Ix.

Still needing a fair amount of sorting out, our “server rack” complete with dual Pentium 2 file server and, hidden away at the bottom, the CD server we’re planning to stream media through the house from.

We live for Her Grace, we die for Her Grace!

OK, so I do Live Action Role Play, and it’s incredibly sad and geeky, and I’m taking over large chunks of a world that doesn’t really exist, but how many of you have your own personal army? My character has now been made Prince Bishop, I’m now in charge of one of the oldest and best known groups, The Prince Bishop’s Men, in the largest and best known LARP system, Lorien Trust.

In between poncing about in my silly blue hat, leading my Boys in Blue onto the battlefield armed only with a small knife, making speeches to large groups of guys in kilts and generally showing off, I have to be all responsible and make sure those other people in the photo, and the dozen who didn’t happen to be around at that point, are having fun. So recently I’ve been very, very busy. Normal service should be resumed shortly.