Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen!

I knew we were going on holiday, I knew when we were going and I knew where we were flying from. I didn’t know where we were going until I saw the luggage tags being put on at check-in. So what did we get up to on holiday? Why looking at computers in museums, of course!

The National Museum is so huge we got lost several times and had to go back a second day. It’s got an enormous permanent exhibition charting the history of Denmark from about 1000 to 2000, and featuring a lovely old IBM with nasty green-on-black burn in towards the end. It also had a temporary exhibition entitled The World Of Tycho Brahe. The man was the ubergeek of his day – he designed and constructed many of his measuring and calculating devices, proved that the planets orbit the sun, and took the observations that enabled his assistant, Johann Kepler, to prove that Earth was just another one of those planets.

Another Danish ubergeek of his time was Jens Olsen, designer of the World Clock that is house in Copenhagen’s City Hall. It is a truely beautiful piece of precision engineering, with delicately engraved facings and such fine gearing that it is reckoned to loose 0.4 seconds in 300 years. It goes far beyond “clock” and well into the realms of analogue computing.

Another day, we took the train to Sweden (a concept I still find a bit odd), and spent our time playing with scientific toys and crawling through the U3 submarine at the Science and Maritime museum. We also spotted some graffiti that made us smile:

Five Pointless Facts

Browsing through various stuff, trying to come up to speed with things after a week of limited access followed by a week in a foreign country, I noticed that Jono had tagged me to do a meme. I don’t think I’ve done a meme on here before, but this looks like an interesting snapshot of who someone is, so here goes:

I keep two blogs. Until about August last year, I didn’t keep a blog at all. Then at LRL, the whole Women In Open Source thing caused far more of a storm than I was expecting, and Jono convinced me to start a blog to be put on Planet Advocacy, so that’s where this came from. However, I have a large number of friends across the country (and beyond) who keep in touch via LiveJournal. I eventually relented and got myself an account so I could lurk on their blog, but ended up being sucked into it myself. If anyone is interested in finding this other blog, which is mostly memes and rubbish and not very much serious content, then I’m sure they already have enough information to go find it.

I’m a pagan. At least, in the broadest sense of the term, and following my own path. I’ve always been convinced that there’s something beyond what science can understand, but it took me a long time to put a name to him/her/it/them. I eventually decided that no name could possibly sum it all up, and that every religion probably had some of it right – especially as most of them seem to teach the same basic ideals of being a good person and looking after each other. Thanks to a long, and continuing, consideration of such things, I came to the conclusion that whatever it is, it’s far to big for me, a mere human being, to fully understand, and that even if there’s only one of it, it’s almost certainly quite capable of taking on any number of different faces. So I call it/him/her/them whatever name seems appropriate at the time, although I’m generally more comfortable with some of the pagan gods and goddesses than the Christian type. It hasn’t complained yet, and indeed everything that seems to go badly wrong has always turned out right, so I guess whatever it is is quite happy with my take on things.

I’m overweight. This may seem like an odd thing to put up here, but many people, even those who know me quite well, seem to have missed it, and I get surprised looks and denial if I mention it. Maybe it’s because of the shape I am, maybe it’s to do with how I dress, maybe it’s because I carry myself with an air of confidence, maybe people are just too polite to say anything. I’m a UK size 18 and my BMI is about 31. I’m not hugely bothered by it, beyond some vague sadness about clothes I can’t get away with, but there it is.

My maiden name is Tuer. It’s just occurred to me that most of the people likely to read this won’t know that because I’ve been married for approximately six months longer than LUGRadio has existed. Despite its similarity to a certain French verb (“tuer”, which means “to kill”), my Dad, with his quite extensive genealogical research, has discovered that it’s originally from Yorkshire, in forms like Tewar and Tewer, and meant someone who worked with white leather, in the same kind of way a tanner would work with brown leather. For all I occasionally joke about getting rid of the four letter word because people have so much trouble spelling or pronouncing it, I’m still proud to call myself part of the Tuer Clan of Carlisle.

I have a degree in Ecology. I went to Durham University to study biology (with a subsidiary in Latin – I’m apparently the second person ever to take that combination, the first being my mate Ali), but then discovered the horror that was biochemistry, and moved sideways onto the ecology course. I did dissections, conducted experiments with live animals, almost didn’t write a dissertation about mosquitoes and finally, after three years of hell and winning every “who’s got the worst housemate?” competition, got to shake Peter Ustinov’s hand at graduation.

I gather I’m supposed to tag people that I want to see do this, but a) I’m still shattered after getting home yesterday from an utterly fantastic holiday, which I will have to blog about sometime, b) I’ve got no idea who actually reads this and has a blog, so I haven’t a clue who to tag and c) there’s a good chance they won’t want to do it so they’ll either ignore it or hate me for it anyway.

I’m blogging this…

…because a Christmas cracker told me to. “This” being the WolvesLUG Christmas Bash, which was seriously good fun. There was curry, there was beer, there were bad jokes and there was generally a lot of smiling and laughing. I wore a rediculously green t-shirt and a matching rediculously green hat (other people may have photos, assuming their cameras didn’t break) for which I was insulted lots. I ate scicilian jelfrezi, thus proving that cheese really does go with everything. We sang happy birthday to… somebody. We ate cake, and it was decided that the correct answer to “chocolate or lemon” is “yes please.” Then I drove home in fog. Which was nice.

EDM179

Early Day Motion 179, “Software In Schools”, now has 64 signatures, and counting. That’s approximately 10% of those eligible to sign it. I’m very pleased to note that my local MP, Joan Walley, has put her name on the list. And here’s a nice little quote from her:

“I believe that this software is highly beneficial and one of the most valuable developments of recent years.”

Even allowing for a certain degree of telling us what we want to hear, that statement’s pretty black and white and I am pretty chuffed.

Pre-installed goodness

My husband’s computer, Caladan, was getting a bit old and flaky, so he bought himself a new one, Arrakis. This in and of itself is not a particularly noteworthy or surprising event. However, it was the first major purchase from a supplier specialising in hardware suitable for use with Linux that I’ve had anything to do with, and I am very pleased to announce that I was impressed with every stage of the process.

Firstly, getting in touch with the supplier for a quote was a doddle – they have easy-to-find contact details on their website. Russ got a quote back pretty quickly for a machine to be built to his requirements. He was very happy to note that not only was it less than he expected, it was less than any the other quotes he’d found (Dabs, Ebuyer, etc) for similar spec machines. Add in the fact that OFE “offer hardware guaranteed to operate under the GNU/Linux system” and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they’d made a sale. Around a week later, a box arrives, and we discover it’s pre-installed with Ubuntu and all ready to go.

So anyone who still thinks that you can’t go and buy a computer with Linux pre-installed for a decent price is wrong, and OpenForEveryone.co.uk proves it. And now I get to cannibalise Caladan for parts…

Diva!

She’s big and blue and beautiful and sounds lovely. Here’s hoping she doesn’t get shot, but having magic rocks in her belly could be fun. I should probably mention that Diva is my new car.

And because I have a new car, I need new car insurance. I am, yet again, bowled over by how utterly bad insurance websites are. So I thought I’d try some of these new-fangled meta-search-type quote-machines. I started with confused.com – well if I wasn’t before, I certainly was afterward, especially with it’s lovely self-refreshing page that kept jumping to the top and prevented me from scrolling properly. That bit where it hinted at me being able to set up a few different sets of info (I was thinking variations like who’d be main driver), but then completely failed to have such a function was a nice touch, I thought. Then I moved on to moneysupermarket.com. I have no idea how good this one really is in terms of the forms you have to fill in and so on, because all I could get to was this error message:

Colour me less than impressed. Oh, and Parkers, get your ads sorted. Rolling out on roll over is annoying enough, but please stop them being permanently rolled out over what I’m trying to read.

.org rocked!

Most of the LinuxWorld Expo was, as expected, dry, corporate and, frankly, boring. However, the .org village was bigger, better and buzzing. It was hard work trying to get along between the stands because there were always so many people around, and there always seemed to be enthusiastic chatter about what people were there to big up. I even got caught up in it and ended up chatting away to some guy about Jokosher (see, I do listen at WolvesLUG!), despite not officially being anything to do with it.

Other things of note include being called in to join the Ubuntu logo photos because I happened to be around, free goats, being invited to half a dozen different pubs (three of which turned out to be the same one) and getting to chat to people I hadn’t seen since LUGRadio Live. I also seem to vaguely recall someone suggesting a LUGRadio stand for next year, and me agreeing to be involved.

Filking Fun

Unlike a number of my friends, I have never had much talent for writing songs. However, occasionally inspiration strikes, and I can filk. In my definition, that means taking a known song and tweaking the words to fit a new situation. After I posted a couple on the LUGRadio forums, the denizens of the related IRC channel kept me busy with suggestions. I’ll not clog this up with copies of them all, but I’m quite chuffed with them and if you’re interested in geek filk, they’re over here.

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.