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.

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.

1000 Postcodes Freed

Currently, if you want to find out where a postcode refers to, you have to pay for access to the database owned by the Post Office, or use a service that pays for it and comes with various restrictions. Free The Postcode are linking postcodes with latitude/longitude and making this information publically available. The data could be used for, say, compiling maps of free events, or searching Open Street Map by postcode. In the past couple days, my bloke and I have input about a dozen postcodes, along with gps readings, and with our most recent batch we’ve just pushed the number of postcodes in their database over 1000!

Silver Linings

It’s just taken me four hours to complete what should have been a one hour drive. This was caused by traffic jams, roadworks, accidents happening right next to me, major accidents happening on the road I’d intended to use and traffic jams caused by people avoiding traffic jams. I did the entire journey between Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent without using motorway. In short, my afternoon sucked. However, I had my other half’s GPS with me and logging, so with any luck, Open Street Map will have some lovely new tracks of places that have never been mapped by them before. Of course, it would be just typical of today if I got all the logs uploaded and discovered it ran out of memory half a mile down the road and didn’t capture any of the interesting bits.

Subtle Advocacy

In my experience one of the best ways to advocate Free software is to do it subtly. If you bang on about it all the time, people get bored. If you pick the right moment to drop the right comment into the right conversation, you can gain ground quite easily, even if it’s only a tiny bit at a time.

Earlier this week, I wandered into the office to the sounds of a conversation about Skype and VoIP. One of the hobbits is thinking about setting up his own system at home. I spy an opportunity! “Have you looked at Trixbox?” say I. One url later, and he’s considering using Free software. I’d say that’s a square inch conquered. If he decides to go with it, I’ll be claiming a square foot.