Knackered

Turned out I wasn't the only one in the flat. One of the more peculiar Chinese/Japanese students was staying until 5am this morning, and he and various friends clearly decided that sleep was for sissies. I had trouble getting to sleep at 11 over the squealing chatter of over-excited Asian students, then by doors being slammed and heavy luggage being thrown around at 1am and again at 2am. Then at 5am there were more doors slamming and I could hear something heavy being dragged down the stairs. Loud periods were interspersed with quieter periods initiated by me yelling such phrases as "SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR FUCK'S SAKES".

Anyway, at least their gone now.

I've been watching the tourists arriving. They've started already. Not too many yet, but then tourist-hunting se-, er I mean tourist season hasn't started yet. Already I feel like my home is being invaded. Somewhere in my primal instincts something is telling me that thousands of people all rushing into the town I live in and setting up home there for a short period of time while they screw it over before leaving... is a threat.

Right, I need tea.

Changes

I've made some changes to the blog script, you may have noticed. Unless you're reading this on the UWA servers. I'm giving serious thought to removing the RSS code from the blog as it makes it extremely messy (it was hacked in as an after-thought) and it actually makes the HTML blog use invalid HTML.

If you're using the RSS feed then let me know if this will cause you problems. I suspect the RSS feed isn't being used anyway, it's never worked right since I built it either. If I do remove it I will create another script that will specifically handle RSS, but there'd most likely be a delay between removing one and creating the other.

Anyway I hope you like the minor changes I've added. I'll add more as and when I find the time to do so.

HURRAH!

Automagical updating is now in place. I shall make updates on nic-nac-project and they should automatically flitter their way over to the UWA servers every hour.

But Does It work?

Congratulations to Stuii for pointing out that crond does not necessarily inherit the same path as my shell does and therefore it is necessary to use the full path to the program you wish to run. It has fixed the original issue, but now it refuses to make an outward connection to nic-nac-project.de - I can only assume that it isn't using the proxy server, so I am currently hacking that into my script and then, hopefully, the whole lot will run automatically.

When this message propogates to the UWA server it is safe to assume it works!

It's Worse Than I Thought

I've started cleaning the floor in the kitchen. It's awful. I hadn't realised that it's actually quite a vibrant blue colour - I thought it was more a turquoise colour, but it turns out that was just the grime on it! No wonder we failed our inspection because of it. I don't even know why I am cleaning. It's not my problem, I only moved in a month ago and the UK Housing Act quite clearly states that no tenant can be expected to leave the residence in a better condition than they found it. But then previous experience has shown that the accommodation office can not be expected to be reasonable under ordinary circumstances.

Currently I am toying with the idea of cleaning exactly one half of every floor in the flat. Then, when they try to fine me because they had to get professional cleaners in I would point out that I had more than fulfilled my role under the housing act by leaving the flat in a far cleaner state than I found it.

The shit mop they gave us is no help at all. I'm going to have to get on my hands and knees and use a cloth, I think. Ooer, that sounds so dodgy. OI! God kills a kitten every time you do that!

Oh and while I've got the mic, Mugsy: What's wrong with my current blog photo? I love that picture.

Hmmm, Now I'm Stuck

If anyone has any suggestions for ways to get around the problem of not having wget or lynx available in the crontab then please let me know. I need to be able to download a file from nic-nac-project to central.aber.ac.uk and it needs to run from inside the crontab.

Damn

Not quite there yet:

Bloody thing. Works fine from the command-line, so I'm unsure why it doesn't work from the crontab. Maybe it's because the crontab runs as root so they've locked down what cron can access... ?

Automagical Mirroring ... I Hope

Ok, I've now set up the two blogs to ... hopefully ... mirror each other automatically. Updates are made every 5 minutes. It took a surprising amount of effort to get it working - and I don't even know for sure that it is working yet!

Mirroring on nic-nac-project

LoweyBlog and LoweyPages are now being mirrored on nic-nac-project.de, you can access them at http://nic-nac-project.de/~lowey/cgi-bin/blog.cgi and http://nic-nac-project.de/~lowey/cgi-bin/igc.cgi respectively.

Officially everything is still on the Aberystwyth servers and nic-nac-project is merely a mirror for now until I decide whether I want to keep it, but I will strive to keep both in synch with each other as much as is possible. If you feel so inclined, please contact me and let me know which you find better - nic-nac-project or aber.ac.uk.

Cheers,

--Matt

Everyone is Leaving

I just said goodbye to Burt, and suddenly it has hit me. 50% of my mates are vanishing into the real world. Next year I am going to have a somewhat limited group of friends. Hopefully I will make some more friends, but it took me a year and a half to make friends with a group of people I got on with, so will I really be able to make a suitable group of friends again within a year?

Somewhere in all this confusion a part of me has also realised that next year I will be doing the same thing. I will also be leaving Aberystwyth and heading for the real world. That in itself is enough to scare the hell out of me, and at the same time enthrall me.

The flat is deadly quiet too, I think there's only two of us in here at the moment and one of the other inhabitant is leaving tomorrow. There's no noise outside from the other flats. It's quite eery.

I suddenly feel quite lonely.