Liz just put a nasty gash in her thumb. :( For a while I thought I was going to hae to drive her to the hospital to get it stitched. I considered driving to Tesco to get some bandage and mentioned this. Liz pointed out I'd been drinking. Er, oh yeah. :-s That hadn't even occurred to me, my thoughts were "this may be a hospital job". It was a nasty cut though. I wonder what stance the police would take if I were to be caught driving while over the limit if her thumb was bleeding everywhere? Hmmm. One would hope they would be leanient (within reason of course) in such a case. I'd like to think they are. Sadly I suspect they wouldn't give a shit.

Oil Changed

That's that done. What a rip-off though. £33.99 for oil and a filter?! If I'd had the tools I'd have attempted it myself. Ah well.

Wish I could stop shaking, I've been hypo most of the afternoon :(

Oh, and Kwik-Fit are Arseholes

NOW they tell me they don't do oil-changes. Aresholes.

"David Rendel, MP, voted to have us all shot"

That was the shocking sign on the front of a make-shift kennel at the Royal County of Berkshire Show. David Rendel voted for a ban on fox-hunting, and how do the hunters retaliate? They make outrageous claims such as this. Now I believe everyone has freedom of speech so if they wish to protest then they have every right, but they can not just make facts up. David Rendel was showing his support for a proposal to reduce cruelty to animals, not shoot dogs. Worse still when the MP in question went to the protestors he made a point of listening to their arguments and comments and then put forward his own ideas and comments, but they were not prepared to listen. In fact things started getting abusive.

What does that achieve? What do they think they were going to gain by being offensive? If they have such a good point to make then they should be able to make it and let the power of their words do the job, but they simply do not. There is nothing good that can be said about fox-hunting. One of the demonstrators was quoted as saying,

This is true, fox-hunting goes back a long way. So too does wife-beating, rape, murder, mass genocide... But they have all been made illegal as there is good reason to. The fact that it is old does not make it right. He went on to say,

I suspect that the National Trust would hate to be associated with the mutilation of any wildlife. But that's not the point. The point is that it's such an outrageous claim! The National Trust is set up to maintain the countryside, the wildlife that inhabits it and areas of outstanding beauty. Fox-hunting is all about the destruction of a single species that inhabits that countryside, the roots of which go back to the days when foxes used to kill the chickens which were an integral part of our food supply. These days foxes are not the same problem that they were back then. Foxes, in fact, naturally prey upon Rabbits which are more of a nuisance than foxes ever will be.

But let's get one thing straight. I have nothing against these people dressing up in silly clothes and riding across fields in hot pursuit. I've got no quarrel with them playing their strange games. I just see no reason to tear a small creature apart at the end of it. Feel free to carry on chasing across the fields, but leave the foxes alone. To them it's "just a fox", but that fox could very well have a litter of cubs. That fox will have been chased for miles and miles massively outnumbered by vicious trained hounds and people on horseback. When it is eventually too tired to run any more it is torn apart by the dogs. If it flees to its den, its one safe place they will dismount their horses and get a spade to dig it out. That's sportmanship that is. You can see why fox-hunting is classed as a sport.

And what about the dogs that David Rendel apparently voted to have shot? They are the ones sent down the hole to kill the fox. Many hounds are lost this way by getting stuck down the hole where they will be left. If they don't get stuck, more often than not they will receive nasty facial injuries from the fox desperately defending itself, and possibly its off-spring. These "sportsmen" really know how to look after their "tools" - and let's be honest here, that's essentially all they are to the fox-hunters.

You want proof? Well let's go back to the title of this blog again. David Rendel voted against fox-hunting and the fox-hunters retaliated by saying "well if we can't fox-hunt then we'll have to shoot all these innocent dogs". Why would they have to shoot them? They claim that they are born killers and wouldn't make good pets. Okay I agree that's true, but they're only born killers because the fox-hunters have spent years training them to be that way. The dogs can be retrained to take part in other less violent and more humane sports, or simply looked after and allowed to grow old and die like all other creatures on the planet. But that's not how the fox-hunter mentality is. They are no longer needed, so they must be disposed of. That is not David Rendel's fault. That is the fox-hunter's fault.

Again the same gentleman:

If I ever catch anyone tearing a fox limb to limb then they'll wish the authorities caught them first.

Finally the absurd retort that oh-so-many fox-hunters use is "all you city dwellers just want to spoil the fun of us country dwellers." I live in the countryside and I want fox-hunting stopped. ASAP. Tomorrow. Today. Yesterday. Last week. Just stop it. It's not a sport, it's evil bloody cruelty. If Joe Bloggs were to declare that stamping on kittens' heads were a sport would that be ok? No. It would be cruelty to animals. Likewise fox-hunting is.

Car, Oil, Filter, Erk

Just worked out that I've driven approximately 10,000 miles in my car since I got it. (whoooah!) Why did I feel the need to work this out? Because I just found out that the oil is supposed to be changed and a new filter put in the car every 5,000 miles. I've changed the oil and replaced the filter, oh let's see now, 0 times since I got it and I've no idea how many miles it did on the current filter before that. Arse.

What could prompt this sudden interest in my car's filter? Well yesterday I found out that my Mum wrote her car off towards the end of last week by driving around in it without replacing the oil filter (or even keeping the oil topped up - very silly) and so the Big End bearings seized. One new engine required. At £800 for a reconditioned engine it's simply not worth it, so she's now bought a new car.

I don't particularly fancy writing my car off after all the trouble I've been through keeping it alive and well, so I shall be taking it to Kwik Fit for an oil change ASAP. Only problem is that the Newbury Kwik Fit (I'm not driving back to Aber until the oil has been changed) doesn't currently have a part they need in order to perform the task, so I'll have to wait.

Suppose I ought to get the air filter changed at some point too...

Gentoo

Contrary to my last blog I decided to give Gentoo a go before leaving for Newbury. Debian was point-blank refusing to play nice so I downloaded a copy of the Gentoo minimal installer and tried to boot it. Nothing happened. I remembered seeing something on the Gentoo front page about a problem with their minimal installer, so I downloaded the "experimental" fixed installer that will boot with older BIOSes. It booted fine.

I watched it go through the process of checking my hardware and autoconfiguring for it. It looked very sleek. It loaded the drivers it needed, bootstrapped itself up and then ... dumped me at a terminal.

Er.

This surprised me a little as there was no error message or anything. It looked deliberate. I consulted the installation handbook. There was an important note just after where I had stopped reading that said "Read this next bit before you continue". Oops. It turns out that there is no installation routine like in Debian and Mandrake. It simply dumps you at a live console as "Root" and you build your system your way.

What an utterly splendid idea. The manual walks you through what is required in order to get a running system so even those who don't know what they're doing can build their system. There was no installer to get confused by the fact that I have existing partitions that I don't want killing. There was no installer to fuck up the network settings. There was no installer to die horribly with unintelligible error messages.

Building Gentoo is like building a kit-car. You learn how everything is working as you go along and you can build bits of it the way you want. Building everything from sources takes a while but it allows greater control over what goes onto the system. Considering that it is a slower process to make a Gentoo Linux system I was very impressed. There was only one hitch while building the system when the package manager (emerge) suddenly couldn't connect to any of the mirrors it had chosen (all in Germany). I removed the mirrors, forcing it to download straight from the local Gentoo mirror and all was well again. Somehow it feels so much nicer building the system this way rather than watching a progress bar.

So all in all, so far, I really like Gentoo. One of the first things I did was set up SSH so that I can still access it from down here in Newbury and so I shall continue to build things while it's sitting doing nothing so that, hopefully, I will have a nice fully functioning system when I get back.

Meat

Last night we decided we didn't feel up to cooking dinner ourselves and agreed on a take-away Chinese. I went to the Chinese take-away and got two Vegetable Chop Sueys and two Vegetable Spring Rolls. They were a friendly bunch. When I got back home we tucked in as we were both rather hungry. I'd eaten my spring rolls and pretty much finished the Chop Suey when Liz, finishing off her Spring Roll, announced that she thought there was chicken in the spring rolls.

I stopped eating. She put down the remains of the spring roll. I poked around in the Chop Suey and found what looked suspiciously like a small bit of chicken skin. Suddenly I felt quite ill. I dismantled the spring roll and sure enough there were small pieces of some sort of meat in it. We won't be going back there again. :(

I Can't Carry On Like This

It's got to go. I've not got time to worry about it now but as soon as I get back to Aber this piss-poor excuse for a distribution of Linux is coming off my hard drive. It's like living in the dark ages. There's no access to any recent packages, it randomly locks up for a few seconds every so often and I can't figure out why. I've established that the shortcut keys is a problem with XFree86 because Debian is forcing me to use an archaic version that has a bug which maps the Ctrl, Alt, Windows and Menu keys all completely wrong. It's big, it's cumbersome, it's slow, it's archaic and I hate it.

Debian is shit.

I plan on having a faff with Gentoo when I get back to Aber. It sounds like it has some nice ideas in there.

I'm Ready to Scream

My Mandrake setup was getting somewhat long in the tooth so I bit the bullet last night and downloaded the minimal net installer for Debian. People keep insisting to me that, although the initial installers for Debian are the biggest pile of shit you will ever see, it is well worth the effort as Debian is by far superior to every other conceivable setup.

Bollocks.

It's taken god-only-knows how many re-installs to get Debian to accept the fact that I don't want to re-partition my harddrive. It chokes on the most minor of things. On many occasions I had to get myself a console and do stuff manually as the installer was too shit to handle it. Still I carried on, determined to reap the rewards of this far superior distribution. By the time I had finally got a working minimal install with 'net access etc etc I was starting to lose hope. Still I stuck to my guns and downloaded all the packages after trawling through the stupidly long package-selection list. And when I finally got to the other side and had set everything up I knew I was just one reboot away from my shiny new Debian system.

Except I wasn't. X failed to start claiming I didn't have sufficient memory to run a 640x480 8 bpp display. Of course I don't. My graphics card only has 64 Mb of RAM on it, there's no way that the required 300 Kb could fit in that. Still, that was just a minor inconvenience. Much hacking of the XFree86-config-4 file later and I had a booting X-server. But what's this? gdm, kdm and xdm are all installed and not one of them is working properly. Never mind. KDE is loading anyway, so at least I'll have a desktop. Except, oh, KDE has crashed without so much as an error message. On closer inspection I find that the installer has ignored my requests to use my existing partitions and so everything has been installed onto hdb1 - the partition I have set aside for the root filesystem. Great. Time to reinstall yet-a-fucking-gain.

This time I work out how to get the installer to install the system without crashing at the sight of my existing partitions. It installs. Hurrah. I carefully select all my packages again and it starts downloading. This time things seem to be going fairly smoothly. Only one package chokes on install and that wasn't anything major. Again the X server is dead. Again I hack the XF86-Config-4 file. The X server stays dead. Much hacking later I find that the installer had chosen to use the Framebuffer Device and that was choking the nv driver. Of course it didn't tell me this. That would be too easy, of course. More hacking and eventually I have a working X server. kdm isn't loading. Much faffing and it starts loading. Good.

When I get into X I find that half the stuff I use is missing. Fluxbox, xmms, aterm... I download it all. Mozilla isn't working. I upgrade it. Eventually I find some settings had persisted from my previous install which were confusing it. I fix the settings, up it pops. It looks ugly. I go to the settings only to find the setting I want has vanished. I check the version: 1.0. 1.0?! That's their "latest" version? How far behind the times do Debian want to be?!

My soundcard's drivers haven't been loaded. I'm going to have to try and remember exactly what the soundcard is now seeing as Debian can't autodetect it (like every other OS and distribution of Linux ever) and fix that manually. I suspect the "latest" version of Fluxbox from the Debian sources is ancient as it doesn't seem to do half the stuff it should, such as shortcut keys etc, and the mouse is configured as the most basic mouse ever. All in all it's one big mess.

But you know what? I haven't the energy to perform another install. I shall fix this version how I like my system and then it can stay like that.

Now to sort this fucking mouse out.

You Cheeky Little Bugger!

Compsoc The Aberystwyth University's Computing Society website. I wrote it. When I wrote it I re-used no material. I lifted no material. Everything you see on the CompSoc website is stuff that I wrote from the ground up by hand. By doing so I think I made the site look good, and I was somewhat proud of it and still am.

mridge.com The website of one Mark Ridge. Notice any similarity?

In fact, if you view the source of Mark Ridge's website you will find comments that I left in there from when I was building the site, including a comment that explained why a table was a certain width. All copyright comments have been changed to point to Mark Ridge's website. Take a look at the source for the CSS file I so pain-stakingly wrote. Note it's pretty much exactly the same as the one on the CompSoc site, until you reach the bottom where the style drastically changes as a load of extra stuff has been bolted on.

If I'd been asked if it was OK to use the layout I'd have almost certainly said "yes". But I wasn't asked. Today is the first time I've seen this. The thing that irritates me most is the addition of copyright messages all over the site saying "Copyright 2004 mridge.com" when in fact all copyright belong to Matthew Lowe.

Grrrrrrrr.

Woo!

I'm back online again. I've moved most of my stuff (still a few odds and ends to shift) but I'm pretty much finished now. Better still, I have the power of the stupidly fast Internet connection. Ahhh it feels good.

My room in PJM is tiny. Especially compared to the room I had on the seafront. Still it doesn't matter too much. I don't tend to use much of my room anyway. The bastards announced, when I collected the key, that they need another £130 from me to cover the period up until term starts. Why the fuck didn't they tell me this a little earlier? Gah. Incompetent wankers.

Now I need to move the stuff that is in my car, unpack various bits and pieces and generally try to get sorted out.