Baby Goths

Found this linked off the yakyak forums. It's so funny I have to share it. Even when I was at school with kids who were like this (constantly conforming to the latest non-conformist subculture) I could see how utterly ridiculous it was. Read the article, laugh your head off then read some of the comments, there are some classics in there. One, maybe two, of the kids featured in the article actually left comments too.

What is with their names? "Shadow Mercy", "Misery Whispers" and "Lord Mercy"?!

As Liz said when she read that: 'do you think he meant to wrte "ironing"?'

I hope to god that was a piss-take!

Okay, how about spending a little more time learning how to spell and a little less time putting on make-up and conforming to the non-conformist ways?

Stuff...

I've been meaning to correct myself on this point for a while now. When I wrote this I thought it would make more sense to just perform a hard shut-down, but since then I have realised this is NOT the best course of action. If you reboot and the system doesn't pick up the hibernate file for whatever reason (for me it was because of an error in my APPEND= line passed to the kernel) then the best course of action is:

* Where /dev/swap is the path to your swap partition, of course. But you knew that, right?

Why? Well because on bootup things get modified whether you like it or not. Things get "touch"ed, things get moved, things get deleted, things get created then removed a little later on. If your filesystem is already in a "dirty" state then this may cause some serious issues. I use reiserfs on my laptop and it does NOT like you modifying the filesystem when it's not cleanly unmounted. The problem is hibernating seems to mark the filesystem as cleanly unmounted. God knows why. They should mark it dirty in my opinion, just in case it doesn't resume properly.

Anyway, providing you delete the resume file from the swap partition you should be okay and get away without any trouble.

I got an email from Alex (my German flatmate in my second year) last night. Which was nice. Not heard from Him in ages. When I get out of Aberystwyth and enter the "real" world I plan on amassing a small sum of money and going to Germany and getting hammered on fine German beers. Er, I mean, going to Germany and sampling some of their fine ales. Yes.

I also got an email from a reader :-o Whatever next?

Today sees the first frost of the year. Well, the first frost of the year for me. It's bloody freezing outside, it's hat and gloves weather but that didn't occur to me until halfway to the Uni. I was too late to go to the lecture in which I had been planning on working on my major project, so I went to the Sun Lounge instead to do it. And here I am now, procrastinating away on my blog- D'oh!

Suppose I'd better get some work done.

Weekend

Back from another action-packed weekend. Well, not exactly action-packed. Liz was rather ill so we spent most of our time watching videos. Not that I'm complaining, I like just curling up in front of a good video. My only worry is that I might have caught the lurgy too, but we shall have to see. I had a bit of a sore throat earlier, but that may have just been psychosomatic/sympathy pain.

We were discussing the idea, once again, of a "search facility for life". A little search box that you can type into to find out where misplaced items are. We've discussed this a lot but I think it's do-able. Simply tag everything that's of importance with an RFID chip and then set up some device that can triangulate on all the items in a room. Making a search facility shouldn't be too much trouble. Then one would be able to do this:

Then you could glance round the room and type

I think it's got marketing potential.

Not heard from the guy who wants the website. Shame. He might email tomorrow, he did say he was going to be out of the office until Monday.

Now I'm going to go and get another drink and then do some more work on my major project. The project is progressing nicely but I need to make sure I don't become complacent.

MOT

The car passed its MOT first time, no problems! :D Now to go to collect it, the bloke in the garage can't leave until about 4 or 5 and I want it back before then, so I'm going to walk to Clarach and collect it. Woo.

Fantastic!

I could certainly use some cash...

Ahhhhh Yeah

Managed to recover everything of value. Man I'm good. Now to back the whole lot up before it happens again.

Oh Shit

Looks like I'm going to have to attempt some data recovery, which is something I've never had much success with.

:(

Oh Shit Oh Shit Oh Shit

I knew I shouldn't have trusted a FAT32 partition with my course notes. I knew it.

Currently I am scanning the disk and hoping desperately that Windows can fix the error in the file-system and retrieve my notes for me. Otherwise I will have just lost a few weeks of notes.

*Note to self:

- Implement an automatic backup routine

Good News, Everyone!

</futurama>

I completely forgot to mention the good news I got today. The marks from our poster sessions have been totalled up and sent to our project tutors. As you may recall I was under the impression that Dave Price hated my project but the email I received from Adrian suggests otherwise:

Splendid! A mark of 7 is considered "on-track", 8 is "good" and 9 is "wahey-hey-then!". 10, of course, is impossible to score ;)

Speed Optimisations

Spent some time last night and this afternoon optimising the bootup on the laptop. It now boots from the Lilo screen to a console login prompt in 20 seconds, and it boots from Lilo to the XDM login within 30 seconds. There's just one thing I can't stop running that I don't want. It's something to do with Gentoo's service management. I want to disable it on boot without completely trashing it, but I can't work out WHAT is calling it on boot! If I could just get rid of that it would make a fair old difference to the boot-time.