I’m busily updating this site’s code. You won’t see any of it because
I’m doing it on my local copy (you think I’d suffer an intermittent
56k connection to design websites? what do you think I am, a Windows
user?

I might get the new code out by Monday!

I need a decent templating system. Mixing HTML and PHP together looks
a complete mess.

I’m back from Dublin. We had a great time and it didn’t rain much!
(unlike what it’s doing now).

Woke up at half five to get a taxi to Manchester Airport. Didn’t know
which terminal we were leaving from, so went to Terminal 3. We were
supposed to be in Terminal 1 which is across the motorway. Dragged our
luggage along too many of those moving walkways - which are a complete
waste of time if you’re in a hurry, you can out-walk one! Found the
RyanAir checkin desk, then proceeded to try and tell Cellnet I was
leaving the country and could I please have international roaming
activated.

Cellnet’s customer service number was unreachable.

The plane was… well let’s say you get what you pay for, and for 11
quid you don’t get much. The plane was a flying advert for the Sun and
News Of The World. It got us there which was the main thing.

Dublin airport was complete chaos. We left the plane, went through
‘immigration’ (a bored bloke that didn’t seem interested in anything
and was just waving people through) and then got lost. For a few
hundred metres there were signs saying “baggage claim ->”, but then
they disappeared. We were directed down a corridor marked “No Entry”
and found the blaggage claim conveyors eventually.

Mind you, I forgot to collect one of my bags and had to be escorted
back into there through the secret ‘Staff Only’ door…

Withdrew vast quantities of Irish money from the nearest cash machine
(B&B only took cash, IR250 of it - which turns into GB200) and then
proceeded to hide it since walking around with 50s in your hand is
just silly. Caught a taxi to the B&B (after giving the driver
directions! We’d been in Dublin 10 minutes and already knew the area
better than he did!).

Visited the Guinness brewery. Nice looking building, great view from
the bar on the top floor, and the ticket you get is just… weird. Go
and get one, you’ll understand. Did other sightseeing stuff and
managed to use a 24exp film somehow. Drank mainly Guinness, but twice
decided on a change and had Murphys instead

Woke up at another insane time to get the 7:30 flight back to
Manchester. Sat for 20 minutes in the airport watching a poor flight
departures PC rebooting itself (crappy DOS-based display trying to
talk SQL to an NT server that didn’t seem to exist, it’d show its BIOS
screen, load DOS, crash, reboot, repeat). In Manchester we saw a
British Airways information LCD screen displaying “System Error”. I
wish I’d not used all my camera film

All throughout the holiday I was without phone or Internet. It was
nice! My phone was quite happy to talk to ‘IRL Eircall’ or ‘Digifone’
or the mysterious ‘IRL 03′, but wasn’t sure about making calls - the
best I got was “Calls to this number are restricted”. SMS sometimes
worked for about 10 minutes once. Turned my phone on in Manchester
and… had no voicemail or SMS

Saw places I recognised from the air! We flew over Holyhead, Bangor,
and Liverpool, then over my house! I actually saw the road running
past my house from the air (it looks very small

Yes, after two weeks of sun and warmth it’s gone crappy and wet. The clouds, obviously not content with floating up in the stratosphere, have decided to come down and visit. Aparrently there’s been thunderstorms and torrential rain in other parts of the country. The best we can manage is a bit of damp cloud. It looked like it might thunder yesterday, but it didn’t (I like a good storm).

It’s my graduation tomorrow. I tidied out my room yesterday, had the most pleasurable experience of chucking 4 years of University stuff in the paper recycling bin at the local Tesco’s

Going to Ireland on Thursday with Emily (she’s just landed in London where the weather is aparrently ‘OK’. Ha, wait till you get down here >:). I plan on seeing if ‘real’ Guinness is better than the stuff we get, this might require a lot of testing…

Ordered Slackware 8, so I’ll be able to have the complete joy of zapping everything off my machine (including that other minor operating system modern PCs seem infected with). I just need to work out how to fit 23GB onto 2Gb DAT tapes and CDs.

Yesterday I bought some CDs, one of them was Deeper Underground by Jamiroquai. I opened the box, and there wasn’t Jamiroquai inside it… there was Destiny’s Child! Unfortunately HMV won’t take snapped CDs back, so I had to be careful and instead imagine snapping it into bits

Oh yeah, and BT Internet are being insanely CRAP! They don’t have enough modems. I sent an email to their tech support people and have received no reply! I wonder if PlusNet are cheaper. Maybe if I can get online I’ll investigate.

The midges are invading. There’s hundreds of the little buggers zooming round outside. Every morning I wake up with a new collection of itchy dots on my arms and legs.

I’ve bought a fly killer. Take that you sods. They’re crawling over my screen while I’m writing this!

Well I woke up on Saturday and discovered Slackware 8 was out. I proceeded to try and download it through my flaky 56k modem (that keeps wanting to be a 9600 thanks to BT’s wonderful phonelines in our area - UNIX may be 30 years old, but that doesn’t mean I want to emulate a net connection from that time!). ftp.slackware.com was OK for the first 6 hours, I managed to get about 70MB, but then the Americans woke up and tried doing the same thing.

My local mirror (http://mirror.ac.uk) doesn’t have it all yet (there’s parts of the ’slakware’ dir, but nothing in the ISO images directory yet), so I’m waiting for it to be available on http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk.

Technically this machine could download things, it is on a 2Mbit link, however we pay for our bandwidth and transferring 3 CD images would put us way over the limit (plus it’d still be on the wrong side of my modem - and the wrong side of Birmingham too!).

I can now ride one way up the big hill between here and my house in my bike’s top gear I’ll try the other side today (the other side is steeper). The weather is still warm and there’s sun up there somewhere. I like it, makes a change from rain. Makes my herb garden grow too (the mint is taking over and it’s only been in there a week!). Had fun putting salt on the slugs that tried eating the corriander. Slugs and salt don’t mix, they go all… runny…

Back to writing this Windows program for work. It’s quite interesting really, I’m doing the entire thing on my own and it’s actually working! I have to demo it tomorrow (aaargh!)