My Nuon arrived last week too! Last Thursday I was woken up by a car door slamming. I peered out my window to see a big red Parcel Force van. I ran downstairs just in time for the postman to see me. He brought a medium sized white box and gave it me. This box was from the US and after getting into it, I found a Nuon

I was on the next bus to Manchester to buy an NTSC->PAL converter and a 110v adaptor.

I then sat and watched the VLM for a few hours, listening and watching my CDs. It’s soo nice, and with the controller I can interact with it, fiddling with the patterns. It makes Winamp look very cheap.

I so thought it’d been lost in the mail, or that someone had stolen it. A few weeks ago I filled in a “Lost Mail” form in the hope they’d find the box, and when it turned up, I made the obvious correlation. However I was wrong, since today I got a letter from the PO saying they were sorry my parcel had gone missing, but that I should contact the sender to get them to trace it!

Last week I decided to wipe my main machine and re-install Linux. This time I’ve gone for Gentoo Linux. After spending two solid days of compiling I had something that booted and was useable.

Gentoo is different. It’s weird connecting yourself to the internet before installing anything. I was chatting on IRC using the boot CD while downloading and formatting disks!

The package system is really good. Installing stuff is easy, you just ask the ‘emerge’ program to download and compile the thing you’re after. Any dependancies are also dragged down the wire and installed (which takes ages if you ask it to install Mozilla). Definately not the one to install if you only have a modem!

I now have a nice working system that is aparrently optimised for my particular system. I’ve not noticed any massive increase, however Nautilus under GNOME 2 is now very usable and nice. Couldn’t work out how to get Nautilus to use Mozilla and render websites, but that’s not that important.

I also spent some time installing Courier IMAP and Squirrel webmail on my webserver. Instead of using POP3 to my workstation, I’ll use IMAP. Means I can read the mail from any machine on my network, or over the web. I’ll put an LDAP addressbook on too and have all my addresses in it. Creating a simple LDAP admin program in PHP shouldn’t be hard either.

This is my somewhat hazy recall of the Llamasoft meeting in Oxford.

It all began for me early Friday morning when I got a lift to Oldham bus station to get the 11 O’clock coach to Birmingham. Due to my laptop buggering up I had to sit and gawp out the windows or read a book instead. Eventually, after being half an hour late, the coach found its way to the coach station in Birmingham.

What a dump! Imagine a scene from Bladerunner, but without the rain. It was your typical 80’s style bus station with grime and weird people to match. I was ripped off something rotten by the food machines and had a bag of crisps and a Twix for dinner. This wasn’t good as the last time I did that I felt sick when trying to drink beer and eat curry.

The next coach to Oxford arrived and we all piled into it. I managed to leave my book in my bag, which had been carefully drop-kicked into the baggage hold. Oh well, time to enter a Zen-like state and stare out the window again. Bought some more crisps and some hot chocolate on the way and watched random parts of Avon go past the windows.

A few stops later and I arrived in Oxford bus station. Doing a usual “me” I proceeded to walk in the wrong direction :) (and I go walking in mountains where walking the wrong way off a mountain can lead to a very long walk home!) Upon turning my “not to scale” map around the right way I set off to find the youth hostel. On the way I realised I didn’t know where the pub was, so a text was fired off to Jeff to ask where it was.

The Youth Hostel was nice (what little I saw of it). Can’t comment on the food as I didn’t eat anything there. I stuck my bag in a locker, made my bed, and went off to find the pub, forgetting to take my joysticks and CDs with me. After returning to the YHA to collect them I wandered off up the road, avoiding posh students and people on bikes.

Turns out I went past the pub on the way in. Met up with lots of people from the Llamasoft Forum and went to have a play on the machines set up there. Discovered I was no better at real Robotron than the MAME version :)

As the evening drew on more people turned up and soon there was about 20 of us, all drinking and playing old computer games, talking, and generally having a good time. Jeff gave me a copy of Tempest 3000 for my Nuon, which, after playing it, is an excellent game - definately one to play in the dark.

Eight o’clock arrived and we went off to the curry house that’d been booked for us. Much food was eaten, digital cameras were produced, Yak was keeping the rest of the forum in contact by emailing pictures from his mobile phone.

Feeling suitably curried up, we returned to the pub and continued wearing the night away playing and drinking and talking. People gradually left to go to sleep until there were five of us left. At around 5am we decided sleeping would be a good idea as tomorrow would be a long day so those of us staying at the YHA staggered off there to wake everyone up.

Next morning I missed breakfast, and by the time I’d come round it was almost dinnertime. Off to the pub I went again :)

Chips and sausage for breakfast, followed by some early morning Tempest 2000, managing to get second place on someone’s brand new looking Jag cart. I played that game quite a lot during the weekend. I got to the point where I was stopping good games because I was getting bored! At one point I had 300,000 points, more lives than the screen could show, and deciding there were other things to do, I turned the Jag off!

At half 1ish the first of many many members of the public arrived to come and discover that Llamasoft is indeed alive again, play games, and drink beer. In the end about fifty people arrived and the pub began to resemble an arcade from the early 90’s, filled with many bleeps, explosions, people, and the Robotron machine looking perfectly at home in the corner - as though it’d always been there, and not that it’d only been there a day.

Sometime during the evening Eric Kendrick arrived bearing Nuons for various people, which caused a stir. The nearest big screen telly was hijacked and Tempest 3000 put on. Yak had first go, “only” managing to get to level 24 with half a million points (”out of practice” aparrently). After that everyone had a go, some of us thinking “cool! I can’t wait to play this at home!” and others thinking “you lucky bastards! wish I had one!” :) Later on that night I got sucked into the machine for a long time, necessitating the need to sit outside in the non glowing, definately-no-particles-at-all Real World.

Once more the forum members left the crowd at 8 o’clock to go and consume some more curry, and returned an hour later glowing with the heat from within, and discovered the pub was just as full as when they left it. Most excellent! people were staying to play the games! And not just new games, but old ones too. Some of the people present were playing games older than they were :-)

The night carried on again until we noticed that, once more, 5am was upon us :) This time however we decided the YHA was too far away and that the floor would do (evidently sanity had left at that point). Pub floors are hard and smell. After a few hours of what I can only describe as unconsciousness I regained usage of my legs and staggered around the empty pub for a while before going off to the YHA to check out, returning to the pub again via a food shop to get some breakfast.

I could only stay for half an hour though before getting my coach, but on the way out of Oxford I sent an SMS to Yak and it arrived just in time for him and the remaining survivors to wave at me passing :) I don’t remember much of the trip home. Only having 10 hours of sleep the entire weekend caught up with me and I discovered I can sleep sat up if I really have to.

I passed through the toilet known as Birmingham coach station in a similar way to the curry I ate passed through me, and off to Oldham before getting a lift home, where I promptly fell asleep :)

Spent the past day discharging my laptop’s battery. This involved poking wires into it and then connecting two fans and my GPS to it. It took a long time to discharge! They hold a lot of charge do laptop batteries! Makes you realise why they cost so much, and just how much juice a PC consumes…

Put battery back in laptop, let it charge. Laptop still isn’t convinced and won’t run on battery power. Looks like I’ll be borrowing electricity off people when I take it places then. I really don’t understand… the battery charges, the laptop knows it has a battery, but it just doesn’t run on it. Help!

Am going to improve this website yet again… Make it more user-friendly for me to administer, improve the display code, and tart up the site layout.

I fitted another network card in my firewall machine. It now has three - A mini network for my ADSL router, one for my wired network, and now one for my wireless net. I can even do cross-subnet browsing in Windows, although it is dog-slow.

My wireless stuff arrived today. Almost missed the postman, I was watching him write some stuff down in his van while thinking “Why’s it take him so long to write a delivery note?”. He saw me and waved me over. He was going to leave me a note and take the box to the PO. I think we need a doorbell.

Plugged the card into the laptop, plugged the Access Point into the network. Lights flashed, Windows churned…and churned… eventually it said “AHA! You’ve got a wireless card… gimme a driver for it then”. Driver CDs were fed, more lights flashed.

Well it recognised the card and claimed I had an 11MBit link. Couldn’t send data across the link though. Had to go out so packed the laptop up and went off.

Turned the laptop on… or at least pushed its power button. Nothing happened. My laptop appears to have gone strange and won’t power up on battery power (battery is full!). No, this laptop doesn’t have a ‘Sony’ logo on it anywhere. Hope that by leaving the battery out for a long time something resets and it works again. Not a lot of use having a laptop with no battery, been there, don’t want to do it again :-/

Came back home for some dinner (i.e to play with new wireless stuff ;-). For some reason it just wouldn’t work… The card saw the AP, and the signal was strong. After much faffing around I got it on the network, and could ping the AP from a machine wired to the network. Then, for no aparrent reason, it started working over the wireless link! Then it stopped. Then started again. I think it’s sorted out now.

I’m a bit confused though. I can’t work out if the AP is a router, or if it’s a hub. It has an IP address, but I don’t think that bears any relation to the wireless network.

Now to set up a VPN and move the AP onto its own network segment to keep the wardrivers out (there are no wireless networks in this building I’m currently in BTW ;-).

Oh, and I don’t know if it was intentional, or by mistake, but the hardware I ordered was some ‘value’ hardware, and the stuff I got sent is ‘Belkin’. The same stuff on sale in PC World for 140 quid for the AP alone :)

Received a laptop as part-payment for some coding I’m doing. I’ve just bought a Dabs Value 802.11b wireless “access point” and PCMCIA card. Hopefully they’ll arrive sometime soon and I won’t have to trail this 15m network cable around with me.

My Nuon seems to have disappeared. Such a wonderful postal service we (or the Americans) have :-/

Just managed to get on the Internet using the laptop and my mobile phone. Spent 10 minutes trying to get sense out of the phone. Rebooting both and clicking a few random dialogs seems to have sorted things out. It had a slight problem of killing my ADSL connection though.

Now for plan B - dialing home, and then getting home to call me back.