When people say to me “Steve, what were your student days like?” I say “funny that, you’re the first person ever to ask me that ever, except in the context of a contrived pretext for a blog entry.”
My student days were a once in a lifetime chance to waste the unique opportunities you don’t realise you have until you’ve been graduated for a couple of years. They were also a time when, if I found a bike in a ditch, I could right then spend the next 72 hours straight restoring it to running condition. They were a time of making kung fu movies in the woods; of building remote controlled ducks and sinking them in Queens Dock liverpool; of building near-1:1 scale Minis out of snow; of forming a band, giving them two weeks to learn the songs, playing a live gig and breaking the band up again; of becoming the vocalist in another band purely on the strength of being a member of band society and hence meeting the guy who would later offer me a job (hi namke:-). They were a time of finding porn on Computer Services’ personal user filestore while searching for an image of the hot girl who used to come in the computer science labs to check her email, of learning to devilstick, unicycle, and ride an ultimate wheel, a time of fire juggling on campus without so much as public liability insurance or a fire blanket, and a time of bringing down the campus network servers with the network traffic from a multiplayer game someone on our year made, and of turning up hours late for a fancy dress party because my robot suit took so long to stand up in.
I’m not sure the alumni office had anything much to do with any of that.
When people say to me, “Greg, what were your student days like?” I reply, “They were a special time: I went to York.” Ever since, I’ve been keen to stay involved. Now there’s a way for all of us to retain our links with the University, whilst supporting all those things that made it special.
This insulting, patronising letter then goes on to suggest I would like to join The Yorkies which is “something special” - a way of maintaining my relationship with the York that I remember…
From the letter, the ONLY way it achieves this is by suggesting I pay them £120 a year.
That’s quite a good price, for only £10 a month I get to fund the continual disregard shown by the admin for the students, the appalling food and service in campus fare, the utter failure to provide or permit a decent venue for music and dancing, and the diseased fountain spraying duck-shit aerosols throughout the academic year…
Thanks for all the advice, both random and specific. Got my brain over that particular blockage.
In other news, HOW has society SURVIVED thus far without STEAM ROBOTS?
That was a test because it’s not true that I have nothing to write about, only that the stuff I have to write about is not blog material. It’s all kind of personal. So if you have any random advice for a problem that you’re not allowed to hear about, I’d like to hear it.
“publish” a private post…?
Hmm, I haven’t been blogging for a while because I haven’t had anything interesting to blog about. Be warned: I still don’t.
Investigating the Mac Mini crashes (by setting up a cron job on the linux box to ping it and tell me the time it stopped responding), it seemed to be something to do with the pickup daemon not being able to talk to the cleanup daemon … both parts of the postfix email system. The logs were full of errors accessing cleanup, and ps aux often shew upwards of 30 pickup processes … even if they are pooled, this is rather many of them.
Scrutinising the Darwin logs showed that cleanup was unable to access virtual.db — not surprising considering it didn’t exist. I’d missed that you don’t just change virtual to set up email forwarding, you have to run postmap hash:virtual to convert it to a database for postfix to use.
Somehow, with this invalid configuration, postfix reload, stop, or abort would silently fail. No warnings about bad configuration, nothing in the log files, and the only way you knew stop or abort had failed was when you tried to start it again and it said “already running”. Postfix is a bugger to kill.
Now it’s all started up, and if the Mac doesn’t fall over again in the next couple of days I will possibly have a replacement for the noisy old Linux box. Ironic that I needed the Linux box to diagnose the problem with its replacement though.
In my old house I had a linux box that burbled away 24/7 and served a bunch of personal webpages. Later I added my salsa teaching website and email forwarding and DNS… this little box in my front room did pretty much everything an internet service provider would do for you, all for the price of broadband, some electricity, and some time spent feeding it coffee and donuts and keeping it running smoothly.
But boy, was it loud! The ancient hardware - disk drives, fans - made quite a racket, which was not ideal as it lived in the same room as my music making stuff.
Later I got a Mac Mini, tiny, quiet, powerful… as a phased implementation I moved the websites over, intending to move the email over when I was satisfied the websites worked.
WELL THEY BLOODY DON’T
The Mac just keeps on falling over with a “kernel panic” having failed to allocate a socket. There’s no army of weenies out there with intimate knowledge of the kernel, there’s no alternative Mac OSX distribution… in short, the Mac is rubbish at doing these simple jobs.
Its interface is great, it’s a joy to look at and to use, but the bloody thing just doesn’t do the bloody job.
It’s bloody fired. I’ll have to make a space in the loft for the linux box, I’m not having it in the music room again.
I had to make sure I marked this birthday as last year I kept forgetting whether I was 33 or 32. Saturday was marked by Annabel’s 40th birthday do, which involved two expected and one unexpected show, which I managed to completely miss by dint of being stupid and rubbish, though I partly blame the BBC for running late. Annabel and Niall apparently did a full-on reproduction of a fred and ginger routine. I will have to see the video.
Sunday was a visit from Bro and Sarah, and lunch in VJ’s… There had been suggestions of everybody piling around but (1) Bro and Sarah don’t really do crowds (at least not of mwah-mwah people!) and they’d made all that effort to drive to York and back in a day in a mini; and (2) The plans started to go wobbly on Sunday morning, so I just simplified.
Rachael got me a güiro, which is totally ace-o-roony (scoobs), and then proceeded to tidy and clean every part of the house that didn’t require an executive decision. What an ace pressie!
I did a blog check and found that the last year has represented rather a lot of progress, even if it had gone rather too quickly for my taste. Rather frighteningly, having a tidy house was also a highlight of last year’s birthday :-O
oo and thanks for the wishes in mongers’ calendar!
… and Courgettes and Green Beans fried in oliveoil and steamed spinach
- are very good for you
- taste a bit plain
- can be a bit greasy
- are really quite noticeable the following day if you don’t have room in the fridge for the spinach and the bin does not have a lid on and it was a long hot day and allthe windows and doors were shut.