Catching up

It’s been a few days since I posted anything here, so time to catch up on what’s been happening since the weekend.

Friday night didn’t involve much, I got a text asking me if I wanted to go out for a quiet drink but since she was on the other side of Manchester to me, plus I’d just made a brew and put up my feet to have a bit of a rest I decided to give it a miss and reschedule for the next day instead. Besides, Have I Got News For You had just returned to our screens and I wouldn’t want to miss that (which, by the way, was amusing as always, especially with Jeremy Clarkson as the host).

After HIGNFY I decided to leave the television on and watch the news, at which point Alisdair mysteriously appeared in the living room—I didn’t know he was staying over although the lights being on in Rachel’s room whilst she was at work should have given me a clue I guess. We had a brew and watched Jonathan Ross nearly break poor Nicole Kidman on his chat show, it was something vaguely amusing to watch but I don’t like his interview style because he talks about himself far too much and says things that are really inappropriate.

On Saturday I’d arranged to meet Katie in town for lunch, although she managed to turn up an hour late, by which point I’d already given up and gone to get something from Tesco. Instead we ended up in Starbucks drinking coffee and indulging in the usual bitching about courses, “kids today” and just general chatter. It was nice to see someone from college again, and to top it all off she paid for my coffee and I didn’t get dragged along shopping afterwards. 🙂

After town I headed back to university for the monthly ManLUG meeting. We were supposed to be having an installfest (whereby everyone gets round and tries to sort out any problems people are having installing or configuring Linux), but unfortunately most of the people who turned up were the regulars who already have Linux installed on one if not more machines. Vlad tried to get the FreeBSD disk to boot on my laptop but to no avail, so we basically spent the rest of the afternoon talking shop with the rest of the motley Linux crew.

Sunday ended up being relatively quiet, I mainly continued with some software engineering work and watched a couple of episodes of Yes Prime Minister as well as chatting to people on MSN about work. Other than that, not much to report.

Monday involved a stupidly early start, causing me to set my alarm for 6:45am. I’d tried to fix a problem on Saturday involving a process on the Compsoc mail server that just refused to shut down, and in trying to debug the problem using gdb I managed to cause the kernel to panic and take the entire system down. Fortunately Vlad managed to switch the BIOS to boot from the other disk in our RAID array, which seemed to start fine and then syncronised with the disk that may have gone down and all was well. It turned out some of the earlier problems had been down to a hostname change that had been made in one place but not other (for the technical people amongst you, this meant that the mail server couldn’t resolve the hostname of the NFS server in order to mount people’s home directories to deliver mail to them). Anyway, it’s all back up and running now so that’s one less thing for me to worry about.

We also had an amusing moment in the databases lecture where Dr P was talking about backups and asked if anyone knew what the departmental backup procedure was, at which point Vlad and I both started laughing which seemed to make the lecturer most disconcerted. For the record, the department kicks everyone off the Oracle server at 23:00 on Tuesdays and does a full backup to tape, which is not exactly the most modern or reliable way of doing things although I guess it works. I’m just surprised they don’t back up to disk over the network or something, tapes seem so, well, old fashioned nowadays.

I’d also made an appointment to go and see the supervisor for the “port GTK to OS X” project that I was thinking of doing next year. I was a bit worried because I didn’t feel I’d ever got on well with the lecturer in question but when I went to speak to him he was really helpful and friendly and went to the student resource centre to book the report written by someone who had done the same project two years ago. Unfortunately it was out on loan but I’ve got it now, and so far it looks like what I’d like to do for my final year project. Also, no-one else has enquired about the project in question to the supervisor (the report from the student who did the project previously is a recommended report to read in general, which is probably why someone else had it out on loan) so there’s a good chance that I’ll get it if I put it down as my first choice. I think I made a good impression on the supervisor as well so hopefully that will help my chances.

Of course, Mondays wouldn’t be complete without Warped, and this week was no exception. I arrived later than usual and apparently made my way to the bar so quickly that Jennie didn’t see anything other than a blur moving across the room. Not an awful lot happened for a change, thankfully I managed to grab a corner of the sofa and avoid the usual attention for the best part of the night, which was probably good because I wasn’t feeling too well anyway. Other than the usual games of tag (yes I know, I shouldn’t still be playing tag at my age but I’m not one to stop the game 🙂 and pool the night passed fairly uneventfully.

Today I managed to get most of my third graphics lab done, I think I’ve got far enough to get 7 out of 10 (which is effectively a first and my average mark for these labs so I’m happy with that) and I have about an hour tomorrow morning to work on it so hopefully I can get some of the extras done as well.

Finally, I got home this afternoon feeling really shattered, tired and just, well weird. I don’t know what it is but I guess I just need to take a break for a bit and stop worrying about certain things that are preying on my mind.