Ben Francis

Operation Trip Of A Lifetime: Phase One goes something like this…

Tomorrow morning , lauperr and I get up at 1am to drive to Stanstead Airport where we catch the 6:30 flight to Venice (for £45!). We then spend two days there with lauperr in the sun.

lauperr then goes home on the plane and we wave her off. The following day djkoa and I catch a 24 hour ferry to Patras in Greece, sleeping on the Deck. Once we get to Patras we have 2-3 weeks to see Greece, Italy, France, Belgium, Slovenia, Netherlands and Luxembourg (and possibly Istambul) and find our way back to England on the trains! (I say 2-3 weeks because the interrail ticket lasts for 22 days but djkoa has to come back a few days early for some exam retakes!).

We will be sleeping on overnight trains, in a tent (preferably on a camp site but the side of the road works too) and in youth hostels, living on an extremely small budget and living out of an 85 litre backpack.

I will probably make Amsterdam the last stop where I might meet up with Adam (my boss) who seems to know the place like the back of his hand.

For the next three weeks this blog becomes a travel blog and I hope to update about every three to four days (Internet Access Permitting).

Wish us luck.

Must be brief for time is short but yesterday was great!

BBQ at lunch at ‘s.

Went to the cinema to see “Descent” which is the scariest thing in the world, don’t watch it if you don’t like: blood, guts, gore, small spaces or things that are lurking in the dark. Seriously, I’ve never been so scared by a film before – I’m the guy who sits there laughing in horror movies usually but this one hit on all the things that scare me, that and I’m squeamish! (sp?)

Despite not having much of an apetite after an hour and a half of gore we managed to clear up a huge meal and monstorous desert at Frankie and Benny’s, I love that place.

Then went back to ‘s, filled the garden with candles and sat around in a group singing songs and making a human pyramid under the stars.

Then we watched Dodgeball (which was a lot funnier than I expected) and went to bed.

7/7
I was at work on Thursday morning when I first heard of the explosions in London. It escapes me how a group of people can actually think they can justify something like that as “The will of God”, which is no doubt how they think they will claim to excuse cold blooded, calculated, indiscriminate murder.

Religious leaders from all faiths have condemned the bombings and they represent no religion I know of, merely the sick delusional thoughts of the few very disturbed people who brainwashed them into doing it. I have a lot of feelings about it but I’ll just sum it up by saying whatever they thought they were achieving, they failed. I have been so impressed by the way Londoners and the British people as a whole have reacted to it all, I’d almost go as far to say I’m proud to be British. That’s probably all they have achieved.

Birmingham
I went to Birmingham, despite having doubts about arriving in the semi-underground train station of Britain’s second city during rush hour, the day after the bombings. And indeed on Saturday they evacuated the city centre where I had been the previous day.

But anyway, it was quite a productive day. I got a few hours of consulting discussing my single sign-on system which it turned out had no simple answer but was certainly something worth working on. Then I hopped to the next train station and had a walk around Birmingham University on graduation day. I managed to convince the travel agent to give me a student card then got quite lost wandering around Birmingham aimlessly for three hours.

The twins’ 18th
The twins next door had their 18th birthday on Saturday night which was a lot of fun, though I spent far too much money on drinks. Nick and djkoa turned up later in the evening and all were merry.

Camping
lauperr and I slept in a tent last night and cooked sausage, bacon, eggs and spaghetti hoops in a mess tin over a very small camping stove. It tasted so good by the time we eventually got around to eating it!

Oh and Live 8 was amazing, I really wish I’d been at Hyde Park. Although seeing all of the different countries simultaneously holding concerts on TV was just amazing, especially when Will Smith tried to get the whole world clicking their fingers in unison, it felt like it was history in the making. When some of the people were talking on stage I found it very moving, although there were others who irritated me and I felt the things they said detracted from the purpose of the event.

I just hope all the good intentions have even a minute effect.

Please people, now the concert is over, don’t just forget about the whole thing.

Work and Play

I’m currently doing an dicey balancing act between the day job, the other job, planning a three week backpacking trip (for less than two weeks time) and trying to find time for other people. I’ve almost completely forgotten that I’m going to University in September!

My non day job has gone nuts, but I’m not saying anything until we actually pull some of it off because I’ve been here before and it’s not come to anything. Well, it’s never quite got this far, I’ve never had this many business meetings for a start. I just hope I can keep some of it up as part time work at uni when I go, without hampering my academic performance. I must stop thinking thoughts like “why am I bothering to go to Uni again…?”

I’ve submitted a paper to the IEE Write Around the World Competition for younger members and have also applied for a scholarship with them. I don’t hold out much hope for either, but it’s all good experience.

The day job is also quite interesting, despite the boring marketing meetings and the seemingly endless printer problems which hamper the more interesting aspects of the job. When I leave they were talking about my replacement being a web developer. I had to point out to them that they’re going to have to pay someone a hell of a lot more money if they want to call them that. I really wanted to say “look, I really don’t develop these web sites for you and admin a Linux web server for the £9000 a year you pay me, I do it for love.” I think the govenors would have been very suprised at what I’m paid. But for now I’m happy for the appreciation for a job well done and to speculate to accumulate, there are more long term rewards up for grabs if I play my cards right.

Soul food

There’s not much time left over after all this work, but I’m trying to find more time for my music. At the weekend I was playing the guitar with lauperr‘s brother which was cool. I really would like to find the time to get back into some music software, particularly the Wired project and some free software tools.

Hoary

I’ve installed Ubuntu Hoary finally and it’s brilliant, except that I somehow managed to remove warty and windows XP from the bootloader. I think the fact that it took me a week and a half to notice this says something about my computing habits.

LUGRadio Live

I went to LUGRadio Live in Wolverhampton (although I ended up going on my own) and it was awesome! I had a chat with Mark Shuttleworth about software patents and asked him if he was a nudist at heart. Bill Thomson shared his dried fruit treats with me as he wrote his presentation at the last minute and I was recruited by Creative Commons, I must get back to Rufus. I briefly chatted to the nice people from Open Advantage, talked to lots of other people, listened to lots of talks and bought a Debian t-shirt. I met slef at the event who very kindly gave me a lift back to Stamford (the trains in the morning had been interesting to say the least) and we had some interesting discussions on the way back.

In other news

I’m going back to OpenAdvantage in Birmingham on Friday following my two two day courses, to discuss a single sign on for a bunch of LAMP apps using an OpenLDAP server and hopefully not some dirty hacks. Then I’ll nip over to the University and try and convince them to give me an ISIC card.

Mum, Grandad and Reuben went up in a hot air balloon and we followed them in the car and saw them land which was very cool, although the early morning was a killer.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned lauperr and I spent a lot of time looking around Birmingham and loved it (thank goodness!). We rode on their temporary London Eye lookalike and watched the sun set over the city, walked along the canal and walked from Five Ways station to Birmingham New Street station past all the lovely water features and big buildings. I’m still not convinced city life is really me, but I do like the city more now I’ve had a proper look around.

Right, I suppose I’d better get off to bed, then in the morning I’ll think about chasing up djkoa the hopeless and buying a £220 train ticket, travel and health insurance and a last minute flight to somewhere in Greece or Turkey for the 17th or 18th.

Please forgive my drivel.

Computer Chips

Microsoft are developing XBox games on Apple G5s and Apple are moving to Intel Processors. According to Steve Jobs they’ve actually been secretly developing for x86 in the sidelines all along, and Intel have no hard feelings about them burning their bunny man.

So Apple are also moving away from IBM, who are making the chips for all three new games consoles. The games consoles won’t actually be games consoles at all but will actually be media centres for the home, which are likely to be more powerful than your PC and could cluster into a distributed supercomputer across the Internet.

What the…

Debian have, after three years, finally gone from 3.0 to 3.1… and our waitress in Birmingham was a man.

My car is bleeding oil all over the floor and my eyes constantly hurt. I’m trying to concentrate on my work while people throw huge numbers at me and I ride an emotional rollercoaster, reaching the brink of a complete change to every possible part of my life.

My brother constructed two three metre tall flowers out of steel and aluminium in the back garden and just took them off in the campervan. Someone flattened the fence in the front garden with a lorry and the new bypass in Bourne has been closed for two weeks because nobody’s signed the bit of paper yet to say people can drive on it.

It was only confirmed a week in advance that the Bourne Festival was actually happening, because it hadn’t been given the go ahead by the Vogons in the local Council. The organisers are so fed up of all the bureaucracy and stupid complaints that they might not even bother with it next year. Why is there always someone who has to ruin it for everyone else? STOP COMPLAINING, it’s only three frelling evenings out of 365.25! “Oh I’m all for charity events, just Not In My Back Yard(TM)”. Well who’s yard shall we put it in then? It’s got to go somewhere.

Amazed with and fed up with the world in general, in equal parts. But in a sure show of insanity, I’m remaining optmistic.

Oh, and I’m going to live on trains for three weeks and I’ve submitted a paper to the IEE.

HMV gift voucher
I have a dilema. To thank me for fixing their computer someone today gave me an HMV Gift card with £15 on it. I’ve had a look on the HMV web site and I can’t find anything there which I want which won’t be me giving money to the RIAA. Added to that is the fact that if I buy online there’s no way of opting out of spam going to my email address and Real Life(TM) address. The dilema is that if I buy something I will probably be giving money to the RIAA. If I don’t buy something, they’ve probably already got the money, I just don’t have anything in return.

So, the next time in Peterborough I think I’m going to buy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy soundtrack, so at least it will be worth it 😀

Physical Exercise!
Having not run anywhere for about 3 years I did the Dyke Village Fun Run last Friday and ran 2.5km (1.5 miles) without stopping! I’m so proud. It took me 15 minutes but I was 131st out of about 350 😛 There’s hope for me yet (tummy is currently slowly approaching massive proportions!)

My legs still ache.

GTDTiddlyWiki

Lifehacker points to this blog post about how people are using GTDTiddlyWiki to get things done. I might not have spotted thi s were it not for mchicago‘s blog posting on the topic, but it’s very interesting. I’m quite impressed that so many people are doing this kind of thing as it’s something I thought of completely independently. I am in tune with the rest of the human race after all! Well, the extremely geeky minority of it perhaps.

GTDTiddlyWiki is a little different of course, in that you can edit it locally or even carry it around on a USB stick. That’s cool. What would be even cooler would be if you could sync an offline version with an online version. I’d rather have it online and most of the time I’m a few feet away from an internet connection, but for the times I’m not it would be great to have a local cached version. Perhaps a hybrid of GTDTiddlyWiki, an online TiddlyWiki and rsync would work. Perhaps even a client to run on a PDA or a java-enabled mobile phone… or am I going mad? Hey, it’s late.

Amazon used items

If I buy something second hand from Amazon I feel good about buying it because a) I’m recycling (well, reusing) and b) I’m spending less money. So when I was browsing Amazon (looking for David Allen’s book which inspired the uses of GTDTiddlyWiki) and came across a little box on the side that said “Used and new items from your wishlist” I went “ooooh! clicky clicky, go to checkout”. To see second hand items at very good prices which were on my wishlist was just too much to take and I went on a (very rare) spending spree:

Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web [Paperback] by…, £1.75
Code 46 [2003] [DVD] (2005) Tim Robbins; Samantha Morton; Om Puri; Jeanne…, £6.99
The Day After Tomorrow – Two Disc Edition [2004] [DVD] (2004) Dennis Quaid…, £6.74
A Beautiful Mind [2002] [DVD] (2002) Russell Crowe; Ed Harris; Jennifer Connelly, £3.99
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes [Paperback] by…, £1.80

The only disadvantage is the postage costs involved in buying second hand items, and of course that it costs money at all, but other than that these are all items that I’d really like but probably would otherwise not have bought.

Congratulations Amazon, you beat me this time.

In other news…

Both lauperr and I washed our cars today, but this was no ordinary wash. For me, it was the first time I’d washed my car since I’ve owned it. Because of this, I was feeling guilty and gave Milliwig the whole works.

First shampooed, then rinsed, then wiped with a damp cloth, dried with a dry cloth, polish applied, left to dry, polish rubbed off and left sparkling, applied glass polish to all glass areas, made windows shiny and nice, applied alloy wheel cleaner and polished, used special blackening cloths for black plastic areas.

It looked so sparkly and nice (apart from the bits of rust) that I took photos for if/when I sell my car on eBay in a few months 😛 Hey, I may even get around to cleaning the interior before I sell it!

Edit: cool, APIs for the BBC

The Microsoft Short Film Competition

Can (or should) thoughts be owned in the same way as physical objects, or are all thoughts ultimately the product of “standing on the shoulders of giants” and therefore belong to noone but the human race itself? Discuss.

Trying to see the positive to the former half of this question, I would feel pretty annoyed if a big corporation (or even a small one) saw the ideas I’m currently working on and created something from them that I considered evil. Especially if I didn’t have the resources to create a non-evil version and theirs was the only one which survived. The only way to prevent them using my ideas would be for me to have some power to prevent them using them, i.e. ownership.

I guess it’s how Einstein felt about Nuclear weapons.

I commented in my blog a while back that I’ve been using a wiki as a brain extension, to organise my ideas and projects. Well it’s now reached 87 pages and 280 links and is really proving very useful. It sounds like I’m not the only one who’s doing this kind of thing either 😛

I’m currently using PHPWiki which is simple and functional. In the future I may upgrade to MediaWiki or one of the wiki modules for the Drupal Content Management System which I want to use for my homepage.

Recenty 37 Signals (who make the popular Basecamp project management software for the Mac) released a commercial personal wiki called Backpack. It’s essentially a wiki + to do list + image gallery + online file store but I think this could be suprisingly useful (examples). Limited features are free but you don’t get much before you have to start paying a subscription.

So I thought I’d have a quick look to see if there’s a similar project which is free and open source and I can run on my own server.

At first I failed, but found another hosted service which is possibly even better than backpack, JotSpot which is very cool. It comes with a list of ready-made “application templates” to utilize the wiki for a wide range of tasks. It has other useful features like being able to email the wiki and a WYSIWYG for the pages. But again, not something I can run on my own server.

About the closest I found was XWiki, but it only seems slightly more powerful than your average vanilla wiki out of the box. It has optional hosting, but I’m not really interested in that.

Moving wiki

As wikis all use similar but different markup and different storage structures they’re not quite compatible with each other. I think that an export as XML feature for wikis would be useful, perhaps even in DocBook format. This may already have been done, I don’t know.