Ben Francis

I got the job! As of September (contract pending) I’ll be an ICT technician for the Art and Design department of the Vale of Catmose College in Oakham. This means that I’ll be working mainly with apple macs which I’m really happy about because it means I’ll be getting some new experience. There are a few Windows PCs lying around for adult learning and prodesktop and things but not any GNU/Linux boxen, as of yet 😉

I think the job is going to be very tiring with working with the students AND looking after a network and various other bits, but hopefully it’s going to be very interesting and as it’s only term time and 30 hours a week there should be time for other work too, providing I’m not too tired! I’m told there’s even the possibility of helping out in their theatre now and then which will be great. I was particularly chuffed because apparently the two other candidates who turned up for interview both had degrees, but I got the job!

Bourne Festival is happening this weekend and it’s so hard to stay away from it! On Thursday night I walked past and saw open flight cases and was just DYING to go over and help out. But I have revision to do. I did go on Friday night after my exam for a break though, and I watched the last act last night too which was “Doctor and the Medics” of 80s fame with their number one hit “Spirit in the Sky”. It was a fantastic performance and I’m told the previous act was good too. “The Doctor” praised the organisers for putting together a great festival and helping to prevent live music from dying! Who says community is dead…

I’m personally proud of Bourne and The Round Table for managing to organise such a great event, there were 6000 people packed onto the Wellhead field last night apparently, including bouncykaz and mchicago who it was nice to meet! It’s just a shame that the event is on such stupid dates though, right in the middle of all the student’s exams in Bourne.

I think I might go tonight to see the second sitting of The Houndogs and Legend which are both really great bands, wish I had time to see more of it 🙁

There was a mysterious power cut last night at an unknown hour between 1:30 and 3:45am which took out tralk and woke lauperr and I with the sound of very loud white noise from my radio when it came back on!

Yesterday I ate a microwaveable prawn curry only to find out that it was actually 6 months out of date. A healthy dose of whisky, Rum, Tia Maria and Guinness seemed to cure the problem though! 😛 The former three were meant to be part of a Black Russian but mum accidentally put Rum in instead of Vodka! :S

P.S. I think I’ve helped to “fix” the Creative Commons licenses which is very cool. Perhaps the next version of some of the CC licenses will be DFSG-free and everyone will be happy 🙂 It’s great when groups like CC and Debian-Legal interact in this way. Keep up the good work guys!

I’ve just had a phone call to tell me that I’m through the the regional finals for the Young Engineer of the Year competition, w00t! Next step is to exhibit my work at Rolls Royce in Derby in July.

I’ve got an interview for the job I applied for! At first I thought I’d lost out because I have a maths exam the same day as the all day interviews and they said there was nothing they could do to change it. But then I got a phone call back and the Principal said I could have an interview on a different day so my interview is on Thursday! Considering the deadline for applications was only yesterday morning that’s pretty soon. So I have interview right in the middle of three maths exams, wonderful.

Extremely hot weather. A thermometer in the back garden reads 33 degrees celcius, but it is in the sun. I think my router overheated.

I telnetted to it and it kept throwing error messages at me saying it couldn’t get an IP address. tralk’s last apache activity was at 6am this morning from an MSN bot and everything refused to work.

So I implemented my high tech cooling system…

And everything worked again!

For some reason yesterday I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. I hadn’t slept very well the previous night which may have something to do with it. I spent the day thinking a lot about things like global warming, endangered species, software patents, corrupt copyright law and for the first time for me really, politics.

The global warming/endangered fuzzy things thoughts were probably a result of a combination of the Douglas Adams book I just finished and the film we watched yesterday – The Day After Tomorrow. I really enjoyed the film despite the slightly limp plot and horrid CGI wolves, but it was a little bit too real for me. It didn’t even matter that some of it was likely factually incorrect and exaggerated.

Coming out of the cinema we discovered lauperr‘s wallet had gone missing and was most likely stolen. Inside was a quarter of her monthly wages, cash card, driving licnese, NI card etc. so the rest of the day was very stressful for her, having to ring the bank, DVLA, police etc.

That didn’t do much for my already tainted view of humanity.

By the end of the day my state of mind had slipped so low I actually found myself emailing candidates for the European elections and anyone who knows me will know just how out of character that is for me.

Anyway, that was yesterday. Last night lauperr slept over and today we took her five year old sister to take a picture she’d drawn to my grandparents where we stayed a little longer than I had hoped. This evening I’ve finished my latest job application and I’m going to hand deliver it tomorrow so I can get a look at the place.

Todays interesting URLS:
LocustWorld – Bio Diverse Networking unleashed!
South Witham Broadband
Community Wireless

Grr. I’ve just missed the beginning of Hannibal.

Btw, welcome to wildduckling and her new LiveJournal.

On April 27th Microsoft was granted patent number 6,727,830 which is basically a patent on double clicking. Surely someone can muster some prior art for this one? I can’t help but think this is getting silly. See Eurovote

The BBC has announced that they will be opening up their archive and applying Creative Commons licenses to the works. On the face of it this is fantastic news and could help spread awareness of what Creative Commons are trying to do. However, in light of one of slef’s recent blog posts here I have some concerns over the CC licenses. Under the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) the CC licenses are still non-free as described here. This has put a dent in my enthusiasm about Creative Commons.

Further to my previous post about small hard disks, Toshiba have just announced the release of a 60Gb 1.8″ hard drive and “Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000 of the 1.8-inch drives per month to Apple for use in the iPod”.

The 40Gb disk had two platters each holding 20Gb, the new 60Gb disk has increased that to 30Gb per platter bringing the total to 60Gb. This is astonishing when you actually hold an iPod which I did for the first time a few days ago. The things are tiny! And that’s not even the iPod mini. I can see iRiver coming up with the “iHP 1-60” soon too.

In other news, the trailer for Michael Moore’s new documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 has been released but I’m having the usual problems with Windows Media Player and Quicktime and so far have only heard the sound!

Shareaza, a file sharing client I’d never heard of has just released its source code under the GPL. Having not been impressed by any file sharing clients at all recently I thought I’d give it a go (I like searching for CC licensed music to try). So far all it seems to have done is miraculously crashed my router several times! The mind boggles.

I got an application form through this morning for another part time ICT technician job. The pay is pretty lousy as usual but I like the look of this one.

lauperr has set up her new web site, EveryoneLoves.me.uk Click “[enter]” just above the soppy holding page image I made to have a look inside. Seeing as it’s hosted on tralk in my bedroom it has probably been a little temperamental recently due to my router problems but should be OK now.

I finished reading Douglas Adams’ Last Chance to See last night. I’ve never had so many goose pimples from the ending of a book before, it was very thought provoking. It was still a much lighter read than the Bill Bryson book I read last which lead onto this one perfectly.

Plan for today: more maths and the job application.

Has anyone seen a PDA with a hard disk? I can’t find one and I think I’d like one. (no I couldn’t afford one anyway).

I think there a couple of reasons I can’t find one. The first is that hard disks probably aren’t brilliantly suited to being bounced around in your pocket in the way people are used to handling PDAs. But hey, the iRiver iHP-140 and the iPod seem OK!

I don’t think size is really a problem any more, the hard disk music players mentioned above are tiny and I believe you can even get 1″ hard disks with a 4Gb capacity!

My guess is that the real problem lies with battery life. Even with power saving features, a battery small enough to power a PDA is likely to have problems keeping a magnetic disk ticking over. I’ve read about the problems that battery life is causing in computing. I’d like to think the solution lies in a complete alternative to batteries in the form of a portable renewable energy source, but now I’m probably asking for too much!

The reason I thought of a PDA with a hard disk was the recent release of media players trying to rival the iPod, including video playback. I wondered if the iPod/iRiver products are merely briding the gap until PDAs can handle better sound quality and much bigger storage. Having an fully fledged operating system (like GNU/Linux :P) running on your portable device has got to be more flexible than firmware upgrades. Why have a separate pocket computer and media player and mobile phone etc. Just a thought.

Talking of renewable energy sources I actually followed a link on a banner ad today which pointed at this page [npower]. I wonder if “Juice – Brought to you by npower and Greenpeace for a renewable future.” would actually be worthwhile signing up to, or if it’s a marketing gimic.

I spent the weekend at lauperr‘s house and we went to wonchop‘s 18th (lurvely pizza :P) and Kes’s little party.

The Bourne Local, Friday May 28, 2004

Our little prank generated some interest in the press. It seems to Local do have a sense of humour after all! I willingly take back anything I may have said to the contrary.

Oh and queenseye posted the link where I made this…

Someone (lauperr) thought it would be a great idea to go to the woods, in the dark, to try and spot some night-time animals. So we packed a ruck-sack with a flask of coffee and a blanket, wrapped up warm and found a tree to sit under near the ponds in Bourne Woods. The idea behind sitting near the ponds was that the animals were likely to come to the water to drink during the night as there seemed to be deer tracks leading down to the water. What we didn’t think of was the number of mosquitos that tend to hang around water and love biting unsuspecting human beings who are out of their usual urban habitat.

Anyway, we had brought along with us a brand new “good strong torch” to help us walk about half a mile back to the car once we had finished. On the way I usefully pointed out that the most important thing in going anywhere in the dark is probably to bring a backup torch, which we didn’t have. “Oh it’ll be fine” says the ever optomistic lauperr. From then on, the torch was jinxed.

At around 11pm we had starting to come round to the fact that the only animals we were going to see were the ducks sitting on the pond and the occasional bat swooping over our heads. We heard an owl at one point but we couldn’t hear much else over the constant sound of the crickets. I’m sure there was a small furry mammal trying to creep up on us all the time we were there, but we never saw it.

So, we started to pack our things and just be happy with having a peaceful, romantic time in the woods with a flask of coffee, albeit slightly bitten. I turned on the torch and we started to pack away our things when everything went dark. Completely dark. There was a few seconds silence, even the crickets seemed to shut up for a minute. After a brief conversation in which lauperr established that I wasn’t in fact joking around we started to try to figure out why the torch had cut out. After about 15 minutes of taking the torch apart, putting the battery in all different ways and shaking it around a lot we finally settled on the fact that the bulb had blown. Great.

Luckily my mobile phone, the Nokia 5210 is pretty useless as a phone but not bad as a torch! As a phone it constantly cuts out and has appalling reception everywhere, but if you take the “express-on shells” off the top and bottom to reveal its silver underbelly an array of very bright LEDs is revealed. This small amount of light helped us pack everything away and gradually make our way back to the car. I had to pretend I wasn’t afraid of the dark while we stumbled across uneven ground and lauperr jumped out of her skin when something rustled in the bushes. Finally we made it back to the car, had a quick cup of sweet coffee and made our way back home.

The all important coffee


Darkness setting in


How light it SHOULD be when you
go to the woods (Taken Monday)

That’s odd, LJ just seemed to break for a moment.

I spent most of today cleaning my room. I’m not feeling too guilty about not having done any revision today because having a tidy room tends to motivate me to work, I have no idea why. So hopefully tomorrow will be productive.

I’ve just wasted quite a lot of time making pretty little 150x50px adverts for different web sites to go on the right hand side on hippygeek. I say wasted because as soon as I put them on the page I realised what a stupid idea it was and I’ve replaced them with AdWords style text ads instead! The wasted time means I didn’t quite finish my tidying and my bed is covered in junk which means I currently have nowhere to sleep.

I’ll end this post quickly because I’m still feeling guilty about my monster post yesterday!

Today was my first exam, Mechanics 1. The exam went very well, mainly due to about 12 hours of revision yesterday. I’m a bit annoyed that I ran out of time on the last question and didn’t get to answer the second part which I could have done, it was worth about 9 marks! There’s still a chance I got an A in this paper which I really need if I’ve any chance of getting a B overall.

After my exam, lauperr had prepared a picnic for me. She had cooked pasta and baked fairy cakes which contributed to the feast we sat and ate in the woods! YUMMY!

We then went on a two and a half mile walk in the woods to burn it off which was really really lovely. We saw voles, a herd of deer and a herron. A robin flew off with a piece of bread lauperr threw down which was half the size of its body! We also saw a Great Tit which I apparently found more amusing than I should have done… lauperr found a broken birds egg and I made a little parcel for her to keep it in from a doc leaf. Before we left she spotted a snake in the pond in my garden as well. With all of that and yet another visit from the Fox in the garden we’ve seen a lot of wildlife today! I love living around here.

I made an important logo for mum in PSP before setting up two web domains on dev and tralk – www.mtsoundandlight.co.uk and www.bransinteriors.co.uk respectively. It’s a long time since I’ve logged into a Linux shell and that little bit of config hacking was a refreshing change from revision.

Tomorrow I start revising Pure Maths. Fnnrrrgh.