Ben Francis

Kaz has left for University! So far all I’ve heard about her first day is “im 67% drunk, i sobered up lots on the way to uni, i was rolling on the floor laughing at one point which i got to ld off for becuase the waitress alomst tripped up”. Hmm. I’m missing Kaz.

Thursday night was Adam’s birthday do at Smiths and an Italian restaurant which finished earlier than I expected and was a bit of hard work for various reasons. I also got to experience ice being stuffed down my trousers, thanks laura. I think Adam was suitably offended by the electric shock lighter I bought him, well Adam – smoking is bad for your health. Overall though it was quite enjoyable.

Last night was Wez’s 18th birthday booze up which stretched across three pubs and a “night club”. I’m still trying to figure out how he managed to not throw up after the amount he drunk and the two helpings of birthday bumps in the street (right under a CCTV camera I might add, hmm only a geek would notice something like that). Wez’s present was a pair of very snazzy DJing glasses with torches on, as seen on iwantoneofthose.com 🙂 Kaz’s birthday present was an “optic” – you know one of things you use to get a measure of whisky or vodka, etc. Lot’s of birthdays in a short space of time. I don’t think she knew quite what to do with it, and her mum is trying to palm off the kumquat plant and make me look after it while Kaz is at uni! I do get awkward presents don’t I?

Tomorrow there is a meeting in South Witham about the cyber cafe they want to start up and then I must get on with my UCAS application, whoopee! :S

I’ve just noticed that in one of the applications I edited this page in all the HTML tags got turned into upper case, how annoying.

 

What’s happened since the last post? I spent three days in manchester recording a brass band with b+h. I felt quite guilty on the train there because I fell asleep in someone’s reserved seat. I knew that the seat was reserved from Nottingham onwards but I got on at Grantham. Unfortunately by the time we got to Nottingham I’d fallen asleep and when I woke up I noticed that I was still sitting on a seat with a reserved ticket on it :S

The actual client turned out to be Warner Brothers so I knew quite a few of the tunes we were recording which made a nice change 🙂 Think Star Wars and Bob the Builder. The recording was in the Peel Hall at Salford University. I had a full english breakfast all three days to keep me going, very long days. Eating venues varied from a greasy road side cafe full of manchester workmen in fluresant jackets to a posh french restaurant on the quayside in Salford. I ordered my dessert in French… kind of 😉 I tried Mrs Raymond, I tried. The waiter just smiled as if to say “Yes we get your sort in here all the time”.

Another of our meals was a pizza, but we had a whole one each and couldn’t eat them all. My roommate, who was great, had a great idea and hung our half eaten pizzas out of the window at the travel lodge overnight (4 stories up over a street pavement) so that they would be fit to eat in the morning. Right…

It turned out that my roommate was a bit of a computer geek. We got talking about computers somehow (I didn’t start it, honest) and when I mentioned I’d just set up a web server in my bedroom I was quite taken aback when he said “Is it running Apache, PHP?”. He did however have a girlfriend (they were engaged!) so there’s yet another geek who has a girl. Frelling…

Once the van was unloaded and all the mics were rigged and everything plugged in, my job was basically two fold – 1) making drinks and 2) pressing record. Both had their difficulties. Making drinks was difficult simply because the nearest source of water was down a labyrinth of dark corridoors deep inside salford university and the fact I had to get through the room where the recording was taking place holding a tray full of cups and a kettle to get there.

The pressing record part wasn’t difficult because of the 7 buttons that had to be pressed in the correct order and combination for every take, that’s very very easy after a while. It’s the fact that I had to remain perfectly concentrated for hours at a time, that and I had to sit cross legged so that Brian could see the digits on the display in our very cramped control room. Every take I had to write down the time on the tape, the take number and exactly which bar from which piece was being recorded – without the aid of an actual score or any knowledge of the title of the pieces! To make things worse, on the second day someone kindly mentioned that my notes would be sent off to Norway along with the recording so that the Norweigan editors could make sense of the forty eight tracks we had recorded a few bars at a time, not necessarily in the right order. Oh and then they were going to cut 15,000 copies of the CD. No pressure then. Do they KNOW I’ve never done this before?

Since then I’ve been back to school. I’ve started to hate that word. Not in the same way I’ve loathed it for all the years I’ve been at one, but in a whole new way. I’ve started to cringe every time I say it, perhaps I feel embarassed that I’m still at school now that most of my best friends are either at Uni or at work. Kaz’s departure from my physical world is growing ever closer and Norwich seems to get further away by the day. Aren’t I sad?

As part of my drastic change in lifestyle this year in order to do better in my exams (yeah, right) I’ve stopped spending quite as much time in #imen. All I seem to do is irritate people. I’ve started trying to go to bed earlier and getting up earlier, which works sometimes. I’ve even said that I’m quitting stage crew this year to make more time for my studies. I may even go to the games lesson tomorrow to shock Mr C who is responsible for that session this year! I haven’t stopped geeking however. The Linux Lab at school now has 6 working compaq workstations and I’m making plans for the school open day to show off my lab to everyone 😀 I might even invite some ALUG and PLUG members.

School is a bit of a pain at the moment because I’m carrying on doing all five of my subjects which means I have half as many “non-contact study periods” as everyone else and have a lot to do. Maths is hard work, but I’m determined not to let it get on top of me. I’m thinking of dropping Physics for complicated reasons, although I’m a bit upset because I find it really interesting.

Went to my cousin’s wedding yesterday. It was a fantastic day and she looked as gorgeous as I’d expected. It’s unbelievably weird for the girl I pretty much grew up with to be getting married – especially seeing as I hadn’t met the bridegroom until the wedding. I really hope she’ll be happy. I feel very close to her. Hope nobody was embarassed by my family turning up in the VW camper 🙂 !

I’m just going to finish watching this programme on channel 4 about the brilliant french sport of “free running” and I ought to do some work before I go to bed!

 

A quick update, erm where do I start? I just got back from a week long 830 mile journey in the hippymobile! We were brave and headed for Scotland as the first trip in “Sunny” the camper, and we got there, just 🙂

Stopped off for two nights in the Lake District near Lake Windemere. If you ever happen to be in that area, don’t go and see Lake Windemere there are too many people there and it’s terribly commercialised. Nip down the road to Coniston Water, it’s wonderfully peaceful and beautiful… is it dangerous to say that kind of thing on the internet? We went up to Scotland and stopped on a camp site in the grounds of Calzean Castle (is that the correct spelling) before heading east for Moffat where the camp site is run like a prison! 😛 Then on the way back we stopped at Grin Lo just outside Buxton on a campsite in a disused quarry which was really lovely, especially the walk up to Solomons Temple on a hill where you can see for miles and miles around – until were chased off by a bullock.

Whilst on holiday in bonnie wee Scotland both sis and I got our exam results. After a small panic sis got her place at UEA to study biological and medicinal chemistry (I REALLY hope I got that right!) by getting three Bs and a C. Yey! Go sis! Then came my AS results, A in General Studies, A in DT: Product Design, A in Computing (the only A in the year), a C in Physics and a U in Maths. The maths result I was expecting and I was one of 27 people in my year to fail, but the Physics result threw me a little, I was expecting at least a B.

But I won’t be beaten, I’m just going to put it down to being a bad year last year, partly due to health. It turned out when I got back and had chance to examine the results in detail that two of my physics modules were a B and one was a D, so the current plan is to retake that one Physics module and bump the grade up to a B and retake ALL of my Maths modules and start a fresh. The only problem is that I will be dropping DT which I got 295/300 in and carring on Physics (C) and Maths (U)! What’s worse is that the results make choosing my degree even harder.

Other news, I finally have my own web server with a static IP. “tralk” is sitting on the end of my ADSL line and can currently be viewed at http://tralk.hippygeek.co.uk. Tralk is a stable Debian install running Apache, mySQL and PHP (If you could just ignore the fact that J came round my house tonight and broke mySQL I would really appreciate it).

It looks very much like FFDesign is being closed down for at least a year as neither J or I will have time to run things this coming academic year. However, the servers will run as before and iMen is still developing at a speed never seen before! I can’t keep up with the site engine version numbers and there’s some debate as to whether it forked a while back. There are also sick sick things going on in the background that I don’t even pretend to fully understand but I’m pretty sure they’re legal 😉 – I get shaky when the word Rovac pops up.

Scotland is being treated to a double dose of torture because about the same time my family came back in the hippymobile sis and family headed up to Edinburgh. So no more bike rides or Sky Film channel for a week. Which reminds me, I still can’t get my lovely DVB-t TV card to run under Linux, grr…

It’s Sunday night and the end of a long week. I started the week feeling very ill indeed and didn’t make it into school until Wednesday. Wednesday night I jumped on a train to Norwich with Sis, spent the night in a “goth flat” above a curry house and had a look around UEA. I have to say it was a lot better than I was expecting. OK, so the main University is a concrete jungle, but if you look beyond the grey monstrosity in the middle you notice that it’s placed in gorgeous countryside with a lake, sorry, a broad. J completely failed to explain the difference between a lake and a broad to me, “I’m no geologist” he claims – at last something he doesn’t claim to know more about than everyone else 😛 Anyway – the concrete monstosity is actually quite nice inside and the computer labs were probably the best I’ve seen so far. Place felt quite homely too, could just be because I’d spent the previous night in the city. At least I didn’t wander into a room I shouldn’t be in and ask the Dean for directions like I did at Lincoln! “I don’t know these things, I’m just the Dean” – oops. After already spending waay too much money on train fares and fast food I bought some guitar strings and went home.

I didn’t sleep too well on Wednesday night, I was programming in my sleep again and kept waking up with an urge to write things down. Everyone I know has tried to convince me that I should do next years computing coursework in MS Access because it fits the syllabus best, AARRGGHH! WHY?! I won’t! I refuse! I’m also even more undecided on whether I want to do Computer Science or Computer Systems Engineering and whether it even matters. Conflicting advice only contributes to me not really knowing what I want to do.

In Norwich I was explaining to J and Sis that one day I’d like to have a Landrover (the old style ones) and a VW hippymobile. J of course pulled down my dreams. The landrover was unsafe and the hippymobile too hard to get hold of. He said they were sooo difficult to get hold of you’d have to pay a fortune for them. Now, if there’s one thing I like doing its proving J wrong – because for some unknown reason it very rarely happens. So, two days later I bought one. A 1979 Volkswagon Camper with a Devon Conversion, for £1650 (after some haggling) which I think was a bargain. It needs a little work but it’s basically sound and has a fridge, two gas rings, a grill, a toilet, lots of lights and a fantastic Denon sound system I can plug my mp3 jukebox into along with a brand new awning only used twice. The adventure has begun! Now as soon as I pass my driving test I can actually drive the thing myself – it’s currently owned half and half between my parents and grandparents whom I bullied into buying it – mum didn’t take much pursuading though! Just means she can’t get a new car to replace the rotting old ellie epic metro for a while 🙁 So, the hippygeek finally has a hippymobile!

Sis went to her prom and thorougly didn’t enjoy the food. She described one of the sauces as tasting very much like “Yack Semen”. Now how exactly she knows what “Yack Semen” tastes like is still undergoing heavy debate, but remains the source of much concern for all involved. J corageously (Oh dear we are struggling with spelling today) got the mail server working and brought the dev server back from the dead earlier. Well done J.

I asked about my problem with my sound card in the weekly ALUG IRC meeting and they managed to get me listening to tunes within about 10 minutes. All I needed to do was disable my onboard sound properly in the BIOS and about two commands in a shell and I had surround sound!

I saw this in a forum on Gnutella.com and thought it was fantastic:

Subject: the matrix has the answer
Date: September 8, 2002 @ 5:15 AM
I wrote this when i was downloading a song and had nothing better to do. i thought it was kinda funny. you won’t understand it if you hav’nt seen the matrix.

Scene 1
I dont know who struck first, us or them, but I know it was us that skorched the sky. throughout human history mankind has relied on the copyright laws to protect thier busineses. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

the RIAA gain a substantial amount of money each year for their efforts to wipe out the abuse of copyright. combined with a form of brain washing. the RIAA had found all the money they would ever need.

Scene 2

Admin:
firts of all you must remember, do not try and bend the copyright laws, instead, only try to realise the truth, there are no copyright laws. its just something the RIAA have in they’re heads.

gnute:
the RIAA, what are they?

Admin:
twats. they can move in and out of any software still hard-wired to “their” system. this means that anyone who spams, is potentially an RIAA agent. we have survived by swearing at them and hacking them, but they are the gate-keepers, they are guarding all the laws and they are holding all the keys, this means that one day, someone will have to fight them.

gnute:
someone?

Admin:
i wont lie to you gnutella, almost every music provider who has prevaled against the RIAA, everyone who has fought them has been taken off the web. but where they have failed, you will succeed.

gnute:
why?

Admin:
i’v seen the RIAA send a guy to Jail, men have written entire books on the subject and affected nothing but paper. but the fact remains that the RIAA is based in a world which is built on laws. because of that they will never, ever, beat you.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing with Linux more, in particular Knoppix. I managed to get it to dual boot with Windows XP at school which was great.

I’ve now dual booted my main PC at home with a Knoppix hard disk install and Windows XP. At the moment I’m getting very frustrated with not being able to get my sound card to work under Linux. I must have spent about 10 hours talking on IRC, searching google, fumbling around in a Konsole and just generally not getting anywhere, while a fresh installation of Windows XP that I haven’t even touched is producing all sorts of sounds with zero configuration… it’s not like I even have obscure hardware. It’s a sound blaster card for goodness sake! Only the most popular sound cards, in the world! I think it’s about time I went to a LUG meeting to find out what I’m doing wrong.

ADSL arrived, and after a long time configuring the router with no instruction manual and a “quick start guide” for the wrong firmware version I finally got connected. It’s fast 🙂

The RIAA announced that it will be sueing a few hundred potential customers for up to £90,000 each over the next few months for offering copyrighted music over Kazaa, instead of actually adopting P2P technology to make money, which I guess makes sense. Not. Isn’t it about time music artists starting ditching these idiots and sold their albums online for a fraction of the price but actually get the profit themselves?

The Bourne Festival was CRAZY. An amazing atmosphere though, finally got to dance a bit towards the end and went a bit wild. Our pictures in the papers were funny, they got Wez’s name wrong, again! I really do enjoy live events, really made me wonder for a while whether I really want a career sitting behind a desk for the rest of my life!

Working from 10:30 in the morning until gone midnight for several days really tired me out, but was well worth it!

There were talks about going to University at school this evening. Although at the end of the day I really like my school, there are a large number of things about it I don’t like.

Next wednesday night I get on a train to Norwich where I will probably end up sleeping on a pavement for the night knowing J, then for the UEA open day – the fifth and final University open day I have planned for now. It’s all mad. I guess now is the first time I’ve ever really felt free to make a serious decision by myself. Do I take a gap year and get a job? Do I go to Uni, or do I get a busking license and find a cheap flat somewhere? Do I want to travel? What do I really want from life. Well I don’t mind saying that I don’t have the foggiest what I want from life yet, and I don’t believe I should know yet either.

I found out tonight that a very very close relative of mine who I haven’t seen for a while is actually getting married, and being basically the same age as me it kind of scared me a bit. Not sure why, but it just made me think.

Too much going on to think about at the moment, and I’m already feeling behind in maths which is NOT good. I think I need a break.

ADSL router should arrive tomorrow, woohoo!

Today was a geek day.

Two new Dell servers arrived for school, each running at 4.8Ghz (dual processors) with 1Gb of RAM and space for 3Gb! Inside the beasts very much resemble the view underneath the bonnet of a sports car, with an array of fans and heat sinks and a setup that looks, and sounds, very much like an exhaust. They also come with removable hard disks (just click and pull) and removable power supply (the same) as standard and boy do they make a nice sound! I’m plotting to install Linux on them when Mr C isn’t looking.

Earlier in the day the Head of Music suddenly said that the Head had given the go ahead to get the cabling and a new PA in time for the next MADD evening. This is all very well but arranging it all in the next couple of weeks is verging on impossible, especially with the quotes I’m being given. Still, if they really want to give me thousands of pounds to spend on geek stuff, who am I to complain?

Talking of sound systems, Wez and I were left alone with a 17 Kilowatt sound system, a 32 channel mixing desk, about 30 barrels of beer and a CD Player today in the middle of a field for two and a half hours! Seriously, they left us with a radio which, it turned out, had nobody on the other end and disappeared. We were also left to set the lighting up for the show which was a bit of a surprise.

A policeman arrived to discuss the event with the organisers and someone piped up “Are you a real Policeman?” to which I replied “No, he’s probably in fancy dress”, which I regretted afterwards, especially when the policeman replied “Easy, tiger!”. Another interesting quote today was in maths, Mike: “My dad works in software” Mr Stonelake: “When you say software, what do you mean exactly”. Don’t worry, he’s retiring this year.

Maths wasn’t too bad today, I’m determined to keep on top of it. But I must sleep tonight as I was in a bit of trouble for having a lay in instead of going to school for a double free period this morning…

I’m currently struggling to decide on a project to work on for my Computing coursework next year. Everyone keeps trying to persuade me that I shouldn’t use PHP and mySQL but should use Access and VB instead. Every bone in my body is yelling “NOOOO!” but I don’t know. There are plenty of easy options, but I’m worried I’d get bored with them. Oh and my hard disk arrived, mmm

That’s it, exams over, a weekend, two days off and we’re back at school starting study for our A2s. We’ve not even been eased back in, full on work all day.

Actually I say two days off, but one of the days was spent in school playing with computers and 8 hours tidying up back stage. Can not BELIEVE what year 9 stage crew get up to when we’re not there. They took the initiate to paint the back wall white and cover up the Wizard of Oz painting… and at the same time covering the £3000 stage flooring with white paint and getting it all over the black curtains. Some interesting wiring dangling all over the place, I didn’t dare go near the amp with power turned on. Me and Wez tidied everywhere but the paint is there to stay, for now at least.

Got a quote tonight for the cabling for the school hall, I’m concerned that the head’s not going to be keen on me spending another two grand of the school’s constantly shrinking funds, but we’ll see. Which reminds me, Mr C has ordered two new dual processor (P4s) Dell Servers that are going to be oh so nice! Oh and the head of maths has asked me to do a web site, again.

Once me and Wez left our first day back at school we went down the local park to meet up with the sound engineer for Bourne’s beer festival this year where the marquees had just been put up (I walked, he went by car, I beat him there). We ended up spending four and a half hours unloading a lorry and setting up sound equipment.

It was a lot of fun, partly due to the free beer on tap that had just been connected! I also now have a stewards T-shirt which entitles me to lots of free food over the weekend! It’s going to be a LONG weekend doing the sound for the festival with continuous music for two and a half days, then Nottingham University Open Day the following Monday. I’m beginning to think Wez is following me around…

Being back at school is a bit surreal to be honest and Maths is already driving me mad! Wez things I’m crazy carrying on Maths next year, but I’m trying to convince myself that it’s a good idea. Sis has started her exams and is plotting methods of suicide using stationary, which is more than verging on worrying. Gunna miss her so much when she goes off to Uni.

My brother has a cute little optical mouse he got from dabs for about £7 and I’ve ordered an 80Gb hard disk for my mp3 collection to overflow onto and to set up dual boot between Linux and Windows. Also, as if we haven’t been spending enough money we don’t have in our house, getting a new bathroom and decorating the lounge for the first time in about 30 years, we’ve ordered ADSL. The chosen ISP after much debate is Plusnet, although Virgin Net came in close second due to no connection fee and a 1 month only contract. So very soon the hippygeek will be enjoying broadband and no 2 hourly disconnections! Yey!

Operation BGSTux is coming on, if a little slowly, and we’ll soon have a whole lab of Linux boxes at school running mainly Knoppix, mmm. My interest in “free” software and the GNU Public License has grown greatly over the past few weeks because of discussions with members of two local Linux Users’ Groups but my choice of University course is getting harder and harder. I’m also seriously considering taking a year out and getting some work experience, which is something else to think about. I’ve talked to the (acting) Head Teacher and Head of Maths about carrying on maths next year, and even if I get a U, which seems quite likely, they think I should definitely try and do it next year. I know I’m capable of getting a decent grade if I just get another chance next year but, it’s just… hmph.

I finished Life, the Universe and Everything for the second time last night and am being driven slightly mad by not understanding why Arthur Dent’s bag keeps changing all the way through the book! Also, I keep getting the feeling I’m missing something really deep in the story, but it’s probably the late Douglas Adams having a laugh at my expense.

Anyway, must go to bed, have to get back into the rhythm of this whole school thing and I need a good nights sleep.

Today, I flunked my pure maths AS. When I say flunk I mean I failed it, quite spectacularly, I estimate around the 7% mark. But hey, it’s an exam, and it’s an exam I can re-take next year, and I WILL NOT BE BEATEN!

Of course it didn’t help that the fire alarm went off half way through the exam and we all had to stand outside for a quarter of an hour in complete silence. Apparently we should get “special considerations” – oh good, so that means I get 8% instead then does it?