On Friday, I defrosted the fridge in the lab.
It's a sad comment on the state of the fridge (regrettably, I didn't think to take my camera) that actually achieving what I did on Friday, which was to get almost all the ice out of the fridge, represents a significant achievement, and occupied a considerable chunk of my time. Anyway, the fridge is now again usable.
Probably the frustration of spending most of my day wrestling with a fridge is why I got involved in debugging a postscript issue on #clug - for whatever reason, evince doesn't properly render postscript without the %%Page: comment deliminators - once we figured that out, everything worked a lot better.
Showing posts with label clug. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clug. Show all posts
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
May Geekdinner
So I went to the Geek Dinner at the Wild Pig last night. Not bad, all things considered. The complimentary wine from GETWINE.co.za was quite pleasant, the food was good, and at around R115 with tip, reasonably priced.
The venue did suffer from poor acoustics, making it hard to talk to people ore than a chair or two away, which limited the ability to get to know people a bit.
The talks were fairly varied:
My photos are up at at my usual photos page.
The venue did suffer from poor acoustics, making it hard to talk to people ore than a chair or two away, which limited the ability to get to know people a bit.
The talks were fairly varied:
- The "Python vs PHP" talk didn't really say anything new (although it was entertaining)
- The "Project Management in 5 minutes" suffered from being overly short, and so not able to address the major issue with software project management, namely that by the time the problem is sufficiently defined that most classical project management concepts can be applied, the problem has been largely solved.
- The "Ruby on Rails" talk didn't convert me, but since I don't work with web frameworks, that is not such a surprise.
- The OLPC talk, while not saying anything new, did have novelty value since it was silent.
- I don't follow AI closely enough any more to really be that interested in the mind games talk, although I should read up on AI Go systems sometime
- The unscheduled talk about ripple was interesting, and the whole distributed credit idea is something I'm going to have to read up on carefully. On the face of it, there are several interesting abuses possible from having both distributed authentication and distributed trust, so I'm curious as to how these have been addressed.
My photos are up at at my usual photos page.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
News, News, get your news here (or what happened since I last posted)
Not a lot, or I might have posted it.
Saturday was Free comic day - I went to Outer Limits, and collected the Wolfman comic on offer, as looking quite decent. I also read the Spiderman one while in the store. In addition to the free stuff, I purchased another Volume of Fables, and the first Hellboy Trade, as well as the 1st book of Peter Morwood's Russia series.
Thereafter, I joined up with Simon,. Adrianna and Phillip to play some vampire. Things where quite fun. My modified Osebo deck lost (not drawing enough strike cards, so I wasn't really able to pressurise anyone), but showed some defensive promise with the modified crypt. The Arhimane deck I threw together won, although it really shouldn't have. It benefited heavily from the extreme combat nature of the table, and some luck. I have to play it again to see how the concept actually works. The last game saw me playing my Malkavian deck, which as usual, did fairly well. I was ousted by Simon's Baali deck, partly due to my not managing the end game carefully enough. I was probably one turn away from ousting Adrianna at the time, which would have probably allowed me to sweep the table.
On the ride home from that, I encountered a car going the wrong way on the N2, which is a first (and hopefully last) for me. I have no idea how the driver managed to be going the wrong way, and, in truth, don't particualrly want to know, but it was a surprising experience.
Otherwise, Tuesday saw me pop across to see the clug talk, which was quite interesting. I now have a much better idea of what the OLPC project's laptop can do. Also got a chance to catch up with Kevin, as he was busy over the weekend and didn't join the games evening. Nothing exciting happened on the trip home this time, thankfully.
Saturday was Free comic day - I went to Outer Limits, and collected the Wolfman comic on offer, as looking quite decent. I also read the Spiderman one while in the store. In addition to the free stuff, I purchased another Volume of Fables, and the first Hellboy Trade, as well as the 1st book of Peter Morwood's Russia series.
Thereafter, I joined up with Simon,. Adrianna and Phillip to play some vampire. Things where quite fun. My modified Osebo deck lost (not drawing enough strike cards, so I wasn't really able to pressurise anyone), but showed some defensive promise with the modified crypt. The Arhimane deck I threw together won, although it really shouldn't have. It benefited heavily from the extreme combat nature of the table, and some luck. I have to play it again to see how the concept actually works. The last game saw me playing my Malkavian deck, which as usual, did fairly well. I was ousted by Simon's Baali deck, partly due to my not managing the end game carefully enough. I was probably one turn away from ousting Adrianna at the time, which would have probably allowed me to sweep the table.
On the ride home from that, I encountered a car going the wrong way on the N2, which is a first (and hopefully last) for me. I have no idea how the driver managed to be going the wrong way, and, in truth, don't particualrly want to know, but it was a surprising experience.
Otherwise, Tuesday saw me pop across to see the clug talk, which was quite interesting. I now have a much better idea of what the OLPC project's laptop can do. Also got a chance to catch up with Kevin, as he was busy over the weekend and didn't join the games evening. Nothing exciting happened on the trip home this time, thankfully.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
The Cape Town Ubuntu-ZA Meetup
So Saturday was the Ubuntu ZA Meetup in Cape Town. Despite not being that awake (Simon and the shared LoB boosters being at least partly to blame), I did make it across (wearing a Debian T-shirt, which was not that delibrate a statement, but I'll pretend otherwise). It was good to finally meet a number of people I've interacted with online for some time, and generally quite an enjoyable way to waste an afternoon.
The event then kind of continued on into a dinner, where I spent too much (on a very good ostrich steak though), and definitely had far too much wine. The company was good though, and the one advantage of using the bike as transport is one sobers up quite fast in the cool air this time of year, so the ride home was not too bad.
Photos up at on my homepage here
The event then kind of continued on into a dinner, where I spent too much (on a very good ostrich steak though), and definitely had far too much wine. The company was good though, and the one advantage of using the bike as transport is one sobers up quite fast in the cool air this time of year, so the ride home was not too bad.
Photos up at on my homepage here
That Armchair Theatre thing
So, what did I do on Friday?
Apart from the usual things (vision group meeting, etc), and getting involved in a personally amusing, if not exactly edifying brief flame war on clug-tech, I went across to attend the bring-n-braai at the armchair theatre.
I met up with Simon Cross and the crowd he was with at Divas, where I'd cunningly arranged to have dinner pre-ordered. This cunning plan, however, took a complicated turn as 8, when we were meant to be getting inside the theatre, approached with no sign of dinner, which resulted in some confusion as we turned our sit-down order into something take-away.
Form there, we hopped across the street to the theatre, and happily walked in. The major speakers I was interested in, Lawrence Lessig and Jimmy Wales, both gave short, but reasonably entertaining talks.
The rest of the evening mainly involved socialising with the other people attending the event, mainly people I knew via the local free software community. There was some interesting music played and so on and so forth, but a spent a large portion standing in the courtyard talking to people, which partly is a reflection on the general crowded-and-smokiness of the actual venue.
Still, an enjoyable evening.
photos, such as they are here
Apart from the usual things (vision group meeting, etc), and getting involved in a personally amusing, if not exactly edifying brief flame war on clug-tech, I went across to attend the bring-n-braai at the armchair theatre.
I met up with Simon Cross and the crowd he was with at Divas, where I'd cunningly arranged to have dinner pre-ordered. This cunning plan, however, took a complicated turn as 8, when we were meant to be getting inside the theatre, approached with no sign of dinner, which resulted in some confusion as we turned our sit-down order into something take-away.
Form there, we hopped across the street to the theatre, and happily walked in. The major speakers I was interested in, Lawrence Lessig and Jimmy Wales, both gave short, but reasonably entertaining talks.
The rest of the evening mainly involved socialising with the other people attending the event, mainly people I knew via the local free software community. There was some interesting music played and so on and so forth, but a spent a large portion standing in the courtyard talking to people, which partly is a reflection on the general crowded-and-smokiness of the actual venue.
Still, an enjoyable evening.
photos, such as they are here
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