Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

February 28
Zeno's kitchen is ... almost there. To be fair, the only thing left is a drawer insert that we asked for after the drawer had been put in place, so it's our fault that's delayed. The kitchen is a joy to work in, what with probably twice to three times the storage space of the old one, and a similar increase in counter space, and all this within roughly the same footprint of the original.


February 21
Startup.com was a fun little documentary that I'd seen reference to some years ago and had forgotten about until the director appeared on The Daily Show talking about her latest work; lo and behold, Screenclick actually had the movie in their catalogue. The general gist of it is following an Internet startup from idea to crash, but without ever making a whole lot of mention of what the actual "product" is (it's in there, but it's not really important). So you get a great view of the personal dynamics between the founders, the VCs, etc. I think anyone who's thinking it might be a good idea to start a company with their friends should watch this first.

February 17
Spent the weekend in Amsterdam, which included looking at 120-year-old paintings (Mr. Van Gogh's).

Took the Windows option on the backups problems: rebooted the laptop before I left for the above. Came home to discover it's now reporting it managed a backup on Feb 14th, which is progress, since it was previously reporting Jan 9th.


February 14
Some historical Waterford sources: Smith (1746), Ryland (1824), Hansard (1870). The last appears to have basically lifted large quantites of Ryland's work and periodically inserted an updated fact (this wild claim based on speed-reading, to be fair). I guess Hansard's book does say, "compiled by".

February 12
The cleaners, from pristine.ie, did an incredible job. Things were cleaned that I'd have said, "ah here, don't bother with that". Strongly recommended. Great value, too.

Trying to fit everything back into the kitchen is, of course, one of those "how do we get all these worms back into this can?" scenarios, although to be fair we do technically have a bigger can at this point (more storage space). Still, there's a lot of stuff to fit in and we've not quite figured out where it all goes yet.

Backups continue to be weird. The old laptop appears to be happily churning out backups (that's the one I moved); the new laptop appears to be churning out backups, but Time Machine claims it's not actually done so since January 9th. Maybe I'll just reboot EVERYTHING.

February 11
Nearly nearly nearly done. It's like Zeno's Kitchen. Tomorrow we get cleaners in, and then we can actually start making proper use of the newness. Still a splashback and a few other minor items to be installed, but nothing that will prevent use of the new things.


February 4
Kitchen nearly done. It's been nearly done for a few days now, but there's light at the end of the tunnel. It's surrounded by dust and the tunnel has snags, but I'm looking forward to actually being able to use the cooker again.

Got access to a somewhat restricted archive and immediately dug up some historical facts somewhat tangential to the family tree reasearch. Certainly appears to unravel something that had been puzzling me, but it's not, as I say, directly related to family stuff.

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Yikes. That was a fast month.