A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
May 30
Philomena was pretty much everything
I expected from the movie - not in the specifics, but in the broad
strokes. There's a light touch on a serious topic throughout, and
while a few liberties were taken with the story for dramatic
intent, the core of it remains factual. The book on which the
movie is based seems, from the reviews, to be something to steer
clear of, mind you. Anyway. Dame Dench as an Irish mammy? Sure why
wouldn't you watch this?
May 29
Swapped the one 500GB drive in the Drobo for a 2TB unit, so now
it's fully loaded with 8GB of drive space. That's sort of a scary
amount. I should consider offline backup of at least the
irrecoverable parts.
May 27
Error messages I should never see: "the phone number should
have no spaces in it". Well, STRIP THEM OUT, THEN. Don't
complain to me about it.
May 24
Realised that due to mumble mumble handwave I've been feeding
most emails to @waider.ie through SpamAssassintwice. Which might account for the couple of times it
got knocked over by the kernel looking for some reclaimable
memory. I've (hopefully) fixed this so we'll see if things
improve.
May 22
Voted, then dined out at Il Sereno, then watched the original
Mad Max which, uh, wow, that movie had
no story, really. I think I'd be happy just watching the same
duration of shots of the Interceptor in pursuit of
things.
DSPsrv drives have been delivered. Waiting for tech contact to get
back to me to see about resurrecting the server.
May 18
Today's fun: getting a temporary crown fitted.
May 16
Back from a week in Milan - work, rather than play, although a
bit of the latter was indulged in.
DSPsrv.com: new disks have arrived at my office (which as noted above
I've not been in this week) and hopefully the server should be
back online in the next week. But no guarantees.
The November Man comes across
a bit as hanging on the coattails of RED, and a bit of
"Pierce Brosnan misses being Bond", and a few other bits
and pieces. It's fairly by-the-numbers; you won't be surprised at
any of the supposed twists, but it's a decent enough bubblegum
movie. Kinda like the visual equivalent of an airport
novel.
May 10
Once again, the awesome Irish Water, shooting both feet so you
don't have to:
Can't recall if I'd registered for online access, so visit
website and do the "I forgot my username" dance.
Discover I've actually saved a password for the
site. Yay!
Password doesn't actually work (really, guys, did you delete
all details when you scrubbed the PPSN stuff?)
Click on "forgot my password"
Get directed to a page to enter a new password. Nothing I
enter makes the page go away; on the other hand, I'm not
actually getting any errors either. Eventually figure that maybe
I've actually managed to change my password, so try logging in
again.
No dice. Back to "I forgot my password"
Page times out with a 500 error, or for the non-tech among
you, "something broke on our end and we're not sure
what"
Try again. Works this time.
Get email, follow link, enter new password, same crap again
- page doesn't display an error but doesn't go away - figure
I'll see if it's updated my password? No.
Like I said before, this is the sort of stupidity that just feeds
the "ain't gonna pay" trolls, and really, it's not like
this sort of thing is exactly rocket science and without
precedent.
OH GAWD. I just looked at the insert in the bill they
sent. "We are bringing [the above IBAN] to your attention
because there is an extra digit in the IBAN number provided on page
18 of the enclosed information booklet." IS ANYONE IN CHARGE
OVER THERE?
(p.s. the 'N' in 'IBAN' means 'number'. Just like in 'PIN', but I
guess that ship has sailed.)
May 8
DSPsrv.com latest: technical PoC established, hard drives en
route, but for various reasons nothing more will be happening for
at least a week. Look for further updates around the 18th. As
before, if you seriously need something from the backups, let me
know.
Aside from the historical distortions, The Imitation Game is a pretty good
movie. Best to think of it as a story, some bits of which might be
true, and some of whose characters are similiar to some people who
actually lived; although you may still find yourself saying,
"eh, the ‘eccentric == Asperger's’ bit is kinda
overdone, is it not?"
May 7
Cute. Copying a file to an Apple fileshare, the file's initial
date is shown as January 24, 1984. As in, the date of Mac's first
appearance.
May 2
! perl (5.18.2) is installed, but we need version >= 5.8
Sigh.
DSPsrv.com latest: hard drives in transit. Still pending response
from tech contact.
Margin Call is a surprisingly
entertaining movie about the start of the financial crash in
2007. Instead of being technical or a documentary, it's a
character driven piece illustrating the various ways in which the
traders are disconnected from the real world, and their complete
ruthlessness when faced with the collapse of their
environment. The company in the story is never named, but its
modus operandi in the face of imminent collapse is strongly
reminiscent of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman
Sachs. The all-star cast includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi
Moore, Paul Bethany, and a bunch of other faces you may
recognise. This is a really, really good
movie.