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Today ... has not gone to plan.
Oddly, I think it started to go wrong on the way home, rather than while I was still at work (although I got no words written today on account of having to fight a series of administrative fires). I was happily cycling home in the dark, lights and high-vis on, everything more or less OK, when my rear wheel started to vibrate interestingly. I've been here before. I pulled over. Rear tyre, completely flat. Arse.
So I pushed my ironically-named pushbike home, and locked it to the mooring loop, as usual, and took the rear wheel off and brought it in with me, to fix the puncture. Since I'd just cycled/walked home, I took five minutes to spod on the 'net, and my music collection disappeared. The player stopped in the middle of a song, and when I went to check it there were no songs. No songs, no directory, nothing.
Troubling. I could swear they were here only a minute ago.
So, it seems the highly reliable RAID I built a couple of years back to store my stuff ... isn't so highly reliable any more. It's a 3 disk array, which means it can lose any one disk without losing any data. It's dropped one particular disk a couple of times recently, both times pretty soon after street-wide power cuts, so I figured it was a little tired, and planned to make backups etc. Real Soon. Unfortunately, now it's dropped that disk, and its brother... Array Failure.
RAID arrays spread the contents of a file across multiple disks to increase redundancy, so I don't even have a few of my many files intact on the remaining disk: I just have bits of the vast majority of my files. Those bits don't add up to a whole, in most cases. None of my skills with Linux seemed to be working, and I couldn't get it to rebuild.
Then, dwm turned up on IRC, and guided me through a six-hour rebuild that hasn't quite finished yet, but looks like it's going to work. Once it's done, I need to pull important things off that drive, then see what happens, I guess. I'm not quite sure what's wrong with the machine, but signs point to one of the SATA controllers going bad, which would be very annoying.
So, bit of a wakeup call there. A lot of my data is pretty insignificant, but I'd miss it if it were gone. So I must implement a Proper Backup Strategy in the soon-after...
I eventually solved the bicycle problem too. Patched the tube, went round the tyre to find the cause, found a 10mm shard of road-grit that had gone right through the tyre wall and slashed the tube. Yet another reason to hate snowy weather...
Oh well. The world turns, things happen, or don't, according to their own inscrutable timetable, and we all get slowly older. This is the way of things.
So, it's been a few weeks since the last Maelstrom of the year, and I can feel the urge to be someone else for an afternoon starting to gnaw at the edges of my consciousness. A few of my friends are working on maybe putting together a linear system for use in Brighton, and there's Brighton Below in November, and of course I should try to get along to the semi-official Fools and Heroes game that runs monthly here. I've heard mixed reviews of the Fools and Heroes rules and setting, but don't knock it till you've tried it, right?
Maelstrom was good, though. A festival hosted by the faithful was always going to be quite religion-biased, and the laws were quite restrictive (less so for males than females, lol Islamic-template-religion), but on the whole, I think it went well. We went there with a small set of goals, and came away having completed most of a larger, completely different set, so ... success, sort of.
Enough froth. The fencing club will start meeting again soon, so since I'm the armourer I need to see what state the kit's in and repair any damage, restock worn parts and flat batteries, and get ready for the start of the year. The club meets at the same time as the Portslade gaming group, and since I'm an officer at the club, I kinda have to be there, which doesn't help my desire to play RPGs any. So it goes. It just means that this Tuesday is the last time I'll be able to see that group of friends until December. Hmm. Have to fix that, somehow.
The Freshers are on campus now, and the old place is starting back up. I have to admit, I am looking forward to another year's worth of young people to meet, and to train. I wonder who we'll see this year? I'm always surprised by the sheer variety of people we get, and how the best fencers are absolutely not the people you expect.
The title of this entry refers to something that makes me slightly sad, but also happy. As you may be aware, I cycle most places and take trains the rest, owing to not having a car (and also as part of the ongoing, and currently stalled, Operation Not Being A Fat Bastard). However, my bicycle needed a new rear hub a while back, which meant a wheel rebuild, which apparently I didn't do very well. Constant tuning and three snapped spokes later, I'm biting the bullet and paying BikeHut to rebuild the wheel for me. Since the price is fairly reasonable, and includes gear and brake retunes and cheap new cables for both of the above, I'm not overly complaining. Still, I'm an engineering student, and I feel like I should be able to do these things myself. I suppose I can claim that my time is more valuable than theirs, but ... eh, justifications. Whether I can actually afford it, until my new funding arrangement starts working properly, is a question I can't actually answer till I see my payslip for this month (there's about a 33% chance I won't be paid the right amount this month due to admin failures) I've enough in savings to get by, it's just a pain.
Onward, ever onward. I've just found what could be a fairly significant timing problem in the work we're doing right now, so I should probably stop blogging and start working again.
I go to a friend's house in Portslade on Tuesday nights, to play games. The games are good, and the company is good: it's relaxing, etc. It's a good idea for me at this point in time. However, if I run to the university railway station after tai chi, it takes me 33 minutes to get to Portslade station, most of which is spend on Brighton platform waiting for a connection. Then, I have to walk five, maybe ten minutes at the other end to the house.
This week, since my bicycle is working again, I cycled from uni instead. Door to door (so to speak), at no great speed, in a headwind, it took me 48 minutes. I think I can get that down a bit, and at that point it becomes worth doing. I can, it seems, cycle faster than a train (so long as the train stays still for a fair while before setting off).
Cycle to work, to Portslade, home again, with Tai Chi in the middle somewhere. It's tiring, and a little painful in places. This means it's probably good for me :)
I actually feel quite human today, for a change. This is probably due in no small part to the way I've spent the day.
It's getting to the time of year (actually, it's past the time of year, but that's due to a slight lack of arsedness) that I start cycling to uni again, which requires me to take the bike out and tune it up. After the rather interesting spontaneous-axle-disassembly last year, in which the axle migrated slowly sideways through the hub and then fell partway out, damaging the hub in the process, I've been dragging my feet on the repair. Eventually, I ordered a new hub (and later, some new spokes after discovering the existing ones were a bit marginal) and rebuilt the wheel. Today, the day after I finished, I took the old machine out for a bit of a warm-up, in the brilliant, hot sun, around the streets of Brighton. Results: good. There was a bit of a weird noise at one point which may have been a bearing wearing in, or something rubbing on the tyre, but since it's gone away for a while now and nothing seems to be out of place, I think it'll be OK.
Of course, cycling randomly around the town doesn't really accomplish anything. Fortunately, a friend is moving across town right now, so I was able to ride to their place (up one of the biggest hills in Brighton: argh, but a good test for the gear system) and then on to the new place once I'd helped load someone else's car with their things (downhill all the way, wooooooo...). The move took most of the day, what with trips back and forth between old and new houses, packing and unpacking things, dismantling things and then mantling them at the other end and so on. It was good fun though, lots of fairly mindless effort and the opportunity to learn a little more of some people who I often only interact with through personas, at roleplay events, which was nice. The pub lunch (at the Thomas Kemp, excellent pub) helped too.
So today was good, even if I accidentally left my water bottle at the new house and had to ride back to get it, passing Red Roaster on the way. Oh, the hardship. Yesterday I went shopping in town (for various things, not least to help a couple of friends pick out outfits for a third and fourth friends' wedding - only partially successful there, unfortunately). All in all, this has been a restful weekend, which probably helps my state of mind.
More things that help my state of mind have to include the Lewes Road guerrilla garden. About six years ago, a petrol station on Lewes Road closed for some reason or another, and was torn down. The site was levelled, and concrete crash-barriers full of gravel erected to prevent vehicles from driving on to the site. A few weeks back, the local residents had had enough. They successfully broke into the site (damaging a single padlock in the process, if that), spread the gravel from the barriers on to the floor to create usable hardstanding, filled the barriers with soil instead and planted flowers. Since then, they've painted the barriers with a simple colourful mural, laid turf in areas where the gravel didn't reach, and set up benches and other bits and pieces. An empty site transformed into a community garden (where today they had a low-key little party, which I joined briefly to break the ride home). This kind or re-purposing empty and abused spaces is a wonderful thing to see. The ground is completely unused - it's owned by a real-estate company, as far as we know, and there are no planning notices or anything, so we assume it's going to remain that way for a while. Until the company chooses to do something with it, the locals have taken it over, and turned a piece of dead space into a vibrant little garden. If they turn up tomorrow with a bulldozer and start building something, fine: it's not the use we object to, it's the disuse. Very calming, and a surprisingly good little community-centre: it seems to have got the local people talking to each other, which is a bit of a surprise in modern Britain.
Things that don't help my state of mind include the annual review process I am currently undergoing. It's the main reason I've been so quiet lately: I have to look back over the last year, sum up my achievements and justify my existence to an interviewer and to my supervisor. This year it's harder than I'd like, because we've done so much paper-writing and conference-organising (and so on and so on) that I've not really had the time for much research. "They also serve who only stand and wait", and all, but it's getting a little annoying. Oh well: I'm entering the write-up now, doing the final iteration of the test rigs and collecting results, then writing the report to our funding body, then writing my thesis. In less than 365 days from now, I will have completed my DPhil, assuming nothing goes very very wrong. Here's to the Grind.
I'm standing at the traffic light, forlornly waiting for it to turn red, so I can walk across the road and stand at the bus stop. I can see the electronic sign from here (just). 20 minutes till the next bus that goes all the way to Hove. The sheeting, hissing, freezing rain is bouncing an inch or so off the pavement as it hits, soaking rapidly into my clothes and laptop bag.
Flash back a bit. Why am I here?
National Novel Writing Month starts soon. There's a group in Brighton, being run by a couple of good friends of mine, and their inaugural meeting was tonight at 1930, in Hove. One of my old English teachers is a member of the group, as are a few other random people I know, and the group as a whole is very cool. It would have been nice to reconnect with them, and to remind myself I'm not totally crazed to be embarking on this quest to write so much, in and around my work. Me, I consider it a welcome break from all the academia: to be able to just write what comes into my head for a change, without worrying about whether it's right, or provable, or supported by results, is a rare pleasure. Still. Other people are at least as crazy as me in this, and most of them would have been at that meeting.
I stayed a little late at uni to get some work tied off, so I was already running late by the time I got to my bicycle. It being, in technical terminology, Bloody Freezing, it took some work to get all my kit tied on or otherwise mounted to the luggage rack, so I lost another five minutes or so before setting off.
The ride back was uneventful until the Coombe Road junction, almost home but barely halfway on the route to the meeting place, a cafe called the Sanctuary. As I approached the traffic lights, the entire frame tugged abruptly backwards under me, once. Since I'm not totally stupid, I pulled up almost straight away and took a look. The rear brake was locked on, solid, because an axle nut had come loose and the wheel was canted about ten degrees in its pivots. Try as I might by hand, I couldn't get the axle nut back on solidly, or the wheel back to its correct angle, so I'll have to look at that tomorrow. I half expect the axle may be damaged, given some of the other symptoms.
Anyway. Bicycle very nearly immobilised, me very nearly road-decoration. Exciting, but not an evening in itself, so I walked the bike home (ten minutes away, rear wheel clunking and hissing against the brake, but I didn't have much choice) and got changed to go to the Sanctuary by bus.
Since the Sanctuary has WiFi, I packed my laptop along with the index cards containing my plot sketches, so I could use the net while at the meeting if needed. I stepped out of the porch and started down the hill in a light mist of rain. Great. My hoodie and jeans are marginally waterproof, so I figured, what the hell? What's the worst that could happen?
The rain ramped up to full-fledged freezing-rain / sleet by the time I reached the bottom of the hill, and was in the condition I mention at the start of this entry by the time I got to the traffic lights. No cover, overflowing drains and gutters made for a very tricky journey. The lights and the buses were the last straw. I like those people, a lot. I don't like them enough to persevere to a meeting in a cafe, in sodden clothes, with a laptop that sounds like a holey water-bucket when shaken. So I turned around and went home. My boots are still damp, six hours later.
Sorry, NaNofolk. I'll be at the next meet, I promise. Unless it's on a Thursday, in which case I'll try... (fencing does have to happen at some point, you know).
Roll on November 1st, and the true start of the madness.