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Today, so long as I go to bed before 1AM, was mostly spent playing Guild Wars. I've managed to fight my way across an entire mountain range (the Northern Shiverpeaks, for those with a map to hand), with refugees in tow, and settle said refugees in their new home. Not bad for a guy in his PJs.
Now I'm sat on my laptop... no, let's start that sentence again. Now I'm sat here, typing on my laptop, waiting for my linux box to finish scanning its big disk for errors. 2TB takes a fair old time to scan, so I'm just leaving it going (possibly overnight at this rate). I hope a damaged /home directory is the cause of the recent instability, but I'll probably stick a memtest disc in it when I next reboot, to be on the safe side. Hate unstable hardware. It's currently running Slackware 13, which is a nice current OS, but... has niggles. It's running KDE4.2, which means Amarok 2, which is a music player only its mother could love. The playlist system is horrible, it doesn't support characters that aren't in ASCII, so all the symphonic metal and indian/arabic music with interesting characters in the titles (and half the metal, to boot) currently hangs the damn player... There's that, and a few little stability-related niggles, and the fact that my graphics card isn't properly supported yet. It remains one of the nicest versions of Desktop Slackware to date, but I have to admit, the "install and use" nature of Ubuntu and OpenSUSE is looking pretty attractive right now. We'll see. If I'm lucky, the problems will be sorted out soon, because I LIKE Slack. At the same time, I like a system that Just Works once it's been set up.
The Winter In The Willows DT system design is starting to come together (well, the "Characters" package is, which is the bit I'm working on right now). I've got the data structures planned, and the object diagrams, now I just have to start implementing...
Wild ride ahead... ;)
Cet n'etait pas une post.
For now, at least. It's been a busy few weeks, all things considered. The fencing club startup has been pretty manic, but... the main problem has been work. My lab has been extremely busy, in the last couple of weeks at least, finishing up the Big Project that has been our primary source of funding over the last three or so years, but we're done now. We're all entering a transitional phase between big projects (though we've already been NDA'd on the next one, so someone obviously thinks it's important). Hopefully it'll give me some time to write up my PhD, at last...
The presentation I had to give went well, at least. I'm normally spectacularly rubbish at presentations: I freeze up, gabble and ... well, it's not pretty. This time, however, I decided not to even try to give any kind of professional presentation, just to study the slides, do the background reading and then give the talk like it were a lecture or a seminar presentation, with my usual asides and illuminatory digressions. It worked pretty well, all considering: despite their being guys in suits and ties, I found them responding a lot like students, which meant I could handle them like students and .... well, it all worked out. I shall have to remember that. Even my supervisor seems to think it went well.
I was going to try for a cut-down version of NaNoWriMo, just 10'000 words this year, but I don't think that's terribly smart, really. When I'm trying to write 120'000, another 10 grand is ... well... likely to be troublesome. Instead, I appear to be trying to help a friend write a rules set for a LARP he's running in the near future. Oh well. Roll on, the month.