2001: A GEEK ODYSSEY

Wed, Sep 26

<16:21> Scheisse! Just noticed the reason why I had got problems with mail.. a mail loop between my accounts at CERN and CambUniv. :-/ Double checking _rules_.

<23:18> Nightly photos

Mon, Sep 24

<21:18> Linux 2.4.10. Also reinstalled Lose98 for some photography stuff. As of the 2.4.10, I'm now at home on a 56k dialup, but fortunately there's patching.

Fri, Sep 21

<15:45> Is this a family reunion or what? Maybe the biologist among you might help. I had the leisure of observing local fauna after finally finishing my work contract. Off to Finland tomorrow. Yippee.

<16:09> Updated the whats'up script to use a sensible directory structure. Some links to other pages of mine may me broken, just let me know if you find one.

Tue, Sep 18

<12:10> Aargh. The presentation is in fact today. Fortunately I did most of the slides last night. Latex is great for this, just switched to paper mode as there's no video projector available.

<17:49> The presentation is over, now I'm finishing another task with the alignment program (which works easily by only changing a few parameters). Freedom beckons.

<19:28> AArrggh. The new data showed some veerry weirrrd results. Like errors of one radian in the angle. But now it turns out that the data itself was BAAd Almost EEVIL should \sqrt{-1} say. So that's not my problem now, my code is OK AFAIK. I'm off for dinner and stuff.

<19:31> BTW, I've had some weird incidents with dhcp-client. When returning from suspend mode, I often need to restart the client a few times, else it fails after a minute or so. Today I got messages from the IT staff that my computer (aka willow.cern.ch :-) kept sending DHCP requests every second or so. Which is not good. Now I'm back to good old pump. So beware the dhcp-client.

Mon, Sep 17

<22:50> Wrestled the whole afternoon with LaTeX and friends, trying to find a decent way to make a slide presentation (due on Friday). Finally got the hang of the pdfscreen package. Evil as PDF is, Acroread makes a great slideshow tool. I may end up making transparencies anyway, but it's possible from this source as well. It's really kewl to have a slick look of 'office' programs with the power interface (especially with math formulae) of LaTeX. :-]

Sun, Sep 16

<00:14> Man, I was pissed off when I thought of getting some nice night pix and went up the tower of the main building. They had closed the doors to the ledge! Probably done for the night every day.. so I took a few behind the glass. One of them was full of reflections and the outcome almost artistic :-].

Thu, Sep 13

<00:15> Yet more pix.. the link is more general now. May want to check that more often, if you don't want to wait for the gallery. Guess that's one reason I should speed up report writing and other stuff at work. Maybe some day I'll get back to work with bluesci as well..

BTW, I've got absolutely no comments on the US terrorist attack.

<01:12> rsync seems to work. It's amazing that I wrote a shell script to do smart mirroring while there are already tools for that :-)

<16:51> Found this gr8 site for K6-optimized RPMs. If only the author released all the specs (isn't that the idea of SF/OS?) so I could make some of my own as well.. Anyway Mozilla/Galeon seems to be notably faster. Which is good for productivity ;-D

<16:56> C-A-F-F-E-E, trink nicht so viel Kaffee.. (a song from my German textbook at elementary school :-). A weird substance indeed. OK, for almost all summer I've been consuming the black devil, roughly one cup a day. My lame excuse is that they make it so well at the restaurant, and it helped with the general homesickness.

Another weird subject, because I've never felt homesick, but the fact that I don't have a room of my own makes me feel somehow detached. So the 'home' refers not usually to my parent's place but my own place and the company of certain friends.

Anyway. Started saving money before buying the G1 and I'm living on a shoestring budget until the end of my Swiss assignment. Thought it's too expensive to spend the 1.50 CHF for coffee every day, and bought a small jar of instant, powdered stuff. Honestly, it's not as bad as it seems. Even though I sometimes feel being a real connoisseur with these things (just don't try offering me any powdered whisk[e]y). It's just different. One day I accidentally made it very dilute. Perhaps halved the usual concentration. And it's still not bad. I've in fact kept it that way for some days now. Reminds me of an 'organic' decaf coffee substitute. Which is partially the same stuff that the Finns had to get used to during and after WW ][ when there was a shortage of foreign goods. Well, I remember seeing that stuff at an organic food store in Varkaus. Gonna get some.. the gr8 things is noticing that I'm not addicted to caffeine but the taste of the substitute.. Maybe not. Dunno. Experiment with that other stuff should prove it. So there.

<21:47> While at CERN I have read a few 'essential' books I should have read way before. First Neuromancer which was interestingly different, though overly packed with chrome, then Virtual Light which was very good, and now just finished one more Gibson, Idoru, which was quite amazing. Somewhat identified with Laney of Idoru, a true grepmaster. Maybe this means I ought to go to that college of emergent sciences after Cambridge. And while there's one year left @cam, there's always information science and other k3w1 courses coming up. :-)

Mon, Sep 10

<13:55> More pix taken... Still no gallery though. I'm thinking of one but there's still quite a bit of work left with my CERN project. Also need to fix up something like rdist/rsync for the site update.. the shell script is struggling with deep directories that came up with the photos and I'd hate to reinvent a square wheel for the task.

Sat, Sep 8

<22:35> Damn this joy. Spent the day playing with the Canon G1 I got via mail yesterday. Pics of planes taking off at the airport, and creepy tunnels and stuff on the CERN site are there on the 128MB flash card, but the USB link refuses to work while the battery is being charged.. and of course the reason I'm here at the office is because the battery's dead. This is probably a bug in the Linux driver. Well, gotta get a CFlash-PCCard adaptor anyway.

Tue, Sep 4

<00:33> Got my tickets to Finland and beyond. Ordered the G1 :-], they said it'll be here on Friday (like it will - snailmail has a tendency to trek around CERN for ages before reaching their destination). My Russian roommate left on Sunday, but I could only enjoy privacy for half a day before a Chinese man got there for replacement. I hope his going to sleep at 8 pm is only a temporary symptom of jet lag, not a usual habit. :-/