Category: Miscellany

Just a few, short weeks and I won’t have to be on campus, Tuesday evenings, until 8 p.m.! This is what the University’s like, when I’m dragging myself home. Truly: compressing all of my on-campus time into one day does mean that I get more of my own research done (no interruptions, I don’t have to dress well, or pack a lunch). It also means, though, that every Tuesday has been a frantic rush, from place to place, and an evening of exhaustion, followed by an unproductive day. No balance, in other words.

Just a few, short weeks and we’ll be back in California for the holidays. We’re both frantically trying to finish up our set tasks, before we leave: T. is putting the finishing touches on her latest novel, and I’m trying to get my surveys finished and tested, so that I can launch them while we have face-to-face access to lots of Californians (I am, after all, considering cultural factors in the survey analysis).

Just a few, short weeks and I’ll get to tease the relatives in person that I know what they’re getting for Christmas. Bwahahaha.

I finally managed to make my way back to my old desk, at the place I work part-time while doing this PhD thing. I’d been bumped out, you see, because I’m only there a few hours a week, and work from home whenever possible.

Apparently, the last guy who had my desk was a smoker (and has returned to the Accounting department). He took away most of his stuff (particular thanks goes to him removing his tea-cup, complete with … old tea in it). He didn’t take away the evidence of his smoking habit, though: Swan Vestas.

Smoking Kills, apparently. Or, no, it’s not that. FIRE kills. By creeping up onto your arm, if you’re a kid, and engulfing it, leaving you to stand there, wailing. After being struck gently, away from body.

In case you’d wondered (and even if you hadn’t), if you have a Google account, you now have some measure of control over what they keep about you: https://www.google.com/dashboard/

Just quick note: you do not have to have an account with WordPress in order to comment here – you can simply visit our registration page, fill in as much or as little as you’d like, and you’re done: you can comment with as little as just an email address and a password.

If you do have a WordPress account, you’ll be able to customize your gravatar, of course, which you can’t do here (gravatar = globally recognized avatar; it’s keyed to your email, managed centrally by you, and is used … globally).

Please contact us if you continue to have problems – we can always create an account for you, just let us know:

[quick_contact]

Well, BT finally realized that we’re not going to go away, nor are we going to stop complaining. They sent somebody out to test the line, and to tell them exactly what I’ve been telling them: the problem isn’t between us and the local station, it’s somewhere within the BT network! Our line tested out fine, no problems, and we can always reach the local station. As a matter of fact, we can just about always reach sites within the UK. The problem comes when we’re trying to reach sites which are farther out than the UK, or sometimes for sites within the UK which aren’t cached (see Edge Caching). But will they believe me, when I tell them this? Well, no: I’m just a consumer!

The engineer went through all of his tests, demonstrated that there’s nothing wrong on our end, we can get into the BT network just fine. We just can’t get out!

Continue reading “British Telecom” →

Some of you have noticed that our blog header changes daily. Neat, huh?

It’s been a lot of fun — and a big pain to do all of this. At the moment, the fiddling is done, the header looks right, and all of our old posts are here. Whew. Home Sweet Blog

Our move to WordPress from Blogger was inspired by the fact that WordPress is just a much more flexible software package, particularly if you go with a “non-hosted” version of WordPress. This means that there are all sorts of custom things that we can do with our blogging software – like having certain posts not go out to the entire world (more on that later). It also means that we can keep control of our content: it lives on our ISP, back in California, in Santa Rosa. We have a great relationship with them – they’ve been our ISP for 10 years or so – and we trust them. Do we trust Google? Well, no, not so much. And Google IS Blogger. So, our content is in the hands of a company we trust, and we can manage it better and more easily.

Continue reading “The Road to WordPress” →

Our neighbors – previously known as “the Scando kids,” now known as the Americans from San Diego – really got into the pumpkin carving, which was cute. They’re old enough to have memories of having done it “at home,” and were determined to do Halloween right, despite the fact that no one else on our whole crescent had pumpkins out. I realized that we needed something to put the pumpkins in perspective, hence the picture of the little old man washing windows. Yes – those windows, again (T’s still shocked to have witnessed this).

There’s been a sort of placeholder-pumpkin stuck to the windows for a few weeks, now: a drawing of a pumpkin (“baby art,” says our neighbor). But, as Halloween approached, we saw first one, then finally four pumpkins, placed out on the window ledge. Last night was their finale, with all four grinning pumpkins lit up with candles.

T. hoped they wouldn’t fall on anyone, and since it started pouring down torrents at about four this morning, we know for sure the candles are out. *Sigh* The fun’s over.

(Digital photography just doesn’t capture the look of the lit pumpkins, because the camera tries to adjust to the lighting. In this case, the lights are typical of what they use here in Scotland, which is a low-pressure sodium light, designed to combat the low fog. The only weird thing for us is that they’re …orange. They start out darker than the pumpkins, sort of a moody red, eventually warming up to become the jack-o-lantern orange. It’s just another Glasgow thing, hard to imagine if you’re not here.)

As for the rest of the West End at least, well, there was revelry up until 3:45 this morning when it started to do more than sprinkle. Though many Scottish friends tell us that Halloween is “an American holiday,” we saw quite a few costumes, and possibly in honor of the holiday, people had more clothes on. They were draped in gowns, or stuffed into super-hero costumes, or wearing glitter and sparklies … but were, all in all, covered up more thoroughly than we’ve ever seen them! Some even wore jackets!

Still no trick-or-treaters. That particular brand of “gimme” is definitely a singularly American tradition…!

Today is a day for T. to read, and for me to be working on my surveys. Figuring out how to ask the questions, so that I can get the right answers, is easier than it sounds. If our internet were a bit better behaved (we’re fighting with BT again), it might go more smoothly, but we’re seeing page timeouts about 50% of the time. They’ve escalated the problem (which is business speak means shuffled the complaint forms off to a supervisor’s desk?), to someone who said that there was no problem. This is par for the course, apparently. Perhaps we should finally just give up and switch ISP’s. Hmm.

Happy Rainy Deluge Sunday, everybody.

We have a pumpkin. At some point, we’ll cook it, and turn it into pie. Until then, just know that we’re here, we’re busy, and that it’s Autumn-rapidly-becoming-Winter. Bleh!

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

About a month ago, my external Buffalo hard-drive failed. Just completely toast. As a result of that, I’ve lost some of my raw images. How many? I just don’t know.

To solve the issue, I bought a NetGear ReadyNAS Duo plus 2 Seagate Barracuda drives, each at 1.5 terrabytes in size. The NetGear just sits on the network, acting as a file server (and torrent client). You connect to it just like anything else on the network, and it sits there, keeping things safe. It’s got built-in RAID support, too, so if you feed it 2 hard-drives, it will clone the information, so that if a drive goes bad you don’t lose anything.

This morning, one of the new hard-drives crashed.

It’s being returned to Amazon, and we can only hope that the replacement is NOT sent via Royal Mail: it took us 4 days to get the drives in the first place, because of Royal Mail’s strike. Even then, I had to hire a car to go down to the postal depot.

Friday I finally got around to replacing the Router with an off-brand, rather than relying on BT. This cost £40 and will save us no end of trauma. British Telecom, you see, doesn’t seem to like people who share files via a Torrent client – even though it is legal for us to do so (see Azeureus for some discussion on the matter). BT doesn’t come right out there and shut you down, though. No – that would subject them to criticism, discussion, and what have you.

What they do is to provide you with a router. Then, every time they decide to free up some resources, well, they update the firmware of your router. This means that the router stops responding, and you have to power-cycle it. If it’s happened when you’re not around, they’ve freed up some resources, and your downloading stops happening until you notice. They updated our router’s firmware 3 times in a single day, last week!

Of course, none of this is documented anywhere, but I’ve spoken with BT about this around 5 times now. Each time I mention what’s logged at the router, they get all strange, shuffle me off to somebody else, and end up disconnecting the call. So, we’re not playing their game any more.

Add all of these things to the laptop failure (it’s back now, and better than it’s been in years), and I’m about ready to say to the world: Technology. You’re Doing It Wrong. Technology items as disposable objects is simply insane. We, as users, ought to be able to rely on the technology to continue, to be durable. Instead, we are forced to “upgrade” our items, shelling out money and time, losing our work as we go along. It really is quite a sham. Technology companies: stop being so evil!

P.S. – if you’re planning to send us anything via the postal mail, please reconsider: the Royal Mail is so far behind that if you send it now, it’ll maybe get to us by Christmas!

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

The other night I went out with some friends (one of whom was kind enough to bring us Maple Syrup all the way from Canada!). After dinner, we ended up wandering about in search of someplace quieter, as the place we’d had dinner was getting all settled in to have a DJ, rapidly clearing out those of us who wanted to actually be heard. We ended up just down the street, at Uisge Beatha.

The lad shown here … was from here. Tell me, any of you out there who have any insight: why would someone go out for a night on the town wearing a “Viking” helmet made of plastic? I suppose it’s all part of why he’d stand around, chatting up strangers, happy to have his picture taken?

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.