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Oo. I was just about to cancel my subscription to Dark Age of Camelot, due to playing so little now, and then Darkness Rising came along. And now I have my very own horse:-
OK, so the stirrups are a bit long for a dwarf, but I'm not fussy.
(Oh and that's my house in the background. House! Not cottage! I'm posh, me.)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4684652.stm
and
The Religious Policeman is well worth a read on the subject.
"And paper Valentine's cards are increasingly under assault from their electronic counterparts.
Research from BT suggests one in six in the UK, and a third of over-30s, have considered sending a text instead of a card."
This is one of the things for which technology ought to take a back seat. Text is easy and in this case, pretty naff. If you want to show someone that you love them, make the effort.
Solaris 10 in and on a Dell PowerEdge 850. Nagios 2.0(stable) and perfparse in and graphing. Monitoring 903 services on 111 hosts so far. By my calculations, we'll have over 2,000 services once we've migrated from the non-open-source monitoring, but that involves writing a job lot of plugins that won't be any use to anyone other than us. I guess I'm feeling good about it because I get few and far between blocks of time long enough to do stuff like this. I know there are plenty of installations which eclipse my effort by a long shot, but it's the win of moving away from expensive, clunky, closed monitoring to open-source, modifiable, agile monitoring that I was after really.
I'd also been wanting to get a look at Solaris 10 on x86 as I've read that there are a few large-scale installations that are going well so far. It was a tiny bit of a pain on the PE850, but that's because of a graphics driver problem and as it's a server I don't need a GUI anyway. I'm not even vaguely thinking that Solaris on commodity hardware by the truckload can compete in the same arena as Solaris on heavyweight Sun kit; that'd be like comparing apples with pears. But, given that Sun are behind x86 Solaris properly again I was interested to see how it would go. There's no way on earth I'd want to put it on a desktop machine (for various reasons I do believe that Windows and MacOS covers that more than well enough by comparison with Linux so Solaris on a desktop is a risible idea to me), but how does it fare on sufficiently vanilla x86 servers is a question that interests me. It's not a question that I'll get much of an answer from a single scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel Dell, but it'll be the beginnings of one. Plus, servers like our monitoring server are the only ones we get to determine things like the OS with any certainty, there's no way any of our current clients will move to Solaris 10 on the kit we support for them because the live web front-end isn't there yet for a start and as for the telly stuff... that's all going RHEL anyway I think.
I guess I could do with revamping my Nagios documentation (yeah yeah I keep saying that), but given that it took ages to get the installation done (what with being a manager and all, I don't get a lot of geek time any more) I'm not so sure the documentation will be coming all that soon.
It continues to piss me off that smokers seem to think that fag ends aren't litter. The oft raised reply of "oh fuck off, they're bio-degradable anyway!" is risible at best. Even if they took only a week or so to degrade they would still pile up outside buildings, where smokers are "banished" to huddle in the rain, making the place look hideous.
It's vile.
Stop it.
Go to "portfolio", "before/after" and look. Some of the changes, mostly ones on page 2, but the first one on page 3 is... they're... well, I wish I'd seen this a while ago.
Apparently I'm a "Faithful Leader". Which is nice. And a definite change since the last time I took a similar test around 10 years ago. It's interesting how experience changes people.
...for the Olympics here in 2012. Wembley stadium, the new one, is being abandoned for the FA Cup Final because it won't be ready in time. And I'm going to be expected to pay £60 more in Council Tax for the Olympics?
Dear Ken,
I never wanted the Olympics here and I still think you're crazy to even try to stage them here. In the light of this, I won't be paying the extra £60 you want for building stuff that won't be finished on time, work properly or be any use to any normal people after the whole fiasco.
Not so much love,
Kate
...of women in technology. Interesting.
The house looks almost completely different now. Changing the manky, crumbling, patchy, dark green stuff for some bright, cream, soft, new carpet has made a world of difference. The hall is much much brighter and the lounge looks bigger. By an accident of packing, I even got brass bars which look a lot better than the aluminium ones I was supposed to get, so that's extra niceness. The down side is that there are three doors which need cutting a bit so as they will close, but that's pretty trivial and will be fixed tomorrow.
Photos may follow in time, but certainly not right now.
A guy got fined by two local councils for littering (what was wrong with the chips, one wonders) across the boundary between the two, right in front of a council worker. If only the authorities were less random with this kind of thing. OK, there's no way that every person who drops litter could be caught and fined but maybe more could be if Community Support Officers got in on the act and then it got into the media more that littering will be punished (because people who currently do it have maladjusted attitudes and no idea how anti-social it is) and then maaaaybe fewer people would do it. Maybe.
But it isn't settling.
Last year I was told, by the Inland Revenue, that I no longer need to submit my tax return. A fantastic piece of news in itself at the time; but this year The Revenue go one better and send me a refund for overpaid tax for 2004-2005. It came in the post this morning. Woot!
Maybe too low contrast too? (LJ syndication readers of this won't have a clue what I'm talking about unless they look at the source site TOTKat.org).
Well I like it anyway. And no <TABLE>s were harmed in the making of the style sheet. Just you try making a menu on the right hand side with free-flowing text on the left that is re-sizable and then tell me it's rubbish.
There are a bunch of add-ons out there, and Forecastfox's a good one (for me). International weather forecasts, configurable to an impressive degree, which sit in space bits of browser furniture.
I hadn't been getting notifications of site comments, so there was a backlog of people with Typekey accounts who hadn't been approved to comment here. Sorry! Done it now though.
From the "whatever next?" school... a tie with an iPod Nano pouch. Oh and they also start selling a shirt with a full-sized iPod pocket and a slot on the cuff for an Oyster card from next month.
Google Pages (beta). Bringing easy web design (and content management) to the masses, maybe? Not had a chance to play with it yet, and I'm not sure about the deletion policy as I've not read it yet either.
Google's Winter Olympics doodles. Pretty. I don't often see the full doodles as I use a browser search box; but at least there are mini ones in the results page now.
It's not all that surprising that this pilot scheme has found that if you teach kids manners, they tend to behave better. The shame is that parents aren't doing it in sufficient numbers and it's that a lot of parents think the duty of teaching anything at all to children lies with the education system.
Today we are exhorted to work our contracted hours. While the overall sentiment of not going nuts and killing yourself through over-work and finding a good work/life balance is good, a lot of people will take the idea too far.
Spotted in the field earlier today...
*
The long awaited Green Key promo. When one of these little fellas pops up on Sky over a trail for a programme, you can press green to add the programme (or series) to your planner. Neat.
[* - image courtesy of "mad loon in my office"]
Some of the weekend was spent doing a little more de-cluttering and marvelling at the new carpet.
I'll say it again:- the lounge really does look so much better.
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