@nthony

There have been many square ones. There will be many more, I hope. I recently found this on my shelf - well I say found - I knew it was there... but I took it out, looked, read, remembered.

The Sinclair ZX81 for me was the start of what I do now. Early eighties computing involved a membrane keyboard, just about enough memory to write something functional before spilling into screen RAM - with games you could stop while loading and look through, and possibly even re write yourself (seriously - 1K RAM, 8K ROM, think about that). It was a world of old humming black and white TV sets for me, with fizzing resolution, and a long pause when you pressed New Line. It was a beginning. My beginning with this fascination that still plagues me. [ READ MORE ]

Upgrades. Today saw the addition of a second processor to the backup/secondary server, along with accompanying voltage regulator module, and heat sink. Two spare drives had their firmware flashed, and prepared for use, and short of the now overdue battery backing (*stamp stamp stamp*) for write cache enabling on the secondary host (while I have a spare 64 bit U320 RAID controller with batteries... there is no internal DB68 connector, grrrr) - all is now done and dusted on a hardware front. Now just for the remainder of the data / mail migrations! It is surprisingly cathartic to be be making with the "Do as I do" as opposed to the "Do as I say" if that makes sense. [ READ MORE ]

Yesterday saw a minor curiosity of one of the domains I look after getting a bunch of attention. It is quiet around here, but relatively shouty yesterday as a peak level of 2 emails a second where knocking at the door to come in, and being politely rejected with "no, try again later". Curiously enough, they where not trying again, these where mostly unique one off mails, from mainly .JP .BR and .BD (yes I had to look it up too - Bangladesh of all places). Like some kind of slow motion mailbomb. But to what ends? [ READ MORE ]

...
Hit http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com lucid-proposed/universe Packages
Fetched 11.1MB in 29s (375kB/s)
...

... I read as I do an update of Ludic Lynx before shutting down for the evening. Half speed download. I recall once upon a time downloading an NT service pack of 15MB ... and it took an entire day, and several attempts without it disconnecting. [ READ MORE ]

Evolution is a beautiful thing, okay, so it corrects itself, and it takes its sweet time - but then, then sometimes you see something and you wonder 'why?'

As you can see here pooch is wearing a fleece and Vibram soled shoes (yes not just shoes, but non slip ones). [ READ MORE ]

Yes yes, I *know* it is out of focus, but I still like it. Alas I have a number of very similar images, all of which, just that little too soft around the edges. Life is like that it would seem; so I am embracing this as still pretty damned fine as it is. So there. Nerrr :p

RAW unprocessed image backlog continues to mount - however I have made a small dent in it with a set from Turkey, Kusadasi, and Ephesus - the pick of the bunch can be seen here in this flickr set. [ READ MORE ]

Hoarding. I am not bad. I am not like the people you see on obscure TV programmes who never throw things away... but I do sometimes look at things and think "I will need that again". To this end for technical things I have two rather sizeable containers for said things, one marked cables, one marked hardware.

[ READ MORE ]

... as they sang gleefully in Holiday Inn, swinging the doors to the barn open! While Christmas was a white affair, and while technically there was no lack of snow - it was no the usual wet dregs. The rules of the game appear to have been changed, and on Tuesday 5th January 2010 at around 1220 the skies darkened and a lesser (and considerably more fun) hell was let lose, with proper powder snow falling onto North Wales - in fact so much that it resulted in us abandoning our car and walking home (hills - never good after rain and a -6C night) that day (4 hours for 6 miles with car/foot). [ READ MORE ]

A set of images from Dubrovnik old city has uploaded : )

I have to say that returning to somewhere like Venice, we are both fortunate in opportunity and in that it allows you to just mooch - as opposed to map clutching speed walking like a crazed orienteer. Florence was a similar experience - far more ice cream, smiles, and distraction. More of what holidays are all about. [ READ MORE ]