'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Sometimes, the algorithm finds the perfect video...

Our church homegroup has a rota for who hosts each week, but since most months only have four Wednesdays we've decided that on a fifth Wednesday we'd do something different. So today we went to the JoJo Gelato ice cream parlour for some very nice ice creams, and after happily devouring them we decided to head off to the pub.

Where myself and another of our group got ID'd. Seriously. Last time I was asked for ID in a pub was um... I'm not sure. Certainly not this year, and probably not this decade. But apparently I looked particularly youthful today or something? I'm not even the youngest one in our group!

Downside of having an electric shower: water temperature is inversely proportional to water pressure. I can have more water, or more heat, but not both.

Upside of having an electric shower: the hot water never runs out.

It's meme o'clock! Blame sarshin for this randomness.

Instructions: put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

Lord, I am not my own, no longer my own

Follow me
Kiss me now with your sea salty lips
Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar
And this is the constant question

I took a chance
Late last night when the squire came home
Came upon an ancient forest
It's 4 in the morning

Red alert red alert it's a catastrophe
Should you hear somebody cry
Swaz hie gat umbe
I came into this world as a reject

Footsteps down the stairs then at the door
Once in Royal David's City
Magic for me
Where are we?

While wandering round ftp.modland.com I tripped across this gem in a file called "dragons.txt":

Far away, there was a special land. Where peaceful dragons lived peaceful lives.
Until the attack. Vicious creatures seeking final extinction for the dragons.
You are their last hope. You are SPACE HARRIER.

So, certain people have been demanding a real blog entry, which does not merely consist of the word "blog".

Well, it's time I updated it anyway. Be warned though that it is nearly 2 in the morning, and so coherency is not guaranteed.

Anyway, what have I been up to recently? Well, quite a few things. Last week (nearly two weeks ago now) I spent the evengins doing the lights for a production of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Which was very funny to watch, and a bit hectic as one of the lights stopped working about half an hour before the start of the final performance, and so I did a hasty spot of light shuffling and plug rewiring.

(at this point I hit "random track" about 20 times. XMPlay is being pervese and refusing to pick something I'm in the mood to listen to. I eventually settle on A Drop in the Ocean, by Stratovarius)

Back to the Dream. It's quite interesting watching while doing the lights - you get a different perspective on things. It is a wonderful play by the King of Shadows, and terrific fun to watch. Our Puck did a grand job of capering around, causing mischief, and generally messing everything up before leading the two suitors on a wild goose chase and undoing the mess he made of things. Still as good today as it was over 400 years ago.

It's odd that - I never really appreciated Shakespeare when we had to study Romeo and Juliet at school, but now, seeing and being involved with a production of it changes your views on it. I'll have to keep an eye out for the various production that get done by the theatre societies at university.

Moving on to other things, I've recently been fighting an old machine that used to have Linux installed. "Used" is the significant word here - the install took an extreme dislike to me moving the hard disks to a seperate IDE controller, and ate most of the root filesystem. This made small but significant components like the dynamic loader very unhappy, and generally mangled the install. So, I decide to do a fresh install, which fails spectacularly. First time round, the ext3fs driver gets confused and eventually writes data into one of its system areas, at which point it remounts the filesystem read-only and stops the install. Second time round (after I'd forcibly recreated the partition table) the kernel panics for some unknown reason during the install.

Next, I try FreeBSD. So far, I've proven that the CD I burnt is unbootable, and that neither of the network cards are supported by the kernel on the floppy images. I'm starting to think that my idea of seeing how much hardware I can fit in this machine (a circa 1995 IBM Aptiva) is possibly not as smart as it seemed. It started out about a year ago as me wanting a machine on which to learn and experiment with Linux, not being willing to offer either of my main machines up for sacrifice.

(after a few tracks, XMPlay again picks something I'm not in the mood for and takes about 20 attempts to change to something I like. In this case, I settle on Catherine's Theme from Riven)

Current ideas are to verify the disc (reburning if necessary), and then failing that to start returning things to their original configuration. The upgrades at the moment include such nicities as a processor upgrade, IDE controller upgrade, disk upgrade, network upgrade (two of 'em) and graphics upgrade. Even the floppy drive is no longer the original one.

I'm not the only one to have suffered, as Craig made the mistake of deciding to do a full system reinstall along with adding both memory and disks to his main machine. Unfortuantly the computer gods did not look down upon him, and resulted in three days of reinstalls to get Windows to a) install, b) install with the correct RAID configuration, and c) have working sound. This was complicated by the fact he also wanted to dual boot Fedora Core 5, which is not as easy as it seems. Especially when the Fedora installer falsely claims that the CD is corrupt, and then hangs. So, I spent about an hour learning how to use grub, and then coercing the one Fedora install that did work to then dual boot with Windows (using the Windows bootloader). Oh, and to add insult to injury, it looks like his motherboard may have a dud RAM connector. Either that or eBuyer have sent him three dead sticks of RAM.

(I pause for a while to listen to Clannad and collect my thoughts. A pair of random neurons spark together and the train of thoughts goes thataway -->)

Project Eden is an interesing game. I've just started another run through of it, mainly because Nick got the Playstation version and Will's been chuntering along at a fair rate of knots.

(as I type this, pleaseremove messages me about a slashdot post to do with games. Something about Sony charging extortionate amounts for games. Meh. I'll be getting a Wii anyway - there's very few Playstation games (past, present or future) that interest me)

Back on track... so far I've got to the Hospital, while last time I saw Will he was wandering round the SkyTran level looking lost. I have a slight chance of overtaking him, mainly because I've played through it before and so know parts of the layout (and what's coming up). It's part of that very rare genre of games that is not primarily about killing monsters. Monster-killing is a part of of it, admitdly, and it's fun to use the flycam to lure them towards a local sentry cannon with Minoko at the controls. Given that due to the regen system I'm immortal in this, I can also go for suicide runs. I try to avoid those though, as it just doesn't seem right. I think I have a tendency to when playing games trying to stay in character. Unfortuantly, some force you into a character that goes completely against your usual style of playing...

Moving back to Project Eden, it focuses a lot on puzzles, of which a fair number are team-orientated. Did I mention that you control a team of four people, each one with a different ability/speciality (e.g. Minoko can hack into terminals, Amber being a cyborg can walk through fire and so on)? It's also possble play it networked cooperatively, which is a rarity in most games. Just about all current network games involve you trying to beat all the other players, with some games offering you the ability to only beat half of the players. However, with this one the main network mode is entirely about helping each other. I've yet to play it four-way, but it'd make some segments of the game a lot easier. While the AI is reasonably good, and the follow-me function works well as long as you don't start in a confined space, it's no substitute for a real player. The AI stays put when in charge, and doesn't understand things like not standing in front of the sentry cannon that's behind the door someone just opened.

Hmm... it's probably about time that I got some sleep. I've so far spent about 40 minutes writing this post, and it includes at least one topic change without using the clutch. Well, you were warned about the lack of coherency - it's even in my userinfo. I'll elave you with one last thing - a quick list of what I was listening to while posting this. This gives you an idea of my playlist, which most certainly does not use a clutch for genre changes:

Destiny, by Stratovarius
A Drop in the Ocean, again by Stratovarius
Dies irae, by Mozart (from Requiem)
Gravity of Love, by Enigma
Canon, by Awesome
Catherine's Theme (from Riven)
Fight view (from Super Monkey Ball 2)
Departure (from Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles)
In a Lifetime, by Clannad
Silent Night, by the New World Orchestra (from Christmas Chillout)
Lost in Time, released by Level-D
Everybody's Fool, by Evanescence
Battle 4 (from Morrowind)
Scarlet Inside, by Clannad

So, that makes its way from rock to ambient and back and forth in under 15 tracks, missing out on the jazz and blues also in my collection. Hmm, shall have to try harder next time. Oh, and the Awesome and Level-D tracks are actually tracker music, so you won't find them on Amazon. They are however available for free download by the creators, so go hunt. Maybe you'll find something new to listen to.

Ans with that, I'm off to bed over an hour after I started writing this. The final track is shown as this entry's music.

Radio BoggyB is now signing off for the night. Toodle-pip.

Dom, let me be among the first to wish you happy birthday.

Yes, I am still up. I'm vaguely considering staying up to see the sun rise, which is something I've not been awake for for many years.

( Long late-night random ramble )

Nintendo Themes Acapella, complete with actions (discovered via tryss). You must watch this.