Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Spare part arrived for Laura's laptop, spent a while soldering it on remembered to use flux properly this once; looks excellent, and actually robust. Re-assembled everything, gaining only one screw. Quite a nice enclosure really.
To work, poked at an ORBit2 pre-processing bug with Kjartan, and some split build buits with calc. Filed emacs bug - loading ORBit2 idl generated headers seems to cause slowness and grief.

2008-08-31: Sunday.

Off to NCC, Emily & Keith's last day - somewhat tearful; Tony gave a summary of Grapevine, back for quick lunch. Much more house prepping, cleaning, barbeque lighting, wafting. A sudden rush of very small children for Myriam's second birthday party.
Very pleasant, leisurly afternoon, apparently two-year olds have more fun playing amongst themselves than in barely-understood party games. Caught up with the neighbours happily. Mike popped around in the evening to help with the leftovers.

2008-08-30: Saturday.

Off to the market - bought up excessive amounts of good things to barbeque tomorrow. Back for lunch, cleaned the house, concreted the inspection hole some more - played with a blowlamp and some spare tarmac - apparently, you can indeed make it more malleable with a flame, and it resists burning nicely.
Amused to recieve duplicate payment reminders from Rentokil to Furniture Village, still at my house: apparently they have serious back-office issues. Lots of tidying of the house, washing of clothes & dishes, cleaning. Sandy around in the evening, long time no see.

2008-08-29: Friday.

Miriam's birthday today - much excitement, dolls house from Grandfather unveiled, and packed with suitable dollies from us. Dug at mail, interesting.
Gave up trying to unwind my dbus threaded oddness, and just created a connection per thread. Lunch, the rest of the family out with Nicki. Poked mango, FATE bits.
Poked at more mail, split build bits with Calc, Chinese travel, dunged out the disk to install 11.1 Alpha2.
Listened to the audio walk through of an accessible install of OpenSUSE. Wow, that is a great recording, gives me a palpable feeling of the sensation - not being able to see his screen. It sounds like he is using Ricardo's yast2-gtk installer, with Orca, and well - the flow should be vastly easier in 11.1 - with Mike Gorse' yast2/root a11y; even so lots of obvious improvements leap from the speaker.

2008-08-28: Thursday.

Up early, poked mail & Srini, tweaked code. Caught up with Julian's valgrind hackery. Did some more analysis of the configmgr deadlock - a simple lock ordering problem, with the magic of apartments and configmgr2 trying to be a separate thread-safe piece.
Wrote up some notes for Frank. Dug at FATEal issues, long planning call in the afternoon, chat with JP.

2008-08-27: Wednesday.

To work, chewed away at script to analyse evolution code ownership, generated list of yet more hundreds of clean files to update.
Poked at a configmgr deadlock - apparently there is a nasty issue with the idle writer thread that does a service activation, while holding the config lock, while the service activation can do config lookups (holding it's own lock). Urgh.
Quick lunch with Lydia, good to see her. Back to a surprisingly interesting all afternoon security meeting. Up late digging into some dbus oddness.

2008-08-26: Tuesday.

To work - hack week, but lots of mail. Phoned BCD - glad they booked my flights, albeit without confirming to me. Phoned Rentokil's Tracy to re-explain that Furniture Village are still, not co-located with my home; gave their real address.
Quick chat with Srini, more mail, told Clarity what I've been up to. Call with Janneke about layout. Encouraging to see all the great work happening while I'm away: must go away more often. Committed Mike's ORBit2 root/a11y tweak.
Off to collect some spare laminate flooring from Julie, lunch, sync call with JP. Poked at OO.o local linking speedup, which seems to have bit-rotted a little.
There are times when you need a strong stomach to read some C++, a classic example today; the somewhat pathetic non-existence of constructor chaining (cf. C# eg.): INI_LIST type macros; this simple 60+ line macro saves you typing all those huge constructor function calls (most of them to a constructor, with at least one fn. call in the arguments) multiple times: that means you can easily create a leviathan .text section, without even trying hard.

2008-08-25: Monday.

Up early, re-admired laptop, ordered replacement power jack from the US, $33 vs. £100 to fix it professionally. Bank holiday today - missing a day of hack-week, bother.
Out to Ely, to wander the cathedral, played with the frizbee, swings, slides, clambering etc. Back, a little more castle work; lunch. David left for home, missing the Veggi-Tales DVD & pop-corn, really good to see him.

2008-08-24: Sunday.

Off to Rock in the morning, J. dealt with the babes, solid sermon. Back for lunch at our place, with James, Kate & Peter. Fed them up. Played with the babes a little, examined the problems of in-castle shelf and sofa construction.
Laura & Creighton arrived with broken Acer laptop. Diverted to this task, then out to Hope Baptist in Teversham to hear James speak in the evening - stayed for some after-service snacks, a fine community going there, interesting people.
Back for dinner & more laptop disassembly - having removed almost every screw - and levered lots of plastic bits (many of which surprisingly failed to noticably break) located, and de-soldered the evily under-engineered power-jack. Never seen something so important, so obviously flimsy - the tragedy of the thing is that a beautiful and hyper-complex working laptop, should be laid low by a tiny piece of broken wire doing the simplest of tasks.

2008-08-23: Saturday.

Off to the market to stock up on good things, good to be home. David arrived at lunch time, great to see him. H. desparately eager to be building the castle afterwards. Instead headed to the gallops on bicycles to remove the rush from the children.
Back home; expert flag-pole & flag creation & errection from David and Julia. Talked until late.

2008-08-22: Friday.

Up earlyish, off to buy a 'big girl' car seat with the Peetle (Myriam), for a solidly successful potty-training experience all week, she seems very pleased with it.
Packed everything rather slowly, and got the car stuffed full, roof box & all. Bid 'bye to the parents & brother & Ilona. Set off for a speedy & uneventful trip home.

2008-08-21: Thursday.

Lie in, slugged in the morning; out to Worthing to another park / playground in the afternoon, train ride around the park, lots of paddling and splashing around. Back, watched Herriot in the evening.

2008-08-20: Wednesday.

J. lie in, played with babes. Rained much of the day - played Lego in the morning with them: made castles, tried to identify female lego 'men'. Lunch.
Out to the lagoons on the front in the afternoon in the rain, played in the playground. Back, to watch the end of The Sound of Music.

2008-08-19: Tuesday.

Lie in, then out to the Booth Museum of stuffed animals (mostly birds) or Victorian Taxidemi (depending on how you look at it). Good fun, some interesting pieces.
Home to join in with Father's exciting drain-rodding experience, what fun - mercifully finished this before meeting Robert's charming new girlfriend Ilona. Lunch.
Out swimming with the babies, Rob & Ilona - lots of fun, splashing, swimmin etc. Back to watch The Enormous Crocodile and other Rohld Dahl bits, and the beginning of The Sound of Music.
Put the children to bed, played guitar with Dad's accordian practice (no better time to start to learn an instrument than your seventies) which went well. Dinner, talked late.

2008-08-18: Monday.

Up early, J's lie in. Played with the babies, trained Dad on the uber-slow, but functional laptop. Off to St. Annes Wells garden in the afternoon - lots of slides & swings to play on. Slugged, watched the olympics a little. Robert feeling unwell sadly.
Watched some of Dawkins on the TV, interesting - must get around to reading his latest book, if I can get it second hand somewhere. Sadly, he reminds me of myself age 16 - irritated by being made to study the arts, and wanting to focus solely on maths & science. Luckily later in life I discovered that, in fact, science has answers only for part of our experience, and that studying romance, history, art, theology is highly valuable. Amused by some of the hubris and misrepresentation applied to Rowan Williams - and the apparent lack of grasp of the history of thought on these topics for the last millenia: eg. the action of chance in producing us - who has not heard the stories of the meeting of people's parents as if at random, and been glad that < insert improbable event > occured, lest we not exist at all ? My personal favorite experience of seeing emminent scientists (eg. the UK's Chief Scientist) tying themselves in conceptual knots, and failing to understand was at a small lecture on a basic topic from the head of the History & Philosophy of Science faculty at Cambridge, an undergraduate course highly recommended before over-prognostication in public on these matters. As a banal analogy Ali G's demand to a vegetarian Eat this chicken, or I kill this other chicken ! condenses a fine moral dilema worthy of detailed consideration into a forum where an answer simply cannot be provided or even explored.

2008-08-17: Sunday.

Lie-in, and off to St. Lukes. Dealt with three in the creche, interesting talk to an ex. professor of parasitology afterwards, caught up with old friends.
Returned to Father's birthday party - seventy-two sounds old, but he's active and in good spirits. Wandered across the parks to the new Hove Park playground, refurbished and in great condition. Thomas left in the evening - sad to see him go.