After my rather spectacular weight loss 2 years ago, I am experiencing now a (hopefully short) period of involuntary weight loss (side effects suck). Funny how pants that oughtn’t fit suddenly fit again. Yet another thing to get rid of, I guess. If they’re not falling of at the moment, then they’re just too small.
So I will work to get this episode behind me. Quite literally actually, the thesis needs to be finished (which requires starting in earnest on it :)
I just found out that I am in Luxembourg because…
That is rather disconcerting. Which, incidentally (Saša *PEER*), happens not only to be a word, but exactly the word I want to use here.
Yes, from time to time Saša questions my vocabulary. I think so far it has turned out every time I was right. Ghi ghi.
As I was writing: I cannot read. This has brought me to Luxembourg, has gotten me to Greece, made me have cooperations with various people in Europe, all because I cannot read. You know, I am actually having all these ideas on what to put in my thesis. All originating from the fact that I cannot read.
This was definitely the worst misreading in my life. Ever. Took me only three years to find out. I’m just lucky there are no consequences to this misreading. :)
As I am keeping an eye on Maren’s bread baking machine while she is in Canada, I am sometimes experimenting with it. First trial was hilarious: I figured I’d like some fresh bread in the morning, and as I had to be at a conference in my home, the bread need not be finished until 20 minutes before the first talk. That did not begin too early, so fresh bread seemed a good idea — hence I set the machine to have bread finished at roughly 8am.
Miscalculation. Fresh bread is nice, but the machine takes about 3.5 hours to prepare it… and it is noisy. So now it was time for attempt 2. And the second problem I’ve discovered too: 3.5 hours is long. It’s close to 11 now, and I will not have my fresh bread for another hour… :(
Well, that underlines that really, the only possibility is to move the machine when it is operating. Which sucks, as I don’t have an easily accessible non-public location… (well, could put it in my office, but that would be pushing it, and would mean breakfast at work… hey… that might actually be an idea… ;-)
What I did want to confer, is that I also ran a bit to kill the time (and to exercise a bit, of course). Killing time is actually a powerful motivator. I felt like returning home quite often, but a glance at my watch told me roughly how long I would then have to waste time before fresh bread (which gives rise to the nice acronym and measure of time TTWBFB), and hence I ran on. In the end, I crossed the one hour limit, which was the rough idea I had in mind. I need to do this more often, but for today, I have other plans. To shed some light:
So, for now, this seems like a dead end. [Edit: or does it?? Patch existing, developer has provided some updates too, compilation woes might be addressable??? [Edit2: oops, I might have been trying the version not suited to my kernel…]] Perhaps the zd1211rw driver will eventually support this feature, but I couldn’t find a timeline, or plans, or any indication for doing so. Actually, the development seems more oriented towards supporting “Mesh Mode”, whatever that may be :)
So the next step is to do the obvious (isn’t it always?): I have a laptop with a wired connection to the internet, and a wireless port. So now to find out how to let that act as an access point. Funny thing is, there are some different suggestions out there, some suggesting bridge-controls, and others not. More investigation needed here.
(though it is good to have a log of my attempts so far — even if no one else reads this, I can find this back and re-realise what is a good idea and what is not. Hence the lengthy explanation / side track in this post.)
Lengthier post than anticipated… if this is the general result of me trying a hand at having fresh bread, I might do this more often ;) But now it is off to the shower for me, and then only another … 25 minutes till breakfast / brunch!!
it’s just a bad idea. So in short: I went to Germany, it was great. Played Rockband, that game seriously rocks. Wish i could afford the empty pool to have sufficient space to play that ;)
Was seen off on the station by Maren, a couple of hours before she left for Canada. Less than happy. Went to WOTE / PETS workshop and conference. WOTE was very good, and PETS is quite nice too. Enjoyed Leuven so far a bit, plan to do more later. Maren landed safely in Canada and has yet to wrestle a bear. I pity Canadian bears. I gave a rump-session talk, which means I had 5 minutes to explain our current (unfinished) paper. Ran out of time… took too long on slide one (which I drew on the whiteboard, since I was too lazy to actually make slides and ensure that the Eee hooks up nicely to the beamer).
That’s enough backblogging for a Friday morning. Tty’all later! ;)
For those of you who enjoy the creative output of Joss Whedon (of Buffy / Angel / Firefly fame), his latest project is up. Right now. Up. Up as in available for free on the web. Available for free as in HE IS ACTUALLY GIVING HIS STUFF AWAY RIGHT NOW.
Offer valid from now until coming Sunday.
So what is happening? Episode 1/3 was released this Tuesday, episode 2/3 is due tomorrow and, horror of horrors, episode 3 I will miss. Anyway, go check it out if you at all liked Buffy and/or Firefly, and are not afraid of singing entertainment.
Sidenote: if the usual result of a writer’s strike in hollywood is Joss Whedon becoming so bored, he goes about creating this sort of stuff and then gives it away for free, let’s make sure there are more strikes ;)
Edit: for more promo-power, view the official thingy-ma-linky-me-postery-promo-gizmo on the left hand side.
Chocolate brick is good! Too bad Laura just moved out, she’s missing the brick. So, what happened? I experimented with cooking once again. This time, I tried and succeeded to thwart the general conventions and notions surrounding the enigmatic concept known as “chocolate mousse”. Without spoiling too much of the fun, I can honestly claim that chocolate and raw egg a good taste do make!
Popular opinion on what exact devation I may applied varies. Current contenders are “insufficient whipping of the egg whites” (by the Boss-man) and “too much chocolate” (by my girlfriend). As we all know, there is no such thing as too much chocolate. Nevertheless, to achieve the airiness usually associated with chocolate mousse, more eggwhite would probably have been better. Thus, the first option seems unlikely too. So, for me, the issue is still open. Which means: I will have to try again :)
Yep, this is getting lame… it seems half this blog is becoming a collection of quick links and tips on surviving Ubuntu. Well anyway: the lame I found in the package manager did not work. Downloading & compiling the source myself worked without a hitch (it does need some build-tools, but apparently I had them floating around — probably after the xmms install…).
And, speaking of handy links and also to add some news for you, my trustworthy readers: This link may actually help me getting my USBAP Dongle working under Unix (still need to follow that up, unfortunately my dongle is from Bigben, and not from Datel; fortunately, the whole world seems to be using roughly the same chipset, so it might work in the end(tm)). Ow, and I am the proud owner of eee PC:P It rocks :)
Update: found some images of the driver disc on the web that have the “Datel” logo there… so this might be a quite viable option :) :)
It has been a while since I did some things (actually, it has been a while since I did loads of things ;-). This weekend so far seems to pick up some of them. I am playing SMG (no, not that SMG) once again, reading GEB, being sportive, cleaning my room a bit (not finished, more planned today), uploading photo’s and ripping cd’s (okay, that is wishful thinking at the moment), doing sunday shopping at Delhaize (also wishful thinking, and not happening if I don’t hurry).
Okay, anyway, what feels really nice right now (exactly now) is having run once again. It has been ages, and in the beginning I felt like I wouldn’t last. So I did :) Don’t you just love that extra push you can get out of that sort of thing once in a while? Well, it almost never works for me, but sometimes, denying the obvious feels just too right, and so it does now. I actually managed to run quite a bit — every time I felt like it was close to enough, there was no decent shortcut in sight (except once, but then I figured “we can just as well take a look in the park instead of returning home”) and every time there was a choice of roads, I felt too energetic to go home. Which became somewhat awkward near the end, I can tell you that :) I managed to finally get home by tricking myself — this energetic avoidance mechanism did not recognise the backside of my convent as belonging to ‘home’, so I was at the backdoor before my body started feeling too energetic to stop. Turns out I ran for something in the order of 50 minutes to one hour (not too sure, didn’t take a watch, but estimates based on music played while I was away). Which is quite surprising, given that I really haven’t had any decent exercise the last couple of way-too-longs.
So I am typing this as I just returned (really: opened the door, threw shirt in a corner and started typing), and I am feeling very happy. (And that’s not just running, but right now that *is* a large part of it).
Best from the ‘Bourg for now,
Hugo.
With Rogier over last weekend, we got round to some gaming. Couldn’t find the exact level that swayed me, but it resembles this one a lot [edit: Well it wasn’t. It was this one :)]. It reminded me once again that Super Mario Galaxy is just an awesome game.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I got to hook my Wii up a bit :)
Too bad Bigben Interactive doesn’t have a Linux/Debian driver for their WiFiMax usb stick… :(
See the verdict (dutch). Will have to think about the implications a bit, especially its impact on DRM systems (one of my research hobbies).
In other news: Things are going swell, Anke & Rogier came by (was much fun), Bras & Diana are mom&dad (though not in that order) and I’ll be taking the afternoon off to relax a bit :)