Stu's Rusty Bucket

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

My Athene experiment is over.

well i tested athene for a short time but it rubbed me the wrong way.

i managed to get qt and other libs installed fine.
but when it came to the kde libs, it spent about 15 minutes clunking the cd then Qik Install told me i needed to install Qik Install Lite!  which I couldnt find on the cd, so could not install any KDE based applications.

the speed of menu redraw aggrivated me no end. it made the whole system feel slow. i wanted them ‘there’. not ‘there’ in several seconds.  i have a radeon 9000 64mb on a p4 2.4ghz box. it felt like a dog.

there seemd to be no way to speed this up.

there is text ALWAYS being drawn under the scroll bars. its as if the system draws the text boxes then overlays the scroll bars and its very off putting.

i tried to play an mp3.. mplayer loads and did nothing. ok maybe a bad mp3.. i tried 10. none worked. they were all sitting on an read only NTFS mount. but that should not have affected it.. some of te mp3 were created with the original l3enc from fraunhoffer, some winlame, some audiocatalyst. some vbr, some nont. none played. but there was no error message. i chcked te mixers, etc, it was ok. hmm..

i poked around DML. i just couldnt do it. writing script inside xml. aargh. why does everyone think everything needs to be forced inside of xml. if Im going to write scripts, i dont want to have to xml tag every little command. it was like someone put me in a straight jacket, gave me a straw and said i had to type a novel.

i did like that it was easier to create simple graphical apps but things just didnt feel right.

maybe some of my problems were because my original cd was corrupt and I downloaded the minimal ISO and it was version mismatched?

obviously my original CD is more corrupt than I had hoped, and it gave me a bad impression of athene. without any of the kde apps I couldnt do jack

Friday, September 24, 2004

Another chunk

I went out night mountain bike riding on tuesday with stu and helen. Im the only one without lights so while it was a majour awesome time (and i am still sore from it), it was scary going down a hill in the pitch black.. when it gets dark on the moors it gets dark!…

I also managed to take a chunk out of my ankle. great stuff, another war wound!! hahahaa. Its only little but hurts a bit if you constantly touch it with ya finger or other foot…

Applied for a few more jobs this morning up in Newcastle… Its back to a waiting game to see if I go forward or backwards again. I checked out the times for trains and things and it takes an hour and a half to get from Middlesbrough to Newcastle. Id have to leave home at 6:30, get a 6:55 train to Newcastle and get there at 8:30 and find my way to a jobplace....

Then do the hour and a half back home again.

Assuming the job is near a station or something up there ....

Saturday, September 18, 2004

It was a Bust

Dinner tonight was a bust :( I soacked the chickpeas overnight, boiled them, descummed them, changed the water about 4 times and simmered for an hour. They were passable. The lentils sucked bigtime. They smelt like deisel fuel or something.

So i ditched the lot and wrote it off as a failure. Will use chickpeas again some other time tho.

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Couple of more MTB pics

Heres a few more pics from our last MTB excursion. Taken by Stu.

Monday, September 13, 2004

Some biking some nothing.

Not a lot to say. Still looking for a job. Didnt bike this weekend.
Here are some pics from last weekend.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Grand Old England

Righto, I am now back and fully ensconsed into life in england. Doing the big ‘job hunt’ thing which is lots of clicking ‘apply’ and waiting for people to ring me up… great fun… not.

time difference to usa sucks since I cant ring joy all the time :( and to top it off, i cant find any overseas phone cards up here in Middlesbrough! Whats up with that?? THey are a dime a dozen with 30 different kinds in london and up here I cant find any…

I will have to haunt the offlicenses and pakistani supermarkets I think.

Went out riding last week. ooooh it was glorious. I got a sore bum on my sitbone muscles from it but they will toughen up pretty quick.

But now I need a new frame, gotta go down from 19” to about 16” or so. Then comes the new pedals aaand oh a new fork right? mmmm well whatever. It might all hinge on waiting till I go to America and doing it next year rather than pay out in pounds…

Thursday, September 02, 2004

Planes

Well, my last entry in australia for who knows how many years?? Im flying out tomorow at 3:30pm, destination, Frozen England!

yay!

See you back in old blighty.