Tom Fotherby’s Blog

The bathroom turned out to be quite difficult to get right because of drainage issues and in the end we had to raise the floor up to hide pipes and to get a better slope for waste water.

It’ll be nice having a on-suite bathroom, no more going downstairs to clean our teeth.

Before:
After:

Fiction, 7/10 - July 2008

Global-warming is a conspiracy! If you don’t believe me, read this book - it even has the references to relevant scientific research papers in the biography. It is full of interesting environmental information all bound within a semi-interesting action story - a bit the same way as Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code contains lots of religions ideas inside an action plot.

I ran out of reading material in Stockholm and was complaining when a guy offered me this book - I jumped at the chance because I was about to spend an entire day on the train to Copenhagen. Some people are so kind. The start is a bit boring but it builds and builds into something I found really interesting.

Romantic Si-Fi, 5/10 - July 2008

Quite a ridiculous book, my first (and hopefully last) romantic si-fi. Even if the story wasn’t great I still find futuristic things interesting because they make me dream. For example, her ship, SIMON (Sentient Integrated MObile Nanoessence) is like a futuristic brain embedded Google. This kind of book is brain candy for me, nice but no good for me. The book isn’t just sci-fi, it also has a touch of Fantasy e.g. mageline sorceress. I’m not sure I like the si-fi/fantasy mix. I like the science in sc-fi to make as much sense as possible.

Is being a goddess by accident funny/interesting? Maybe a little funny for example her drunken bar-crawl ramblings have become like religions commandments but the fallout from the ‘revelation’ of the ‘goddess’s’ true nature is never explored properly so it makes the whole thing a bit pointless? A further weakness is the ending, there’s almost no show down at all.

In Stockholm we found a Cola drink with the same name as our favorite Operating System. It’s fair trade and tastes just as nice as the original Cocacola.

Ubuntu roughly means “I am because we are”. From The Guardian: In fact, the word ubuntu is just part of the Zulu phrase “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”, which literally means that a person is a person through other people. Ubuntu has its roots in humanist African philosophy, where the idea of community is one of the building blocks of society. Ubuntu is that nebulous concept of common humanity, oneness: humanity, you and me both.

Fiction, 4/10 - June 2008

Perhaps this book was a bit too clever for me? I found following the several different characters hard and always assumed the relationship between them would either be explained or inter whine at the end. I was also aware of some more complex literature techniques being used that I’m sure my old English teachers would love - I got a bit of the symbolism and metaphor but probably missed the “greatness” of it. Anyway, I found it hard work to read. I enjoyed learning a bit about old Chinese customs and also a bit about how older people might view younger people.

Fiction, 8/10 - June 2008

Firstly, I realised with a shock that this book wasn’t going to have a hint of mathematics in it but I got over the disappointment because I liked learning about Zoo keeping and I found a boy wanting to be in 3 religions funny.

The extreme situation that the boy found himself in was an interesting read and a powerful story but because it wasn’t a true story I felt the factual nature of the book could be deceiving - a tiger would not necessarily behave as described in the book! It’s like a adult fairy tale. The make-believe island comforted me because it reminded me this was a work of fiction - I wonder if this is what the author intended?

I liked the ending an awful lot - Which version was the truth? It puts another spin on the potential fictional aspects of the tiger.

We’ve finally finished the living room:

Before:
After:

It is much more laptop and console friendly. It used to have 1 socket, now it’s got 10. It used to have 1 storage heater, now it’s got 2 central heating radiators. It used to have nicotine coloured wall-paper, now it’s got new plaster and fresh paint. Other work includes a soft carpet, dimmable lights, DVD storage space, gas & electric meter relocation, TV socket, Telephone socket - It’s much more comfortable now.

I had to replace a rotten floor joist:

Sci-Fi, 7/10 - Apr/May 2008

I didn’t know anything about US politics until I read this book. I’m not much interested in politics let alone US politics but the book did an excellent job of hiding any potential boringness in character descriptions, a fast plot and a single super interesting sci-fi concept which any cyberpunk fan would enjoy thinking about (e.g. Imagine Google in your head).

It was quite topical because there is a US political fight going on for real at the moment, Hillary Clinton vs Barack Obama for the democratic candidate and I think it helped me enjoy the book. The book focuses on media manipulation tricks that politicians try - puppet mastery I guess. The book wasn’t particularly about computers and didn’t have a broad sci-fi scope, it was more focused on a single sci-fi idea which was explored in depth. I enjoyed it quite a bit (I enjoy anything with powerful characters that demonstrate a strong will).

This quality half-terrabyte Western Digital external hard drive is to replace our now broken NAS drive. Instead of using a NAS drive we have created a Samba share on our server which we find more convenient.

This 2nd drive is for backing up our files using rsync to mirror our primary hard disk.

We map the USB hard disk on our Ubuntu 8.04 machine by putting the following in /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdb1   /home/fotherby/Bitbucket    ext3    user,rw 0       0

We call our backup drive “Bitbucket” which is a name we learnt from the IC DOC labs. We do a nightly backup by putting the following script in /etc/cron.daily/ourBackup:

#!/bin/sh

rsync -a --delete /home/fotherby/OurStuff /home/fotherby/Bitbucket/CharmeleonMirror/
rsync -a --delete /var/www/tomfotherby /home/fotherby/Bitbucket/CharmeleonMirror/

• -a: Archive. This causes rsync to maintain things like file permissions and ownerships (same as -rlptgoD).
• –delete: This tells rsync to delete files that are no longer on the server from the backup. The delete is done BEFORE any of the new data is transferred.

We are having the dining room and sitting room re-wired and re-plastered:

Before Plastering:
During Plastering:
After Plastering:
After Painting:

It’ll be nice to not have to look at the bare brickwork any more. Plus having more than one socket in the room will be a real luxury.

Since we are having our dining room re-plastered and have stripped the wallpaper, it is the right time to have our window replaced with French doors. We have planned to do it ever since we were looking round the house when it was still on the market:

Before:
After:

It has made the room much brighter. A big improvement which I guess won’t be fully realised till the rest of the room is done.

Chloe’s company, Panasonic, have made the whole Thatcham mobile phone development site redundant and are giving the staff their PCs which I’m thinking of as a leaving present.

It is a Dell Optiplex GX270 which is a good upgrade but exactly the same form factor as the previous GX260 : CPU: Pentium 4 3GHz RAM: 1GB DDR SDRAM.