Still trying to get this thing symmetrical. Still failing.

The good news is that my laptop is upgraded and restored to the point where I can at least post this. The ironic news is that the gDesklets CPU monitor is showing a consistent 20% usage by the gDesklets CPU monitor (and, to be fair, a few other desklets). So… am I back to the old days of a bare desktop and no way to know much load my machine is under except by the heat coming from the grille on the side? Or will I find a more efficient CPU monitor? Stay tuned!

Ahhh, gDesklets. This makes it feel like uni, when pimping your desktop was basically a diploma course.

I’m in the middle of upgrading Ubuntu on my laptop.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true. I’ve finished upgrading, and now I’m waiting for my home directory to rsync from the server that I backed it up to. It’s moving steadily at about 100MB a minute, which seems sort of slow, but not surprisingly so given how crufty everything in between is, and I’m definitely not going to investigate it before it’s done.

I did actually go to the effort of putting /home on a different partition when I installed it originally, so that I could upgrade it and keep my home directory in place, but I also formatted it as Reiser, which I think has possibly been at the root of some performance and drive-clicking problems, so I’ve reformatted both partitions as ext4, which is presumably somewhat better supported in Ubuntu, being the default filesystem, except that there’s this vague rumour that it occasionally corrupts very large files, except that nobody can reproduce it and they’re starting to think that the reports are bogus, but of course the nature of software is that it’ll never fail when you’re actually looking at it, so now it’s niggling in the back of everyone’s mind that one day all your stuff might be corrupted.

Wasn’t there a time when these things were simple?

…

No, now that I think about it. It’s always been this complicated. But it’s sure as fuck not getting any simpler.

Today’s random facial-hair-related piece of coolness: The Longest Way is a guy who planned to walk from China to Germany. That in itself isn’t all that relevant (although it is awesome), but he has a time-lapse video of his beard.

Also, he stopped about a third of the way through the planned trip (but still having walked across most of mainland China) and caught a plane home, because he decided that what he really wanted to do was go to university. That… is also interesting.

If I’m not mistaken, today, being the half-way point, is judgment day – the day you can rate my mo.

This whole thing… is such a weird concept.

I only just found out recently that there’s a Crust in Parramatta. We ordered pizzas from them last night. They were Good. I think Tina is converted.

(This is in no way Movember-related.)

Yes, there’s a good reason that I’m wearing a high-contrast stripy… is it “stripy” or “stripey”? “stripy” looks like a case-insensitive string processing library for Python or something.

…shirt.

Anyone noticed that @7pmproject has more motion blur than most TV? As though the studio is dark and the cameras have a long exposure time…

Wow. My head looks even more bobbly and off-centre than usual today.

In an ideal world, what sort of setup would you have to take one picture per day in as close to exactly the same position as possible? Based on recent experience, you’d at least need

• a fixed camera,
• a chin rest, also fixed, and
• consistent lighting (away from windows, or only taking pictures at night).

That sounds like a lot of hard work and, more importantly, space. I wonder what you could do with it to justify all the effort…

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Spongebobs #manlegs