neuro.me.uk

(With apologies to Monty Python)

Four well-dressed men sitting together at a LUG meeting, surrounding a laptop running Ubuntu 9.04.

First Yorkshireman (1Y): Ahh … Very passable, this, very passable.

Second Yorkshireman (2Y): Nothing like a good install of Ubuntu Jaunty, eh Gessiah?

Third Yorkshireman (3Y): You’re right there, Obediah.

Fourth Yorkshireman (4Y): Who’d a thought fifteen years ago we’d all be sittin’ here recordin’ a podcast usin’ Jokosher on Ubuntu?

1Y: Aye. In them days, we’d a’ been glad to have Slackware installed on t’hard disk.

2Y: A beta of Slackware.

3Y: Without network card or CD-ROM drive.

4Y: Or a hard disk!

1Y: In a filthy Packard Bell.

3Y: We never used to have Packard Bell. We used to have to use RM Nimbuses.

2Y: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of a Sinclair QL.

4Y: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

1Y: Aye. Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, “Money doesn’t buy you operatin’ systems.”

3Y: ‘E was right. I was happier then and I had nothin’. We used to use Yggdrasil Linux on an old Compaq with half of case missin’.

2Y: Case? You were lucky to have a case! We used to have motherboards and components scattered about floor for ’servers, all hundred and twenty-six of ‘em, no cable ties. Half the things were un-updated; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of being DDoSed!

4Y: You were lucky to have updates! *We* used to have to hand-patch kernels every week!

1Y: Ohhhh we used to dream of hand-patching kernels! Woulda been a weight lifted to us. We used to infiltrate remote systems to snoop on the kernel to see what’d been changed the night before to reverse engineer t’changes back on our own kernels. Patches!? Hmph.

3Y: Well when I say “patch” it was a hard copy of a diff printed on continuous paper with the green lines on it, but it were a patch to us.

2Y: We stopped gettin’ our hard copies; we had to fly to Finland and get Linus to transcribe bloody diffs onto notebooks!

4Y: You were lucky to have notebooks! There were a hundred and sixty of us passing code changes across Europe by t’game of Chinese Whispers.

1Y: By phone?

4Y: Aye.

1Y: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a telephone exchange intercepting phone calls on the off-chance we’d catch your Chinese Whispers. We’d scratch the diffs onto nearby bits of copper wire, swallow ‘em and spend fourteen hours on bog trying to get em back again when we got home. Then our Dad would thrash us t’sleep with his copy of BYTE!

2Y: Luxury. We use to have to swim t’Finland at three o’clock in the morning, sneak up to Torvalds’ house, spy on him until he typed in the bits we thought he was changing, scribble them down on newspaper and post them and ourselves back by DHL, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken Tulip network card, if we were lucky!

4Y: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up at twelve o’clock at night, figure out t’diffs by mental projection, lick t’diffs onto EEPROMs for 1,166 Swatch Internet beats, debug the compiler with a slide rule, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with unsheathed Cat 5.

3Y: Right. I had to steal kernel diffs from you bastards, invent time machine, go back in time, give diffs to Torvalds to implement as the first version of the code instead of the twentieth, go forward in time, and find all the diffs already implemented in the kernel I got with Slackware, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing the Free Software Song.

1Y: But you try and tell the young people today that … and they won’t believe ya’.

ALL: Nope, nope …

The first rule of Lunch Club is you do not talk about Lunch Club

The second rule of Lunch Club is you do not talk about Lunch Club

Third rule: If someone says “nachos!”, orders a garlic bread, or eats with their fingers, the lunch is over

Fourth rule: Only one plate to a person

Fifth rule: One course at a time

Sixth rule: No napkins, no salad forks

Seventh rule: Lunches will go on as long as they have to

And the eighth and final rule: If this your first day at Lunch Club, you have to munch

Ahhh, Christmas Tapes …

Jono’s post about taxi cabs and close calls with death reminded me of how little hassle I’ve usually had with cab drivers.

I usually chat away to cabbies, and tip pretty generously on most occasions, but one guy in San Francisco took the biscuit, and didn’t get tipped. Or chatted to, as I was giving him directions.

I had to go 8 blocks from Clay to Green carrying a load of crap in plastic bags, so thought “fuck it, cab”. There was one across from the hotel. “Battery and Green”, I’d asked. “Do you know how to get there?” he replied? I thought he was implying it wasn’t that far, or did I know where I was going? Nah, he was asking because he didn’t bloody know where it was. Then, when I gently discussed how cabbies in the UK have to do The Knowledge before they’re let loose on the streets, he told me that that was “not true, they can just go out and drive like here”. Hey, don’t mind me, I only bloody live there. I ended up having to guide this guy to the destination as, by his own admission, he’d only been working for two days, including that one.

Then there was the private cab driver who, on taking me from Chelmsford town centre to Stansted Airport on a Friday afternoon, seemed to be dominating the conversation. He was basically chatting me up. He even broke my cardinal rule, which is when taking a cab for work travel, expense the bare fare, but pay with a tip. That way, the tip comes out of my own pocket. But nooooo, this guy threw an extra fiver on the receipt. “There you go, mate, something back for yourself”. Brrrrrr. I took a meal off my expenses that week to counter it.

… designed the titles for Star Wars, they’d look something like this.

The first rule of Drink Camp is: you do not talk about Drink Camp.

The second rule of Drink Camp is: you do not talk about Drink Camp.

Third rule: If someone says “shots!”, orders a martini, or drinks Fosters, the drink is over.

Fourth rule: Only one glass to a drink.

Fifth rule: One drink at a time, fellas.

Sixth rule: No cocktail umbrellas, no coasters.

Seventh rule: Drinks will go on as long as they have to.

And the eighth and final rule: If this is your first night at Drink Camp, you have to drink.

His name, was Jack Daniels.

Got back from Develop at Brighton at the weekend. Got some choice quotes from the couple of days I was there.

• “Do you do a fish butty?” (asked in the fish and chip shop next to the Hilton Metropole)
• “This is fucking awful!” (said by an unknown woman to Peter Molyneux outside the Hilton)
• “I’m on the same panel as the guy who created Loco Roco!” (said in gushing tones by an conference attendee)
• “There’s nothing serious about a My Little Pony butt-plug” (overheard by accident at an after-conference meal)
• “You’ve been drinking all our fucking booze!” (an irate gamesindustry.biz employee getting a bit stroppy)

Last year, I thought “how cool would it be to have a Talk Like Yoda Day, you know, like Talk Like a Pirate Day?” I wasn’t the first to have the idea — and I certainly won’t be the last — but I’ve finally managed to throw content onto talklikeyoda.com in time for the proposed Day on the 21st of May (the 1980 US release date of Empire).

I should have done it much, much sooner, but you know, I suck et cetera. Anyway, enjoy.

UpdateDigg this, you will.

My ADSL connection is currently tres latent due to some Cisco badness on BT’s part. If you’re trying to call me on Skype or my VoIP number, it’ll either sound like I’m the Moon, or it won’t connect. You may also find my site a tad slow too until it’s sorted out.

Still, in other news, I’ve found out a great way to get a cheap flatscreen TV that looks like this …

… the only problem is, that to install it, you have to do this …

Cheers to Derek for that!