Peter Russell

It used to be that when it got to be the early summer and I stayed out too late, I'd be horrified by the morning light.  We'd ruined the coming day, Jo would shout at the starlings "SHUT UP".

Tonight, last night, I was at Wax:on at Leeds University Union, which was my place of work up to yesterday.  It was highly recommended, but in the event completely shit.  Never mind, we were able to get on the guest list.  Today, yesterday,  I've been working out what I'm doing with my redundancy money.   Since I've managed to land a new job (subject to three month trial), I should be alright.  Also I've been bottling my home brewed beer.  It should be good.

Right now there are aeroplanes starting to cut vapour trails through the virgin cloudless blue, and the world is completely silent as the sun rises above the skyline of Leeds.  It's deeply, deeply beautiful, and I feel glad to be seeing it.  Who cares if tomorrow is ruined, who cares if it's the end of a bad night out, on the heels of another bad night out.  Right now, listening to music and having a drink with the gf, it's beautiful and I'm properly, truly,  happy.

I intend this to be the last proper update of this journal.  I may start blogging elsewhere, if I do then I'll link to it from here.

Dear Sir / Madam,

I'm writing to you to complain about Virgin Media's handling of the the current row over Wikipedia's page on The Scorpion's Virgin Killer album. As you will be aware the page is being blocked as a result of it being put on the Internet Watch Foundation's blacklist.

I have been researching this issue a little, and like many of your customers, I feel extremely aggrieved by the way that Virgin have handled this situation. I realise that the initial decision was made by the IWF, not by Virgin, and I understand that Virgin have reasonable reasons for using and supporting the IWF, however there are several ways in which Virgin should have acted better:

1. The page was blocked by a transparent proxy that does not use the X-Forwarded-For header. This has made it impossible for Wikipedia to tell between users who are not logged in, meaning that anonymous editing is inevitably impossible (one vandal ruins it for everyone). There is no technical reason for this to be the case (other ISPs appear to have managed) and I would like to be assured that if this should ever happen again, Virgin will have remedied this.
2. When visiting the blocked page, the proxy server returns a blank page, with a "200 OK" status code. This is wrong, clearly everything is not OK, and it's hard to see this as anything less than Virgin Media lying to their customers. At the very least the proxy server should send an appropriate error code, and return a message explaining that the page is blocked as a result of being on the IWF black list. Visiting Wikipedia discussion pages on the subject quickly shows the level of confusion that existed when the block was first put in place. Hiding things without explaining why or even acknowledging that they're hidden is not acceptable in a free society. Again I would like an assurance that this will be remedied in future.

Beyond these technical issues, I can't help but question Virgin's willingness to unquestioningly enforce the IWF's judgement even now that it's clear (as it must be) that they have made an error. Surely you should be able to correct the this for your customers. In a competitive market of ISPs, I think I should be able to use willingness to employ common sense as a criteria for selecting my supplier. I hope you will confirm that you haven't abdicated that ability to the IWF completely!

As the Internet becomes peoples primary means of communication, private citizens need to be able to have a relationship of trust with our ISPs. I hope you will restore my trust for Virgin Media by demonstrating that you understand why these issues are important.

Yours Faithfully

Peter Russell

Meredith Brooks may have been a poor man's Cheryl Crow, but sometimes that's what a poor man needs.

At the insistence of many of my friends, I've signed up to Facebook.

Now what?

As far as I can tell, it's simply LiveJournal, but without the journals.  No less pointless than Orkut.

I mean at least MySpace has those bloody annoying music things that all play different things at the same time.  They're annoying as hell - a fucking terrible idea, but at least they're something!

Update:
Oh, apparently they do image hosting.

I used Google code search for the first time today. It really helped me out :-)

Going to be in Cambridge for the Saffs on Saturday.

Anyone else coming?

Russell's law of war:

If a conflict has been going on for more than one generation (i.e. people are fighting in it who were not born when it started), then it will be impossible to win by force.

Received a letter from Blockbusters today saying that I had fines outstanding because I returned some DVDs late. Only it didn't say that. What it actually said was You have made use of the Extra Night Option, which apparently is a service that they do where you can keep films for as long as you want, and it costs you £1.95 a night. Kind of like a fine.

A website that Qustom were doing the back-end for went live today. It says at the bottom of the page Best viewed in IE 4 and above at a minimum screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. I wasn't working on it, but I apologise anyway.

Woke up on Saturday morning this weekend to find a text message on my phone:

Dad has won the big premium bond prize
mum

This got me pretty excited, I looked on the website and, as I suspected, the big prize is (pinky in corner of mouth) one million pounds. So I tried to phone Mum back. In my excitement I got the wrong number once, then didn't get an answer. It was brilliant news, because it meant my parents would be able to stop worrying about their pensions, and they'd be able to support themselves through their retirement without any problems.

It took a few hours before Nicola remembered that it was April fools day.

I also got suckered by the wireless extension cord on ThinkGeek, although in my defence, when I was shown it by justtom, it wasn't yet the first in my locale, and I was sent a link straight to the page, rather than seeing it on their front page. Had I seen the Grow Your Own 1-up Mushroom kits and USB tanning studio, I might have caught on a bit faster.

Given that it's now the 3rd, and these things are still on their front page, without any sort of comment explaining that they're hoaxes, I think it's fair to say that April Fools has come and gone, so they're the fools for carrying on.

I know very well where my passport is.

I keep my passport in the shoebox of Things of Sentimental Significance. If for any reason it's not there, it is almost certainly at the front or back of my expanding file of Important Paper, but it won't be in the file, it'll be in the shoebox, because I remember putting it there.

And if it isn't in either of those places, then it must be in the pile of paper on top of my toolbox that belongs in the file but just hasn't made it's way back there yet.

Failing that, it's probably in my sock drawer, or one of my desk draws.

Or down the back of my chest of draws? Under the bed? Under the wardrobe? What about the living room table? Tucked behind the u-bend of the toilet?

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Update: Of course it turned out to be in the shoebox, I just hadn't looked hard enough. Shame that I've moved the entire contents of my bedroom onto my bed in the process of looking for it. Looks like I'm sleeping on the floor again tonight.

According to pyramidbattery there are two types of people in the world : Those who don't find me funny, and those who are fucking mental.

She did laugh while she said it though.

It makes me suspicious when I see people who are looking to recruit a candidate with at least 2 years commercial Java 5 development experience., or five years experience with .NET.

Try running python -c "import this" at a command prompt.

Where is my bag? WHERE IS MY BAG?? WHERE THE FUCK IS MY BAG??

I have an awe-inspiring opportunity for 4 x Credit Analysts within this leading financial organisation based in Yorkshire. (Emphasis added)

Hate hate hate hate

Just phoned up this woman about a job I'd applied for. Spent slightly too long explaining that Haskell isn't actually very much like C.

The things I'm finding hardest about this relationship thing are when all I really want to talk about is her, but no one really cares, and worse, the bits that I can't really tell anyone about, but I want to so much.

For example, I just got a text message, which I really want to post here, to say Look at this. There is someone in the world who likes me This much. I am THIS fucking SPECIAL, and you're not, or you might be to someone else, but not to Her, and that can't possibly be as good.

But of course I can't post it here, because that would be a massive betrayal of confidence.

But I wish I could tell you, I really wish I could.

Here are some nice things people have said to me recently:

Do you have plans for Christmas Day?

I've been in Yorkshire for a year now, and I've not made a great deal of money, and I've not got a great deal to show for it. But at least three people from the pub asked me if I had plans for Christmas day, and if I didn't then I'd be welcome at theirs, and when people like you enough to be willing to invite you into the bosom of their family at Christmas, well that's certainly worth something. As it happens I went to Tom's family's again. Had a good time, but I think next year I'm going to aim to spend Christmas with my own family.

Hey, happy birthday dude. we are all in the red lion toasting your past present and future.

It's good to keep old traditions alive. I was really pleased to hear I had a party in Cambridge even if I did have another engagement (work). I got drunk at the Tut after work, and on the 28th justtom, rimmel5622, a1r0tc1v, Leon, Andy, Rich and Amber came to the FAB cafe and got me drunk again, and then we played Munchkin until six in the morning. Painfully hungover the next day. My birthday got well and truly celebrated this year.

I love you

Nicola has been away in Canada over Christmas, which has been a bit weird. Since she's been back I've spent quite a lot of time with her, which is always fun. I guess it might be simply that absinthe makes the tart grow fonder, but this morning she told me that she thought she was in love with me. I said that I loved her too, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't lying. Pretty exciting, huh?

Here are some New years resolutions:

The usual one.

Doing OK so far.

Do some programming every day, at least until I get a proper job.

I want to get some practise in the different languages that I claim to know. Failed both days so far. Oh well, always tomorrow.

Get a proper job.

I'm looking for a new job, for reasons I shall expand on in a future entry if I ever get the thing finished. Hire me! I'm a great programmer! No really!

Cycle more.

Sometime before the summer I intend to cycle to Liverpool. This is going to require some training, a week off work (if I have a job) and possibly a new bike, but I reckon it should be possible. In the meantime I just want to use the bike again. I haven't been on it at all since I got knocked off by a car a few months ago.

Dear IT industry,

Please stop using the word Innovate. I think you know why.

Yours,





Peter S Russell

Last year I wrote that I didn't know how to spell my cousin's name. I realised tonight that a year later this was still true. Fortunately I managed to work out that she's Clare not Claire (which I'm recording here for my own reference in future years), by looking in the logs of IM conversations with my Dad. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it would be better if all my conversations were on IM, but full text search is a pretty useful feature :-)

I was pretty pleased with myself for working this out, until I wrote Peter instead of Patrick when I wasn't paying attention.

I'm staying in Leeds again this year.

My confession to the Internet:

I am an alcoholic.

I'm told that the first step is admitting it, but I'm not quite sure that I'm ready for any second step.

We've had no alcohol in the flat for ages, and as a result I've been relatively sober for quite a while, however justtom brought half a bottle of Bols Gold Strike (cinnamon schnapps with little bits of gold floating in it; Goldschalger by another - cheaper - name, 50% alcohol by volume) home from his parents with him tonight, and I've drunk at least three quarters of it on my own, since about nine this evening.

I leap on any opportunity to get drunk. Normally I'll stop when I'm at the point of embarrassing myself, but when it's a night off, and Tom has gone to bed, there's no risk of me embarrassing myself except from on my LiveJournal. Ah well, it was free booze, although I imagine that Tom might have liked to have had to have some more of it himself.

That said, I only seem to write interesting things on my LiveJournal when I'm drunk, and I'm certainly drunk now, so maybe my apology can be to write something amusing or interesting (some fat chance).

For the most part my life is much the same as it has been for most of the times I've updated in the past year. Still working for Qustom during the day (although I've not had a great deal of work to do recently, so I've not been making a lot of money out of it), still working in the Tut 'n' Shive by night.

With respect to Qustom, we're gearing up for a prospective big project at the moment (fingers crossed!) To be honest, a lot of the time I find the bar work more interesting that the programming, but maybe that will change if/when we start working on the new project. Hopefully we'll be able to make the most of the experience we gained from the previous project (which was in all meaningful terms, a complete failure, at least so far). I hope that this time we won't make big design mistakes at the start, which we have to fix again and again and again; that gets depressing! This time we're being paid to produce a spec and a design, and we're not going to start coding unless we have a contract to deliver a product.

For some time now I've been thinking that I probably ought to give up on Qustom, and get a proper job, but I've invested too much time in Hive, and in this new project to walk away right now. Hopefully before Christmas I should know if we've got a contract to develop this new system. If we do, then I'm pretty much committed to completing it, and it should bring enough money into the company to keep it (and us) going for a while. If not, then I think I'm going to have to get a Nine To Five. Paying the rent for last month was hard (I only did it today, and it involved a calculation of how many days worth of food I had in the flat. Thanks rimmel5622 for leaving those Chinese rib steak things in our freezer!), and this month is going to be harder. We've just had an influx of utility bills.

I'm not sure that I have the confidence, determination, or self motivation to play any major role in bringing a company to success; but if a Free/Open Source Software company is moving towards success then do I want to be a part of it? Oh hell yes, especially if it is with Andy, who is a great guy and a True Believer.

There are two dreams that I want to live, the Dot Com dream, and the Generation X dream. Right now I'm (theoretically at least) realising both of them, although Generation X was largely about telling stories, and not very much about working behind a bar; I seem to be working behind a bar quite a lot, but not telling very many stories any more, at least not here. Still, turning away from this would be hard.

In slightly-more-interesting-than-my-morose-reflections-on-my-two-inconsequential-jobs news:

I've got a Girlfriend.

I've said a little about her here already, but, I hope, not too much. Her name is Nicola, and she really seems to like me. I'm not entirely sure why. She approached me in a pub in Leeds, asking me to buy her a dance, which was one of six options, selected on the turn of a die. On reading the piece of paper that the choices were written on, I realised that she was meant to ask me to buy her a drink. She seemed to be happy enough with that.

Since then I've liked her more every time I've seen her or spoken to her. To start with it was good that she came up to me first, because for every foible and idiosyncrasy of mine that she stumbled across, I didn't need to feel too nervous that it would scare her off me; she chose me after all. It turns out that we're not all that dissimilar, despite me being a barman (for the most part), and her being a secondary school teacher.

As I like her better, I care more about what she thinks about me, and I'm feeling more, rather than less nervous around her. I expect this will retreat over time, but at the moment when I eat around her I feel sick, and it's proving to be quite inconvenient. Still, every time I say goodbye to her I wait to get out of her eyesight, before jumping around like a seven year old on speed. It's really quite a feeling to know that a date, or a text message conversation (or best of all, a text message conversation after a date) went well.

All of that is to say nothing about the feeling of holding someone else's skin against your own. I can see how people seem to get so addicted to that feeling.

I imagine that sooner or later Nicola is going to come across this entry. I hope I haven't said anything out of line!


Writing this entry has taken the best part of three hours. I've got through the remainder of the Goldschlagerclone in that time, and listened to a hell of a lot of music. Has anyone ever produced an entire LiveJournal entry within the duration of a single track or is the music field always either inaccurate or there to make a point, as it is for me?

Here's a nice rant: http://www.pigdog.org/auto/software_jihad/link/2581.html

Found on BoingBoing.