paul.j.fenwick
Freedom Loving Scientist
Welcome to my home on the internet! Everything here is free
under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license unless marked
otherwise.
This site contains various pieces of writing across my various
interests, and spanning several years. You can
fork this site
on github if you wish.
Busy
Been stupidly busy recently. There's a lot of people who's
mail I haven't replied to, and lots to write but not enough
time to do so.
Got some interesting news I'll post the next few days.
(read more...)
Neighbours
Met our neighbours today, with whom we share a wall.
They're extremely cool. They're geeks (like us), they're
about our age, they're vegan (we're vegetarian), they're
interested in sustainable living, and they know all the same
people we know. They're very friendly, and have been kind
enough to offer a length of CAT-5 over the fence (or to
drill a hole through the wall) to give us decent network
connectivity until our new line gets put in.
Gave them some Earth Garden magazines to read and a free
copy of TPJ #19. We're probably going to go out to dinner
this weekend, and maybe go along the Merri Creek to go
spotting edible plants. Oh yes, they also like chickens and
ducks.
The bad news about the neighbours is that they're only
renting, so potentially they may leave at some point to
be replaced with boring neighbours. I hope this
doesn't happen.
(read more...)
Moved House
Yay, at last we've finally moved. The new house is great,
and I think I should be able to run a bit of network cable
from our machine-room, out the window, and under the plum
tree. That makes me very happy indeed.
Got a bunch of things to do, so I'll write more later.
(read more...)
Blah, still sick. Everything's okay provided that I stay
still and don't think, which means everything is also
incredibly boring. I'm going to be rightly annoyed with my
immune system if I'm not feeling better by tomorrow.
(read more...)
Sick
I seem to have caught the flu that has been doing laps
around work. It seems that we've never really been able to
eliminate it from the office, it just passes from section to
section and eventually mutates before re-infecting its
original hosts.
Unfortunately between the flu and the medication to make me
feel slightly more human, I've been left on about 10% of my
regular mental capacity. Coding is impossible, writing is
difficult, and even Java in a nutshell no longer
seems to be a warm and friendly way of forgetting worldly
pains.
One of the weirdest things is that the flu is giving me some
very bizzare dreams. I have odd dreams at the best of
times, but these ones are really setting a new standard.
Last night I dreamed that my nose contained an XML
parse-tree, which is why it was so congested. Worse still,
I kept refusing to blow my nose because I needed that data
and it hadn't yet been backed up.
House
We move in this weekend, which means this week is
busy-busy-busy. The weekend was spent doing plastering and
painting, and we had half of a solar hot-water service
installed today (the rest is being installed on Friday).
I've been trying to find a plasterer to replace the cornis
(spel?) in the bedroom, but every plasterer seems to be
booked out for the next two months. The ones that aren't
busy haven't been returning my calls.
Smoking
Gill lasted a couple of hours in her attempts to give up,
but AFAIK Kat's been clean for about two weeks now. I owe
her a little monkey talking-hair-scrunchy for her
willpower. Good Kat.
(read more...)