David Morris – brassedoff.net

What is black?
Burnt toast is black
Coloured like the black tarmac

What is white?
A white cat is white
With limelight eyesight

What is pink?
A soft drink is pink
Next to the skating rink

What is green?
A leaf is green
Fluttering down to a bowling green

What is blue?
Glue is blue
Left upon the marble statue

What is yellow?
A song is yellow
Its melody played upon a cello

What is red?
Cherrys are red
Off the tree they fall on the head

What is violet?
A highlighter is violet
On the table in the twilight

What is orange?
What oranges are orange
Just orange

By Daniel morris, aged 8.

I decided to take the plung and have a go at writing a Wordpress theme for a new venture Mrs Woolforbrains is working on. I can do the PHP (backend scripting code), but I’m not a designer. However, with the playing about I’ve done recently with the Kiveton 2009 web site, I realised that CSS had come a long way from being an easy way to change a few colours on a page, so perhaps it was time to trawl around a few web sites and see what I could come up with.

So far, it’s not brilliant, but it’s not finished yet. I started with a completely clean sheet, a new theme in a  new subdirectory. I’ve had to create all the graphics from scratch as well.. not many so far, but there are more to do. I fancy having rounded ends on the post headings and I haven’t given much though yet to the sidebars. It’s going to be a bit on the minimalist side, but it’s a start in the right direction.

Cycling home from work a couple of nights ago, I was struck (not literally) by the number of buses. There used to be the old adage of buses being pack animals? Well it was a bit like that at Darnall on Wednesday evening.

Let me set the scene. There are two major bus companies plying their trade in Sheffield – First Group and Stagecoach. I don’t quite know how it works, not being a bussy person generally (my public transport tends to be tram or train), but they both run services on the 52 route which in t’olden days used to run from Woodhouse to Crookes. These days there seems to be an unlimited number of variations on that, but I digress…

Anyway, there we are, at darnall and it’s instant traffic jam. No less than four, yes shouting for the hard of reading,FOUR 52 service buses at Darnall, all trying to get the best spot to get passengers on board. Two First single deckers and the same number from Stagecoach. What I’ve observed in the past is that when you get this type of scenario, the two companies’ drivers seem to indulge in a turf war: “They’re MY passengers”. “No they’re not, they’re mine and I’m going to block you from getting to the bus stop first”. What happens next is that there’s an almighty melee of buses and scant regard is paid to any other road users.

“Sorry, was that a cyclist I nearly knocked off his bike? Not to worry, at least I’ll get to the next bus stop before that stinky {insert name of rival company} driver”.

The best plan is to stay well away from the pack animals.

Why the reference to the Iron Lady? Once upon a time, Sheffield used to have an efficient bus system until the previous Conservative government deregulated the buses and opened them up to private competition. Cue two companies…

Dan took his Grade III euphonium exam on Monday. I’ve just had a text from his teacher to say he got 80/100. All that practice on scales and aural paid off. Needless to say, we’re very proud of what he’s achieved considering he’s only 8 and been playing for under 12 months. I think his teacher is quite pleased too!

In the words of “Not the Nine O’Clock News”… “this has nothing to do with me”…

I did promise some more pictures from my canal trip last weekend when the sun was shining, so here goes.

This one is of the Seth Ellis exiting Limekiln lock. The two Petes are standing guard on either side of the gates waiting for Chris and  Georgina to bring the boat out. I’m down on the next lock getting it ready complete with windlass and camera. If you want to read an alternate take on what life’s like on the Chesterfield Canal, read my friend Boatie Pete’s blog. He’s the one on the left in the above picture.

Ever wanted to know how to ascend a true treble staircase? Well, there’s the instructions.The Chesterfield Canal was opened in 1777 and these staircase locks are some of the earliest in existence. The flight from Shireoaks to Kiveton, the so-called Giant’s Staircase, has two double staircases and two treble staircases. Thorpe Top Treble is the the first lock you hit on leaving Kiveton. You think that’s bad? When Norwood Tunnel was open, the top lock was a quadruple staircase and there were doubles and trebles as well… and that was after having legged or poled the fully laden boat through the tunnel. No rest for the wicked eh?

You know who you are!!

Try this link for size: http://www.periodicvideos.com/index.htm#

(…just seen on El Reg)

For once, this is a work-related blog (I promise another canal picture later though!).

I thought I’d share some openSuSE11.0 upgrade experiences in case anyone else has problems.

I’ve got two machines at work – a Windows box and a Linux box. Box are home-built and both are rock-solid performers. I do tend to update the Linux box as latest versions of my favourite OS come out, and the upgrade from 10.3 to 11.0 promised some nice features, like KDE4.0 and compositing as standard.

The first problem was that after the upgrade the grub configuration got trashed. The ‘kernel’ line didn’t point to a kernel that had been installed in the system. Maybe it was an installer / upgrade problem – maybe I did something wrong, but it’s the first time I’ve had that go wrong, and it took an hour and several reboots with the recovery systemto fix it.

The second and more concerning problem was that I started to experience frequent lock-ups. Because these initially started to affect me when I was using KDE4, my first assumption was that it was something to do with compositing and KDE4. With that in mind, I left the machine in text mode and tried just using NX to connect from my Windows box (which is how I use the machine most of the time anyway), but I was still getting the lock-ups when running KDE4. Blaming KDE4, I tried KDE3 but was still getting problems.

After an hour or so trawling the various forums and newgroups, I saw one posting that made me think it could be the kernel. When I checked, my system had the -pae kernel installed. Removing that and replacing it with the -default kernel appears to have done the trick, and KDE4 works as well!

More canal pictures to follow.

English summer. Pimms. Cricket. Barbecues.

Rain.

More rain.

Yes, it’s that time of the year again. This weekend, we’ve had the Seth Ellis up at Kiveton for Boats and Boots, and on Friday, predictably, as I booked the day off work to work the boat, it hammered it down. I took this shot look towards the rear of Seth Ellis, at replica tug Portugal moored behind us on the feeder moorings and I feel it said it all about the day. Despite that, it was great fun.

Today the sun is shining and we’re taking the boat down from Kiveton to Shireoaks. Four hours cruising and 21 locks including two treble staircases and two doubles. 18th century engineering at its best. I’ll be taking the camera and hope to get some nice postcard shots.

My 18-month contract with O2 for my mobile provision has just expired. I’ve been delighted with the service considering I was forced to move by Orange when they refused to do me a suitable deal that included a Blackberry at a reasonable price and keep my number, despite having been with them for pushing 10 years at the time…

Anyway, I digress…

It had always been my intention to upgrade my Blackberry Pearl 8100 to an 8120 with GPS, WiFi and video shooting capability when the contract ran out, so I rang O2’s (UK-based) customer services this morningto see what my options were.

“Sorry,  but we can’t offer you the 8120 any more. It may be on the web site but it has been discontinued. Would you like an 8310 instead?”. No, Iwouldn’t ‘cos it’s huge and I already have to carry an 8810 for work. Back to te drawing board, or so I thought.

Having gone back over the web site again, I revisited the 8110 specs, and sure enough, this has GPS and video shooting capability. Whilst talking potential contracts, the guy also offered me a contract with the same minutes and texts (pretty) much as my current contract (which I never use all of anyway!) and free, yes, free unlimited Blackberry.

Well, seeing as the Blackberry is worth a tenner a month, it seemed too good a deal to miss, so I signed up on the spot. There’s a 10 day cooling off period following receipt of the handset, but I don’t somehow think I’ll be sending it back.

Pebbel is the newest addition to our family. there’s me, Mrs Woolforbrains, Daniel, Laura and Tewkesbury the two guinea pigs and now…

…meet Pebble, an eight-week old Shih Tzu puppy.

So now, we’re going through the house-training bit….

“Is that damp bit on the rug anything to do with Pebble?”

“No, but what was there before was…”