My new headphones are very poorly designed. The indicator on them detailing which is left and which is right is a raised section on the speaker-part of the earpiece, meaning if you put the mufflers on you can't work out which is which.

Well I am writing my first proper update since I went down south for my summer internship.

I'm staying in Winchester, working in Romsey - two places near Southampton, at the opposite end of the country from my home.This is probably what uni feels like to people who travel more than half an hour south from home!

IBM is an interesting place to work. I have been entrusted with a ~2.5Ghz Netvista computer to work on. The first thing I did (as I couldn't do anything else at the time) was to install debian. Without going into too much detail this wasn't easy: the netvista's network card driver isn't in the debian rescue floppy distro, and there isn't a cd burner. I ended up having to download a CD ISO using jigdo on win32 and mounting that as a loopback filesystem. That jigdo program is nice.

The place I am staying is quite nice but very expensive - 90 GBP a week. Food here is reasonably expensive but what can you expect for the south. The people I live with are pretty nice, as are the people I work with, so I'm looking forward to getting to know them better.

What I work on is confidential, but I can tell you a little bit about it. I am working as part of a team to develop some test software. I am personally writing a linux kernel device driver - so lots of esoteric reading and hardcore C, lovely.

Anyway I'm enjoying it, making quite a lot of progress at work and learning some new things. Unfortunately I'm not doing much work on my disseration because I'm so busy, but I'll have to get back into the swing of that this weekend.

KSR's Mars trilogy to be made into a Sci-Fi short series, as Dune was recently. Read about it at scifi.com, zap2it, discuss it at the demimonde.

A small piece of non-news, the mysql server is back up, so the links page works again. I now have to get on and improve it!

Well despite my disclaimer, a random passer-by _did_ buy me something from my wishlist. A lad from uni accidentally ordered me a book on his friend's account (Thanks ali!). I'll get the cheque to you asap.

There will be a slight delay however, because last night someone placed a very inconvenient chair in my room.

My bed is a few feet in front of my door in my room here in durham, and I don't have a bed side lamp at the moment, so I have to turn off the lights at the wall and walk to my bed in darkness. No problem, I hear you say.

Except, someone put a hard wood chair directly in the path from my door to my bed (don't ask how I didn't notice it in the first place) which I walked into and cracked my toe on.

This morning I got up and it has swelled up loads, and REALLY hurts. I'm fairly sure its broken (the pain is not like bruise pain), and I'm going to the hospital in a bit, just as soon as I can make sure someone is in when I return. Taxi fairs to and from exams are going to cost a bomb :|

I will be replacing newsdot with my own version soon, which I will be using for my own purposes, so if the original doesn't return, fret not!

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