Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

A busy bee…

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— orudge @ 31/08/2010 1:55 am

… is what I’ve been lately. Quite a lot has happened since my last blog entry – I was back in the UK for about a month, seeing Olivia, who is doing really well. She’d grown a huge amount since I was last there, and is now incredibly aware and active and just itching to start moving around a bit more! She’s been teething for a while now, which has sadly been bothering her; hopefully her teeth will come through soon and stop bothering her so much. And I’m sure that it won’t be long now until she’s crawling (or even more) – no doubt the fun will really start then! I’ll be back in the UK for a bit in November, and then, as many of you know, I will be moving back for the foreseeable future come December, to be significantly closer to Olivia than I am at the moment. So there’s lots to look forward to, and lots to sort out as I get the fun of another transatlantic move to organise!

For the moment, though, I’m back in Minneapolis, where it is currently quite hot. We’ve not yet moved into our new office, but we should, fingers crossed, be doing that next week! It’s also the Minnesota State Fair this week, so that should be fun to go and have a look around. Nothing else going on that’s too exciting at the moment (I spent most of the weekend doing accounts – fun, eh?). Just keeping busy, as is usual.

Well, I’d best go and stick some washing in the dryer, and then I shall watch some Angel, which I am slowly working my way through after my Buffy marathon this time last year (well, it took me 6 months to watch it all, so perhaps “marathon” isn’t the term, but it was quicker than taking 7 years to watch it all I guess!). Catch you later, peeps.

Yes, I’m still alive!

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— orudge @ 26/06/2010 6:44 pm

I haven’t blogged in ages, I know – things have been a bit busy lately! I headed back to the US in April, and have been enjoying the Minnesota summer (except when it’s been far too hot). Just a few weeks now until I head back to the UK for a month or so – lots of travelling this year! But anyway, at some point between now and then, I shall write a more extensive blog! Promise!

A busy few weeks!

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— orudge @ 17/03/2010 5:04 pm

Sorry for the lack of the updates on the blog – as one might imagine, it’s been a busy few weeks! I don’t think I actually even announced that we’d named our daughter on this blog – we decided on the name Olivia, her full name being Olivia Grace Rudge Littlejohn. There are some photos up here. She’s been doing really well – very active and aware, and growing far too quickly! Things have been quite hectic though, so hopefully they’ll be settling down a bit now. I’ll be heading back to the US at the start of April, for a few months – I shall certainly miss people here though, but I’ll be keeping in regular contact! I will hopefully post a more substantial blog in a while when I have a bit more time, but whether by then I’ll be on this side of the ocean or the other I’m not sure! My Twitter tends to get updated a bit more frequently, so you can always follow me there!

An announcement, part two

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— orudge @ 28/02/2010 10:55 pm

For those of you who haven’t seen my Facebook or Twitter pages, I became a father yesterday! Jen gave birth to a beautiful baby girl at 7.38am yesterday. She came out as 8 lb and 13 oz, and is quite long! We haven’t decided on a name yet, but I will of course post when we do.

Would write more, but as one might imagine, we’ve had a bit of a busy weekend! Shall provide a further update – and a name! – in the coming days.

A long-awaited update

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— orudge @ 11/01/2010 6:04 pm

Well, I’ve intended to write a new blog since October, but have found myself rather busy and until now, didn’t quite get around to doing so. I’m now sitting on a flight back to Minneapolis after my trip to Tahoe, listening to air traffic control on Channel 9. (First United flight I’ve been on in ages which has had Channel 9 enabled!) So it seems like a good time to write this. No doubt you’re all wondering what’s been going on in my life recently, so here goes!

As you probably know, I’m now living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, having moved here in early October. I’ve been settling in pretty well, and am enjoying it so far. Living in a large house in a nice part of the city, quite close to everything, which is handy. Plus the famous Minnesota winter has so far been reasonably tolerable for me. Lots of snow recently, and I think the lowest temperature I’ve experienced is about -25°C. It’s funny how quickly you get used to it though – -5°C now seems pretty warm to me! Of course, the downside it seems is that the Minnesotan winter drags on until about April, but luckily for me I’ll be skipping most of it – more on that later!

Anyway, yes, so far I have been enjoying Minneapolis, and work – it’s good being in the office with everyone else, and not just for the free doughnuts on company meeting day. My first few months have seen various interesting things happen, some of which I shall try to recount here, if I can remember them all! I experienced Halloween American-style, becoming the character of Shaun from Shaun of the Dead (made more convincing by the fact I’m British, of course). There are some photos lurking around somewhere, so I’ll probably upload them eventually. A week or two later, most of the developers at CodeWeavers, myself included, were off to WineConf, which this year was in the Netherlands. It was pretty fun, although I was literally just there from Friday to Monday, so it was a very brief and jetlaggy weekend!

Other things that happened after that… hmm… well, there was my first Thanksgiving, which involved eating far too much food and attempting to understand an American football game. I think I preferred the Rock Band which later took place. I also attended my first ice hockey game, which was a college game between Duluth and Minnesota. Confusingly, of course, Duluth is in Minnesota, but the “Minnesota” team is basically the main Twin Cities team. Anyway, Duluth won, and we lost. A fun game though, something I may well see some more of at some point. That same day we’d taken a tour of the Summit brewery, which is based in St Paul. One thing that did surprise me somewhat was the variety of nice beers available here – lots of microbreweries and the like. I guess I’d got too used to the cinematic version of American bars, which naturally only includes big names like Budweiser or Miller that pay for the product placement!

Speaking of beer, every week now my housemates and I have been partaking in a local pub quiz at the Leaning Tower of Pizza. Our team, which begun as “The Flying Scotsman” and went through a variety of names (typically with the word “flying” replaced with something that vaguely rhymes), has generally done reasonably well – some relatively bad weeks, and some pretty good weeks, with us coming 2nd or 3rd on a number of occasions. We alas haven’t yet come first at LT, but we did also try another quiz at a place called King’s, at which we have a 100% success ratio – we played there twice, and came first twice! We may have to return there again soon, clearly, to make it a hat trick!

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes, Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving finally brought what was more or less the start of winter (this November was one of the mildest Novembers since records began, apparently!), with a load of snow falling in the first week of December, which generally stuck around. And December of course brought Christmas, and then New Year. Christmas was a relatively quiet affair for me, but I was quite content with a nice steak and the Doctor Who specials. Then, after New Year, I was off to Lake Tahoe for skiing, and to see Rachel again of course. The trip was pretty fun, with me getting a bit better at skiing (I can somewhat do parallel turns, it would seem). I also rented a car for a couple of days and took some trips into California, visiting Sacramento and the Apple Hill area, which is full of, as the name might suggest, apple-growers! Rachel and I also ended up going out to a town called Hawthorne, located in the middle of nowhere (relatively speaking) in Nevada. This actually provided a quite enjoyable trip, with an interesting drive there along some scenery which was partially quite spectacular, and partially rather dull. Speaking of spectacular scenery, my flight from Reno – Denver was one of the first flights I’ve been on in the continental US where I’ve been in a window seat (most of my long-distance flights I prefer aisle seats), and I noticed just how massive and, well, spectacular the Rocky Mountains are. Alas, I didn’t get any photos, but it certainly made for an interesting view. All in all, a fun week. I shall be uploading photos from the trip as a whole probably in the next week or two, as and when I have some time.

Speaking of next week (well, tomorrow), we have a big CodeWeavers company meeting here in St Paul. I’m not quite sure how we’re going to cram everybody into the office, but thankfully we do have a conference room hired for most of our meetings and the like, I believe!

Anyway, the week after next, I’m heading back to the UK! As I’m sure you all remember from my previous blog post, I’m going to become a father in about 5 weeks, so I’m heading back a week on Thursday, and shall be heading up to Scotland soon after that. One of the benefits of my job is that I can work remotely during the few months I’ll be staying in the UK, so that is at least handy. I will return to the US in April, but for how long I’m not currently sure. Either way, it’s all very exciting – really not long at all to go now!

Right, well, there are probably other things I’ve forgotten about that I should have mentioned, but we’re approaching MSP, so I should turn off the ol’ computer. Hopefully I’ll be able to post another blog a bit more quickly than I did this one!

(Of course, I wasn’t able to post this blog on the plane, so for “now” read “last night”.)

An update coming soon, promise!

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— orudge @ 31/12/2009 10:00 pm

I’ve been meaning to post a new blog for a couple of months now, and I really will. Just not quite yet. I’ve got a 4 hour flight on Saturday, maybe I’ll write something up then (assuming these silly new security rules don’t mean I can’t use my laptop or something…)

Until then, hope you all had a merry Christmas, and have a happy new year!

An announcement

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— orudge @ 24/09/2009 8:44 pm

It’s been a while since I last made a post here. Quite a lot has been going on! Indeed, I think my last proper blog was when I was in Brazil – which was lovely. Since then I’ve pretty much just been working. Anyway, the main reason for this post: I have a couple of announcements to make.

Firstly, as many of you will know anyway, I’m moving to Minnesota next month. I’ve been working remotely for CodeWeavers as a software developer for the past month and a bit now, which has been going quite well. The work is challenging, for sure, but it is generally enjoyable! Back in June, we applied for an H-1B visa for me, which would allow me to move to the US. The petition was finally approved last week, and on Tuesday I went down to London for my interview at the US embassy on Wednesday. The interview was very brief, and the visa was approved! And today I got a message telling me that my passport would be delivered back to me tomorrow! So I’ve booked my flights now for the 13th of October, giving me about three weeks to get ready. It’s going to be a hectic few weeks, that’s for sure. Lots to pack, lots to get rid of, lots to generally sort out. But it should be a fantastic experience!

And now the other news, which is perhaps more significant. I’m going to become a father in February! This will probably come a bit of a surprise to many of you – it did to both of us when we found out, but both Jen and I are really very excited about it! Such a major change is of course going to have an effect on me going to the US, but I’ll be returning regularly. Four months to go… it’ll be hard work, but it’ll all be worth it.

It’s going to be an exciting few months, for sure.

A busy month

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— orudge @ 31/07/2009 8:54 pm

Well, it has indeed been a busy month, and one in which I have spent surprisingly little time in the UK – a little over 24 hours, really. At the start of the month, I went to Vienna to see Silvia for a few days, and much fun was had. Photos will follow at a later date, once I am back in the UK. And then, the day after heading there, I was back at Manchester Airport to fly out to Frankfurt, where I would then catch a flight down to São Paulo, from where I would finally get a flight up to Jõao Pessoa to see Dad. I’ve been in Brazil since then, and will be heading back to the UK on Sunday (arriving back on Monday). Lots of flying, for sure – some 17,000 miles or so by the time I get back to Manchester on Monday!

So what have I been up to in Brazil? Relaxing and enjoying things mainly. Been down to the beach quite often, out for a swim and then back for a couple of beers. Went out on a boat to the reef last week, which was quite pleasant – got a bit sunburnt though, which was not. Generally, taking things easy – I start work soon, so this was probably the last chance I’d get to head somewhere for a “long” holiday. Again, photos will follow when I get home.

In other news, the updated Locomotion Depot should be launching soon – hopefully later next week. The new site will integrate better with my existing Transport Tycoon Station, and with the future Saved Game Repository (which, yes, is still under what might be considered “eternal development” ). And of course, next Saturday it’s the third annual Transport Tycoon Forums meet, this time in York, which should prove to be interesting!

Right, well, that’s me for now, I think. See you back in the UK!

Packing away…

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— orudge @ 28/06/2009 1:53 pm

Well, I think I’ve meant to write this blog for about a month – things have been a bit busy since then! The main news, of course, is that I am now Mr Owen Rudge BSc (Hons) (St And). It was my graduation this Wednesday past, and a pretty good day it was, too. The weather, while foggy at first, brightened up and was really quite nice by the end of the day. I’ll stick some photos up when I have time. Then on Friday, it was the Graduation Ball – the final social event of the year. It was nice to see everybody one last time, although of course it’s not going to the case that I’ll never see anybody again (and you’re all quite welcome to visit me in Minnesota come October ). Since then it’s been a case of packing and tidying, which I am taking a bit of a break from just now.

Before this past week, I also had a trip up to Banchory to see Jen, where we also went to visit Balmoral – all quite fun. Photos will again follow at some point. I then spent a few days in Inverness with Ann and Graeme, before returning down to St Andrews again. And before that week, well, I can’t quite remember any more. Lots has gone on, anyway.

Lots will be going on in the near future, too. Tomorrow I’ll be heading down to North Wales with all my stuff, dropping Silvia off at Edinburgh Airport on the way. Hopefully I’ll be able to fit everything in the car so I only have to do one trip, but it’s possible I may then have to head back up to St Andrews, and drive down again on Tuesday to take the last of my stuff. We shall see. Then on Wednesday, I’m off to Vienna for a few days, visiting Silvia, before heading back to the UK for all of a day on Sunday, before departing for Brazil on Monday for a month! All a bit mad, really.

Then come August I shall be starting my new job with CodeWeavers, remotely until October when hopefully, pending the approval of my H1-B visa, I will be moving out to the US. So lots to be sorted out and organised.

The past four years have been fantastic, for sure, and quite the experience. But now new horizons beckon, and the future looks bright.

Tick… tick… tick…

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— orudge @ 19/05/2009 9:30 pm

That’s time there, ticking away rather quickly. I had my last ever exam today! (Well, for the foreseeable future, at least.) It’s rather nice to know that I am done with academia. The past four years have been quite the experience – very interesting, of course, and I have learnt much, both inside and outside of the lecture theatre! So anyway, for the next few weeks I get to relax a bit and generally enjoy things, before my graduation at the end of June.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, but I currently do have a job lined up for after my graduation, working for a company in the US. I’m hoping to start working remotely in August (after visiting my Dad in Brazil during July), but the long-term plan is to move out to the US in October. So the other thing I’ll be doing over the next little while is applying for a visa. Specifically, the company has to apply for the visa (an H1-B visa), and I will no doubt have to provide lots of paperwork and the like during that process. In a way it’s quite lucky really – the past few years, demand for H1-B visas has been incredibly high, with something like 3 times as many applicants as there were places last year. This year though, with the recession and so on, there are still some 20,000 visas left, going down at around 1,000/week, so there are still lots available just now. Hopefully I’ll hear more about this over the coming weeks.

Right, well, I’m rather tired, and have Ashes to Ashes and Prison Break to catch up on. Night, all!

Oh, and I know I still have lots of photos to upload from various trips and so on. I shall try to do that over the coming weeks, too.

How awesome

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— orudge @ 29/04/2009 1:23 pm

You’re probably familiar with the likes of TinyURL, which converts a URL into a shorter form. Well, DickensURL lets you convert a URL into a piece of Dickens’s finest prose. I highly recommend visiting http://dickensurl.com/55/%27No_one_is_useless_in_this_world,
%27_retorted_the_Secretary,_%27who_lightens_the_burden_of_it_for_any_one_else.%27, for instance.

And that’s my Link of the Day for today.

Time is ticking on

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— orudge @ 23/04/2009 11:35 pm

Two weeks tomorrow, I shall have had my last ever day of classes at university. Then I’ll have my final two exams, and I’ll be done with university. Mad, eh?

Got my senior honours project handed in last week, and gave a presentation on it yesterday. Overall I’m quite pleased with it, and I think the presentation went quite well. The project itself is a GUI-based configuration file editor for the Apache web server, and it is my intention, once the project has been graded and so on, to release it for anybody to download from this very site. As it is currently implemented, it is quite functional and makes setting up an Apache server really quite easy. It’s portable, too, running on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Keep an eye out on the site in the future if you’d like to try it.

Off to North Wales for the weekend tomorrow afternoon/evening – taking some of my stuff down in advance of me taking lots of stuff down in May/June, and it’ll be nice to see Grandad again, if only for a few days.

And that’s about it for me just now.

Easter holiday

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— orudge @ 10/04/2009 1:21 am

Well, the past couple of weeks have been the Easter holiday (or “spring break” as I guess we’re meant to call it these days, since it doesn’t actually fall over Easter any more). It’s not been much of a holiday for me at all, alas, as my senior honours project is due in next Friday, and lots of work has had to be done. (Some 115 revisions committed to my Subversion repository since the 28th.) Things are looking a lot better now than they were before, though, so that’s something. I’m very much looking forward to getting this all handed in and done with, though, for sure.

In other news, time is ticking on, and in just over a month’s time, it’ll be exam time again. Provisionally my exams are on the 18th and 19th of May, and then that’s me done until graduation at the end of June. Hard to think my university career will soon be at an end…

Prolific PL-2303 driver woes

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— orudge @ 24/03/2009 3:53 pm

I figured I’d post this in case anybody else out there on the Internet is having problems. I’ve been looking for drivers for my Prolific PL-2303 USB to serial port cable – specifically, 64-bit drivers for Windows XP x64/Vista x64. There are some on the official web site, but they didn’t like to work for me. It turns out some bright spark decided to create two incompatible devices, the PL-2303 and the PL-2303-X (also PL-2303-H, PL-2303-HX), but give them the same USB vendor and device ID. If you happen to have a PL-2303 and can’t get the drivers to work, I found that the drivers here worked for me. (Thanks to the links in the comments on Rob Garrett’s blog for those.)

And please, to any hardware manufacturers: if you’re going to create incompatible devices, please don’t give them the same device ID.

Going all Web 2.0…

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— orudge @ 22/03/2009 7:14 pm

Well, I went and got myself a Flickr account in January, as I mentioned before. (On that note, I’m still to upload my California/Nevada photos from January – I did start uploading them a while ago with the Uploadr, then it kept timing out and being a pain, and I haven’t yet got around to retagging and reuploading them.) I also seem to have ended up getting a Twitter account. I’d never really been a fan of it before, but it’s mainly during the past few days with the union elections that I’ve found it can be quite handy. So I may well end up updating that a bit more often.

In other news, my senior honours project is due in on the 17th of April. This means I have a lot of work to get done. I’ll probably be relatively quiet until then!

SFO

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— orudge @ 08/02/2009 1:47 am

(or KSFO if you are RPharazon and prefer ICAO codes…)

So, today was my last day in the US, and I’m sitting at gate 94 of San Francisco International Airport waiting for my flight to Heathrow. We should be boarding in about half an hour, and I’ll arrive in London around about 1pm tomorrow, I believe. I have an essay to finish on the plane, which will be fun. On the plus side, SFO actually seems to have power sockets readily available (unlikely LHR), so I can go onto the plane with a full charge on my laptop (which should last about 4 hours) and the wifi here is priced pretty reasonably, too.

Today was a rather good day. We were in San Francisco doing the touristy thing, and the weather was fantastic – we went up to Twin Peaks, and got lots of good photos – last time I was there, in June/July 2006, it was foggy, and the photos were not so good! Ate at a very pleasant Italian restaurant/café, and visited the Exploritorium again to see the bits I missed with Rachel. All in all, a nice day.

Anyway, I think I am going to have a look for a drink before getting on the plane, I’m thirsty. See you in the UK.

Tahoe

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— orudge @ 05/02/2009 12:34 am

So, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks staying with Rachel at Incline Village, Lake Tahoe, just over the border in Nevada. It’s rather nice here, with Lake Tahoe being rather large and picturesque (and many photos will follow once I get home and upload them all). It’s been surprisingly warm and sunny here (considering it would normally be quite snowy) – in fact, a lot of the snow has been melting. Tahoe is one of the best places for skiing in the US, so I figured it was something I had to try. Before last week, the first (and last) time I had skied was in 2000, when I was on a school trip to Edinburgh. I seem to recall that I only began to feel vaguely comfortable when it was time to leave…

This time, though, things were a bit different. I went last Tuesday afternoon with Rachel, and Rachel attempted to teach me the basics. Alas, this didn’t go very well, and I fell over a lot. In fact, I pretty much spent more time on the ground than I did standing up. So I decided it would make more sense for me to get a proper lesson. Went in on Wednesday morning, and got the “early bird special” private lesson package, with a great instructor called George. Somehow, everything seemed to make a lot more sense, and the lesson seemed to go really well. I stuck to the basic “schoolyard” slope for the rest of the morning, and in the afternoon got a cheaper group lesson. (I also managed not to fall over, instead of the previous day where I barely managed to stay up.) Since the place was so quiet though, there were only two people in our group, and the other person dropped out after a while because they weren’t quite as comfortable as they thought they were at skiing (it was a “2nd time skiing”-type lesson). So effectively I got a two hour private lesson for $25. Winner.

The instructor that afternoon took me up “Lodge Pole”, the more ‘difficult’ of the beginner slopes. I was somewhat apprehensive about this (particularly since the previous day, Rachel had recommended we go up for the view – which was fine, but getting down proved to be a problem… I ended up getting a trip down on a snowmobile!), but it turned out to be fine and dandy. Did a few runs of this, and the instructor seemed to think I was fairly good at it. So for the last event of the day, we went up “Lake View”, which leads to more intermediate runs, and we took “Freeway” down. I did manage to fall over a couple of times here, mainly because I was afraid I was going to end up accidentally going down some of the more difficult runs instead of going where I was meant to. When I think about it now, I’m not quite sure why I did this, but I guess it was my first time up on one of the “intermediate” runs, so I was a bit nervous!

Anyway, next day, I came back, and was on my own for the day. Ended up trying out Freeway again (which had got quite icy due to the snow melting in places), and after a few runs of that, made the choice to try some of the more tricky intermediate slopes, such as “Popular” and “Penguin”. These were a fair bit tricker – steeper and longer, but rather good fun. Came back again a couple more times over the past few days, and I’m now reasonably confident about some of these runs. Today Rachel and I decided to take a group lesson (and again, ended up being the only people in the group!) to improve our skills a bit – I wanted to try to master parallel turns. This is something I didn’t quite manage to do, but apparently I’m a lot better at it now than I was. In the afternoon, we went up the “Crystal Express”, which is the lift that takes you to the very top of the mountain. The view was quite something – see the photo above – and it wasn’t too bad down, if rather tiring due to my inability to properly perform parallel turns!

All in all, the past week or so skiing has seen me go from falling over a lot, to managing to get down from the top of the mountain without falling over. So I’m pretty pleased about that. It seems skiing is something I shall have to try again in the future.

Over the next couple of days, we’re going to visit some of the local towns and so on and see some of the non-skiing-related sites, before I head home on Saturday. Get in on Sunday (back in St Andrews by the evening), and then the new semester starts on Monday! Project work and an essay due next week too, though, so there’ll be lots of work to be done while I’m here…

Speaking of work, I got my exam results back yesterday. One exam wasn’t quite as good as I expected, but otherwise I’m fairly pleased with the results.

Well, I’d best try to do some of that work, I guess, now. See you back in St Andrews.

The video is up now

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— orudge @ 25/01/2009 1:01 am

The video of my Google Tech Talk is now up on YouTube. If you haven’t already, check it out.

Exams, cameras, Flickr, California, Google…

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— orudge @ 23/01/2009 7:37 pm

Well, it’s been a busy few weeks, that’s for sure. What have I been up to since my last post?

I finished my move to Thunderbird, and indeed my move to Windows Vista on my main PC. After tweaking it significantly and getting rid of a lot of the guff, it seems to be working alright. A few niggly features, but oh well. Installed the Windows 7 beta in a VM, too – looks like it should be everything Vista should have been!

I revised for exams. And procrastinated instead of revising for exams…

I bought a new camera, a Nikon D40. It’s shiny and nice. After having to wait a few days for things like the memory card to arrive, I took some photos. Here are a selection of photos of St Andrews at night, some of which turned out quite nicely, I think! The camera has accompanied me to California, so I will describe more about that later.

I created a Flickr account, and indeed, migrated my entire photo gallery to Flickr. (Although it seems I need to reupload a few videos that didn’t quite get copied over properly.) I’m going to integrate that into the blog a bit better, but that’ll probably have to wait until I’m back in the UK. Eventually, my plan is to tag my photos properly and so on, although with 5000 photos, it’ll be a slow process! I’m likely to be a bit more selective with new uploads, too – there are a lot of bad photos in that 5000. While I’m not planning on removing any of the existing ones, I may just upload the good photos in the future (I only uploaded a quarter of the photos I took in the St Andrews at night gallery, for instance, since the rest were all a bit too blurry or poor.) Thoughts on this may be appreciated!

I revised a bit more, and procrastinated a bit more.

I sat my exams. Multimedia was the first one, which seemed to go quite well. Artificial Intelligence was next, which everybody found kind of tough, including myself – in a way, though, it’s good that everybody found it hard, rather than just a few people finding it hard and the rest thinking it easy! The last exam was Distributed Systems, which I think everybody was quite positive about.

I went to the dentist on the afternoon after my last exam (to check that everything was OK after my root canal a few months ago), and frantically tried to sort things out (packing, etc) for my trip to California the next day.

I got about 2 hours sleep, then had to drive down to the airport. Well, I drove down to the park and ride, where it seems I can park my car for two weeks free, and just have to pay £4.50 for the bus. Bargain compared to the official airport parking! I then flew down to London, waited a few more hours, and got on my flight to San Francisco. I was flying with United, and economy class was seated in a 2-5-2 configuration. I was in seat C, and there was somebody else in the equivalent seat on the other side – so there were 3 ‘free seats’ in the middle, since the plane wasn’t full. This meant I had a bit more room to stretch out, which was nice! The flight was fine enough, if not overly exciting (11 hours is a long time on a plane). I did rather like the channel on the entertainment system that let you listen to air traffic control though – the ATC channel at Heathrow Airport seemed incredibly busy, the people who work there must be very good at what they do! Anyway, got into San Francisco around 4pm, and got back into Napa by around 6.30pm – rather tired! I’m staying here with my friend Rachel, as I did in June 2006.

So, I got into California on Wednesday, and yesterday was my first full day here. And the first thing I had to do was go down to visit Google, with Rachel, where I gave a tech talk on Wine – specifically, the Wine user experience. I went and met up with Leslie Hawthorn and Ellen Ko, at the Google Open Source Programs Office. These are the people who are responsible for running Google Summer of Code, which I took part in last summer. And what can I say… the experience was fantastic. The talk seemed to go well – it will be put up on YouTube in the coming days, I believe, so you can watch that if you should like. Then we had a brief tour of Google (I’ll put the photos I took up sometime soon, probably when I get back to St Andrews), and we then all sat down for lunch at one of Google’s 19(!) cafeterias! Now, the Google lunch is famous, and rightly so – it was rather good, and best of all, free! There’s no such thing as a free lunch, except at Google it seems! We then went back to the Open Source office and got lots of free swag. I think both Rachel and I very much enjoyed our trip there, and it was very nice to meet Leslie and Ellen “in real life”! Thanks to both of them for having us, and also for putting all the hard work they do into Summer of Code! (As I have said before, I would highly recommend that any students out there interested in programming for open source take a look at the SoC programme, and take part in it!)

After Google we went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which is a museum-type thing with lots of sciencey displays, much of which was rather interesting. We didn’t really have enough time there to look at everything, unfortunately, but it made for a fascinating afternoon’s trip!

Today we’re heading off to Tahoe (and my first trip into Nevada), up in the mountains. I shall report more – and take lots more photos – when we get there!

Owen out for now.

A new year, a new operating system

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• General

— orudge @ 05/01/2009 9:37 pm

So, it’s now 2009. I spent Christmas at my Grandad’s in North Wales, and new year with my brother and mum in mid-Wales. I’m back up to St Andrews now, since my first exam is on Saturday, and there is work to be done! Then I have another exam next Wednesday, and my final exam the Tuesday after that. Then, the following day, I shall be flying out to California to see my friend Rachel (who I stayed with back in June 2006). While I’m there, I’ll be visiting Google, which I’m quite excited about, and giving a Tech Talk (assuming I manage to get it written in between all these exams and so on!). It should be fun indeed, although I’ll also have to continue to do work on my senior honours project, for which a deliverable is due in February once I’m back.

In the mean time, I’m planning to finally move to Windows Vista, something which I’ve not really had any desire to do in the past. Having a new DirectX 10-capable graphics card, however (a GTX 260) is one incentive for me to upgrade, though, and I found that Vista isn’t too bad when you turn off a lot of the annoying stuff. So, I’m going to take the plunge and install it on my new hard disk. But one of my major issues is that Windows Vista doesn’t support/include Outlook Express, which I’ve used to manage my mail for some 10 years now – I have approximately half a million pieces of e-mail in my OE installation, which take up about 5GB of space in OE’s .dbx format. I have a couple of options here: I could move to Windows Mail (or Windows Live Mail), which is effectively a newer version of OE, or I could move to a client such as Thunderbird. I’ve used Thunderbird for years on my Mac for accessing various IMAP accounts, but it had (and still has) a few quirks that meant I didn’t really want to adopt it as my main e-mail client. But the alternative, Windows (Live) Mail, wouldn’t be ideal either, as not all that many programs support conversion from it. Plus, W(L)M stores each e-mail as an individual file, instead of one file per mail folder – with 500,000 e-mails, that’s highly inefficient! So, I’ve decided to move to Thunderbird.

I’ve got Thunderbird more or less set up in a way I like (although there are still a few niggly things, some of which I believe will be fixed in Thunderbird 3.0). The main issue then is converting all my existing e-mail. Thunderbird can import mail from Outlook Express, but it then loses read/unread status (I still have a lot of unread mail in my folders), and it doesn’t transfer things like reply/forwarded status in messages. So, I’ve decided to do things in a more laborious, but ultimately better, manner: copy all my messages to an IMAP server (which I’ve set up on obiwan), and copy them back – this way will preserve the attributes and so on. It is, however, a lot slower than the automatic conversion. It’ll take a while, but once it’s done, it’ll be worth it. Also, with Thunderbird, I’ll be able to stick my profile on my local server (obiwan), and share it between platforms, should I want to, which could be quite handy.

Anyway, I really should get back to revision – it’s funny how all these other distractions appear when one has exams or deadlines looming.

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