I have a week's break from work. I'll be improving the OpenStreetMap coverage of Wooler, hopefully. I need to check over some enscript patches, so that I can make a release. At the same time, I want to practise using gnus for email more thoroughly.
Went to the optician's and asked about prescription swimming goggles today. Might have to get them made specially - buying cheaper ones with standard spherical lenses would not correct my astigmatism, and leave everything blurry. Still, it would be the difference between being able to read half the eye test chart and not being able to see where the chart is. I have an HP dx2250 at both home and work, and HP's BIOS doesn't enable the SVM instructions on the CPU (which would let you do cool things with virtualization). So this could be my excuse to finally use/develop coreboot. Will make a shopping list of tools to flash my BIOS relatively safely.
On Saturday I went to Birmingham for the Friends of the Earth West Midlands regional meeting. We learnt about campaign planning, and got an overview of the main national campaigns for the next year. FoE Birmingham use Edubuntu. On Sunday I went swimming again. Not so tiring - still need to get some prescription goggles. Today at work we were delivering a PostgreSQL database training course for a company in Leicester. BigG happened to be one of the tutees.
gLabels is a nice and simple app, and works well for making CD labels. Swimming appears to exercise completely different muscles to jogging, so is very tiring. I could really use some prescription goggles. The usual plural of no is noes.
I am not having a good year. Traditionally, when annoyed, I make extravagant purchases that I may or may not regret later. In this new economic climate, however, I have found a substitute outlet. Arriving soon at a CPAN mirror near you: Net::NationalRail::LiveDepartureBoards 0.01 - an interface to a SOAP API from ATOC. Given a station code, you can obtain the next few arrivals/departures/both. This is in hacky Perl, but the module should be easy to translate to other languages which have SOAP libraries.
I had a reply from Jeremy Wright MP today regarding EDM 2141 - he's going to sign it. I'm going to think a bit about how to follow up on this. My desk is looking far too cluttered with House of Commons stationery at the moment.
Of course, http://www.change.gov/ uses XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
Following Dan's lead, I have emailed Jeremy Wright, MP for Rugby and Kenilworth, concerning EDM 2141. Watch this space.
Interesting discovery of the evening: the third-party Apache module "mod_macro", packaged as libapache2-mod-macro for Debian. Awesome.
I haven't written a blog entry for a week; obviously I have been busy with interesting things. Like xulrunner. Procrastination may be a valid time management strategy. By prioritising tasks and doing the more important ones today, lesser tasks are pushed back. Occasionally these tasks then fall over a deadline, and disappear. Whether this is a good thing... I'm not sure, but this has happened to me with around three tasks this week. :)