Dominic's Diary

The second half of term went incredibly quickly - and I now find myself about to get kicked out of college (term finished two weeks ago, I've been staying on for various reasons). I'm off to live in Marston for a month, until Hack's (Ganesh
and friends' house) lease runs out.

Dave has left Oxford now, though he insisted on loitering in my room for a large part of last week. I think perhaps he can't cope with the prospect of not being at Oxford any more - I think I'll find it quite hard when I leave to be honest. He had a great 21st birthday party which I was lucky enough to be at.

At the moment I'm sitting here "testing" a laptop which mum has bought and kindly sent to Oxford for me to set up. It's lovely, and my old 486 laptop really doesn't quite cut the mustard. Also in my room at the moment is a workstation waiting to be configured for the JCR office, an IBM RS/6000, a
Sparcstation, and a couple of random x86 boxes not doing a lot. It's an absolute mess, and I've a nasty feeling today and tomorrow are going to progress at rather a pace.. and mum is turning up to move stuff on Sunday :(

Also on the computer front, I bought a nice Plextor CD writer.. it's SCSI, which alleviates some of the problems which stem from the fact that the IDE on my system is horribly broken, due it it having a Via chipset. It will supposedly do a 12 speed write, but I've not got more than 8 speed successfully out of it under linux so far. It's good enough for me, anyway :) The fight with Dabs to sort out the broken Philips writer it replaces continues.

Urchin, our colo machine, is getting on well; I spent ages writing some nice scripts for adding users and domains and suchlike recently.. hopefully this will pay off.

My plans for the rest of the vac aren't particularly detailed... after July I will move back home, and possibly go away somewhere, as Dad has very generously offered to fund a holiday for me. I think he thinks I'll never get away from the Internet and computers otherwise, and he's probably right :) Until I move home, the focus will be Physics, and possibly to learn a bit of C programming. Oh, and to go and get some exercise - I'm currently putting myself into a daily morning jog routine.. as I have finally realised that my dad's advice about exercise is quite sound. The original plan for which I arranged to be in Oxford - working for ISI, a division of Mars - isn't happening any more.

Went to see Evolution tonight. It 's a completely wacky film, highly recommended if you like shallow, tongue-in-cheek and at times utterly hilarious comedy.

Also, regarding the business venture I mentioned earlier in this diary.. well this has also fallen through unfortunately. We planned to offer alumnus email to the Oxford colleges, but it turns out that the colleges are getting away with doing it through machines in college - ie. using JANet - when we were making the assumption that that wouldn't be possible.

Right, after that mammoth update, time for bed.