There are two takeaways on the other side of the road. This means that pretty much any time between 1800 and about 2230 there are cars parked on the double yellows (on both sides of the road) because people are far too lazy to walk more than about 5 metres to get their chips.
I find this slightly amusing, partly because they're all lazy fat bastards (spaces just a little bit down the road...), and partly because of the very bad driving/parking that goes on. Pulling out across the road in front of other traffic? Not a problem. You'd think they'd at least pull up on the kerb, as it's not the widest road ever especially with parked cars on both sides.
But today, we have a winner. A bus. as in proper full sized public transport bus. Parked on the wrong side of the road. Ten minutes later the driver emerged with his food and drove off. Not before shooing away some random old lady who I think wanted to get on the bus.. hah.
My washing machine arrived today. This is a very dull and boring grown up thing. Even worse that I've spent much of the day waiting for it saying "oooh washing machine yay" at random intervals to anyone who'll listen... This does now mean that the flat is 'complete' in terms of huge items of essential furniture though. And I own all of it! (or will when I write my mum a huge cheque anyway).
So yes, it beeps and makes funny noises and has buttons and lights and complicated things that I don't understand. But it will clean my socks and that's all I really need, heh.
However I do have one slight problem with my kitchen now... see if you can figure out what it might be. Oops.
Did my 2km swim in an hour and five tonight. Nearly fast enough!
kubuntu is upgraded, and I can't find anything different. Newer KDE, so there's a few small differences there, but apart from that, nothing much. ho hum.
Upgrade took far too long though. I eventually stopped being stubborn and used their upgrader thingy. 40 minutes of downloading updates, that's not too bad (only got 2meg broadband, grr). But configuring everything? 2 and a half hours in the end! Blatent lies from the upgrader, which claimed it was going to take an hour and five. hmm. A full install takes less time than that...
On a slight sidenote, I wonder if I'll ever figure out what it is that I have against Linux for Dummies. er, I mean ubuntu. hmm.
But yes, feisty. meh. Something appeared in my system tray to tell me that my ethernet cable is plugged in. Oh really, how very useful For wifi maybe, but I don't use that so I've told it to go away. Not quite as bad as the random thing on my computer at work that occasionally pops up to tell me that there are no problems with the network though.
Upgrading overwrote various config files (well ok, I told it to) so I've been reconfiguring apache today. And whilst I was redoing subdomains and blocking all non-local traffic I thought I may as well change a few other settings that I've been meaning to do for months and have never got round to. Like telling it to run as my user rather than as www-data so I don't have to chmod/chown/chgrp things every time I want to resize a batch of images for my photo gallery. ha.
Other things I have been putting off for months - printing photos to frame and decorate the flat with. Oh, what fun that was... My printer works fine under linux, but before now I've never actually tried printing anything that wasn't just text. Now thinking there was good reason for this.
Resize/retouch images in the gimp, then discover that gimp won't print directly so open the image with a different program just to print it.. which worked, but it came out the wrong size (despite me telling it what size to print at) and that meant weird stretching and chopping off of heads. Then figured out that the gimp will actually print if you do enough kicking and prodding. But still it's not printing the entire image, and the colours are terrible and the whole things is pants quality.
Grr. It's not like I have a shitty printer either - got a HP deskjet thingy that's actually quite good at doing nice quality photos. If it's set up correctly.
Then I remembered seeing somewhere that feisty has a new HP printer toolbox thing. Found that, fiddled some settings and cleaned my print heads, and woooo, it works!
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For wifi maybe, but I don't use that so I've told it to go away. Not quite as bad as the random thing on my computer at work that occasionally pops up to tell me that there are no problems with the network though.
