Excitement (by sarah)

For the first time since I had Jean really, I am starting to be excited about my future and to see something like a career forming. I am not forcing anything, I am not planning or going down approved routes - I am just going with the flow.

I am creating... well STUFF, art, craft, writing and finding people want me to share in the form of workshops more and more. I am getting more short stories and things published and winning awards. I am using my art to communicate science concepts and helping instill a love of learning.

I am so excited that today I actually got some material for my mum to help me make a new skirt for the Poetry Festival which is currently happening in Cheltenham - I am reading on Friday at the Muffin Man and then I am going to be running two lots of childrens' workshops.

I have also very nearly gotten the contacts of all my close school friends - there are still some wholes but it is getting there :)

I feel I have achieved more since January than I have done in the last six years. I am finishing off projects and starting ones I'd wanted to do. Our debts are whittling away nicely and I have my purple carpet and a purple butterfly on the outside of the house. Alaric, David and my Dad have worked so hard on the house - it is starting to be lovely :)

I fear slightly writing this incase it all suddenly tilts again but it is all feeling just so right. I still feel sad about science and my health but I can do science later on and the health stuff I have things in place to deal with now - no I am not going to be an explorer ever again, trapsing up mountians but I have the memories of when I did and you know there is alot of fantastic stuff I can still see - even if it is from the lense of someone elses camera.

Life is good at last.

Havering Youth Circuit Choir (by sarah)

Back when I was about 13 I joined a choir/singing group based at Upminster Methodist church - this would have been in the mid 90's I suppose. We primarily did religous musicals like Witness. I just find myself wondering where everybody is these days and what they have been up too.

I am really rubbish with names though so only remember that there was like John, Clare (not sure how it was spelt), Martin and so on. I even went on camps and things with these guys - me and my school posse were basically the youngest members. I bumped into the Clare whilst at Uni at a pub but she was still that older cool person so didn't really establish contact with her and that itself is now an age ago.

Basically I'm posting this because I tried googling and didn't find anything but now there is something so if someone else tries hopefully they will find this post :)

Brilliantly Big Birthday Bonanza BBQ, Banquet and Baffonary (by sarah)

Friday it all started with the arrival of the alien shroom

a.k.a. my father or Ferfer as he is better known. This was accompanied by the rest of my family as in my mum.

My bro and his wife all of whom got family snuggles :)

Jean had been preparing treats for the last few days :)

Which she forced people to eat - especially people with April birthdays

I'd been baking too.

Lots of DIY and work on the house was done then Saturday night more madness ensued with the arrival of friends who also had April birthdays - they bought yummy vegan cake with them :)

We ordered take away - I set the table up nicely - the 'new' table as in my grandmothers dinning table which had come up in my parents car on Friday. It has leaves that fold out to make it a big table - but there were now 11 people in the house so I went for buffet style.

Food arrived - a mix of pizza, chips, curry, and chinese food. Everyone was catered for :)

Including the baby

Aunty Michelle kept giving in and feeding her :)

The next day - with five birthdays to cater for we decided BBQ was the way to go :)

the neighbours bought round cake too as it was their easter celebration :)

Of course it had to be lit first

Then the celebrating began :)

My Bro on his birthday celebration :)

The weekend also saw scrabble playing

And Music!

A good time was had by all :)

p.s. almost forgot to mention the welding and papier mache that took place too!

Stroud Dance Festival 2012 (by sarah)

This is Jean getting ready for her dancing at the Stroud Dance Festival. She did really well though had to sit out one of the dances due to feeling sick towards the end - it was very hot in the hall and the kids were doing A LOT of dancing.

Spring Cleaning (by alaric)

I've spent more time building infrastructure than using it, I suspect. I love building infrastructure, so I've often built it because I can; however, with everything that's happened in the past six years, I've ended up struggling to maintain the infrastructure I already had. So I've had to change tack and become much more pragmatic about my infrastructure astronautics, such as getting rid of my limited company and migrating from a tightly-bound cluster to a single box for my hosting platform.

This has given me some time to tidy up and simplify the infrastructure I want to keep.

So this weekend, I got around to rebuilding the Kitten Technologies web site. This is where I publish my open-source creations; they were all version-controlled in Subversion, and I had a PHP site with some static pages, then a dynamically generated project browser that would pull out files called VERSION.txt and README.txt from the SVN repositories to build a description page, offered up tarballs of all released versions for downloading, and linked to an SVN web interface for browsing the repo. I wanted to get around to implementing ticket tracking at some point so folks could submit tickets.

However, for a while I've ached to migrate to Fossil for version control, mainly because it has integral ticket tracking and a wiki for each project, along with integral repository browsing; it provides a fully-featured project Web site, and it's a distributed VCS to boot, which is also useful. However, I wanted it to still all look like a nice integrated site for all my projects. So what I've done is to write a Fossil skin stylesheet that has my new look in it, then to build the wrapper site using the same CSS (eg, by using Fossil's names for div classes and overall page structure), based on Hyde; the CSS is actually generated from an scss master file that Hyde processes to generate the CSS as part of the static site, which the Fossil repos just refer to. My deployment script rolls the skin out to all of my repositories whenever it's updated, so they are all kept magically in sync. It still has a few rough edges (I want to improve the navigation with a consistent site-wide nav bar above the Fossil menu bar, that has the current project highlighted; this will be slightly more complex as I'll need to make the script modify the skin for each project to highlight the correct one) and I am still incapable of making non-ugly CSS, but it means that Kitten Technologies is now live on Fossil. I've a lot of projects still to migrate, but after I've done the "fiddly" ones that need some level of manual tweaking, I hope to produce a script to automate handling all the rest.

Secondly, I've been tidying up the home fileserver. It was down for some time for various reasons, which means that I've ended up with a new archive of photos, music, and PDFs forming on my laptop. I pulled our music collection out of the backups onto my laptop, too, which meant that I then had a diverging fork of that (as there was some new music on the file server since the last backup, which I later retrieved from the disks), so the re-unification of all those tens of gigabytes of files has been fiddly. But, it's now largely done, which is great; and there's now precisely one master copy of everything, and the home wiki is back up to date and pruned of outdated TODO items from several years ago.

However, this has increased my desire to implement Ugarit's archival mode. Rather than manually curating directory structures to organise my stuff (and the pain of merging changes to them), I'd love to just be able to pour files into a Ugarit library and tag them with metadata (maybe some time after the original import, if I'm in a hurry at the time), then create virtual filesystem views on that which reflect things like "All my music, organised by artist/album/title" or "All my photos, organised by who is in them, year, then event title". Combine that with the proposed Ugarit replication backend, and it will even manage replicas on my laptop as well as the home fileserver, all kept seamlessly in sync; having a home fileserver was easy when I worked from home on a desktop machine so I could just permanently mount the filesystem from the server, but it's a bit trickier with a modern laptop-based lifestyle.

Also, as the archive is already backed up into Ugarit, migrating it into a Ugarit "library" will be fast and efficient - Ugarit will automatically recognise that it already has the content of the files, and just need to upload the metadata!

I think with that and my workshop sorted out, I'm done with spring cleaning - my urgent tasks are now sorting out paperwork for my Cub pack, fixing an offline external disk on my fileserver, getting Ethernet to the workshop so I can do useful computer work in there (and move the home fileserver out of poking range of the baby, who loves to turn it off), resurrecting my salmonella install, hacking Ugarit, ring casting, and getting the foundry working so I can cast bronze, and wearable computer work! Not to mention endless minor DIY things in the house - we've got pictures to put up, dents in the plasterboard walls to fill, a flu to install for the fire, walls to repaint, ...