Despite being at least nine years old this article is still a good read. Warning: Neal Stephenson wrote it.

One thing that I have been thinking about a little lately is how physical organisation of spaces affect how people relate to each other and their perceptions of themselves and others. Need to find some reading material on the topic I think.

Yesterday brought even more proof that the world is tiny. Rob had joined the team here shortly after I did and it turned out he was living in Kildare not far from where I was from and in a somewhat world shrinking move was renting the house he was in from my old Engineering Teacher. I was chatting to Rob last night and made a reference to being in Africa doing work for AT&T in 1990 (Yes that was long ago and I was very young) and he mentioned he used to work for AT&T too. Turns out he worked with/for the same group of people there. It also transpires that some of the other people here did as well. Small World.

So the house I live in was built in 1956 and nothing was ever changed so it was only last November that central heating appeared in the building. Barring the odd extra sockets which had been put in over the years the wiring dated from the buildings construction and lacked things like an earth, circuits rated at very low ampages for a modern house - kettle and washing machine could trip the downstairs circuit - oh and the circuit breakers used to take about 5 minutes to trip because the springs had taken a set. While pipes and water scare me electrical stuff I am quite happy with so the plumbing got outsourced but the rewiring we were going to do ourselves.

We got a lot of work done during Christmas but then we lost momentum until Andrew got a sudden spurt of enthusiasm at the beginning of July so this weekend was an all hands on deck event. Lots got done over the two days including:

• Completion of 3 ring mains - upstairs, downstairs & kitchen/garage
• Completion of the downstairs lighting circuit
• Laying out routes for all the cat5 cables to reach the attic
• Ran an earth to all the places that were not earthed before.

We didn’t do the upstairs lights since the attic would have been an oven with the weather over the weekend. Also left to be done is putting the earth rod in place and pulling the cat5 cables in. Then we get to replaster all the walls we made holes in and then and only then do we get to start on things like painting / carpeting and all the other doing up a house stuff.

One of the less than good consequences of all this work is that my hands and arms are cut up pretty bad since the finishes on all the holes in the joists are rough because who would ever going near them again. My other pet hate from the weekend is the person who decided that looping the exisitng cables over nails at points where there is no hatch in the floor made using the old cables as draw wires really challenging.

I apologise for how dull this entry has been but it was my whole weekend and it needed an entry.

I really want to go climb some hills but both this weekend and next have stuff arranged. This whole working thing takes up way way too much of ones life. I have never managed to get to the top of Lugnaquilla and have decided it is one of my goals for this summer.

Plan would be to start/finish from Glendalough but due to the generally useless nature of public transport to wicklow I am probably going to have to overnight it somewhere along the route. This opens up some interesting options since it allows me to take in some of the other peaks in the area maybe even jump across the wicklow gap on day two and do Tonlagee and Stoney Top.

Dell has made me unhappy. I have a new GX280 desktop that has been giving me troubles with video settings so I wanted to update the BIOS as some people had reported that this had helped fix things. Now dell provide an exe that you can run from the desktop if your a windows user and for everyone else they have an exe that you need to put on a bootable dos floppy to flash the bios. Now two things, Firstly how do I get a bootable dos floppy given that windows won’t make them any more and secondly the machine doesn’t even have a floppy drive.

So Mr Dell here is my suggestion (you will also be getting this by email later) bootable cdrom images that include something like freedos if needs be.

In the end I defeated it using a USB floppy drive and some sites on the internet that had disk images I could write to a floppy from my windows laptop.
Didn’t fix the problem though but more on this later.