Another piece of art at the Pompidou Centre was a Fibonacci Series. This was the second outing for my camera and I hadn’t worked out how to use it. This picture got me chased around the museum by an angry custodian who didn’t like the flash. Indeed, it would probably have been a better picture without the flash, but this is how you learn.
Keith, you plonker, what were you thinking? It’s so easy to question. It’s so easy to say that you should have stuck around. Let me say this:
Thank you for hanging in there for as long as you did.
I was never a part of your jilted generation but your energy leaked out into my world. And I am glad of that.
The thing is that you don’t know is how you are going to act until you get into that place. All the ‘you should talk to someone’s in the world are not going to be heard when you are there.
I remember a day in London. I had just started working there, commuting from Cambridge until I found a house more locally. I got on a crowded tube train holding a large book I was reading, there was a big crowd on the platform and as I moved onto the train the corner of my book brushed against a girl standing on the train. She wasn’t paying attention to the crowd boarding the train. She started shouting at me to stop assaulting her.
That evening, on my return journey, I made a conscious decision to walk close to the wall as I went down the platform because I knew that if a train arrived and I was walking next to the track the temptation would be great. No one would have known the reason. No one could have known.
Since then, I’ve been there again and again. Talk to someone? No. I only function this well because I’ve got a plan to get out when I need to. The option is there and, all the time it is, I can probably live another day.
Friday midday my Ikea delivery arrived, with 15 boxes of flat pack furniture. Some 30 hours later all boxes have their contents built and ready for use, my thumbs and knees are sore, and we have destinations for the contents of more boxes.
The unpacking is progressing, all the easy wins have been done, its the complicated things now, but it looks like a house we can live in. And, shortly, we’ll have somewhere for guests to sit too. So if you would like to visit, get in touch and we’ll find a time.
Some years ago I shared a house with a number of people – it was a large terraced house opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral in Northampton. One of our housemates there returned to her native France where three of us would visit her. Mostly we’d pile into Daves company car and he’d drive us there. One year we visited the Pompidou Centre in Paris where we found a cave installation.
On my thirtieth birthday, I met with a number of friends in London. I was, then, as now, not very organised and didn’t have a plan. We dithered and tried to find a restaurant in Leicester Square that could seat us all. So we ended up in Wong Kei in China Town. It wasn’t what I had in mind, but it was a great night.
The most determined of us went on some Goth night at Gossips afterwards, a slimy dark hole of a club under the back streets of Soho.
It was also the day I got my first digital camera, a small, cheap, fixed focus thing with a memory card that would take 8 pictures. This is one of those first few.
It gave me no clue about the joy I would get over the years as both my cameras and my skill improved. A lot has happened in those eighteen years and I have pictures to show for most of it, behind many of those pictures is a story that could so easily be lost like tears in rain.
My AWS heavy utilisation instance expired some time ago so I brought down the build server. Now I have a replacement, albeit local network only, running on a Synology NAS.
By default these boxes don’t come with a compiler installed (!?) , so I have had to install Entware, which puts everything in /opt/, nice for separation, but it means a bunch of stuff needs wiring together. This is what I have done:
At this point the ./bootstrap of Octave would run, but failed with a syntax error in automake – at line 3936. This is in a variable substitution function and *might* be ignorable, so I have commented out the line for the moment. This allows ./bootstrap to run, and, in turn ./configure to run.
However, ./configure now fails with a requirement for a fortran compiler, of which none are installed yet.
After something of a hiatus here, I’m going to make a bit of a transition. My time has now become significantly limited, so I can no longer maintain the Octave build system I was working on – it has been archived and I may resurrect it at some point in the future, but for now I cannot give the attention it deserves, better to not try than to do half a job.
Moving forward, I want to develop my ability to write. To this end I want to pick up a pattern from software engineering and apply it to human language. The pattern is this: buy a software design patterns book and implement them one by one as you read about them. You can see this pattern in many code bases as you move around the industry.
This pattern can be applied to human language. It seems to me that language patterns, or figures of speech, can be practised without the kind of maintenance overhead required by long lived software projects.
I never had any formal training in rhetoric, although I attended a grammar school, it was a grammar school in name only and still behaved like the technical high school it was until my arrival. The classics would have bored me at the time, so even if that had been available it would not have been of interest.
The civil package does not contain a src/ directory and can be directly installed. This package appears to install correctly but is not found when described – looking in the DESCRIPTION file, the package name is civil-engineering, not civil.
Fixed in build #4.
The zeromq package has no dependencies. It has a src/ directory containing a bootstrap script. It requires the zeromq library.
Fixed in build #4.
The netcdf package has no dependencies. The package has a src/ directory containing autogen.sh to create a configure script.