Since I’m now on this work placement, I seem to have very little to say for myself, day-in day-out things are very similar to the previous day. I do this and that in a different order to the day before, solve problems in a manner of ways that after a while just seems to get boring and so it continues. Please do not misunderstand, my work is great but to talk about it is just dull.

However, I’ve been ill this week and although this morning thought I was on the mend, I found that this afternoon I have lost most of my voice. As an affect of me feeling ill, I have not been to any of the kung-fu classes this week and therefore feel pretty bad about that too. Hopefully next week I’ll be on top form and be able to over-work myself into a wincing ache.

This weekend gone by, I started the change over to Linux. A few minor glitches but I got there in the end. There is more compatibility than I thought I would have, so the change has hardly hit me at all. I’m only sorry that I didn’t make the change over a lot longer ago, everything I had on windows is equally availble on Linux only in a guilt free format of being either stable, unstable, testing and I have not yet had to find a sneaky way round anything. Although, do not change over if you do not have an internet connection and serval linux competent friends at the other end to help you out.

Thats about it.

I recently made the move to Linux and I have decided to document everything that I found usefull for readers to note, if not they’ll serve me when I forget them.

To extend you screen resolution beyond 800×600 when (in KDE) your Desktop Config/ Control Center wont allow you to change up.

Open your terminal window; login as root.
change directory to /etc/X11/

cd /etc/X11/

open XF86Config-4 in your favorite command line editor (mine being pico) but I know that all the fanboys hate it.

pico XF86Config-4

now basically edit the lines:

                Modes           "800x600" "640x480"

adding your monitor/vga limits, something like this:

                Modes           "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

Then all you need to do is: restart X

/etc/init.d/gdm restart

you may have problems with this in which it only stops X and doesn’t restart as such. In such a case.. login as root (as you will be in command line).. and go back to gdm and start it, thusly:

/etc/init.d/gdm start

done!

Stupid to most, but the manual doesn’t make this clear enough:

In your terminal type su and then enter your root password

username@hostname:~$ su
Password:

This will allow you to install and access files anywhere on your installation; in fact without being root there is little point at all having a terminal screen. Well there isn’t to me at least

Yesterday I watched: American Beauty (1999) and later watched Alex & Emma (2003). Both these films were great, I highly recommend the both if you haven’t already seen either.

I could connect with the characters of both films. Kevin Spacey as usual was a wonderful part of American Beauty which if you were anything like me you’d aspire to live a life much like the role he conducted. The latter film was a soppy film with a everso predictable storyline. However, near the end there was a mild stir-up which almost made me turn it off with frustration, however the dialogue that followed made it worth finishing the film. What it was that really touched me about the dialogue was the scenario in which the guy introduces his new girlfriend to his ex as her job position apposed to her significance to him… in which later in his defence says “it was not to hurt either of you” and then she replies “it was just to protect yourself”. Which got me thinking about much crap we say and do to our partners under false pretences just to assure our backs are covered. Anyhow, another thing that also touched me was the fact this stupid idiot guy in the film lingers on the past (much like I do).

Have a watch!

(its taken me a week to finish this article… I apologise).

This week has been very good! I started it off on Monday by beginning my kung-fu & tai-chi classes which I thoroughly loved.

Tuesday was good because I did my job well and was told by my boss that the engineering company (sub contractor) would want to snap me up if I wasn’t already working for George Wimpey. Secondly that he (my boss) is very pleased with me and is happy with everything I do. Then later that day excelled by pointing out some flaws in the construction that needed to be rectified which made them swoon a little more as I’m more on the ball than they are.

…and today well just about made it conclusively the best week ever. I had my Architecture open-day do; I went in feeling a little skeptical by the fact there were about 12 of us there. It got worst by later being told after submitting my work, that only four of us would have an interview. Thinking the worst case scenarios of whether getting an interview was a good/bad thing got me all stewed up, come the annoucement of the candidates chosen for the interview I was chosen. As you tend to do when you know something bad is about to happen, I preped myself for all the impossible questions they might ask. When I turned up for it however; it was bliss. Complimenting me on my work, and telling me how I’d be find on the course (no worries about that; nod nod wink wink), all they wanted to know was how I was going to go about transfering from my present degree to their degree. My autodefensive mode had an anticlimax as it didn’t get what it was expecting.

It really was great, I’ve been wearing a smile, ear to ear, ever since I got the news.

Oh and although I am trying to give up computers in general I ordered some parts for an upgrade and they also came on Monday so its been getting better and better all week long. Come Friday I’ll be floating.

Words fail to describe the things that have gone through my mind today so lets leave it at just a picture and a clip of Pico (the hamster) doing his thing on the coffee table.

Click the image to see pico in action!

I should point out that the picture and the clip were taken at the same time, but due to the flash the picture appears darker.

Another point to note, the food on the table in the picture came out of his cheeks which he had in there whilst the video was shot.

I was taking a Saturday mosey around the park and happened to walk past a dozen eastern Europeans sat in formation on the ruins of the old Crystal Palace, lip-syncing to some eastern European rap, whilst one of them filmed this for a music video no doubt. The music was blasting out of a car parked a good distance from where they were, with the doors wide open to get the optimum amount of noise out. As I walked past them and towards their car I felt increasingly tempted to get in and drive off with it, to later trash it on a lamp-post or just into another parked car (for the heck of it).

While the opportunity was very favourable and I more than likely would of got away from them before having my head ripped off by the Russian mafia, that instant. I felt the feeling that just imagining it would be just as good as the real thing, as the consequences of being tracked down by the Russian mafia isn’t my favourite weekend activity.

Now for those of you who don’t know already, I’m not that much in favour of people who come to this country to come and abuse the system; yet, so many do and we’re fast approaching the point were the argument is flawed by the shear mass of foreign population here. London is now at the 50% saturation point, meaning half of london is of non-English speaking origin, and they’re here to stay. Worst of all is that England offers many free services to all, and favours immigrants over nationals.

So what do you do?

Stealing their car to trash it is a start. The car was more than likely bought with money handed to them (implicitly speaking) from our taxes anyhow .

Been a while putting these pics together, partly because there isn’t a heck of a lot to take pictures of- and then at the same time there is heaps to take (depending on what you want to look at). I’ve decided to do a subsection for each picture explaining what it is so it makes sense. I also will put the pictures in order of application even though they were not all taken in this order. So here they are:

Marking out

Believe it or not, each column has to be precisely placed using an EDM. (below)

EDM used to mark out the columns using northings and eastings and so on, precise to a couple of milimetres.

Shutters are placed around the marking out along with a prefabricated steel mesh within, and then the concrete is poured in, giving a final result of:

Datums and Lasers!

Providing the colum was poured to the correct height, the datum is marked at 1 metre from the bottom side of the floor above. Using a “dumpy” we project a datum line upon all the colums around the visible area, like thus:

Then, from this we use a laser that spins around which is picked up by a detector on the end of a staff, which will be set with the offset of the datum, basically the difference of the laser height plus/minus to the datum line… minus the distance to the lumas plus the thickness of the ply. In reality it is really simple, with the equipment we use its 625mm from the bottom of the luma to the datum plus/minus the difference from the laser height. THE REASON WE DO THIS… is so that when making the floor above we can easily identify if the boards are high enough. Here is a picture of one of the paddies doing their laser detecting:

I should point out the laser detector beeps and indicates whether you should go up or down, easy tool to use to get the job done precisely

Slab Layout

Slab, refers to the floor. Once the lower decking has been put in place and is level, you can then start preparing the deck for the pour. Essentially what this involves is marking where the edges of the concret are, and adding additional information to the deck before you flood the damn thing with concrete.

This job is rather simple, generally the columns give enough information to know where the edges of the slab should be.

The tricky part of this job is marking out where the service holes are going to be, the engineering drawings generally have offsets that suit the designer not the person marking the stuff out. Anyhow, here are some service boxes, they are boxes made of ply that won’t be filled when the slab is poured.

From here on the steel workers throw a REBAR together (in accordance with the engineers drawings). Which ends up looking something like this:

Which is then boarded up around the edges and then poured with concret, and a day later it looks like this:

I really do hope it wasn’t too boring, I found it interesting when I learned about it. Although, this building is 100% non-sustainable the heads behind it didn’t even think how to design the damn thing let alone how to sustain it or dismantle it, the materials used and that which is wasted is gastronomical and non-ecological. I am learning heaps about how disgusting the work I am doing is. I hope that this experience teaches me a fair lesson in how to NOT do things in the future.

Recently I discovered I have the first 6 Hellraiser movies; and having only ever watched the first, I set out to watch the rest. I’m not a gorey type of person and horror movies aren’t something I watch to get a kick out of, but I felt that having these films would be useless if they were never to be watched.

So far all of the previous Hellraisers have been about Pinhead giving wannabe intellectual monologues about how everything is about flesh and dominion, however this film was more inclined to being a David Lynch film than a Clive Barker. Infinite loops that have no victorious escape is how I’d sum this film up. The film touches on morality and places emphasis on how you will pay for your own seflishness and those you hurt. The conclusion of the film at the end was warming and the horror of the film was more psychological than graphic detailing.

If you don’t mind disturbing films I would recommend you go and watch this. Thumbs up!

Part of a continuation of a discussion I’ve had with a couple of people, I’ve decided to write my thoughts down and share it out so that people can think about it and write back their opinions with regards to it.

It has occurred to me that nothing seems to be named properly. Let me point out here that when I speak of names I’m referring to everyday devices we use; not so much names of people. I have been contemplating lately that things we handle and use and refer to seem to have meaningless, implicit, or just boring names and they either fall into one of the following categories; a) a name that describes its function, b) a cliché reference to a historical/mythological figure, c) a name that describes the unit to be inspirational or revolutionary.

I think for these categories I ought to elaborate and set examples to what I am referring to. I think firstly I can quite simply say that all categories a, b, and c have been well exploited by NASA to name their space ships, e.g. :

1. Explorer – how dull is that?
2. Apollo – Greek god of light?
3. Challenger – how pretentious is that?

The point I’m trying to put across is that in a couple of centuries from now if our (un)civilized ways are still lingering, how will we look back upon our generation of misleading and ironic and clichéd names? What does this tell our children?

Previous to now, words would be invented to give meaning to things. Now we give names with reference to things that did have meaning which is instead of creating a new word to name/lable it. It makes me angry that we live in such a dull era. Why can’t we just throw syllables together and make up words? or is there a syllable concatenation ban?

Opinions?

Examples of invented (good) names that I can think of in the last 100 years: Googol, Klingon, Vogon…..