Where Everybody's Crazy

This week I have mainly been a sysadmin.

I've been working on the college network with Keith, the IT guy; we've been installing new servers, upgrading services, and installing NetReg. After half a day of messing everything up, it now seems to work very nicely. The next stage is to put Nagios so that we know in advance when things are going wrong.

I've had mixed feelings during the week. In way it's been nice to get back into computery things, and I think it's been very good for Keith to have another geek about, but I've found that I can't seem to get as deeply involved as I used to - my eyes have been hurting this week after staring at the screen, and my wrists are beginning to tingle again. I've been trying to write a TPJ article in the evenings, and can't summon up the motivation. It'll be great article once it's done - doing wavelet decomposition of images in Perl so that Memories can suggest tags based on similar photos. I'm stealing the code out of ImgSeek and porting it across. But I just don't have the yen for the coding right now.

Unfortunately I probably won't get it done in the near future either, since I'll be on the road from this afternoon and don't have a working laptop at the moment. There's a few quid in the laptop fund, but not very much, and I'm hoping that the rumours about Apple releasing a very cheap Intel iBook next January turn out to be true. Otherwise, if you're planning on upgrading or dumping your (t)iBook, please let me know!

It's been a strange week in other areas. We had a music evening at church on Monday - I trundled down to the wonderful JCF House in Acton expecting... well, I don't know. To sing and maybe play a bit of piano, I suppose. Turns out it was more like a private concert - we have a few students from the Royal College of Music at church, and a couple of them did some piano and violin pieces. There weren't too many of us in the audience, either - Pastor and Mrs Morinaga, and their friend Mr O, and one of the girls from church, AK.

Now, I'd seen the letters "AK" at the top of some of the songs we sing in church as the person who'd translated many of the newer worship songs into Japanese, and kinda sorta wondered who it was. And even when my friend AK tried out some of her new translations - "Did You Hear The Mountains Tremble" and "Before The Thrown Of God Above" - I didn't really twig. And then Mr O asked me to be his interpreter at a piano auction the following day, and the week just got steadily more bizarre.

Now I'm off to a friend's Christmas party in London, JCF on Sunday, and then on to Reading for some work Monday and Tuesday. Then away for a brief holiday, and then I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing. I'm just making this whole "life" thing up as I go along, I hope you realise that.