Bike!

[juliet]

Hurrah for lovely shiny new bike, meaning that I am now back in cycling action. Sadly, it would appear that 3 months of no cycling leads to a certain lack of fitness. Called at two different bike shops en route: On Your Bike had the women's saddle I wanted, and a replacement non-quick-release saddlepost bolt, and a fitting for the front light; Evans didn't have the rear light fitting either, but sold me the display one for cheap instead. So I can also now get home in safety, albeit in somewhat slow safety :-/ Ah well, am sure it won't take that long to return to former glories etc etc.

Pub last night was a somewhat quiet affair owing to us all being a bit knackered, I think. It's the return to work after the longish holiday... just_mon is now on her way back to Ireland, but was able to come round & inspect NewHouse before heading off to pack last night.

I have been playing with majordomo, & have concluded that in order to make it play nicely with our current setup (which basically involves mail being relayed through the ICT central servers, and no 'proper' servers running at our end at all) would involve a level of co-operation from ICT which we are unlikely to get. They will, instead, correctly suggest that we get our list-running user to switch to their mailman listserve whatnot. Sadly, our user doesn't like ICT because "they keep changing things". I have handed this problem over to Ivan with a sigh of relief.

Comments

[andyroyal.livejournal.com]

Do I remember correctly that you're at Imperial College? Because the ICT people there are complete @#%&ers. Everything worked so much more smoothly when most of the computer stuff was handled locally, but over the past couple of years ICT have been becoming increasingly anal about everything due to virus paranoia. A while back they were talking about giving people computers totally under their control, that they'd build, installed.and maintained. Most people in my department said thay'd never use it and just have their own computer instead.

[(Anonymous)]

Ooh, bike! What sort of shiny new bike?

If I haven't raved at you about how wonderful hub dynamos are, prepare to be raved at.

HTFB

[juliet]

Not a very exciting bike, I'm afraid - Trek T30. Does the job (i.e. commuting) in reasonable order. But I love it greatly already :-)

[briefly reads up on hub dynamos]

Ooh, shiny indeed. If I manage not to get my bike nicked for a year or so, I might think about getting dynamo lighting for next winter. Have forked out for bike handcuffs in an attempt to retain this one a bit longer...

[juliet]

Yes, I am; and yes, I am under-impressed with ICT. Especially their near-total lack of support for Linux (to be fair, they *are* improving this a bit). And they insist on RHEL3 rather than Debian, growl growl.

[sigh] Astro is still handling much of our stuff locally; just not the mail server any more. Or *some* of the web server (though we're hanging onto some of our webpage locally).

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Shiny bike; looks quite similar to the one I use :)

[andyroyal.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, that's another thing: they once proposed that they should make Microsoft Word the standard format for all email communications. Would you believe it, the UNIX and LINUX people weren't too happy about that

[juliet]

Yeah; when being forced to move bits of our website across to the New Template, they said 'well, you could use the new content management system'. 'Do go on,' I said. 'It only works on Windows,' they said. 'Well I can't then, cos we don't have any Windows boxes. Apart from one, & I'm not sure where that is any more.' Cue looks of baffled horror all round :-/ I wound up having to use Dreamweaver, which obv doesn't work on Linux but does work on my lovely Mac laptop, so that's OK.

[brightybot.livejournal.com]

I used to do Juliet's job, and remember that one - why they couldn't have pdf as the standard format is beyond me. I also designed the astro site which prettyness Juliet is kindly clinging on to for me, against the ever-increasing pressure to standardise to the main Imperial templates.

[juliet]

Hey, it's not just for you I'm clinging onto it. I really cannot face the prospect of moving the entire sodding site onto evil Dreamweaver. I do not like Dreamweaver, it is much more hassle than just writing HTML by hand. (& having to access the site on the ICT servers makes the whole thing dog-slow).

[andyroyal.livejournal.com]

Do they still make you sign that thing that says you're the custodian of this this and this compuyter and you don't have any unlicensed software on it etc? That was a complete joke, half the people just signed it without reading it, the others refused to sign it until they threatened to block their IP address.

Gahhh, Dreamweaver.... apparently it's got better since the days I had to use it, but I'm still unlikely to prefer it to hand coded HTML.