Daily archives: April 25, 2005


Upgrade

I touched Spinneyhead earlier, gently stroking its purring black heart.

Then I pressed the button and rebooted it because the server had crashed.

All these years of running this website and today was the first time I’ve actually seen its physical manifestation- a server sitting in the corner of a room. It was borderline mystical, so it was.

Plus, having pressed the button, Tim says I’m now upgraded from chicken soup machine repairman third class to second class. If I can just learn which way round to hold a screw driver I might even make it to first class.


Nuclear Future

Honourable Fiend has a compelling take on the recent upsurge in interest in Nuclear power as “environmentalyy friendly” and a good stop gap towards the zero carbon future.

It’s also extremely bad news for the commercial entities which depend on that weapons-power-weapons cycle for their bread and butter. Hence the current US fad idea of building new nuclear power stations “to reduce CO2 emissions while renewables are too expensive”. Which is obviously a complete crock of shit since it’s only cheaper because it’s subsidized to the lug’oles, and it’s only subsidized to the lug’oles because it’s required to maintain a weapons programme. Plus of course there’s the minor issue of waste management.

I worked at Sellafield for a while in the early nineties and there was a certain smugness that must come from being a protected industry. The biggest example of which has to be the THORP programme, which went ahead before the main customer, Japan, had signed any contracts on the understanding that if anything went wrong then the Government would surely underwrite something that had already cost X hundred million pounds rather than risk BNFL collapsing.

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Monday is becoming minor disaster day

Last week Casa Spinneyhead was disconnected from the Interweb for a day whilst the broadband threw a paddy, today I’ve been hit by two annoying setbacks to my blogging. One is short term, the other means a re-think of my plans for the next six months.

I left the computer on last night to run scheduled tests and because there were some sites left open I wanted to revisit. Some time during the night it crashed, corrupting the OPML file that detailed all the RSS feeds I check every morning. So now I have to track them down and rebuild it. You can bet I’m going to back it up this time.

More annoyingly, the training scheme I was booked on which was going to give me, amongst other things, six months support to become a pro blogger, is no longer open to me. Now I have to go and jump through other idiot hoops just to satisfy the JobCentre and get a job I’ll hate.

Grumble, grumble, complain.

At least it’s sunny out.
Update I think Monday heard me complaining and decided it hadn’t done enough, because the server crashed at about five and had to be manually restarted (by me). Not a major problem at all, but, in keeping with the rest of the day, mildly annoying.

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