MaW’s Blog

Just thought I’d mention it. I like watching snow fall, but it’s a little distracting whilst at work.

Should’ve posted about this earlier I suppose, but the vote’s been delayed so there’s still some chance of things working out okay. Software patents are extremely evil — we’ll have none of that here please. Perhaps the European patent offices aren’t quite as stupid as the American one seems to be, but even without granting patents for which there is plenty of prior art, or which are just dumb (a patent on cut and paste, anyone? Bit late for that, I think — or how about a patent on selling legal services online? Where’s the inventive step in that one?) there is still a lot of potential for things to be Very Bad.

There’s a petition to sign, I’m not sure how much attention anyone will pay, but get that warm fuzzy feeling of doing something without actually having to write to your MEP (who is my MEP? I have no idea) — and it’s probably too late for that anyway.

Perhaps you’d be better off just praying.

I just spent a very happy five days in Germany (Müchen, Ingolstadt, Berchtesgaden) and Austria (Salzburg). We visited many places and I took lots of photos. A selected few of the places are up now, and later in this entry I shall describe them. Photos of people will come later, and I’ll also be able to provide the full-sized originals to interested and involved people as and when they ask.
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Well, I got a new PSU, everything seems to be working so far… fingers crossed!

I have, however, vowed never to have a floppy drive in my PC again.

My computer is dead

It’s actually my fault. I won’t explain entirely what happened, it’s boring and you’ll laugh at me (or be more worried than should be necessary). Suffice it to say that you must be very careful with floppy drive power connectors. There was smoke and glowing wires.

However, I believe only the PSU and the floppy drive were destroyed in the incident, so all I should need is a new PSU to get things up and running again. That’s assuming there wasn’t some kind of feedback pulse which fried the motherboard or something on it - if that happened, then I’m going to be particularly irritated.

In other news, I’m going to Germany from Monday until Friday. Highly reduced Internet access, although I’m hoping to pop online somehow at some point. Try not to fill up my inbox with mail while I’m gone…