Office Spaces

They’re still in our office. Which meant that it was a little cramped this morning, but then only one person came to see me anyway, so it wasn’t too bad. From the crawling pace of the Facilities trolley across the lower floor today, everyone should be in their proper places by Friday. Just in time for the holiday weekend…

Finally disposed of my traveller's cheques today. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that they'll end up in my bank account; the staff weren't especially helpful, and I used filled in the account number on the basis that one number filled all the spaces on the deposit form, and the other one didn't. And yes, it is a wonder I manage to get through the day without causing myself any serious injury due to my incompetence.

Today, I finally visited Lenoir Hall; those of you reading this from Manchester will recognise this as an amazing achievement; in the entire three years of being enrolled at the university, I never once set foot inside the Refectory. I only managed to last two weeks here. My big fear here was that, although I read the Dining web site thoroughly to understand what I could and couldn't do, I have all these horrible, TV-implanted memories of American students coming up against the evils of the dreaded "Meal Plan". But, aside from asking for a 6-foot sandwich (ho ho), it wasn't nearly as scary as my memories suggested it would be. Also, unlike the Refectory, it actually looks well-kept, clean, and a place where you'd like to sit and eat. Plus it's a wireless hotspot. Look, I promise I will make a post which doesn't mention it eventually. Give a week or so to get it out of my system.

I think I promised pictures at some point before I left. I have a groovy small camera, the Sipix Blink, which takes reasonable 640x480 pictures, which I was planning on carrying around for taking pictures. However, it doesn't work in Linux. This is not for the lack of trying; myself and others have puzzled long and hard about how to make the camera work. We've managed to decipher the USB protocol that it uses, and we take dump image data from the camera onto disk. This is where we get stuck. The data it spits out is completely unrecognisable. It's stumped the gphoto-devel list, who are much better as this sort of thing than the rest of us. Sipix refuse to answer our questions about the camera, so we're left with a useless collection of bytes on the computer. And as I can't run Windows at the moment, there's no point in taking any pictures if there's no way of viewing them. Hopefully, my office machine will have a USB port, and I can get some pictures taken then.

You may have noticed that the right sidebar has a few extra bits showing. I'm using the MTAmazon plugin to show what I'm currently reading, and then below that is a link to my Amazon Wish List, just in case anyone is feeling really generous...