life – Page 64 – Louisa Parry

10 years ago

21/7/2007 / louisa / 10 Comments

Ten years ago today, I had what I generally consider to be the best night out in a nightclub of my entire life ™. The truth is probably that the 21st July 1997 wasn’t a particularly exceptional night out, it was just representative of a most enjoyable entire summer of clubbing, spur of the moment adventures and music festivals.

It was the summer between leaving sixth form college and starting university. After being largely depressed for most of the previous two years, I’d finally settled down with a good group of friends and was feeling more confident about myself than I had done in a long time. Andrew and I had become friends in April and on a steady diet of gossip and nights-out, we became best buddies by the time the summer properly kicked in.

Every Monday and Thursday night, pretty much without fail, from the end of our A levels in June to after I started university in September, we trod our regular path from the Corrie pub, to Manhattans (for the “indie room”), then skipped down Back Bath Street to Stanley’s Keg. After the Keg shut, we’d sit in the street with our regular Keg crew until people drifted off to get taxis home, and we’d head to the phone box outside WH Smith to call 547000 and get our ride home.
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LUGRadio Live 2007

8/7/2007 / louisa / 2 Comments

Just back from LUGRadio Live 2007 – the annual weekend of geekery in Wolverhampton. As well as being in a different location to last year, it had a completely different atmosphere for me – last year was too hot to circulate much but this year, I chatted to lots and lots of interesting people.

Good & Bad points below but all in all, it was pretty cool (both in temperature – hurrah! – and as a quality statement) and we both had a great time.

Lurking

10/6/2007 / louisa / 2 Comments

I have started lurking on the ubuntu-uk, ubuntu-women, and linuxchix mailing lists and the IRC channels of the latter two too.

I would like to get more involved in the whole FOSS community fandango but I don’t know where to start or what sort of things I want to do so I thought I’d start lurking to see what comes up.

I don’t know if I’ll end up contributing any more than the current occasional bug report or blog entry about random software, but I figure I’m way more likely to get involved now that I see what is going on than I was before.

So we’ll see.

Reducing your carbon footprint, geek style

7/6/2007 / louisa / 1 Comment

Care of Planet Ubuntu-UK, I’ve just read Michael Wood‘s post about Bringing down your carbon footprint.

Leaving aside the “joke” one of our cats is called Carbon and I like his footprints, I thought the green-geek angle was interesting and have a few things to add to Michael’s suggestions. None of mine are particularly rocket science but as with the philosophy behind Recycle This, what is blindingly obvious common sense to one person is a revelation to another.

Recycle computers and old computer equipment when you’re done with it. People like us of the geeky persuasion are usually upgrade well before the end of a computer/gadget’s lifespan but other people aren’t so insistent on everything loading instantly or having the latest graphics card/wobbly windows.
If you don’t know anyone to pass it onto directly, find a company to do it for you – our local one in West Yorkshire is Airedale Computers in Castleford and last time we went, they took everything we had to offer from full PCs to random cables, cards and spare keyboards.
Linked to that, computers that aren’t fast enough to run Vista will probably be still able to run Linux so forgetting all that hippy freedom nonsense, encourage people to make the switch for that reason.
John switched his mum and dad onto Ubuntu last year because he was sick of having to fix their old, knackered Windows box. Their computer is running a lot faster now and since they only use it for basic things like web browsing, IM and word processing, they’ve not really had any problems. The only snag they’ve had is easy (without any help from us) photo printing – but photo management on their computer is a lot easier now.
Where feasible, download software rather than sending for a CD. This is obviously pretty easy for FOSS users but I know people that have sent away for Ubuntu CDs for their one install and left them on the shelf since then.
And related to that, use reusable media for storage where possible – USB keys over CDs etc etc. And as an extension of that, go for quality and a size that’ll last rather than replacing cheap stuff frequently.
But if you’ve had to use a CD or if you’ve got some absolutely dead computer equipment, there’ll still be ways to reuse them if you think creatively enough. We’ve got a Technology category on Recycle This which includes loads of cool suggestions for bits of computer and AV tech. I’d like to do more posts on that sort of thing so if you’ve got any suggestions, please let me know :)

One of my main green issues is the amount of always-on computers we have in the house. In addition to the laptops John and I use throughout the day, we usually have a server (mail, internet gateway, media) and an second back-up server (for daily back-ups of the main one) running. I suspect the latter could be turned off more but the former is pretty much needed all the time (to maintain our IP etc). Perhaps we should hook up a pedal powered generator…

A year on

24/5/2007 / louisa / 0 Comments

So it was a year last weekend since I left work at the University of Leeds and things are going well. Not rolling-around-in-piles-of-money-and-giggling well (at least not all the time – but we’ve had our moments) but steady well (aka ‘enough for me to be able to afford the trip to Lindisfarne’ well).

John’s joined me in the crazy world of self-employment and he seems to be enjoying it too – he’s got a steady stream of consultancy work as well as doing development for our future projects. In fact, the former is delaying the latter at the moment but no biggee.

Highlights of the year:

Filters I’d like to see added into GIMP

I use GIMP every day. For those that don’t know, GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program – ie, the free software equivalent of Photoshop. I’m probably not supposed to call it that but meh.

I mostly use it for pretty basic things like cropping/resizing, sharpening and adjusting the colour levels on photos for use on the various websites I run. For doing that sort of thing, GIMP is pretty fantastic.

But work on pictures for Fametastic in particular has made me realise that as extensive as its filters are, it would be a lot more useful to me if the programmers added some additional features.

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