I know, I’m breaking my own rules, and doing it more often than I should. But despite a promising start, my inspiration and motivation hit the same brick wall at once, and whilst I could force my way through to completing something, it’d give me another 4am finish, so all in all, I choose sleep.
Maybe next week.
It’s Tuesday! (or it was, four hours ago) and I actually have a piece ready!
This was another 11 hour marathon, though I actually had all the ideas in place in the first hour. I’m not really sure what happened to the hours between 8 and 12…
Anyway – this one’s a song, for the first time in a while, and it’s another step into an unfamiliar genre – though I’m not exactly sure which one. But probably one that involves eyeliner, bad hair, and never, ever smiling.
I’m pretty happy with it, all in all – I got a chance to use the clarinet, I managed to write some lyrics (though I have no idea what they mean), and I played real chords on the guitar.
There’s all the usual roughness that results from one of these sessions – the bass gets bodgy near the end, there’s a few places where the levels fight me, and I will always, always hate my voice, but none of that matters because of two things:
1. Baby Ducks.
2. Explosions.
Yes. Baby ducks, and explosions.
I will now leave you with that thought, and collapse in bed.
…if one’s thoughts take the form of Facebook status updates?
Since updating to Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop, and doing some research into my problems with wireless and the Cisco VPN client, I am now fully able to work without wires once more.
In 7.10, when using wireless (intel 4965 chipset) or using a USB broadband modem attempts to use the VPN would result in a kernel panic and a hard freeze, with just the numlock and capslock lights flashing. Wired usage was fine.
On updating to 8.04, it looks like I can use the VPN with a broadband modem now – I managed half an hour of usage before I stopped, whereas previously it’d be less than a minute before the crash.
As for the wireless – that still causes the crash, but on doing some further research it appears that Cisco don’t support SMP. It happens to work with some network drivers, but not with others. So the workaround to that is to disable one core before connecting to the VPN via echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online.
Obviously that’s not an ideal solution – but it’s probably the best we’re going to get, and most of the time I’ll have access to wired network anyway. This just means that if I do feel like sitting on the couch to work, or sitting outside in the sun, I can.
In fact, I was going to exercise my new found freedom today by heading down to the lake for a bit, but in the end I decided it’s probably just a little too cool for that, and I’d just disrupt my current run of semi-productivity.