I opened up my sky+ box to try and get recorded stuff off it. It turns out that anything not free-to-air can't be extracted from the disk, leaving me with a few movies from film4 and some stuff from bbc1.

I did finally put a hard disk in my popcorn hour. I'm still waiting on a wireless card to turn up for it but for now I've repurposed a spare airport express in order to give it some network access and the box is happily torrenting down the tv I missed over the past couple of weeks.

Plans for today mainly consist of: sitting, watching tv, emptying and refilling the dishwasher, buying more yoghurt. Maybe some coding if I can keep my concentration levels up, otherwise mindlessly surfing the internets for hours.
It's an action-packed Saturday.

In an effort to feel less stupid I've been watching some of the Stanford Engineering Everywhere videos. They're really well done and I'm hoping by the end of it I'll actually understand a lot of the basic bits of software engineering and computer science that I never picked up. I'm a pretty awful coder and while I'm pretty good at monkeying patches for existing code, I'm terrible at sitting down and writing something from scratch. I'm also bloody terrible at learning from books. There's no real work or anything required of me so I'll see how this goes.

Otherwise this was a not-so-good weekend of feeling like shit. Still waiting for brane medicine to start working.

For the first time in ages I made myself leave the house without needing a prior arrangement. Instead we spent the day in Dublin city wandering.
The Point Village market was a bit dead so we didn't really hang around for long. It has a Pie Minister though and they do sell awesome pies, and got a sourdough loaf from another stall. Later we sat for a while in 3rd Floor Espresso on Abbey Street and enjoyed some awesome coffee. Easily up there with the Bald Barista for excellent espresso.

I've successfully managed to stop running all my own services like email and DNS and my servers are sitting idle. My (non-public) revision controlled stuff is copied to dropbox, email, calendar etc. is all provided by Google Apps, and the handful of websites I used to run (like www.asplode.net) are now on Google Appengine.

On one hand, this makes me really really happy. It turns out that despite my day job, I'm a really lousy sysadmin for my own stuff. I don't monitor half the stuff I'm supposed to, I ignore security updates and generally don't spend any time on the maintenance of my machines and the software that runs on them. Now my stuff is monitored 24/7 by teams of people who are paid to take care of the services they run and this is all blissfully out of my hands. And I'm not spending anywhere near as much on this stuff as, say, a hetzner dedicated server or a bytemark VPS.
It still makes me a bit twitchy knowing that I can't tweak this stuff myself. And I'm not sure I'll be amazingly happy to make DNS changes using a point-n-click web browser interface.

That said, who edits DNS more than once a year? And really, why spend time on maintaining this stuff when someone else out there is happy to do it for me? It's fucking difficult to run an effective anti-spam filter, and gmail seems to be doing a far better of of blocking spam than I ever could. I think I'll be sticking with the cloud.