Trains
Wednesday 21st December, 2005 00:22 Comments: 0
I took the train on Saturday to a friend's party, and it took a very strange route, which nearly doubled the travel time. I was originally sitting next to a 14 year old girl, with her colouring book and pencils, when she asked me if I could buy her a Strongbow. I said no, obviously, as she definitely didn't look 18 and she responded "I got money". I somehow managed to restrain myself and just shook my head. What I realy wanted to do was tell her that the money wasn't the point, and she should have said "I have the money" instead of what she'd said, which barely passes for the English language. And tell her to get some deodrant.
So how could it get any worse? Well, the girl got up, leaving her stuff in the mesh thingy on the back of the seat in front, and had even left the tray down, so I figured she was coming back. Then along came an old man, who sat down in the seat. I told him that someone was sitting there, but he didn't appear to hear me. I tried again, putting my hand on his arm and saying quite clearly (the man sat the other side of the aisle appeared to hear me) that the seat was already taken. He just sat there, sorted out his walking stick, adjusted his gloves, and ignored me. I don't know if he was eating something or was just weird (I still didn't know if he was rude or deaf or both), but whatever he was sucking on made him drool, so every few minutes he'd wipe his mouth, sometimes digging his elbow into me in the proces. Could it possibly get any woese? He started picking his nose. Not even one of those casual rubs, or a quick poke, this was a wholehearted shove your finger as far as you can up your nostril. Thankfully, he left the stop before mine, giving me half an hour of peace, sat by myself.
There was also a guy (he looked about 19) that was playing with his laptop on the train. He didn't really have much on it, so resorted to Hearts and Pinball, then flicked through for some music, but at one point he must have looked in a videos directory, and Windows XP started showing thumbnails of all of the AVI files. They were all rather rude. Lots of naked ladies. He probably thinks no one saw, but I could see the screen reflected in the window as I sat behind him.
But it was worth the journey with all the crazy folk, as the party was fun, and it was great to catch up with my uni friends. Sure, the sleeping bag was a bit cold on the lounge floor, and I didn't get much sleep, but I'm glad I went. Also finally met Steve's girlfriend, Toni, who seemed lovely (and just his type, he's a lucky guy).
I was playing with my new work laptop today, managed to sort out the NVIDIA drivers so I could get widescreen (far easier than I expected, download one file, run one command, hit the Return key a few times), and even managed to get the soundcard working (again, one command, hit Return a few times)! I definitely like Slackware, it's a good distro.
I finally got an email from Amazon to confirm an order I'd placed about an hour earlier, I've never seen such a big delay before. Hopefully the presents will arrive in time for Christmas.
I was also looking at the new BitTorrent 4.3.3 code, adding my modifications, then discovering that you couldn't launch new torrents in the usual way. It's down to the new IPC code, which they've just introduced, and doesn't appear to work - even on a clean install of their official client. So I reported it to the BitTorrent bugs mailing list, hopefully it won't take them two months to fix (like they did on the maximum upload rate slider bar), but for now I replaced their new IPC code with the old controlsocket code, and all is well with my build. I think it's a simple correction for them to make, so I'm waiting for another version to appear in the next few weeks. I had to do even more botching to get my client to work, I'm now placing my modified *.pyc files in the library.zip, rather than building all the files myself, as if you follow the instructions provided the client doesn't seem to work properly.
So how could it get any worse? Well, the girl got up, leaving her stuff in the mesh thingy on the back of the seat in front, and had even left the tray down, so I figured she was coming back. Then along came an old man, who sat down in the seat. I told him that someone was sitting there, but he didn't appear to hear me. I tried again, putting my hand on his arm and saying quite clearly (the man sat the other side of the aisle appeared to hear me) that the seat was already taken. He just sat there, sorted out his walking stick, adjusted his gloves, and ignored me. I don't know if he was eating something or was just weird (I still didn't know if he was rude or deaf or both), but whatever he was sucking on made him drool, so every few minutes he'd wipe his mouth, sometimes digging his elbow into me in the proces. Could it possibly get any woese? He started picking his nose. Not even one of those casual rubs, or a quick poke, this was a wholehearted shove your finger as far as you can up your nostril. Thankfully, he left the stop before mine, giving me half an hour of peace, sat by myself.
There was also a guy (he looked about 19) that was playing with his laptop on the train. He didn't really have much on it, so resorted to Hearts and Pinball, then flicked through for some music, but at one point he must have looked in a videos directory, and Windows XP started showing thumbnails of all of the AVI files. They were all rather rude. Lots of naked ladies. He probably thinks no one saw, but I could see the screen reflected in the window as I sat behind him.
But it was worth the journey with all the crazy folk, as the party was fun, and it was great to catch up with my uni friends. Sure, the sleeping bag was a bit cold on the lounge floor, and I didn't get much sleep, but I'm glad I went. Also finally met Steve's girlfriend, Toni, who seemed lovely (and just his type, he's a lucky guy).
I was playing with my new work laptop today, managed to sort out the NVIDIA drivers so I could get widescreen (far easier than I expected, download one file, run one command, hit the Return key a few times), and even managed to get the soundcard working (again, one command, hit Return a few times)! I definitely like Slackware, it's a good distro.
I finally got an email from Amazon to confirm an order I'd placed about an hour earlier, I've never seen such a big delay before. Hopefully the presents will arrive in time for Christmas.
I was also looking at the new BitTorrent 4.3.3 code, adding my modifications, then discovering that you couldn't launch new torrents in the usual way. It's down to the new IPC code, which they've just introduced, and doesn't appear to work - even on a clean install of their official client. So I reported it to the BitTorrent bugs mailing list, hopefully it won't take them two months to fix (like they did on the maximum upload rate slider bar), but for now I replaced their new IPC code with the old controlsocket code, and all is well with my build. I think it's a simple correction for them to make, so I'm waiting for another version to appear in the next few weeks. I had to do even more botching to get my client to work, I'm now placing my modified *.pyc files in the library.zip, rather than building all the files myself, as if you follow the instructions provided the client doesn't seem to work properly.