We havnae got the power capt'n!

Left home at 10:00 this morning and headed for Hugh's, to help him with flat-moving.  Not the actual physical carrying of stuff (that's what movers are for), but the moving of boxes to the correct rooms, the putting back together of beds, the collecting of mothers from train stations and the dashing to B&Q when the lack of a vital nut made the putting back together of the aforementioned bed impossible.  In short, all the little jobs that make moving flat a huge pain.

Things were made virtually impossible by the fact that the electricity people didn't turn up to turn the power on.  They were supposed to be there by 4.  The cable people turned up early, and then wandered off again, unable to do anything without power.  Then they came back at 5, to find we still didn't have power.  Hugh phoned at 4.  And then at 5.  And then at 6.  And then at 7.  By which point the call-centre staff had given up making excuses, put in an emergency call-out and gone home for the night.  We eventually got power at 8:30, which was great, as I was freezing and the three candles we had weren't exactly perfect.  I suggest that anyone using Scottish Power switch to someone else.

Telewest (the cable people) were great, on the other hand.  Because we didn't have power they couldn't get the various boxes set up in our flat.  So they got hold of an inverter, took the various boxes down to their van, tapped into a cable from down a manhole and configured them on the fly.  A great piece of hack-work from some people that clearly wanted to actually solve a customer's problem.  Not only that they didn't leave until about 7:30, and tried to turn down the tip that Hugh handed him for service above and beyond the everyday.

Now back home, having left the family relaxing with the remains of take-out pizza.  Tomorrow we get to go shopping for all the stuff the new flat is missing.  Woo.

The kind of geek I am not

is personified in this (hopefully satirical) comment

"As a Gentoo user what really stands out to me is that this test was clearly biased away from Linux. If the reviewers had been serious they would have used an optimised distributions such as Gentoo, which would have taken far fuller advantage of the extra 32bits in each register to provide a much fuller experience, more than any current Linux distribution possibly could. It really saddens me to see that people go out of their way to spend so much money on such expensive hardware and then squander their investment by running barely suitable software on it. To me, an extra 0.1% performance increase, even if I am only imagining it to be faster, is certainly worth one day a week recompiling all of the latest packages from source code. Even if I do occasionally get my CFLAGS in a muddle! I think I speak for Slashdot when I say that Gentoo is the only sane option for getting the most from your hardware!"

Cheers to azalemeth for the link to http://www.funroll-loops.org/.