Holiday time!

I've been on leave for a couple of weeks - spending some time with the kids now they're off school. Deb is off for the whole summer - yikes! I was glad to come back to work for a rest.

We were in Menorca for 1 week. We went to the same hotel as last year in Ciutadella. It's an all inclusive and reasonably nice. The old town is wonderful - tiny narrow streets and little squares. Although it was very hot (90F +) we still managed some time to sight see - mostly in the evening when the heat had gone out of the day.

As usual Jessica went hell for leather playing in the pool and had worn herself out after 4 days. She ended up quite grumpy by the end. Alex also got tired, and finished wanting to spend a lot of time in the room.

Still we had a good time and were lucky to miss the airport chaos last week.

Back at work now and likely to be spending quite a bit of time in Accrington. Lucky me.

GVIM and fonts

Tip #914 - Looking for the perfect programming font ? : vim online:

I've been struggling to get my preferred text editor GVIM set up according to my taste for ages. I'd given up basically until I found this note at the VIM homepage. I downloaded the ProggyClean font and installed it as instructed. I then recompiled VIM to use GTK2 (can't believe I was still using GTK1!) and now everything looks cleaner and is much more usable than it was. Woohoo! I'm using it to now to work on my draft for a website. This is planned to be for parents of autistic children on Wirral to share thoughts, interventions, things that have worked for them. It's still a long way from being finished. I'm currently struggling with the mechanism for adding links to content. I'll have to post more detail when I've got time.

See you soon!

Byzantine Studies Page

Byzantium: The Byzantine Studies Page:

Quick note to add this page to my blog. If you're interested in Byzantium, then this is as good a place as I've found on the web. I haven't done nearly as much research through this page as I would have liked. This is the best portal that I've come across - although I'd happily hear of a better if you know one. If nothing else, this site can point you to a translation of the full text of Michael Psellus' Chronographia. I haven't read all of it, but for the period of Byzantine that I'm interested in this is probably one of the best sources there is.

Time for another update. I've been extremely busy in work with my new job, so I'm going to blame that for not writing earlier. I've moved into a project job - at least for the time being. This week I provided assurance on a spend of �2.5 million (!).

In terms of FreeBSD, my laptop (Dell Inspiron 1300) is now basically fully up and running. It's on 6.1-STABLE as of 23/6/2006. All the hardware works apart from the sound and modem - neither important for me. I'll blog some howtos on what I did later.

I've also set my Palm Tungsten E to connect to the web. This note is being written with Plogit and I'll upload it later.

My family is OK. Alex is doing well at school, we're preparing for Year 2. Jessica is OK but grumpy. We're using a Handle massage technique to relax her. Early days but it seems to be effective at helping her relax at night. We initially used it on Alex, but stopped some time ago as he seemed to be through that phase. Jessica has real problems going to sleep at night. She can't seem to relax. This massage technique is helping, but she's not there yet - often not going to sleep until 22:00. See you later.

I'm in Blackpool today - not for fun I hasten to add. I started a new job recently & I'm now working with some colleagues in Blackpool. Lots of fun travelling up the M55!

My new laptop arrived recently. It's a new Dell Inspiron 1300, the cheapest I could find. It'll replace the IBM 600e I bought from ebay a year ago which no longer boots - and is now listed on ebay again to see if I can make some money back!

I've successfully loaded FreeBSD on it - and upgraded to 6.1-PRERELEASE over the weekend. The onboard Broadcom 440 is detected as bfe0, but I'm using an Asus WL-167G usb wireless adaptor. Took some research to find one that works with FreeBSD - this is seen as ural0 and worked first time. I now need to get WEP and X working. See you later.

This is the Harrison family blog. I've set this up as a temporary replacement for our old website. What will you find here? Updates on my family - my wife Deb and children Jessica and Alex; information on my adventures in FreeBSD; maybe some thoughts on autism; or even some ramblings on Byzantine history which is another of my interests; or heaven forbid work. Most of this will probably be written on my Palm Tungsten E with Plogit. I may add an entry later to explain how I made this work. See you soon.