If I gave you a £20 note for goods that were worth £5.45, how much change would I expect in return? £14.55 I hear you cry! Well, not according to a cashier at Morrisons supermarket in Leeds, who proceeded to process my transaction, attempt to converse with two collegues, and sort out her mess of a cash draw at the same time.

She faffed around for some time, then took the £20 note from me, and opened the cash draw, she then opened up a pouch of pound coins and sorted them out, then she sorted my coin change and handed me that and the receipt all the while talking to her buddies about something (I have a receipt and £4.55 in change in my hand at this point). I keep it held out, waiting for the £10 to be placed in it, there doesn’t appear to be one in the cash draw, and she rummages around trying to sort the thing out. She then closes the draw! I immediately say that I need my £10 note, I had to show her the receipt 3 times and even have someone waiting in line tell her to hurry up before I got what was owed to me!

If your going to work in a supermarket, the minimum requirement should be being able to add and subtract monetary sums, after all how much change to give is on the damn register, it’s in front of your eyes, how can you FAIL to get it right!? I think Morrisons need to review their recruitment and staff training policy. Reason 1647: You’ll always get less change than is owed to you.

Just when I thought Linux couldn’t get any better someone showed me Tux racer. How I hadn’t heard about it before I don’t know, after all what could be more fun an addition to ones Linux box than a game that allows you to direct a penguin down a snowy/icy slope at 100 miles an hour catching fish and doing jumps!

Gleefully I installed it, and discovered it ran so slowly that I had to get a cup of tea and come back just to have seen tux start his descent. Ok, so off to apt I go to get some proper drivers for my nVidia graphics card and get my OpenGL working nicely, restart X and wayhey! Speedy tux!

Its amazing, for a non-gamer how fun this is…. suddenly *BLACK*. The screen just shuts off. Box is still running, but shes not responding to commands. I try to kill (and so restart) X, nothing, still off. I try a few commands, nothing. So, I go for the power button. That doesn’t work either. The box is completely locked up hard. With a slight shake in my hand I reach for mains plug - *CLUNK* everything goes off.

I reboot the box and all is well, problem is, this happens everytime I race with tux for a bit. There is no point in the game at which this happens, it just happens after a little while. There is no recovery, its the mains plug everytime.

Google revealed very little in the way of help; all reports indicate that nvidia with normal drivers should run flawlessly. Ah well, looks like I will have to do without Tux and the snowy mountains

For those who want to see how fun this game looks, here is a screenie, oh and if you want to play on windows - you CAN! Just google tux racer and enjoy - trust, me this game is awesome.

It seems the choice of SE12 programming project is a wise one; I have recently converted all my MP3s to go nicely on my Linux box. All well and good you might say, after all they sound good, and are nicely ordered in folders by artist, then album and the file names of the tracks include the title and the number of the track on the CD. Problem is, none of that info is in the ID3 tags!

Crisis looms as I am faced with the prospect of having to manually tag well over 10,000 MP3s from hundreds of CDs I have ripped for playing on my computer. All I can say is I’d better get coding in earnest

As I cracked on with work today I have been listening to one of my favorite artists, Cassandra Wilson, a fair bit. Amazingly I came accross a beautiful track on one of my albums I had never heard before called “Harvest Moon” (how I hadn’t heard it before I don’t know, maybe it was a slow starter so I had skipped it in the past). It bears much resemblence to music from an album called Jazz by Twighlight, but with the added bonus of Cassandra’s wonderful voice. It brought back lots of fond memories, and made me smile and think a little. I post the lyrics below; I hope they mean something to you too. Oh and do check out the track in question, and in fact the whole album from Cassandra. It’s called “New Moon Daughter”

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleepin’
We could dream this night away.

But there’s a full moon risin’
Let’s go dancin’ in the light
We know where the music’s playin’
Let’s go out and feel the night.

Because I’m still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because I’m still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart.

But now it’s gettin’ late
And the moon is climbin’ high
I want to celebrate
See it shinin’ in your eye.

Because I’m still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because I’m still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

Well I’ve just knocked my sleep pattern right out of sync again. Stayed up coding really late last night as I got far too engrossed in something. Then lay in bed till 3 in the afternoon. I’m going to have to force myself to go to bed early tonight and up early tomorrow morning to get myself back on track for monday. Ah well, sometimes you need sleep

I also had the strange thing yesterday of needing to sign for a magazine as a parcel at the site office. How bizare. I had to show ID and everything. Still, was worth collecting it - New Scientist is always a good read.

I have had numerous calls to publish a page with all the quotes on that come up in my random generator. After keeping many people in suspense, I have now done this.

Simply click the link under the random quote on the right, “View all quotes” and off you will go to the page with all of them on. I add to them every day practically, so they are always changing. Hope you enjoy them!

Went to collect my tickets from the fast ticket machine for coming home on 17th Feb. I know it’s early, but otherwise I’ll forget or be in a rush on the day and not have the time to get them if I’m not to miss my train.

Put my card in the machine, expecting it to prompt for the confirmation code I had in my other hand. The card came out I put it away. “Searching” it said, suddenly, no confirmation code asked for, it said “Printing” and my ticket details on the screen that it said was printing. They’ve done away with the silly code, how cool.

Suddenly *BANG* out shoots ticket number one. Not into the tray, oh no, skittering across the floor of the station. 10 metre projection at least. I hurry to pick it up, *BANG* ticket number two comes out, misses my outstretched hand and hits the lady operating the machine next to me. Just as I think it’s all over and I go to apologise *BANG* my receipt is spewed out in the same fashion, this time missing me and impacting with the ticket inspector who had just made her way over to come to my aid with the clearly defective machine. Don’t you just love technology?

I got my exam results for the first semester this morning, and I have one main thing to say on the subject:-

It was interesting to see which modules I and others did well on, and surprisingly, some of the ones we all thought we had done well on were some of the lowest marks, and by contrast, what after the exam was almost completely branded the hardest paper ever, we did much better than expected on. I was particularly pleased with my maths result; at 83% it was unexpected to say the least given my track record with maths!

Still, some proper celebration in the form of Guinness and jazz are most definitely in order for this set of results

I broke my ftp server last night. I managed to kill the rogue process(s) that had brought it down, and got proftpd back up, but then the virutal users config file refused to be loaded so no one could log in. I checked the file for corruption, even deleted it completely and re-created it, but it wasn’t having any of it.

In sheer desperation, and because I didn’t want to reboot or anything drastic like that, I killed all ftp processes, including the main on for proftpd, uninstalled the lot using apt, and purged all files related to the application. Upon re-installation it came up ok. I re-instated the config files, and away she went. Draconian I know, but I just have no idea what part of the install wasn’t playing along.

If anyone knows why proftpd might do this, please post a comment. For anyone who has been trying to login, apologies, you should be able to now.

Peter White’s Confidential is an album I have had in my collection for some time, and in fact I purchased it second hand. Before buying this album I had heard quite a bit of his music, but somehow this album is kind of special. I love music that tells stories, even if they are not true, and the best stories are the ones not just told in in song, but in a subtle way accross an entire album. I cite Alexander O’Neal’s “Hearsay” as a prime example (although a far cry from jazz and Peter White!). This album however is special, because it actualy contains a story in the inlay card, and the songs on the album relate to different parts through their titles (and if you are one to read things into music without words like me, the songs themselves relate to it too).

There are two songs on the album that have vocals, my favorite of the two, “She’s in love” is sung by Christopher Cross, an old favorite of mine; his musical talent most noted in his song sailing - on that still makes me feel amazing when listening to it to this day. The other vocal track “Lost without your love” is by a less known, but none the less brilliant artist David Sparkman.

The album is almost all smooth jazz, which given the story in the album is very appropriate. One notable exception on the album is the track “Jump on it” aired in fact on URY during my time there. It has a funky edge to it, and really makes you sit up compared with the rest of the album.

Peter White has a very special way of playing guitar, one that stands out, but none the less has subtle differences on every track, tempo and backing complementing it perfectly. It is also worth noting here that time spent does seem to relate to quality in this instance; the album took over a year to put together, and a lot of hard work not only from Peter, but from his entire team made it something really great.

If you like smoother music, or even if you are simply a fan of great guitar, this album is really worth a look. If you haven’t heard music from Peter White before, you are in for a treat. I do like the love aspect in many tracks, and will confess to owning a large number of love songs. Love in jazz however is something entirely different; most of the time you are not left with words to tell the story for you, so for you to like it it’s got to mean something to you. This album does exactly that for me.

If you own this album, please leave your own views in the comments as it would be good to know what others think about what is, I’m sure, my favorite Peter White album (I now own several!).