DjMagra’s stuff ‘n’ stuff

Not coming from a family of TV nuts, we don’t have Sky at home, sticking instead to the regular 8 analogue stations that are available. However, increasingly so, I am thinking that getting Sky in would be a good idea, interactive TV just looks so cool. I am kinda worried that I will turn into a complete TV junkie if we do get it in, which is why I have been reluctant to date.

However, the case for getting it has been growing stronger of late (having to get up and out in order to watch the Lions match being the most recent case) and, I have just read that Sky have no secured the rights to show all the European Rugby Cup matches involving Irish Teams ahead of RTE. This is going to be a real pain in the nuts, and may well be the final nail in the coffin….

I heard it for the first time the other day, and I’m hooked, I think it’s such a warm, happy tune. I am of course talking about You’re Beautiful by James Blunt and I suggest you go out and buy it and smile lots!

I think this just about sums it all up!

Personal highlights: Bono taking the little girl up on stage, his new friend / Sunday Bloody Sunday - and Bono’s sermon which followed / Bullet The Blue Sky (amazing as always, though slightly more reserved on Bono’s part than normal / When Johnny Comes Marching Home (snippet) / The Hands That Built America (snippet) / Please (snippet) Running To Stand Still (amazing!) / Happy Birthday Aung San Suu Kyi (snippet) / Walk On (snippet) followed by the International Declaration of Human Right’s and Bono’s call to Make Poverty History

Had a strange one here today. I applied the latest update to FC3 on my box here, an update to selinux, and it started spewing errors all over the place! Of course, it would all be nice and easy if I was able to do a package rollback on my box, but, that’s another story!

Here’s what was updated:

[daragh@daragh lib]$ sudo tail /var/log/up2date
[Mon Jun 27 11:22:30 2005] up2date availablePackageList from network
[Mon Jun 27 11:22:40 2005] up2date installing packages: ['selinux-policy-targeted-1.17.30-3.13']
[Mon Jun 27 11:24:47 2005] up2date deleting /var/spool/up2date/selinux-policy-targeted-1.17.30-3.13.noarch.hdr
[Mon Jun 27 11:24:47 2005] up2date deleting /var/spool/up2date/selinux-policy-targeted-1.17.30-3.13.noarch.rpm

And here is the errors I got (unable to ls a lot of dirs, ssh out etc unless I sudo)

[daragh@daragh lib]$ ls
ls: error while loading shared libraries: /lib/tls/librt.so.1: cannot apply additional memory protection after relocation: Permission denied
[daragh@daragh lib]$ ssh db00
ssh: error while loading shared libraries: /lib/libutil.so.1: cannot apply additional memory protection after relocation: Permission denied

So, after a lot of head-scratching and poking about (and with a little help from some friends over in ILUG I realised that I had downloaded a new kernel recently as part of an update, but, had not actually rebooted into it.

So, a quick backup and reboot later (was forced into a hard reboot after the soft reboot hung), all was back working again.

So, there ya have it, even on linux, if in doubt, reboot!! (ok, ok, I don’t actually advocate this, but, as you can see, in my scenario, it worked!!)

When every Irish person in your MSN buddy list is showing as listening to U2. Currently I have 8 people from Ireland online, and all are showing as listening to U2 at the moment! Only a very few short hours now until the boys start rocking for the first night, unfortunatly 3 long days to go before I get to go along!

There’s also an amazing buzz about the city, in fact the whole country, there’s very few people I know who are not going, and it’s put everyone in such a good mood (despite the pretty pish weather tonight!)

Glastonbury without John Peel for the first time, that’s going to be a strange experience. Jo Whiley, his usual partner in crime on the late night BBC 2 coverage has just said a few very nice words on her Radio 1 show about the late, great John Peel

Hmm, I had actually planned on writing about this (the BBC’s decision to time-delay live footage of breaking news), but, instead, I’m going to write about something different under the same subject.

Watching the RTE news at 9 this-evening, there was an article on about Cystic Fibrosis in Ireland. They had an exceptionally good looking and intelligent girl on, who is shortly about to turn 21, the usual life expectancy for a person with CF in Ireland. This is completely shocking, this girl was in the prime of her life, looked perfectly healthy, yet, I would imagine, has a very short life expectancy, such a horrible illness.

What makes it all even more shocking mind, is the fact that a few miles up the road in Northern Ireland, the average life expectancy for a CF sufferer is 30 years of age!

Henmania is now gone, replaced by Andymonium, and Henman Hill has now been re-christened Murrayfield by the Beeb…how quickly they forget!

So, yeah, I missed this last night, only finding out about it on the news this morning.

There was an optical illusion created last night, which made the moon appear much larger in the sky, and closer to earth than normal! There’s a detailed explanation of how it all happens over here. It actually looks like it’s going to be apparent for the next couple of days, though, by the looks of it, I’ll be seeing nothing but grey Irish skies tonight!

The summer of 1995 had just started. Nothing startling about that fact, until you remember that 1995 was the last time we actually had a summer here in Ireland (rather than the odd nice day interspersed with lots of grey and rain!).

I headed off to Wales on the boat with the family and a few friends on the 21st, the Irish Sea being like a glass pond, and the weather being amazing. And, that was pretty much it. We had a minor blip on the horizon the last few days of June (I remember this, as the Bellewstown races were on, and it was decidedly icky during them), and once that blip was out of the way, it was wall to wall sunshine just about every day from the end of June until the end of September.

Now, with today being such a nice day, here’s hoping (even though it’s not forecast) that the weather decides to do it once again and give us a proper summer at last. Ireland can be such a nice country when the sun shines, and Irish people can even be so nice (and sometimes, shock-horror, even pretty!!) when the sun shines!