I have been trying to pick up the trumpet again this term, and attempting to learn to play the keyboard. My major sticking point is reading music. I can read music slowly, and almost understand the lengths of notes and rests, but when I try to put it all together it sadly goes wrong.

Practise makes perfect they say, but practise require patience, which I guess I must learn first. In a world were speed is the essence and we are used to fast food and next-day delivery, patience and perseverance are becoming lost arts.

Joining the beginners brass society at Warwick means I at least get one hour a week practise, and I now have some music books so can start to have a blast on the trumpet at home when all my housemates are out.

At the end of the first term, Me, brass Dave, Hazel and John played three Christmas carols at the rev cabaret. I lost the melody at times, but I think it still sounded half decent. Hopefully that will spur me on to continue next term and beyond.

I have been making quite a few train journeys in the past week or so, and on the train is the only time I get to read books. The book of choice for the past few journeys is one by Rick Warren, called The Purpose Driven Life.

At a time of my life when there are lots of things changing, lots of decisions to make about the future etc. I have found this book really helpful in focusing on what is important. It doesn’t contain all the answers, but it has some brilliant pointers and useful points which make you think.

It is split into 40 brief chapters, designed to be read one per day for 40 days. Starting right from the beginning it covers a number of topics regarding why we exist and how we can best use the skills that we have.

It is not a novel, so you can’t just pick it up and read it cover to cover. It requires time, concentration and is very thought provoking. I have not yet finished it, but if the second half is as good as the first I’ll be much wiser by the end.

Today I traveled from my sisters house in Maidstone to Jon’s house in Bognor Regis via Horsham where I picked up Abby.

When we arrived in Bognor we were met by a strange looking pink car driven by Jon. He is a crazy guy, but brilliant!

After visiting his church and seeing his tidy office, we went back to his house to pick up a car that actually moved, and took it to a ‘local’ pub that served decent food. Ham and cheese baguettes later, we started to head off towards the Spinnaker Tower. We didn’t get very far before a member of the group who will remain nameless, left their handbag in the pub and had to go back for it.

We couldn’t find a suitable family configuration for the three of us and we couldn’t prove that we were all from the local area, and we also couldn’t face paying a ton to go up the tower, so we stayed outside staring at if for a while. There were quite a few boats moving in and out of the harbor, including a police boat that kept an eye on us!

Abby attempted to purchase items from some of the boardwear shops, so we had to drag her out kicking and screaming.

We trekked back to Jon’s house with Sparky amusing the motorists, and looked through some camp photos and stuff on Jon’s computer. I think we must have bored Abby with computer talk, because she decided it was time to go home. After walking her to the train station we headed off to another local pub, where I thrashed Jon at pool, 4-0. I don’t rate my pool abilities, so that is quite an achievement for me!

Later on we headed back to Jon’s house and played on his computer and chatted for a while. It was really good to catch up.

Despite being older than I care to mention, and being 100% british beef, I had never been to London (Apparently I went when I was tiny, but that doesn’t really count).

My sister has a new house near Maidstone, and so I decided to visit her for a bit and see some of London whilst I am at it.

After catching a bus from Denton, I caught an early train to London Euston, where I had to find the tube and navigate my way to Victoria. Being so near to Christmas I thought that the train would be really packed, but it was fine.

Getting on the tube for the first time was not too difficult, I found the tube at Euston and managed to get on the Victoria line going in the right directon. I was impressed with the tube, as they were so frequent, not at all busy and they accelerated really fast. I guess if you were on them all day every day you would quickly get bored of them, but hey, I’m not!

I got off the tube at Victoria and was a bit confused, I could either follow the signs for Gatwick, or the central & reigional lines. I wanted neither! I headed for the exit, and soon found Victoria train station. After waiting there for a bit and eating some food, I got the train to Barming where I met Conrad.

Their house is very nice, although the entrance very much reminds me of uni halls!

Today me and Jude travelled into London and looked around. First we went to Hamleys, Then went to Trafalgar Square. After visiting the gates of Buckingham Palace and taking a few photos we continuted across the Thames and walked down the south bank past the London Eye.

After seeing lots of other things, we decided that it was time to head home as we were both tired, and so we travelled back to Victoria on the tube and got the train back to Maidstone.

I have for a long time, been using brute force to mate my two computers and keep their tiny brains in sync with each other.

When I try to rsync my desktop and laptop’s FAT32 partitions, it always tried to transfer all the files even when most of them existed unmodified in both locations. A while ago I tried to play with the –modify-window value, but that didn’t make any difference. I relied entirely upon the -c (checksum) command, which went through every byte of the massive amount of data to calculate the checksum for each file on both computers, before deciding that they existed in both locations and so didn’t need to copy it. This understandably took a while, especially on my laptop where the hard drive access speed is less than desirable.

FAT32 is a farily restrictive file system in terms of permissions and has very little file metadata in comparison to a journal file system, like ext3 and so there is little for rsync to go off when trying to find out if a file has been modified, accessed or created. On top of that, the basic mtime for windows uses one less byte, and so has a resolution of 2 seconds which can create interesting scenarios. As if that is not enough, if the two computers are in different time zones (or windoze decides that it will cleverly change to BST even though linux has updated the system clock to that effect, so you still end up an hour out) you can have the same file with different metadata.

Today I got fed up waiting for my desktop and laptop to checksum themselves, and so decided to read the man rsync pages. There I found an option named –size-only, which only compares files based on size rather than the mtime metadata. Now it only takes a second or two to compare the file lists on my computers. Perhaps occasionally I should include the checksum to make sure there are no files that I have edited but are still the same size, but for now I am happy with –size-only.

andy@laptop:~$ rsync -rv –size-only –delete andy@desktop:/file_storage/ /laptop_storage/