a view through my own eyes

21. Clarkson – You’ve got Soul
Jeremy Clarkson provides a chapter on each of his favourite vehicles, be it Concorde, the Spitfire or the GT40 etc and explains why in his view they transcend mere machines and instead have a soul of their own. Good entertaining read – ideal for the erm bathroom.

22. Phillip Pulman – the Golden Compass (Northern Lights)
The first in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and to be honest I think it is the best. Pulman gives us an alternative earth which is similar and yet different from our own. I am not going to say any more as there is enough entertainment from the American Catholics being up in arms about it without me giving any clues away. As an individual book I thoroughly enjoyed it, as part of the trilogy it was definitely the strongest part.

23. Pulman – the Subtle Knife
The second part in the trilogy which promises so much as it joins the alternative earth to our own earth and other worlds. Sadly although I like the idea of the crossover and the travel between the worlds I just felt let down. The best written part was a death scene (saying no more for obvious reasons).

24. Pulman – the Amber Spyglass
The final part of the trilogy. I would rename this as the pointless spyglass to be honest. Its clear from the start that Pulman either did not know what he wanted to write or was bored doing it, it did pick up but boy does it plod. Again the promise and ideas are on the whole pretty good, BUT the alternative world was incredibly badly executed, the death of the assassin was to be honest laughable, the spyglass was umm pointless and the temptation bit just did not appear to work. BUT I did enjoy reading the book and the others beforehand, they were on the whole good fun some of the ideas were poorly (I felt) executed, some the of the concepts were a bit ‘oh wow’ because of the downsides I did not feel as satisfied with the three books as a whole as I would have liked.

25. Neil Gaiman – Stardust
I tried to see the film of this on my birthday – sadly we gave up on the cinema that day due to levels of mayhem. The book however is an utter romp through the world of faery in only the way that Gaiman can, as I read it I could easily imagine it as a graphic novel in the style of say the Sandman. Much fun, highly enjoyable and incredibly tongue in cheek. Waiting for the dvd to be released now.

26. Harry Thompson – Penguins Stopped Play
The tales and history of an utterly inept village cricket team as they attempt to play a game on every continent. This book is in moments a travelogue a comedy and an obituary. On the whole its utterly hysterical the tales of British Airways should go down as legend. I thoroughly enjoyed this, but then like the village team in this book – I was utterly rubbish at cricket but not due to lack of effort or enjoyment in the process.

Thus concludes the book consumption of 2007 – not as many as I hoped but then I spent a lot of reading time studying and this list did not start in January. Wonder how many I can manage in 2008.

Well finally the first term of my course has finished.

A few things have been learnt:

Whilst twenty hours a week to do a part time degree does not sound unreasonable, on top of a full time job and normal ‘life’ stuff things get challenging. For example its either four hours a night mon-fri or most of the weekend or a combination of the two. Lets face it though after a whole day at work some times there is an urge to say ‘sod it’ and do very little.

Since the core reading is pretty much supplied, doing the reading prior to the lecture makes things more understandable particularly if the seminar is shortly after the lecture.

Taking notes straight onto the computer is a good idea – since when writing essays – you only need to cut and paste quotes and references for footnotes and bibliography.

I am no longer as youthful as the first time I did a degree, if anything I am old enough to be the parent of most of the full time first years. I have now learnt that pulling an allnighter is no longer an option – I just cannot do it anymore. I can manage staying up until about 1am, I suspect that I will have to change my hours round as getting up earlier in the morning is now easier than staying up late. It should also be said that when I first did a degree I did not have a full time job.

When there is a reading week (as in no lectures/seminars) so work can be done on essays – do not take the whole week off work, just take the afternoons off and go and work in the library then at home in the evenings. Otherwise I get distracted and have a most definite touch of cba.

The good news though is that I am thoroughly enjoying it.

[version 2.1 of the instructions]

Having done some more nosing round, it appears that Apple have made ssh-agent more integrated than I originally thought in that it now integrates with the Keychain Access tool that is a standard part of OS X.

To automagically not need passwords to login to Unix hosts:

1. generate a key:
ssh-keygen -t dsa -f ~/.ssh/id_dsa -C “you@exampledomain.com”

2. add the public bit of the key to the authorized keys file on the host:
cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh you@host.domain ‘cat – >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys’

When you first try to ssh to the host, the Keychain Access Tool will kick in and ask for the key phrase relating to the key stored in your .ssh/id_dsa file.

Thats it!