// October 19th, 2006 // 9 Comments » // General
I managed quite a varied assortment of artists last week. I’m noticing that to satisfy my musical appetite I’m having to play the music I’d normally listen to at Saras as well as the music I’d normally listen to at home. She’s got me hooked. Here’s the top ten:
// September 26th, 2006 // 4 Comments » // General
Home is an ex-mining countryside village a few miles from the Peak District National Park. There’s lots of stately homes, moors, farms and large fields within a ten minute drive. This picture is taken a minutes walk uphill from home, you can see lots of green; trees in the midground and fields in the background. You can also see Chesterfield famed “crooked spire” church. The downside is nearly everything is a drive (or bus) away.
After having trouble finding housing in Stafford for my final university year Nick and I turned our eyes to its urban Northen neighbour, Stoke-on-Trent, industrial, sometimes soviet-esque and grim. We live near the old Stoke football stadium, in the Stoke part of the city, which confusingly is not the city centre. Gone are the rolling fields, gone are the moors. Arrived are traffic jams, sirens and a wetherspoons a walk away. Drama aside it seems alright, there’s a small town centre area within a five minute walk but the main shopping and night area – Hanley is a car ride away. It would’ve been nice to live nearer Hanley, but our location next to the A34 means getting to uni is easy and quick. The locals all seem friendly and quite talkative too.
We live close to where the Victoria Ground used to be, in one of the many rows of identical ex-potters terraced housing, it almost has a Coronation Street feel – the houses all have little alleys between the rows. You can tell the houses used to be for the factory workers and familes – every house has had to be extended in order to have a kitchen and bathroom. Our house is just off the edge of this picture: (the football ground is no longer there and is now just wasteland)
Here is a page with a picture of what will probably be our local pub.
Nick and I are living with someone new this year, Rashid – who’s studying for an MSc in computing, also at Stafford.
// September 26th, 2006 // No Comments » // General
A meme doing the rounds, here is the list of ten applications I’ve used the most. I appear to have a much smaller HISTSIZE than some.
dean@tir:~$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn | head
119 sudo
77 ls
34 apt-cache
25 ping
23 vi
20 man
20 cd
18 cat
17 ssh
14 iwlist
Guess who’s been having internet problems and is struggling with patchy access to a neighbours wireless. A lot of the sudo commands are me bouncing the network connection.
Like Wouter I have a habit of using “ls” when I’ve forgotten what I was going to do. I’ve also been using bash completion so I haven’t been “cd”ing as often as I used.
// September 14th, 2006 // 1 Comment » // General
I’ve been using (unstable) Ubuntu as my full-time operating system for the last 18 months and one of my new years resolutions was to try and help out with open source software a bit more. So I’ve been volunteering some time to help out with testing and bug triaging amongst other things.
Anyway Tuesday night sfflaw made me member of the Ubuntu quality assurance team. 
Thank you Simon. See the Bug Squad page to find out how you can help.
// August 17th, 2006 // No Comments » // General
During my summer holiday, I’ve been visiting a few local attractions. It’s quite nice to visit places when they’re quiet and do some work, read a book or have a picnic. So I thought I’d share some photos.
The first is the parkland of Chatsworth House, accessing the park is free (except parking), you can also visit the House itself and the gardens for a charge. Being a poor student I tend to just walk around the park. I briefly spoke about Chatsworth before.
Parking up in the Carlton Lees car park and crossing over the cattle grid brings you out near the derelict water mill. I think this was once used to grind corn, now though it’s just a ruin, locked up so you can’t enter.
Walking on down the side of the Derwent you could see deer – does and their fawn, grazing on the opposite side.
Walking along a little further there’s a few picnic benches, so I sat down and did some work on a report for uni whilst looking over the view, during my typing I was visited by three ducks looking for food.
I walked along the river bank, dropping down to the river then jumped across the stones almost half way across the river. This is just one of many small waterfalls of this size that are on the Derwent. More spectacular is the water features in the gardens..
Moving on along the river, past some deer right on the opposite bank, hiding behind bushes. Eventually I came to the first glimpse of Baslow edge, along with some near-perfect reflections in the water.
Eventually Chatsworth House came into view, at least the west wing. At this point I turned around and walked back through the park to go home for tea.
More links:
// June 23rd, 2006 // 1 Comment » // General
From the bottom of some junk mail from the Royal Mail “Royal Mail, the cruciform and the color red are registered trade marks of Ryal Mail Group plc.”
They’ve trade marked the colour red? The mind boggles. I’m sure that can’t stand up in court.
// May 20th, 2006 // Comments Off // General
As the domain name may suggest I am Dean Sas. Not just any Dean Sas but the number one Dean Sas in the world (proof). I’m a twenty-something geek who loves toast, and potatoes, usually not together but often with cheese.
When not at work, studying or socialising, I can be frequently be found on Ubuntu related channels on irc.freenode.net, bug triaging on launchpad, or just spending time with Sara.
Shockingly enough, I also enjoy watching films, reading books and listening to music.
I use open PGP, my key ID is D729F676.
See also: my music preferences, my bookmarks, my photos and a list of stuff I intend to buy.
Copyright © 2012 Dean Sas's Weblog. All rights reserved.
