General: Bob's Basement?

Yesterday was an interesting day. Karl and I went down to our monthly KLUG (Kent Linux User Group) meeting, where as we were given a talk on BASH that left me checking my e-mail, followed by a talk on LaTeX. I wasn't expecting to find this talk interesting, but i was. LaTeX is a markup language that allows you to write documents/books/letters in a standard text editor - at a console for instance, which can later be processed into a fully formatted PDF file (as an example).

The markup isn't formatted related, but more a case of marking sections - like the beginning of a page, or a header. And then using templates, or your own designs, this information is processed and the output looks differently accordingly. The woman giving the talk (Julia) felt this was useful for day to day word processing, which I'm not 100% convinced on. However, I imagine it could be useful when used in conjunction with a scripting language for automating certain tasks, such as creating invoices from a database. Spitting out plain text from a script is easier than interacting with something to create formatted output.

After this, Julia invited us back to join in on the fun of Bob's Basement. It almost sounds like the underground movement of Spode's Abode, but it's a crack team of Geeks with social skills, putting their collective minds to work on geeky projects. The project I ended up involved in, was the Pirate Ship, which has plans to be a lot of different things. Initially though, it needed to be a working boat - so that's where we started. By the end of the day, we had a 6ft long boat, in a fairly glued position. It had a feel of Scrapheap Challenge, but with more time on our hands.

What I liked about this group, is the talk of embedded devices, robotics, GPS, 3G control, solar panels and crazy ideas - right up my street. Not only will I imagine it being quite fun, but I should learn something at the same time.

Then of course, after a long day, Karlson and I wound down with a long Guitar Hero session - a recommendation to anyone.

I'm having a few issues with 64-Bit Ubuntu that are making me wonder if I should go back to 32-But - Flash keeps breaking in Firefox, and I'm getting a lot of occasional hangs that seem unnecessary. However, I think I'm first going to give LinuxMint a go, it's far more than an Ubuntu re-badge and has been catching my attention a lot recently.

You built a boat? Wouldn't it have been just quicker and easier to buy an old canoe?

Canoe believe it!

I'll get me coat.