Ok. Every now and then I get asked about this and people don't like "It's not particularly interesting" as an answer. It's not, so don't say you weren't warned.

Many moons ago I went on holiday to Crete with Kathy, Derek and Jane. They'd just finished their A-Levels, I was just about to start my final year of them. We got a very cheap deal for 2 weeks. During the course of these 2 weeks we found the only thing we all ate that we could easily get hold of and cook in the very basic self catering were noodles. At some point I said to Kathy that if I ever got round to running a BBS (which I'd been talking about for a while), then I'd call it Noodles.

As it happened I did end up running a BBS, and lo it was called Noodles (I've just tried to find a suitable Fidonet nodelist to indicate this, but failed. I was 2:443/21 from some time in 1997 until 2000 or so though). And eventually it got to the point where I got email gating to the BBS, so I used a subdomain of noodles. Note at this point I wasn't anywhere near using Noodles as a nick. I was j@ as an email address.

More time passes, I'm getting ready to go to university. My college "father", Jon Chin, writes to me and offers me an account on his machine in college. I suggest jonmcd (which was my Nortel username) or noodles (as I'd used that as an ISP account name for the BBS). Jon decides he likes silly usernames and so I get noodles. Fair enough.

Note I'm still not actually known as Noodles. However when Compsoc ask me for an account name, I choose noodles, rather than having to remember multiple account names. This continues, until I'm noodles most places I have accounts. And then OxIRC starts. And I type "irc" at a bash prompt and magically I become noodles on IRC. And that's really where it started. I think my downfall was the day I failed to turn round when someone shouted "jon" in a lecture theatre, but did turn round when they shouted "noodles".

There. Sorry you asked now?

Meh. Still feeling run down after Debconf. Am sure I didn't feel this bad after the last one. I'm such a crock.

Not up to a lot; mainly been dealing with customer support requests and moving one of Black Cat's secondary nameservers around. Also been looking at various smart card specifications since I obtained a reader from Simon Richter last week. There doesn't seem to be a lot of useful Linux code out there. Although pcscd works with the reader ok I haven't found anything that can usefully deal with the two examples of smartcard I currently possess - a Chip&Pin credit card and a GSM SIM card. However I've found specs for both, so hoepfully I'll be able to knock something up.

So, last day at Debconf. And I've got sick. Bah. That's what I get for not sleeping enough. Too many late night saunas (well, only 2, so perhaps not enough?). It's been good to put some more faces to names, and also to see the people I met for the first time last year again! I'm not quite sure I was as productive at hacking on stuff as I was last year, but then that's never the main point in these things for me. I did manage to get CACert assured while here and can now assure other people which is cool. JD will no doubt laugh at me for this. Plus I've been pointed at some groovy looking GnuPG compatible smartcards which I'll have to look into more closely. Is it wrong to see them and immediately wonder about whether the code is available and if the key size can be upped?

My flight's too damn early tomorrow morning, so I think I'll be spending the night in the airport. Less hassle than getting 2 or 3 hours sleep and waking everyone else in the room up when I'm getting ready to go.

Oh, and Robot101 rocks.

After staying up on Thursday night until at least 4:30am (times are hazy after that) I'd planned to get an early night last night. Until Uncle Steve said there was a party on our floor after the keysigning. This never quite happened (people gathered outside instead), but I still ended up getting to bed at around 7am. It's probably put me in the right frame of mind to continue looking at mjg59's x86emu issues though.

So I had this conversation with Hanna last night, where I mentioned about the fact I find prolonged online conversation usually quite hard work (say in a debian-devel thread, rather than personal mail to a friend). And she replied by saying that based on her original email/irc conversations involving me she'd thought I was quite bland, but after actually meeting me she'd decided I actually was interesting enough to talk to. Which is interesting, because I like to think I can be entertaining enough to talk to (don't we all). And I got to thinking that perhaps the fact I never seem to able to blog is related. So, I'm going to try harder to do this, in the hope that it will also persuade me to participate more in mailing list discussions where I feel I can add something.