Smelly

The Question of the Week on B3ta at the moment is all about personal hygiene. It's full of exciting stories about people who smell really bad.

Unfortunately this seems to have coincided with an eczema flare up, and the great sage that is Wikipedia is advising:

The first and primary recommendation is that people suffering from eczema shouldn't use detergents of any kind unless absolutely necessary. Current medical thought is that people wash too much and that eczema sufferers should use cleansers only when water is not sufficient to remove dirt from skin.

Interestingly this seems to be serving me quite well. Cutting back on soap has spared me from spending the morning itching, a significant problem just a few days ago. The only problem now, though, is personal hygiene.

If you happen to be walking past me any time soon and I offend your nostrils, please tell me.

Linux - Is it the way forward?

I've spent most of today compiling packages aiming to produce a bootable version of Linux From Scratch. I've downloaded the source and compile it on the machine to produce a working Linux OS (hopefully).

It's quite exciting, although I'm not sure how much I'm learning just by typing in commands from the book. Two early observations are:

• Bash is really cool. For some reason I thought that DOS was quite good, but this takes the biscuit.
• Regular expressions really aren't. I've never seen something so confusing. One day, I suppose, I might get my head round the syntax.

Meanwhile I'm still compiling away. Unfortunately, I rather suspect that the experiment will end with nothing more exciting than a blinking cursor. Oh well, it beats doing work.