I've no idea why, but today has somehow been quite stressful at work. Most of my day has been in a huge email conversation or answering this or that query, I've had very little time to develop new code.

I was going to come here to vent and say exactly why I'm stressed but then I realised that this being real world work and my blog being real world accessible, talking about my feelings about customers or the work I'm doing is not quite right.

I very rarely tone down or avoid issues that I want to talk about, and I'd openly talk about my job in general here because those feelings I would have no trouble with my colleagues or boss reading.

But doing this whole responsibility and growing up thing makes me realise I can't just flaunt my opinions on sensitive business information.... I don't want to lose my job! ;)

I was looking forward to this weekend just gone for days as ex-housemate Chris was visiting from Friday to Sunday. I hate those blogs that list activities day by day so I'll just say that it was lovely to have him to stay, despite his bad influence in getting me drunk on both Friday and Saturday nights :P.

But the weekend was more social than I expected as Uni-Clare and Alisdair randomly popped in for a few hours on Sunday. And whilst they were here, Stuart and Erin came round for the evening.

We had fireworks too! We got 14 rockets from Sainsburys for £14.99. And what a bargain they were! They were like real proper firework display ones! We're having some more fireworks this evening in fact. So if you hear lots of them around my flat soon after 7pm come and join us! Ooh, and I've got Stu, Erin and Jen a toffee apple each, but don't tell them... it's a surprise! :)

After everyone but Stuart and Erin had gone home we sat and chatted and did a little bit of sober spontaneity. We've booked tickets to go and see Phantom of the Opera in London on the 19th. I'm quite excited!

[Edit: I'm pleased to notice that my website updated BST to GMT correctly unlike the opposite transition at the start of Summer]

I've had loads of things I want to blog about recently but I've been busy at work and in the evenings at home so I've had no time to write about anything that's been on my mind. After the weekend I'll have to make time.

However, I've just spent ages upgrading all the software on the servers I admin at work. My biggest problem has been with postfix and authenticating users. The information I found on Google was pretty useless so I thought I'd add my way of fixing it to the Google index for the error message.

If you're using sasldb2 to authenticate users on your postfix server and are getting the following error, you might want to read the way I fix it.

postfix/smtpd[29658]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
postfix/smtpd[29658]: warning: SASL authentication failure: Password verification failed
postfix/smtpd[29658]: warning: localhost[127.0.0.1]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed

The reason that it can't find /etc/sasldb2 even though you've created it (hopefully) using saslpasswd2 is that saslauthd chroots (by default) to /var/spool/postfix for security. Thus, despite the authentication daemon thinking it's checking /etc/sasldb2 and this is where the saslpasswd2 creates the database, it's not there. Simply copy /etc/sasldb2 to /var/spool/postfix/etc/sasldb2 and the problem will be fixed.

And I'll be shocked if there are ever any on-topic comments to this post! :)

I've just been across the road to grab a bottle of wine to drink over the next few nights. Now I really don't mind getting IDed so I'm not complaining about that, but what just happens is shocking.

The woman who served me looked at my driving licence for about 30 seconds. Time a 30 second pause next time you're at a checkout, it's a bloody long time. I was wondering what her problem was. I know I'd just cycled back from work but surely a little bit of red cheek doesn't stop me looking like my photo. She then blurted out to her colleague on the next till "Can you check this please? I can't work the date out."

I apologies if through some utterly strange set of coincidences she gets to read this, but how can anyone take more than 30 seconds to work out that 1984 to 2005 is a longer period than 18 years?! I might come across as a pretentious graduate but even on the most simplest level there are two lots of ten between 1984 and 2005. Can it really be that hard?!

And that's even before I rant about the fact that every point of sale system I've ever come across prints up the date 18 years ago when alcohol is scanned so that the dumb people using the terminal don't have to to any mental arithetic at all!

Arriving in Aldgate at about 10:30 we had a look around and found a pub next to the London Metropolitan Uni which opened at 11am. We were in and drinking at 11:07 which started our clock ticking.

At Blackfriars, a guy I've met a couple of times breify before joined us. Andy stayed with us all the way through to 'M' on the Alphabet Alcohol Challenge. Considering he originally was going to finish at 2pm or at 'G' so he could get ready for his Uni formal ball in the evening he did fairly well.

We met up at 'L' with my two pilot Meetees(?). Neil and James are both great people. They've help reassure me that the type of people who are up for Meet Matt Chapman are those crazy enough to get on with me.

They both wore their t-shirts proudly and I have word from James that he'll be wearing his to work on Monday. However, the five of us in MMC t-shirts attracted a fair bit of attention. Most of it was great. The older couple at our 'U' were really interested in both the AAC and MMC; they wanted their own t-shirts! All of the barstaff right round the trip were interested and enthusiastic. One landlord even poured us drinks after he had closed the bar and the staff and customers at Ickenham all wanted to know more!

It was fantastic having people interested in MMC. On the overground train we caught from central London out to our 'U' we got talking with some of the passengers. One mid-twenties couple were particularly enquisitive about it but there were a couple of teenage girls doing the typical chav confrontational thing... "Who the fuck is Matt Chapman?" "Why the fuck would I want to mee you?" etc. But consdiering they were trying to make my life difficult I think I did fairly well and made them pretty curious about the whole thing.

Throughout the day that was the only really negative bit about MMC. I'm so glad that lots of people were really interested and the way they all talked about the project amongst themselves and said "Goodbye" as we left trains makes me think that the project is unusual enough that it will work well!

Anyway, I'll write all about the MMC pilot on meetmattchapman.com as soon as I've finished coding the site. Any suggestions on content are more than welcome; What sort of details would make you take part?

As for the challenge, we did it. At precisely 21:57:43 we finished drinking our 'W' half pints. The entire thing took us 10 hours, 50 minutes and 43 seconds... Andrew was falling asleep but had battled through stubbornly wanting to quit at 'V', Richard was pretty drunk and has forgotten a great deal of the trip and I had to have a break in the loos to gag, on the verge of throwing up. But after splashing water over my face we got some "winners" photos taken and with beaming smiles, congratulated ourselves on a great achievement..

We met up with Arleen at our 'W' stop who took us to have a look around London. You can see where we went in the photo gallery. We ended up in an impressive wetherspoons and had a drink there. It was at that point I asked James and Neil just precisely what were they doing in the middle of London, drunk with a total stranger wearing a t-shirt with their name on it. And I think that's what makes it so fantastic!

You can view the photos from the entire day by browsing over to the photo gallery.

All in all, it was a fantastic and impressively successful trip! But Christ do I ache today! :-(

It's about quarter past 7 now and I'm up, showered and dressed. During the week I've not even started to consider getting out of my warm quilt.

But that's dedication for you on this very important day. It's our re-run of the Alcohol Alphabet Challenge and we're determined to complete it this time.

But not only that, I've got the t-shirts for MMC and am meeting both James and Neil during the trip to London.

And on a completed different note, and one that makes this day even greater is the fantastic Little Richard just brought me a doughnut. Sugary pastry goodness at 7:17! Yum.

I never really got to know her properly. But I miss Dubia Gemma, who's not actually living in Dubai anymore. She travelled something like 5000km to come to the Hitchin Meet I organised a couple of years ago and I was so happy that she did.

The reason I randomly bring this up now is that I'm unpacking some of my final bags with the odds bits in to find which I packed my Way Out map (thanks to Clare) in and I randomly came across the present Gemma brought from Dubai... a bag of sand from the beach. That reminds me, I've still got the Dirham she gave me in my wallet too. Such simple presents but they were unique and exciting.

I just set this challenge on IRC... I've "encoded" a message and kudos goes to the first person who can tell me what the source text is and how I reached this "encoded" message:

C ,rbe.p ,day ydco y.qy ,rgne nrrt nct. cu C ,.p. gocbi a Ekrpat T.fxrapev C-m oguu.pcbi uprm POC abe ydcbt Ekrpat mcidy x. yd. orngycrb!

Recently I've been working full time coding and as I work first this means I've been doing a great deal of typing. In the evenings, with friends away at Uni again, I've been spending most of my time not watching Lost season 2 or doing housework on my computer. I've been doing some coding on the game Planetarion. (For those that are concerned it's not interfering with my full time job. :-))

However, I'm silently quite worried at the moment. I've already taken two break to stretch my hands at this point in the post. I can't type more than a sentence or a line of code without the chronic pain of RSI making me cringe. I've never really suffered from it before but what's brough it on mainly I think is the stressful rush at work I've got at the moment.

I've got this weekend with Rich and Andrew doing a re-run of the Alcohol Alphabet Challenge so I've got Friday evening to Monday morning without typing so I'll see how my hands are on Monday.

But the worried stems from people saying once RSI starts, it's there permanently. Not only would it interfere with the only thing I'm good enough at to earn a living but it means I can't do a set of washing and drying up without stopping due to the pain.

If it's something that's going to be a constant problem for me, couldn't my body have given me more than 3 months in full time employment before it gave up on me? I'm not in any emotional mood at the moment, so I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that if my hands stay like this, I can't be employed to productively do a fulltime job that involves the keyboard.

My first thoughts where "It's bloody months from April 1st" but apparantly it's quite serious. 100+ churches in the US have clubbed together to run Porn Sunday.

I know my views of the Church piss alot of people off (including some of my good friends) but this is utter madness. The idea is pretty much to bring porn into discussion so that the Church can brainwash their members into thinking it's a bad thing and to reitterate their message of no sex before marriage.

It's inevitable that in this modern world we're living in, even devout Christians are having teenage sex. The Chruch if it had and sanity would surely realise that their rules and regulations (because that's essentially what they are) are very outdated. Sex before marriage happens, and there's nothing people can do about that. The natural human desire for affection and closeness will break some peoples faith, especially the blind faith for which they haven't any personal experience or any real world sensible reason to believe in.

What the Church should be doing is saying they don't approve of sex before marriage. However, they need to admit it happens. By having a flat view against it, they are alienating their youth majority who will go away and have uneducated, dangerous sex. They need to tell those people the ways to protect yourself during sex, they need to educate people about sexually transmitted infections and ensure that any sex that happens is safe.

And don't get me started about Catholocism and banning birth control. That just escalated the problem of young and unwanted pregnancies.

But this whole Porn Sunday thing is utter bollocks anyway, because everyone knows that Porn is great! If you want to impress your husband or wife to be on their wedding night, surely you need to get as much pre-marital sex in to practise those akward positions and ensure you give them the most ecstatic night of their lives?

I've had an upsetting thought hit me this evening... I'm about to enter this exciting part of my life where I say "fuck it" to getting into the pattern of full time work that so many adults are content with. I'm about to start meeting new people every week for the rest of my life. (Yes that idea scares me as much as you. But what makes me better is I'm actually doing it. And how's that for a bit of ego?!)

Anyway, I know alot of people through the Internet and I've not usually called them friends. There are the odd few whom I love to bits and have met lots in the real world but the majority I see as aquaintences and I've always called my true friends the people I know from home.

However, it's shocked me over the past few days when I've been sending emails to and from old home friends or talking to them on MSN. Hardly any of my old friends know about my Meet Matt Chapman thing despite having been planning it for about a month. It upsets me to think that I'm growing apart in all those friendships. I don't think I ever noticed this happen whilst I was at Uni because I had my own separate student life to distract me. But I know very little about how most of my old friends are getting on.

I can cope with that because there's always opportunity to catch up but I always blame myself for not keeping in contact. However, I then realise friendships work both ways and I'm putting as much into these relationships as the other person is, in most cases. And that's where my shocking realisation comes from: Life is moving on, things are seriously changing.

I hope I'm just being paranoid and that things will be perfect at Christmas when everyone comes back from Uni, but I still find it surprising how much a change of life finishing the education system is. And without typing a further depressing sentence, I will bid you good night... Sweet dreams.

I'm sure most people who've watched TV have seen the iPod (Shuffle) advertised. In doing so you'll have heard the track Caesars - Jerk It Out.

When I have guests over I generally ask them what music they would like on in the background. I would never make a good DJ; I'd always pick the music people don't want to hear.

When Laura was over once she wanted to listen to Jerk It Out and it was a track I didn't have. As I blogged a while back I later purchased it as my first legal online music download and I've aquired the rest of the album since then.

I'd like to just say how good this album is. There aren't many albums it's easy to listen to the whole way through and this is one of them. I'm crap at reviewing things, especially music. So I'll just say get it and listen to it. It's brilliant.

Talking of reviews. You also need to see the new Wallace and Gromit film. It's excellent. There are so many jokes that only adults will get. There's probably more for adults to get out of the film than there is for the kids. It's so funny! :-)

It's amazing how things can go from being so good to everything suddently looming over your shoulders.

Over the past 48 hours two things have gotten to me. The first is that I'm working most of my waking time to pay to live in my flat. And the only purpose to living in this flat is so that I'm in commutable distance to my job. If that isn't a paradox that upsets you, what is?!

The second is I have, especially tonight, a burning desire for love. I've got so much affection to give and it's the only major thing missing from my life at the moment. And that sounds bloody sad. But the reasoning the second thing that's getting to me so much is that I want to use the Meet Matt Chapman thing as a way to find new people. I don't intend to use it to find a girlfriend at all but...

What worries me is that the project will take up all the little spare time I have (escallating problem 1) and reducing the chances of meeting someone I can "fall in love with" (escallating problem 2).

This all makes sense to a "Matt's been out on a Friday night" mind. I wonder how I'll feel about those two things tomorrow.

I hate to mention it any more on this site as I'm sure Google will start to think kloopy.com has more relevence to the project than the new site does itself. You can help the unintelligent search engines work out which site to go to for Meet Matt Chapman by linking to it over the next couple of weeks as I get a proper website running.

To help you, I've made one of those snazzy 88px by 31px images that everyone seems to use. You can grab it at http://www.kloopy.com/img/mmc_small.gif. If you are going to be so kind as to link to it, please go the extra length and ensure the alt tag is "Meet Matt Chapman" as I'd like the search engines to heavily associate that phrase with my new domain.

Anyway, now that I've got my small imagey link, there's little procrastinating I can do before actually coding up a website and starting the project.

If you are someone I've never met before of know of someone who's crazy enough to be my pilot Meet, I'll be in London on Saturday 15th of this month doing a re-run of the Alcohol Alphabet Challenge. If you want to schedule a letter to meet up at and join us for part of the challenge, I'd be honoured.

Drop me an email: meetmattchapman at kloopy dot com. You can be the first to Meet Me and get the t-shirt!

Ok, so I'm starting it. I've no idea how it's going to work of even if it will and to be quite honest I'm nervous about putting all the effort in because it (and by that I think I mean 'I') could horribly fail.

But having a positive attitude on the idea... something like this could lead anywhere. Litterally anywhere around the world. It takes my life down a path which I know nothing about and have little control over. And that is exciting.

I think the thing that persuaded me was a chat to my parents about the project. They asked me to imagine not doing it and in a number of years time, reading back on my blog. Their question was "Would you regret not doing it?"... and I think I would in all honesty. I don't overly mind if I fail, at least I've had fun trying and given a t-shirt or two away.

So, the website is registered. Over the next week or so I will design something decent to put there and then, somehow, I'll begin.

http://www.meetmattchapman.com/

I wish not to detract from my previous post but I thought something had to be shared with you...

I give you my word, I wasn't rushing. But the following timestamped chat messages that I wrote show that I can leave my computer, buy a 6pack of Fosters and get back to my computer in under 4 minutes:

[17:49:11] Just off to grab a couple of cans of beer.
[17:49:13] BAck soon.
[17:53:06] Yum.
[17:53:27] < 4 minutes to go beer shopping. I love where I live. Location location location.

For it's proximity to the shops (and thinking about it, to the local pub) I don't think I'll live anywhere better in my entire life!