The diet has some slight damage around it’s footings today. The last couple of nights I’ve been going out of my way to eat as little as I think I can get away with, and only apples after 6pm. Today for lunch I’ve had a sandwich, but ah..also a rich chocolate brownie. It tasted like 2 stones on my beer belly and I hated myself for cracking.

Looks like a light tea then! I also need to make some personal changes. It occured to me in a moment of clarity last night that I’m in the middle of some relationship issues, and I need to make some hasty (and permanent) changes to make good.

Sho mo…

Went SLED10 release version last night, doesn’t look, feel or play differently than the RC3 I was using before. Had the usual problem of the machine crashing at the end of the main install (you know, the graphics and sound card bit). Hand cranked the NVidia drivers and re-write of Xorg.conf with Sax2 -c 1 after coming up in “failsafe” mode (aka Runlevel 3).

Restarted and all worked OK. I had to run the sound detection in YaST | Hardware | Sound, but that took seconds and worked flawlessly. After that, added four Xine RPMs to give me DVD playback. I don’t bother with XGL as it interferes with Xine too much. Mangles the control panel etc. Nevermind. I can live with it.

Now just putting all my junk back on, such as photos, tunes etc. At home, I must use Windows 0.5% of the time, and that’s only because of my Windows Mobile PDA.

Took some nice snaps of Manchester in the sunsheeeiiinnnneee on Wednesday, some of which made it to Flickr (almost out of quota for this month!).

Weather slightly cooler today, glad for something of a break!

Stupid acronym, great product. Ready to start putting it through it’s paces with students come October.

Once you sort the DVD playback issue, it’s got just about everything

You know, like :-

– Shrek 2 DVD

– “Get A Grip” by Aerosmith

– INXS Greatest Hits

I’m sure there is a whole lot more from my past waiting to be rediscovered (even if Shrek 2 is reasonably recent, it’s a lot better than the first).

The weather in Manchester has been oppressive, at least by the usual standards. It’s been high 20 something Celsius (sorry, don’t know what that is really in old money – 80F?) all week and I suspect even sun lovers are getting a little sick of the sweltering nights and sweaty days.

The aged A/C in the machine room at work is barely able to keep the equipment at a workable temperature. Maybe if it all trips off, we can go home! 😉

It’s still 24C now and it’s thundering it’s arse off. I find something quite liberating about being caught out in the rain on a sweaty night. It once happened in Wigan on a Saturday night out years ago – we got drenched in a flash shower in between pubs. We got into the John Bull and everyone stared at us like wet t-shirt contestants!

The finest pub in Wigan, and the holder of many fantastic memories.

So England are out of the World Cup. Perm any one of the following excuses as to why :-

– It was Rooney’s fault
– It was Erikkson’s fault
– It was Lampard’s fault
– The weather was too hot
– Crouch is rubbish
– We’re rubbish at penalties
– It was Ronaldo’s fault

All of which are utterly pointless. You get what you earn in life, and England just aren’t good enough, pure and simple. We’re all armchair pundits who become experts overnight, so my opinion is just as valid/invalid as the rest, but that’s life, get over it. At least drunk people didn’t smash up city centres again. Maybe we’re getting used to it now!

On a lighter note, I’ve read SLED10 ships on the 17th July, barring any major disaster with the public beta. I’ve installed it at home and work, and like it a lot. I’m becoming massively anti-Microsoft as every day passes. They are obviously still a very powerful company, but I detect a shift in attitudes now.

Users are wiser now than they have ever been, and are looking at what their alternatives are. I like Macs, but don’t like the price point. If I can have the software functionality on general purpose PCs, I’d be happy with that. Throw in Open Office for free, and I’m a happy camper. SLED10 does everything I want, and turning on XGL makes it a fun environment in which to work.

I’ve even got to the bottom of the Linux DVD player. Novell aren’t going to throw one in, but I can recommend Xine. Go to http://www.xinehq.de and download the RPM/deb for your system. I used the ones from the Brazilian maintainer.

Installs in minutes, no mind numbing compiling from source. I’m just not down with that at all, it has to pass the idiot test and install with a few clicks and no cryptic build errors. I’m thinking of writing a Cool Solution about it.

The end of a long but productive week. The ZENWorks workshop stuff we did went really well, I just hope we can keep the momentum going. It’s tough because folks are demoralised. We have good people but they’ve been messed about and it’s not fair. This blog has nothing to do with work, so I’m going to express the view.

We’re taking a look at the new GroupWise Mobile Server next week, we’re all cautiously excited (is that a bit odd?) as it will open a lot of new avenues for GW, which we’re hell bent on keeping. I just hope we can have more bodies so we can give more and better quality support for it.

Got SLED10 RC2.5 working finally at home. The NVidia driver thing was a really tough one, but one forum had a fix involving Sax2 re-writing the xorg.conf. Took minutes to solve, ironically. Still can’t register for updates. Apparently that bug is top of the list for both SLED and OpenSuse 10.1.

The weather is perking up too, and England are still in the World Cup. Toute le monde, Rodders!!

Friday – ate some Kettle Chips, bit into a “conjoined” pair and cracked my molar. Ow. Thinking about it, ow. Drinking hot or cold drinks. Ow.

Time I got a checkup. Maybe it will be easier to pull the bugger out as my tongue keeps caressing it without my permission.

The presentations seemed to go well, shame there were so few people at the Novell event. If I made one person think, then it served it’s purpose. I don’t think I’ll get the free invite to Salt Lake just yet.

Too many papers report we want Emile Heskey. Worse luck, we seem to be paying for him! He’s probably a nice bloke, but underperforming footballer. God help us!

That is certainly the question. I’m locked in mental anguish, trying to decide whether or not to stick with reliable but extremely boring NTL telly, or whether to go with Sky+. Everyone I know who has the latter says it is indeed the dog’s love potatoes, but it’s still a bit of a decision to make.

I have no beef with NTL, the phone and broadband is perfectly fine, but they are so slow to innovate, it’s untrue. They’ve recently merged with Telewest (who have just released a PVR, which is really the selling point), but there seems no sign of integrating TW’s progressive thinking into the boring green giant.

Sky’s latest offer ends today, so I’m going to take a look tomorrow to see what’s on offer. If it’s good, I’ll probably go for it. If not, I’ll hang back and see what NTL has to offer. I might even ring NTL up and see if they’ll bend over for me if I stay with their TV a little while longer.

Watch this space. Going to watch 24 now…

What have I been up to lately? A lot. It feels like a lot, in fact, it probably is a lot when you can’t stop your brain from ticking over. No, I don’t take drugs. No, I don’t smoke. No, I don’t really drink. No, I’m not totally boring (though I can see where you’re coming from).

My friend Dave and I claim inventorship of a stoopid new game. It doesn’t have a name, but it’s rules are simple. You pick scenes from your favourite movie and re-enact them in an accent of your choosing. For example, we chose RoboCop (a mutual favourite) and re-enacted scenes in a Brummie (Birmingham, UK) accent. It’s damn funny. In fact, it’s damn funnier if you have a few alcoholic beverages first. We then moved onto Pulp Fiction. I can’t remember laughing so hard in a long time. Pick any film, pick any accent. A guarantee you’ll love it!