brief, as I’m too lazy currently to blog properly (and in no particular order) :-

– Getting to grips with my new camera, not as tricky as I presumed, but then again you need to have imagination to frame good pictures, and I don’t seem to have it.

– Joined Facebook, and I still don’t get it. I feel old, this manifests itself in various different ways, especially when I eschew new tech fads. You can rest assured that you’ll never find me on Second Life. My first life is just fine, thankyou.

– Jemima Khan – Find your own cats and stop wasting everyone’s time. And newsflash – YOU AREN’T SEXY!

– Metropolitan Police – Stop humouring dumb as fenceposts micro “celebrities” and concentrate on real crime, you know, where real people actually get hurt.

– Thierry Henry, I don’t think real Arsenal fans will miss you moaning your head off. Fans in the suites, you’re going to have to learn the players’ names now, aren’t you?

– SLED10 SP1 killed both my NDISWrapper powered wi-fi stick and also my NVidia drivers. Managed to sort it all out reasonably quickly and it’s good experience.

– Come on EA, get some decent footy game out for the PS3. Playing FIFA 06 is not the same.

– Blair is out, Brown is in. Nothing changes, except things get worse.

– Manchester congestion charging – are you taking the p*ss?

Full of a cold, bad mood, feel like I’m constantly choking on phlegm.

a while. I noticed that the last one was at the beginning of May, which surprised me really. It seems like a lot longer than that. And of course it goes without saying that an immense amount has happened in the last six weeks. Not least the following (in no particular order) :-

– Went to Spain for a two week “holiday”

– My wife broke my camera, so only a couple of days of photos

– Father in law lost his job owing to the actions of a despot who runs the place like his own personal fiefdom

– Dad got a job! Woo! Thought it would never happen and he’d have to keep on dragging himself off fishing until he drops off his perch

– Bought a new camera (Fuji 5600), not arrived yet

– Got a PSP, frightened to death of breaking it (see above for why). Good fun though, if a little frivolous

– Went to Port Aventura and saw their new ride, “Furious Baco”. Damn, doesn’t open until after we leave

– Hardly got sunburned at all, thanks to judicious use of hats and suncream

– Went to Barcelona for the day. Nice place, nice weather, mad people at the Sants station coming back to Salou

– Went to Tarragona and had a look at the cathedral and windy streets. Beautiful stuff and made me realise that I need a better camera (see above)

I’ll probably blog in more depth tomorrow as I’m going to see Velvet Revolver after work, which means me staying in the office (Apollo is only 20 mins on foot from work) and attempting to kill time.

strange kind of year so far, really. Once Christmas was out of the way, it was all eyes on BrainShare. Once that was out of the way it was Easter, now I’m only three weeks away from a fortnight in Spain. It feels a little bit “bitty” in that I haven’t really established any kind of momentum before I’m off doing something else.

In the news locally, my employer has hit the headlines for it’s treatment of students. I looked at the MEN website earlier today and the level of vitriol is quite amazing. That said, I’m sure I’d feel the same way if it happened to me. I don’t really feel the need to pass further comment on it, as I’m sure the students have done all of the talking. Needless to say it doesn’t look good!

On the tech front, installed OpenSUSE 10.2 the other day. Not bad, much of what we come to expect these days from one of the good Linux distros (Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat). For those who installed Linux three or more years ago, there was usually some measure of pain getting the thing going. These days it’s a testament to the people who build it that we just assume it will work right out of the box. Which it does. I had a small problem with OS10.2 not mounting a ReiserFS partition, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed quite quickly. Also, the Register reports that Dell is soon to ship Ubuntu. Whilst I would have liked to see SLED or OpenSUSE in there, it’s certainly a good start. Ubuntu is a good distro, but I’ve been living off SUSE for around 18 months solidly, and it’s started to become ingrained into my DNA.

SP1 for SLED is now at RC3, so I can only presume a release is around the corner. The RCs have been roughly three weeks apart, so based on that I think we’re looking late May. I’ll see a Novell employee tomorrow at the GUG event in Leeds, so I think I’ll grill him on a release date. I doubt I’ll get much out of him, mind.

Trying to learn Spanish again – problem is that it’s usually in the evening when my brain is utterly dead and will not respond. I did try listening to Michel Thomas on the cross trainer this morning, that seemed to go in OK. Maybe it’s his methods too. Buuuuuuuuuuuueeeeeeeennnnnnoooooooo! He doesn’t half give that bloke a rough time though, doesn’t he? Only an hour before Liverpool vs Chelski, ought to be a good game. Oh, and I give Sammy Lee 6 months at Bolton before the love affair ends. BFS did a reasonable job there, and SL will feel a little like “after the Lord Mayors Show”.

Hasta Luego!

one of the best shows on TV in years, Life On Mars, ended last night. It will certainly put a void in my week’s TV viewing. It’s notable that the paucity of good shows now (especially British ones) have meant that there are few programmes I stop what I’m doing to sit down and watch. LoM is one of them, along with the CSI franchises, and that’s pretty much it. Oh, and of course the ever brilliant 24.

I originally watched the show because it was filmed in Manchester, some locations were even at MMU (Toastrack building in season 2, the offices of the Avon-type company) and also last night in the finale (Geoffrey Manton building standing in as the modern hospital). Locations apart, the show had so much wit, heart, style and was clearly a labour of love for the cast and writers. I now read that the brilliant DCI Gene Hunt will return, in an 80’s style sequel called “Ashes to Ashes”. Hope it doesn’t stink!

back, from outer space. Or at least Salt Lake City, where I had the privilege to visit Novell’s annual BrainShare conference. Not only did I visit it, but I presented two sessions, attended every evening shindig and sat the CLE9 exam (which I failed, just). To say it was an exhausting experience is a slight understatement. After coming home to Manchester on the red eye from JFK, I expected to be able to resume normal operations straight away, albeit with some slight fatigue thrown in. Man, how I was wrong! It’s hard to put your finger on the phenomenon, but I think owing to sheer exhaustion from throwing myself into the event and the 17hr journey home with all the loving that the TSA give you at airport security, it’s taken me the best part of two weeks to feel like my old self again.

Speaking of the TSA, nice of you to treat all passengers equally, especially at JFK. What I mean by that is that you treat all passengers, regardless of age, as a total criminal. It’s a nice feeling, especially for those of an elderly age who have enough trouble getting shoes and belts off to walk through the metal detector. I know 9/11 was a bad thing, but I do sometimes wonder if the Bush administration took this as a green light to bestow draconian measures on the travelling public.

Anyway, SLC itself is a nice place, surrounded by the most amazing mountain views. A blog entry can’t do adequate justice do describing what it’s like, you just have to try it yourself. And no, you don’t get assaulted by Mormons on every street corner (far and away the #1 I have been asked since I returned) and no, they don’t wear badges or try and tap you up to convert. For the record, I don’t believe in God and you are wasting your time trying. I posted pictures from the event at my Flickr stream. Sadly I think that owing to internal restructuring at work, I’ll never be at this event again, at least presuming I stay with my current employer.

The event itself was again more Linux, which was co-incidentally what my sessions were about. If you happened to be reading this and you came along, thanks for your support! Hopefully you gave me a fantastic review, even if you didn’t mean it! 😉 I got back and immediately got cracking with XEN virtualisation, building my first XEN-ed server in no time (SLES10 on SLES10) and I do believe from what I’ve heard that as well as identity management, server virtualisation skills are the way to go in future.

It’s already occurred to me that in order to sell this as a solution at work, I have some “hearts and minds” work to do with colleagues. This was brought home with informal conversations with colleagues and their superiors. The good news is that I see a lot more GroupWise on Linux this summer, provided the server replacement fund is allocated.

Away from BrainShare, I’ve bought a PS3! I know they are expensive, but I had a bit of extra money and I thought, why not? It’s not like a have a social life to speak of! I wasn’t sure if the games were region free, so I went to BestBuy, out in the SLC suburbs to check out what was available. In the end, I bought MotorStorm, Ridge Racer 7 and an extra controller. Along with a DS game, it came to around $220, which is about £120. The point here is that is considerably less than what I would have paid in the UK, where we continue to be right royally ripped off by everyone. Even Bill Gates’ notion on the dollar to pounds conversion (like for like – $200 equals £200) seems hard to explain. Thankfully I won’t be buying Windows Vista while I have a hole in my arse.

What else is new? Too much for me to cover now, and my fingers are very cold, so not much typing here I don’t think. Maybe next time!

now until I leave for BrainShare on Saturday (or three days, depending on how you count it). I have finally got my suitcase out of the loft, I don’t know what it weighs, but I can’t imagine I have much scope in there to add to much more. I think my limit is 32 kilos, which sounds like a lot, but the case itself is a beast, so depending on how many clothes I throw in there, I may have to trade down.

I still can’t say I’m looking forward to removing my shoes and belt, taking my laptop out of my bag, being restricted to a small clear bag of liquids, giving the Masons handshake and all the rest through passport control, and I wonder if it’s really necessary. Like I saw someone say the other day, if someone is going to blow up a plane, they are going to do it anyway one way or another. Treating every passenger like a criminal first and foremost is not good practice. Quite apart from anything else, nothing has since been heard on the so called “liquid” bomb plot, least of all anyone being in court. From what I gather, planes are much sturdier than you might think, and to bring on down, you’d need to take your mix on board on a trolley, as you’d need so much. Oh, and the trolley dollys should be so kind as to give you the galley to prepare the device!

In the news, experienced and highly decorated former Army commanding officer Patrick Mercer MP is removed from David Cameron’s front line Tory team for expressing the view that some bone idle ethnic minority soldiers play the race card to excuse the fact they aren’t good officers. Mercer makes this remark off the record and it’s published. Cameron removes him as a racist even though he has promoted five black officers and they all claim he’s the best commander they ever served under. Let’s be clear Mr Cameron, in battle situations, we’re talking about life and death and being able to put your life in your team’s hands. What it isn’t is standing outside some posh drinking club at Oxford where you and your minted chums get bladdered, smash the place up and have a jolly good laugh. If you ask me, Patrick Mercer should be the leader of the Opposition, not David Cameron. There is someone I can vote for!

He’s not racist, and nor am I. My motto is to take people as you find them, but the steady erosion of free speech in the UK at the moment is not a healthy thing. One thing you might infer from all of this is that maybe (and I’m postulating here) the reason non-whites don’t get the plumb jobs they deserve is because the employers don’t want to worry about what baggage may be brought along in the event of a dispute. An allegation of racism against an employer means mud sticks, even if it isn’t true.

I’m all for the best man (or woman) for the job, regardless of the fact that they are white, black, Asian, Chinese, disabled or whatever. The playing field is not equal for anyone because employers remain terrified of being sued.

Oh one last thing, turns out energy saving bulbs (which EU ministers have voted for, in favour of phasing out standard bulbs – thanks for asking) are a bit of a con. They’re bad for your eyes, are not as energy efficient as they’re pitched, can’t be used in many cases where current lighting is and made of banned toxic materials! Stroll on!

beta 3 on the work laptop, which I brought home for the weekend. It’s a Toshiba Tecra M3, and the grub install failing apart (requiring some voodoo with Knoppix, amongst others), it’s worked really nicely. What I do like about what I see in SP1 :-

– New Banshee, with radio stations, task bar support and podcast support (sweet, Mr Bockover!)

– Firefox 2.02. Better Firefox, and the Beagle plugin works. Must be newer than the one published, which refused point blank to work with the 2.02 I downloaded on my home SLED10 FCS machine.

– Redesigned GNOME Main Menu, makes more sense than before, better flow abd grouping. That said, I’d still like to see an application browser to complement the Spotlight-type interface there at the moment.

– I think XGL has had some under the hoods tweaking too, some of the effects seem a lot more responsive than previously and there are some icon changes in Control Centre (hah! UK Spelling)

That said, power management is still an issue. Maybe it’s the wi-fi draining the battery, but I’m only getting a couple of hours max, even with SP1. I’d like to see this improve vastly, really. The iBook I used in Barcelona gave me 4 hours without breaking a sweat.

I still like where SLED is going, and the rate of evolution is staggering. At this rate, by SLED11, they will really be cracking heads together.

Away from Linux, Wigan win again and we move off that dreaded fourth from bottom spot. Still not as much daylight between us and the drop zone as I’d like, but better to be where we are than down there, for sure!

pummelled for being a global warming denier (for the record, I don’t deny changes are afoot, but I dislike the mass hysteria about it and I also question some of the “facts”) but I saw something today that made me guffaw quite loudly.

It turns out that quasi-Oscar winning mouthpiece and creator of the internet, Al Gore, ran up usage of 221,000KwH last year for gas and electricity for his 20 room mansion in Nashville. His folks would like you to know that since he’s hitched his wagon to the green crusade (probably to get up GWB’s nose), he’s change energy suppliers to someone a little more tree huggy.

Still, you have to laugh!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6401489.stm

a couple of weeks. Now then, what’s been happening….

Blair (as usual) e-mails a raft of people who had the temerity to sign a petition denouncing road tolls/congestion charging by telling them he’s going to do it anyway. Quelle surprise! What he singularly fails to grasp is the fact that we Brits abhor the idea for many reasons :-

– The levels of taxation don’t correspond (even roughly) with the levels of expenditure on public transport subsidies, improvements, rail links and improving roads.

– Out of 83p per litre fuel, roughly 50p or more of this is tax

– We also pay £170 or so per year road tax

– We pay the highest per mile rail charges in the whole of Europe, and some of the highest in the world.

I would have thought with any modicum of common sense that it would be quite easy to work out that if a country is more productive because they can do business easily by travelling easier, then this works out better for the Government in as much as less welfare state payments, more income tax collected, people in better health etc. etc. Many countries such as France and Japan have wised up to this already and run the transportation system at a loss, but the flipside of this are amazing, arrow straight train lines than run on time and roads in fantastic condition with little or no congestion on motorways.

I’ve said more about that than I was going to, but hey!

A little over two weeks to BrainShare – finished my presentations, had them proofed and glossed, it all looks good. Never before have I had much of a crisis of confidence, but I feel like a bit of a fraud. Here I am talking the talk about Linux, and haven’t much walked the walk. Perhaps I’m being a little unkind to myself, I suppose it’s all relative. With four sessions to deliver, I can’t afford to have this hanging over me, so I suppose my usual approach of all our honesty may win the day. Well at least it isn’t a boring sales pitch, or that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.

Another fine win for Wigan today, I do hate 1-0’s though. Alan Wiley had a stinker, booking players on sight from our side, and it wasn’t even a dirty game (not like the Carling Cup Final later ;-)). That said, the John Terry thing was a little unsettling. Hopefully he will be OK. Anyhoo, we maintain the uneasy gap between us and the bottom three, whilst dragging Sheffield United and Man City towards us, it’s always better to look up than down in football.

Well done too to Liverpool, the win over Barca was much deserved. I do have a lot of time for Barca, having had the privilege of going around the stadium and museum, but they don’t half get up their own arses sometimes. At the risk of sounding smug, I did predict a Liverpool win beforehand, simply by virtue of the fact that Barca’s players have been squabbling so much lately.

Not much else to tell, been off work for three days. As much as I love my family (of course), three days of bickering, fighting and arguing is too much for me and I go back to work tomorrow feeling totally unrested, run down and stressed 😦 Never mind, things can only get better.

it’s now just 33 days to BrainShare. Sounds like a mile away and also frighteningly close in equal measure. My presentations (BUS222 and BUS226) are done and dusted, but I will be giving them the once over before the final deadline for submission. Still seems a bit odd really that all of this is happening, presumably it will sink in when I land at JFK and I have to wait hours for my connecting flight!

Wow, this is my first blog post for Feb. In the news, Blair nicks more Muslims, this time part of a beheading plot. I hope this turns out to be more successful than the Forest Gate raid, which cost millions and made all look stupid. Similarly the airline liquid bomb thing, that turned out to be a big fuss over apparently nothing. Mark me as highly cynical, but these major busts seem to handily co-incide with bad news for Labour, like the cash for honours probe. Blair now has blinkers on, has gone mad and will need escorting out of Number 10.

Microsoft launch Windows Vista. Had a brief play, I still think 6 versions is bloody stupid. It looks not unlike a Mac, so why not buy a Mac? The Aero interface is not as good as XGL in SLED10 (which latterly uses much less hardware) and half your current apps and devices such as PDAs, Cameras and iPods don’t work with it. Bloody marvellous. I know Microsoft bashing is an Olympic sport, but it is always good to laugh at their multi-million dollar expense.

Pre-ordered a PS3 from Virgin Megastores, however it ships on the Friday I’m at BrainShare, so hopefully my collection proxy won’t get any hassle from the pimply jobsworth that usually mans the games counter. All the accessories will be coming home with me from SLC, where they are half the price of the UK. We’re being robbed, I tell you!

Arsenal were lucky, but I’m proud of the boys. One last comment, if that “penalty” incident had have been at the other end, Dowd would have pointed to the spot. The big teams always get the decisions, fact.

Goodnight, Life on Mars is back!!