Had the worst trip to Ikea ever yesterday. We have to really plan it when we go, because it's quite a drive into London, so we had yesterday all planned. We knew what we were looking for, a side table type thing for the dining room as wellas some small items.

We went, and we found one that we liked, so we made a note of it's location in the pick up area. We also noted the location of the slightly smaller version of it, because we weren't sure which to get at that stage. By the time we reached the pick up area we'd decided, we wanted to get the larger version, so we headed for it's location.

It wasn't there.

Not in the sense that it was sold out, but it just wasn't meant to be there, we looked up and down the aisle, but nothing. Thankfully, we'd noted down the location for the smaller version, so we headed for that instead. The larger version was there too! Now, if we hadn't looked at the smaller version at all, we wouldnt have found what we wanted. So, we picked it up, put it on our trolley, and headed for the checkout.

At the checkout, I forgot to remove the yellow bag from the trolley, and the checkout person accused me of attempting to steal it, but we eventually got the table out and to the car.

We drove home, opened the box, and discovered that some of the pieces were split. We had to go all the way back to Ikea, and exchange it. Of course, simply exchanging it would be far too simple, no, they refunded my payment, and then we had to go back into the shop, get another one, queue at the checkout again, and then pay again!

Anyway, we now have a nice storage side table in the dining room.

Had a lovely couple of days, although midnight service Wednesday night took it's toll, and I'm still rather sleepy as a result, early night last night, probably another tonight. Yesterday was great, church in the morning, I was doing CTP, then pressies, lunch and Die Hard (favorite Christmas movie, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...). The rest of the day was pretty lazy, as today has also been.

Can't believe Clare blogged twice on Christmas Day, even I'm not that sad, all I did was check my email and pop onto Asylum briefly.

Liverpool won 3-1 today, although I have a horrible feeling I may have left it too late to get tickets for the Spurs match next month (again - did the same with the Chelsea game). May ring the ticket office tomorrow to try to find out, otherwise not much on for the weekend, probably going to go for a Chinese tomorrow, then I'm making a chilli Sunday night, I do enjoy cooking

Oh my word, RotK rocked my socks! What a movie! Definitely the best of the three, and I cried for a large part of the latter half. If you've seen it, you'll know at which points.

Afterwards, we bumped into Alex & Bev in Asda, which was quality, love those guys. Gonna be a not-quite-full day at work today, which is good, cos I still have a few small things to buy, as well as all my wrapping to do.

Amanda's parents arrive today, and they'll be sleeping in the same room as our computers, so I may not get much online time this side of next Monday, and I'm not back in the office till the 2nd January, that's next year!

Nadolig Llawen

enough said

I think it's about time I wrote my own blog software really, not 100% happy with what I'm using, and the code is near unreadable, so I can't even realistically hack it to behave how I want. What I want are the following:

• A MySQL backend
  
• Categorization of posts
  
• RSS output
  
• Pretty display of posts, easily themable to match any future site redesigns
  

Not much to ask, but of course, the software I'm currently using does none of them. Of course, first order of business will be to set up a MySQL server at home, I have a spare box, and a spare largish hard drive, which could be combined for just that purpose, just a case of when do I do it... Not likely to be this side of Christmas, Caz is coming round tonight at some point, and I need to think about wrapping some of Amanda's presents, if not all. Then, tomorrow night, we're going to see Return of the King. Then it's Christmas Eve, and Amanda's parents arrive. They'll be staying in the same room as the computers, so I can't do it while they're here.

Ah well, it's a thought, add it to the TODO list...

Yesterday was a really odd day, lots of good stuff, and some kind of hard stuff too. It was another half day, which was good, and I was chilling out at home when I checked my email in the middle of the afternoon, and there was a piece of very good news there for me, relating to the ordination plan. When Caz arrived in the evening, we toasted the Bishop (can you guess what the news was?) with a very good bottle of Wolf Blass 2000 President's Selection Cabernet Sauvignon which we'd laid down about six months or so ago, it was delicious.

Then there was the News as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the verdict in the Soham trial, which, having followed the case quite closely (news junkie that I am) was pretty well what I expected. It just felt really strange having this celebration on a day like that.

At the end of the evening, we also let Audrey, one of our cell leaders, know that the three of us are going to look for a different group.

All in all I think it was a good day, just wish the good bits could have happened on a different day, so I could really enjoy them, but I guess that's life...

Had another half-day yesterday (and another one today as it happens), did some shopping (and a lot of walking) in the afternoon, as well as some housework.

Then, last night was the night that Amanda was doing the present wrapping in the town centre (it was coordinated by Watford Town Centre Chaplaincy). I was there too to chat with people, and help with keeping the wrapping area tidy. The response was amazing, people just couldn't believe that it was free, all in all a bit of a result.

Cell group Christmas night out for drinks tonight, Caz is coming round for dinner before that, should be a good evening all in all.

Half day today, will be knocking off at about 12:30. Got Tim & Kathryn coming round for dinner tonight, I'll be making lasagne. I also need to sort the house out a bit, cleaning Tia out last night took it's toll on the living room a bit, and the dining table has Christmas pressies all over it.

Had a great evening with Caz on Friday, she'd made this amazing curry, and we wore silly Christmas cracker hats, and talked till very late. Always good, she's a great friend.

Saturday was quite a lazy day, read the Church Times, watched some TV...

Yesterday was Clare's birfday, and we had lunch with her and some of her family after church, which was really nice.

RIP Ettore

I didn't know Ettore, I had never emailed him, nor he me, but he was one of those people who I respected a huge amount for all the work he did for the community, and I'm shocked and saddened to hear of his untimely demise.

My heartfelt condolences to his family, friends and colleagues, he will be missed.

Welcome to the back burner!

Nearly the weekend, day and a half to go, and then next week, I've got three half-days, which should make it more bearable. Tomorrow night should be good. Going to Caz's for dinner, and after an explosion in my brain last night (no doubt related to Christmas shopping) we're going to call it Christmas, crackers, the whole nine yards. (excited!).

Evo 1.5 was released last night, so of course, fool that I am, I posted straight away on SLE saying I'd aim to have packages ready by the end of the week. Going to be a serious pain in the neck to get it parallel installable with the stable packages, looksl ike I'm going to have to install it, and all it's dependencies into /usr.

Those deps include the GNOME 2.4 versions of ORBit2, libbonobo and libbonoboui, man I hope I don't break everything. Like I said on SLE "Be prepared to lose all your data, but have an enormous amount of fun in the process "

Miserable Failure

There's another one.

Watched Bowling for Columbine at last on Saturday night. A great film, if a little rambling in places. It could definitely have coped with another half-hour's worth of editting, but in spite of that, I found it very effective in making Moore's point. One with which I do agree.

There are lots of ways you can determine how close a friend someone is. The modern obsession (of which I am a victim) with SMS (text messaging) is a new one.

If you can comfortably randomly text someone from a pub, and reasonably expect a comforatble reply, you have a true [modern] friend.

Kudos to Caz and Nick.

Gonna be on my tod (well, with Tia) again tonight, Amanda's going to Gift Wrapping Training at church.

Gift Wrapping Training? What the...? It's for something that church is doing in the run up to Christmas, free gift wrapping in the Harlequin (Watford's big shopping centre), and of course they need to make sure that everyone's going to do a good job. If it were me (I don't have the leave available to be able to do it), I'd definitely need training, I can't wrap a present to save my life.

Wow, Saturday set new records for "loose-endness" I was right in my predictions about PC tinkering and and trashy TV - went to PC World to pick up some extra RAM, which simply caused muchos locking up and boot failing on weasel, so I'm going to be getting my money back on that just as soon as I get around to going back to PCW.

The weird thing was how bored I was, I like to think I'm pretty good company, but apparently when it's just me, myself and I, not that good. To be fair to myself, I suppose I could have used the time better, maybe read something, or bonded with Tia a bit.

Speaking of Tia, I did spend some time last night bonding with her while Amanda was doing Word Projection at church. She's getting used to being out of her cage quite nicely now. That makes me happy.

and not a moment too soon, man I'm bored!

It's really been one of those sucking-the-very-soul-out-of-you weeks, and I'm glad it's over.

It's not been a bad week per se, just a dull one, and the trouble with that is that I end up feeling really tired as well as a result - ho hum.

All that said, had a quality night in the pub last night, we went to the quiz with Cat (see Mates section) and we did less badly than usual (only fair way to describe it), and it was good to see her.

Gonna be at a serious loose end tomorrow, Amanda's working at the Soul Sista conference all day, so I don't know what to do. I shall probably end up watching trashy TV and/or PC tinkering for the day.

Pipex, my ISP seemed to have some problems with their DNS servers yesterday afternoon and evening (UK time), which caused problems with mail delivery for the various lists hosted here during that time.

well, I had a week off work last week, which is probably why I didn't blog anything. Was deathly boring though, nothing compared to being in the office of course. Being ill for the whole week (still am) didn't help either.

Some rather annoying PC problems resulted in me upgrading the VGA card from a GeForce3 to a GeForce4MX, and replacing the 512M of RAM with 256M in our main desktop machine at home. What I don't understand is how with an apparently better 3D card, the 3D performance with the NVidia drivers is (based upon FPS on screensavers, glxgears etc) about half what it was before. Tres weird as our friends across the channel would say if they spoke broken franglais like I do.

Should be quite a quiet week this week, only night out of the house (at the moment) is Wednesday for Cell Group. Been a while since that was the case.

When none of the people you want to get back in touch with are registered?

You know who you are, use the link at the bottom left of this page and get in touch!

(oh, the arrogance of assuming they are bound to read my blog...)

...Ancient Klingon Proverb

So begins Kill Bill Vol 1 which I saw last night.

Great Movie!

It's extremely stylish and cool. The choreography is superb, and the performances (especially from Uma Thurman) are excellent. It has Tarantino's trademark combination of extreme violence and wit with a great soundtrack in the background. Actually, the best soundtrack moments in KB are the periods of silence, the sound of silence is used to great effect in this movie.

I can't wait till Volume 2 next year.

Also, Amanda's got a new job. Well, it's the job she's been temping at for the last couple of months, with the Employment Tribunal Service in Watford, but she found out today she got the permanent role - which is quality!

193.128.117.15 Thursday, 6 November 2003|What is the Matrix?|16:00|Frankly, I'm none the wiser.

Revolutions was a massive disappointment, very poor answers to a lot of the questions raised by Reloaded, waaay too much padding, waaay too little Kung-Fu, and possibly the worst ending to a film ever. (Especially as it's totally out of character with the whole of the rest of the trilogy)

Don't see it at the cinema, wait for the DVD.

I've booked my tickets to see Kill Bill Volume 1 next Tuesday, hopefully that will restore my faith in the cinema.

Had an email yesterday, from CNet News.com asking me for an interview about the Novell acquisition of SUSE. Unfortunately, because of being in the UK, and them being in the States, my responses didn't get to them in time for the piece, although they may use them for a follow-up.

Ah well, tonight is Matrix Night! Amanda and I are going to see Revolutions, 7.30 showing, and I can't wait. In fact, I've been counting down (right now it's 4 hours 45 minutes to go...)

Remember, remember...

So, today has seen the news that Novell are to buy SUSE. There has inevitably been a lot of discussion about this already on the SUSE mailing lists, and here's a redux of my thoughts on the matter.

The acquisition by Novell of SUSE, should it go through potentially represents a massive investment into Linux/Free Software development, Novell are paying $210m in cash for SUSE - they're not short of a few bob. At the same time, IBM (remember them?) are investing some $50m in Novell.

Here we have a GNOME-focused (Novell own Ximian) company buying a KDE-focused company. The potential here is that for the first time we'll have a commercial Linux distribution where the two major desktop environments in the Free Software world are equal partners, complimenting each other in the distribution, rather than one being pushed at the expense of the other.

Here's a great quote from the Press Release:
"Novell is firmly committed to open standards and maintaining the existing open source kernel development efforts. From advocacy and development resources to events and support of open source efforts like kernel projects, XFree86, ReiserFS, KDE, GNOME and Mono, Novell stands side-by-side with the open source community."
There's a certain other three-letter company who are trying to kill the open source kernel development efforts, Novell potentially provide muscle to fight SCO alongside IBM.

There's currently a webcast going on, seems Novell are saying they don't want to junk KDE from SUSE (which possibly confirms my KDE/GNOME thoughts). They're bigging up the SUSE development team, and they'll be using their existing support and services to push Linux, "the future of computing"

Well, I booked my first real time off of the year today. I have to confess to being completely knackered. The only time I'd taken off work this year had been some time at Easter, which was spent mostly putting together our new kitchen (see the Photo Gallery), and then a couple of weeks in August to work at Soul Survivor. Soul Survivor is even more work than actually being at work, so I wasn't exactly rested when I got back into the office.

So, I've taken the week commencing the 17th November off, I'm just going to sit around at home, and do nothing. Maybe read, maybe listen to the radio, but certainly not think about work, or even do any usr local bin stuff.

We're getting our new hamster today. Our pride and joy, Annie, passed away last Sunday after a stroke. Amanda works with a guy who breeds hamsters, and he's sorted us out with baby female with an incredible set of lungs on her - I could hear her squawking while talking to Amanda on the phone earlier.

Went to a great party at the weekend, for our good friend Caroline's party, theme was vicars and tarts, and both of us went as vicars, Amanda even wore a cassock. Was a quality night, and a lot of wine was drank

...if you are, get out and Vote Georgy Russell today!

In other news, it's the Linux Expo at Olympia tomorrow, a chance to catch up with my old SuSE mates, and others - should be good.

Big night for me this evening, seeing DDO again, hope it goes well, and then tomorrow our cell group has it's first evening with new leaders and a new venue. I'm leading worship for that

I hate MIPS machines!

Ahem.

Anyway, since I last blogged, GNOME 2.4, and GNOME Office 1.0 have come out. Don't have the time or box to build GNOME 2.4 packages at the moment, but I have done a full set of GNOME Office 1.0 packages.

Please stop the insanity.

This server, swamprat.homeunix.org should be slightly less flaky now, overnight I moved the partition upon which the web site is stored from ReiserFS to ext3, as the Reiser filesystem on it was seriously battered.

...is a somewhat strange blog title for a Christian you might think, but I've felt for sometime that marijuana should at least be de-criminalized, if not fully legalised (in the same way that alcohol and tobacco are).

The reason I'm posting this blog entry, is that a friend and I were discussing Georgy Russell, a fellow geek who's running for governor of California. One of her campaign positions is that she is for the legalisation of cannabis. I ought also to point out that I have never smoked cannabis, nor do I have any desire to do so.

Cannabis is no more harmful or addictive than alcohol, yet we live in a society where alcohol is an integral part of daily life, but if you smoke pot you risk a jail term. It is much less harmful than tobacco, yet the government make a fortune every year from the taxes it places on the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products. I feel there would be no threat to public health from the legalization of cannabis, and in fact, legal cannabis could (probably should) be taxed in the same way as alcohol and tobacco, money which could be used to fund the war against more serious drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Which brings me to the second point. It is often said that cannabis use leads to hard drug use. If this is true, then it is due in a large part to the fact that under the current situation people who use cannabis are already being supplied by criminals, and so there is a direct link to harder drugs. With cannabis legalized, it's supply is taken out of the hands of criminals, and the link is broken. People who want to use harder drugs will irrespective of whether they use cannabis, and of whether cannabis is legal or not. But making it legal makes it less likely that those who just want to use cannabis will end up being drawn into harder drug use.

Been thinking recently about friends who I've not seen for a while. Ironically for such a technophile, I'm really bad at keeping in touch with people by email, so there's loads of people from university who I consider really good friends who I've not heard from in years. I've been trying recently to get back in touch with some, with mixed success. Heard back this morning from my best [wo]man from my wedding, Ruth, which was just great, but another friend who I'd got a message through to about three months or so ago, I've not heard from.

The ironic thing is that there are some people who I didn't spend vast amounts of time with at uni, who by virtue of using the same MUD or IM system are now people I chat to every day, which makes me wonder: When I next move on, which of my friends will I stay in touch with? Will it be the ones I'm closest to, or the ones who happen to use the same MUD/IM? (In some cases those are the same people). I'd like to think it'd be the former, but my past record does not bode well...

Well, I'm in Taunton, ahead of Soul Survivor, and I've actually had a haircut!

Now, anyone who's seen me knows that my hair is very important.

But fear not, I've just had a trim to get all the damage and split ends out, and now it should grow better.

For a couple of weeks at least. This evening we'll be heading down to Somerset ahead of the start of this year's Soul Survivor events. I shall try to blog while I'm there, but I dunno if it's really going to be possible.

This week has been quite quiet in terms of GNOME updates, although I did pick the brains of another James who's a GNOME hacker about how better to install default settings using GConf. Didn't want to do updated packages with such a major under-the-hood change just before vanishing for the best part of a month, so ulb-gnome 0.4 has been put back till probably the beginning of September.

We were present on Tuesday when a mate of ours was ambushed by London Weekend Television for the pilot of a new show hosted by Davina McCall. they gave him a [much needed ;)] makeover, and then he picked one of the assembled ladies to go out on a "date" with. Amanda was amongst the ladies who had been planted (nearly all of them were friends of his), so she might be on telly!

Cos my goodness it's been a slow week, I've been ill, and work's been so tough. Finally had a breakthough this afternoon, squashing a couple of bugs, but it's just been hard.

We're going to our friend Caz's for dinner tomorrow, which will be great, I love spending time with friends, and just relaxing.

This time next week, we'll be heading down to Somerset, Soul Survivor is approaching again. We're leading the Word Projection team again this year, and I've been helping sort out internet connectivity for the office while they're down on site. should be a quality few weeks.

I was asked to make some comments at work about Linux distributions, and what's to stop them closing their code, as well as Linux's relationship (ahem) with Microsoft, and the SCO case. What follows is what I said (with the approval of my boss to publish it publically)

All the Linux distributors take the GNU/Linux system (that is to say, the GNU Operating System that has been under development by the FSF and volunteers since the early 80's to produce an replacement for UN*X that is totally untainted by proprietary AT&T code with the Linux kernel) and they "package" it.

Now, the packaging takes a number of forms, the key is in the tools provided, and the base configuration. Each distributor has their own installation and configuration tool[s]. Red Hat has Anaconda, SuSE has YaST, Mandrake has *drake, and Debian has dpackage, to name a few of the major players. These tools take care of the installation and basic configuration.

In addition, the distributors configure the various pieces of software so that the default setup is consistent with their particular emphasis and ethos. SuSE, for example, being a German company produce a very secure basic configuration, and with the help of SuSEconfig (a very complex set of scripts that links in with YaST) ensure that everything works together - ie if you use SuSE's tools to make a change to your machine's name (for example), then where that name needs to be included in, say, the Apache configuration files, it's done automagically for you.

What's to stop companies like SuSE, or Red Hat continuing to publish source code? The law for a start. They don't actually own the vast majority of the code that's included in their products, so they're simply not allowed to change the licensing on it. The kernel, for example, is owned by Linus, Alan, Marcelo, Dave J, and all the hundred of other hackers whose code Linus has accepted in to the main tree. [For Linus read Marcelo for the 2.4 tree, Alan for 2.2]. Now, of them, Alan works for Red Hat, Marcelo for Conectiva and Dave J for SuSE, but their code is copyright to them, and licensed under the GPL.

Getting beyond the kernel, none of the code really belongs to Red Hat, other than the Anaconda code (and that's GPL), only the YaST/SuSEconfig code belongs to SuSE (that's under a semi-free license) - you get the idea.

It's a mistake to think that these companies don't make money though, they do, although mostly not from their consumer distributions. They sell services, do consultancy and sell hugely expensive "enterprise" distributions that come with serious support contracts. For example, I'm pretty sure that SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (SLES8) for IBM Mainframes runs to thousands of dollars, and sells in not insignificant numbers.

The SCO case is a distraction, SCO have been sinking fast for years. Their version of UN*X is bad beyond belief, consistently ranked bottom in terms of performance and security. Caldera who were a GNU/Linux company bought the remnants of SCO after the company collapsed back in 2000. Caldera were never really a favoured company in the community either, their distribution was woefully badly maintained, in short, it bit the big one. The SCO Group (as they're now called) has realised that in terms of Linux, they've been left behind. They lost just about all their hackers to SuSE last year. They joined the United Linux consortium as an attempt to rescue themselves, but everyone knew that UL was basically SuSE, and so the other consortium members were little more than reseller channels. And so, in a last-ditch effort to get some cash from the company, it's executives have launched this ludicrous legal case against IBM.

The fact is that their case is based upon inaccurate claims, and is so obviously a scam as to be beyond a joke. They also seem to be trying to extort money from Linux users by spreading Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about it's legal status. Interestingly, since this has started, the SCO stock price (and bear in mind that it's major shareholders are those executives behind the case) has rocketed in price - someone's getting very rich off this even if it doesn't get to court. Also, Microsoft, who would like nothing more than to crush Linux like they crushed OS/2, invested in SCO just before it all started.

To compare Red Hat to Microsoft is like comparing apples and oranges. Apples and oranges are both fruits, there the similarity ends. M$ and RH are both Nasdaq listed companies, and there the similarity ends. To explain all the evil aspects of Microsoft would consume far too much time, but we all know that their approach is always to exert control over their users, and to extend their influence in political circles. Bush's regime is owned by big business like Microsoft, and Blair took time out of the last General Election campaign to advertise the launch of Windows XP.

Free Software, and the companies who support, develop and sell it, like SuSE and Red Hat are all about giving choice and control back to the user. (In the case of a company, the user is the IT department, not the individual at a desk). If you don't like the way something works, you can change it. If you're happy with something, you don't have to upgrade the moment the vendor tells you to jump. You computers become your possessions again, and you decide how they are used, rather than just the home to something you have rented from Microsoft under license terms that they can change at any time.

More information on the SCO vs IBM case be found at http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html.

Well, Monday anyway...

Released ULB GNOME 0.2 - updated Nautilus, gnome-desktop, uses Vera fonts by default, and has themes: view in Nautilus, I think it's gorgeous.

Good weekend, watched a bunch of movies on Saturday (Ferris Bueller, 51st State, Final Destination), then we were teaching on 'Hearing God' at the Ministry Training afternoon at church yesterday, seemed to go rather well, and there were a lot of words for people.

Building AbiWord 1.99.3 at the mo, should have it uploaded before I go home...

Well, today I announced the availability of ULB GNOME 0.1, not quite the same deal as I'd originally planned, but a drop-in replacement for SuSE's core GNOME packages, to improve the default setup, and fix some of the problems a lot of people had with the GNOME setup in 8.2.

Well, my DSL (where this blog is hosted) should be more stable now, I've dropped my Alcat-hell USB DSL modem in favour of a nice Netgear DSL router. It may just be my imagination, but the line seems quick er as a result too.

Was looking at the gPhoto CVS status today, looks like a fair bit of code's been checked in for the Sipix cams, including the blink since I last checked, so I've grabbed a CVS snapshot, and will give it a whirl tonight.

Feeling rather ill, been getting worse over the last couple of days, think it's a virus of some sort - erk.

...and not just because of the fun of the last few days ;-)

It makes me very happy that a project I've been working on for the last few weeks may well get a public airing early next week, so watch this space...

It's just about the weekend, and my brain is all Perled out ;-)

Well, my musings yesterday seem to have been answered in a fairly round about way. As part of considering what to do, I had a report done on the traffic usr local bin receives by my boss. The answer was a lot, and my initial feeling was that the site would have to go offline, or move elsewhere.

Seems I over-reacted a bit, but I do think that increasing the disk space & bandwidth the site uses by the extent required to do a GNOME distro would be tempting fate a bit, so ULB stays the way it is.

My employers continue to provide ULB to the community as much as I do, I applaud them for allowing me to use their network to host a site the appears to be rather important (judging by the messages of goodwill I've had over the last couple of days)

So, another day, another core GNOME package on usr local bin, this time it's gnome-panel.

And so, I take another step towards the point where I might as well just do a full GNOME install for SuSE (ULB GNOME has a nice ring to it...).

Thing is, I don't want to create a situation where I force SuSE users to install the full GNOME setup from my site just so they can use the apps they want (which would be linked against the updated versions of libraries).

So, I need two streams - packages built on as close to a clean SuSE install as poss (with YOU updates and relevant deps updated as required), and a full desktop install.

In order to do that, I need hardware, I'll need a build machine to build the latter packages on, to ensure to tainting of the vanilla SuSE intended packages.

There's no way I can afford to do that! So, do I setup a PayPal account for people to contribute? What's the tax situation for that in the UK? It certainly wouldn't be paid work I'd be doing, people contributing wouldn't be able to dictate what I do with the packages or the site, but at the same time I'm not a charity.

And would people donate money?

Answers on a postcard I guess...

Had an appointment with an allergy specialist today about my pollen allergy. Turns out that I could be a candidate for desensitisation! Unfortunately, it takes somewhere in the region of 3 ^1/2 years to do, and for the first half year it means taking an afternoon off work every week or other week. not the most practical option. Add to that the fact that it's only effective to the point of making regular anti-hystemines work properly, and it's not a life-long solution, and I decided that at this time it wasn't the best option.

Had a mad night last night, was planning to go to the Sung Eucharist at St Albans Abbey last night, which started at 8pm, but didn't actually manage to make it. I basically had time to get home from work, shower and drive to the Abbey. So, having got home, I got into the shower, which then packed up while I was in it! (I subsequently discovered it was the fuse for the loop that it's on - now fixed.) Most annoying, not to mention delay causing. I finally got out to the car, running late by this point, turned the key in the ignition, and the fuel light came on! So, I had to stop and get petrol on the way, making me even later. When I finally got to St Albans, I just couldn't find anywhere to park, ended up quite some distance from the Abbey, and ran towards it, got to the gates at about 7:53, only to find they were chained shut. I could see the lights on in the building, so figured they must use a different entrance for midweek services, so set out to try to find another entrance. At this point, the Abbey bell started tolling, I thought, for 8 o'clock. My heart sank. Thought I had missed the start of the service. When I looked at my watch, it said it was 7:55, which led me to think it had been running slow. When the bell continued ringing past eight rings, I realised it wasn't the case, and figured it must ring until the service starts. I had five minutes, the search for the other gate was on. Finally, with less than a minute to go, I found a sign, pointing down a side road, marked for the East Gate. I headed down this road and a few steps down it, the bell stopped chiming.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I went home, couldn't face turning up late, slumped myself into the sofa, and gorged myself on duck chow mein - lovely.

Last Friday was our anniversary, and we spent it in Lancaster, checking out all our favorite coffee shops, pubs and restaurants up there, as well as taking some pics that are now in the photo gallery. Was a great time, and I was very pleased to see anti-war chalkings all over the place. Was somewhat disappointed though to discover that only seven people went on the march from the campus to the city centre. It seems that even when the entire nation is being engaged in politics because of this illegal war, student apathy still takes over.

This is my first entry since my colleague Sanjay's son was born - many congratulations to Sanj, and to Shree.

SuSE 8.2 is on the way, and I'll have a whole bunch of packages to go with it there's a lot of things waiting for the update to GNOME/GTK 2.2, including Galeon, Gnumeric, AbiWord, MrProject and The GIMP. As well as the very exciting Evolution 1.3 betas.

You can tell I'm bored when I get around to doing an entry to my diary ;) The trouble is that I haven't got around to automating this at all, so I'm manually transferring the bottom entry from here to the top of the archive, then putting the HTML template in place, all before I actually start typing.

It's Ash Wednesday today, I've given up caffeine for Lent, although I actually started the beginning of last week. Been drinking a decaf filter coffee that a friend suggested, and it's actually quite good. Also been drinking a lot of water, which I guess has to be good for me.

It's the last of our nights together as a whole church instead of cells tonight. Last week was the last of the actual training evenings, having a night of worship & prayer tonight. Then we have to start looking for a new cell group of course.

Amanda's parents are going to be staying with us this weekend, helping us fit a new shower, which will be nice, having a b0rked shower has not been a lot of fun. Plus, it'll be really nice to see them.

Palanquin is the new album by Mr Kevin Prosch. My copy arrived Monday morning, and went straight into my car stereo. I have to say simply that I was blown away, musically it's as unique a recording as I think I've heard, spiritually it's deep and moving.

Been a really busy time the last week or so, not helped by being ill the last few days. Was a one day conference on worship last Saturday, and that was great. We were doing CTP, but the handy thing about there being two of us on duty is that we each get an opportunity to really enter in.

We had the Soul in the City Celebration at St Paul's Cathedral on Friday, what a time! It was just incredible, we were full to capacity inside (I think it was just short of 3,500 inside), and then we had apparently about 1,000 outside who couldn't get in. They stayed to pray! Over the course of the evening, the sound and AV crews rigged up a video and sound relay to them.

It was just incredible, in that amazing building that's been a focus for the worship of God in our country for centuries, to join that great tradition as we worshipped Jesus, and interceded for our capital city.

Before going down to get the CTP stuff setup, met up with my mate Nick (aka DjDanny for lunch which was class, and took a few photos for my Photo Gallery.

Spent the rest of the weekend recovering really, Friday was once seriously tiring day, I really feel for the guys who were there from first thing, and were still working till midnight or later, they really served.

Okay, so Coh-lin (it's Colin, for goodness sake man, you can't even pronounce your own name, and here you are pronouncing judgement on an entire nation-state!) Powell presented the US's evidence against Iraq to the UN Security Council yesterday. I for one am still not 'on-board' for the upcoming military action. Leaving aside the fact that I do not trust the evidence as far as I could hurl a Patriot missile for a moment, there seems to be some mad idea floating around that there is such a thing as a justification for going to war.

What we're talking about here is not a game, it's not a bunch of robots fighting each other, it's not a game of chess, these are real human beings here! Just because they are a long way away, and some (the ones on 'our side') are employed as soldiers, doesn't mean they are expendable. There is no way that murdering thousands of innocent Iraqis does them any favours. It is not the case that the West is served by endangering a generation of young men and women who don't know any better than to have joined the armed forces. All that will happen if the West attacks Iraq is that a lot of people are going to die, and ultimately Iraq will get the government that George Bush wants them to have, which is obviously the best government they could have.

Then there's the issue of the trustworthiness or otherwise of the evidence. I don't know whether the evidence presented is accurate or was fabricated, but what I do know is that I have no reason to trust it on the basis of it being American. This is a regime that was not elected democratically, and has shown itself to be hellbent on pursuing any sovereign state who don't subscribe to the American way of life and government militarily. They don't care about international law, and selectively enforce UN resolutions when it suits them to do so. Why then should I trust their word on this matter? The chances of them submitting their evidence for independent scientific verification are minimal I suspect, and in the absence of that independent verification, it frankly looks very suspicious.

Gnumeric 1.1.16 was released at the weekend, finally saw the announcement today, and went to try to build it. Alas, it depends on libgnomeprint-2.2, which in turn is dependent on fontconfig. Gah! Can't be bothered to produce fontconfig packages for SuSE 8.1, so no new Gnumeric packages until 8.2. Thankfully, it'll be included with 8.2 apparently.

GNOME 2.2 is due out any moment, of course this whole desktop release has fontconfig as a dependency, so roll on 8.2 so that I can have me some GNOME 2.2 goodness.

Incidentally, kudos to jdub and the rest of the release team, as well as all the dedicated GNOME hackers for getting this release out the door, the info I've seen (as well as the many screenshots) look seriously cool, and I can't wait to use it.

Well, this weekend was the first of the Soul in the City London Celebrations that I've been able to go to. It was at Ealing Christian Centre, on Saturday night. Amanda and I were on CTP duty, and all in all it was a bit hairy. Our hardware didn't make it to the venue, but thankfully, our backup backup plan, a CD with the software and songs on did. We installed it on the PC at ECC, and discovered they only had a single-head VGA card. What fun, suffice to say it was seat of the pants stuff, but we pulled it off.

Also, saw a friend from uni, Lisa Campbell, her husband is the West London host for SitC, was great to see her again, will probably see her again as SitC continues.

The evening was great, there was an amazing atmosphere, and it's great to see young people from across the church spectrum coming together, wanting to reach their communities with the Good News. Looking forward to the next celebration, this Friday at St Paul's Cathedral!