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