This morning I intended to enjoy a tasty low-fat yoghurt, my usual breakfast. I was horrified to find that the first one I took from the fridge was definitely off and in the second I tried, I found a hair at the bottom of the pot.

I phoned the company who produced said dairy products and was treated very courteously and helpfully upon production of my proper title. Sometimes being able to not be "Mr Ogley" is very helpful.

Pointless but fun things to do #563:

Pour Pepsi into a Coke-branded glass

The GIMP 2.4 has been released and it's available from GNOME:Community for 10.3/Factory. Users on older products will need to use GNOME:STABLE as it requires an updated gtk2 package (and probably other stuff too).

You can 1-click install it using the buttons below:

(10.3)

(Factory)

(A brief aside to start: Google are a large company, whether you choose to trust them with your calendar and schedules is up to you.)

[Ref]

This is pretty rocking news, being able to share online calendars and schedule meetings with fellow Google calendar users has the potential to remove one of the key reasons some people still pay to have an Exchange server. Looking forward to 2.22 already (and we only just got 2.20).

Joe: Congrats!

I don't have a bowtie but I do have some nice Pierre Cardin cufflinks.

Trans-Atlantic may be a bit further to post than you'd been thinking though

I also have a pair of Marston's Pedigree promotional cufflinks - Mmmm, classy...

So far, there are two confirmed candidates for the Lib Dem leadership.

On Wednesday, my MP Chris Huhne announced his candidacy. Currently the Environment spokesperson for the party. This is a higher profile job than in other parties as the Lib Dems have long been the most environmentally-focused of the main parties. Having been runner-up to Menzies Campbell 18 months ago, he'll be hoping to draw on the experience of having been involved in a leadership race before.

This morning, Nick Clegg made his announcement in Sheffield. He is from the party's right wing (although it's all relative) and is the early favourite at the bookmakers. He has also picked up some early support among senior party members including Steve Webb, the party's manifesto writer who had been expected to run himself and comes from the left of the party.

I'm expecting at least one candidate to enter the race before nominations close at the end of the month and, had she not ruled herself out already, I'd suggest it would be Susan Kramer. Watch this space...

I'm at a Child Prevention Protection Day in Winchester today, which I'm anticipating being extra-ordinarily useful. The main reason for this is that I've actually lost count of how many times I did basically the same training at college. The same will be said for everyone else in the room. Sadly, backside covering seems to be the order of the day in the Church these days. This is not to say that I think Child Protection isn't important - it is. I'm acutely aware of its importance, especially now that I'm a parent. The trouble is that there is a real danger that by forcing us to sit through the same thing time after time, we can become so mind-numbed by it that we become blase or annoyed by it. This would be disastrous.

I'm going to make notes in this entry of things that occur to me that would be better uses of my day:

• There's a Deanery Chapter meeting today. This will be very dull but quite possibly useful.
• I could have been at our midweek communion this morning, continuing to get to know people in the parish.
• There are a couple of practical projects at church that I'd involved with at the moment which have pressing deadlines.

I really wish I'd read the notes I printed out recently about connecting to my phone via bluetooth in order to use the GPRS/3G facilty on it because there's no Wi-Fi signal here.

Middle of the afternoon session now and a quote which, had the whole day been condensed into an hour, would have made it worthwhile: "Theology is a minefield" - it certainly is.

So, the Lib Dems are now looking for a new leader after Sir Menzies Campbell's resignation yesterday. Although his departure was sudden, it was hardly surprising and, I think, has come at the right time. Sir Menzies has done a fantastic job steering the party through the difficult period following Charles Kennedy's departure but the reality is that Ming didn't bring enough zing. The latest polls show the party 12% in terms of support and by resigning now, Sir Menzies has ensured that whoever replaces him has a good run at the next general election, whenever that may be - probably 2009 now.

I'll be keeping a close eye on progress, not least as I'm finally going to sign on the virtual dotted line and join the party at last. As the key players - notably Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg - make their moves I'll be providing some inexpert analysis (as well as linking to the experts).

Some useful links:

• The timetable for the contest
• Independent front-page story - with profiles of a lot of candidates at the bottom
• Statement by the party
• Guardian Lib Dems section

[Ref: BBC News - Iraq strike 'kills 15 civilians']

The US-led forces stated that the insurgents had put innocent women and children in danger by their actions and presence.

I have to disagree. It was the American-led forces who put these people in danger 3 1/2 years ago when they illegally invaded Iraq. Without that invasion, there would be no insurgency. Without the power vacuum generated by the complete absence of a follow-up plan, al-Qaeda would never have become established in Iraq.

The US needs to stop ignoring its own responsibility for the situation in Iraq. Sadly, I fear this will never happen while Bush is in the White House. Roll on January 20th 2009.

So far this morning, between myself and Amanda, we have had the following things stuck in our heads:

• The Jack's Subway Tush song from Will and Grace
• The Two Ronnies theme
• The May to December theme

How annoying!

Side note, I need to tidy my desk, badly...

...or at least it will be. It's not up on the servers yet but by the close of play today, we will have unleashed the latest, greatest openSUSE distribution on the world. And even as I've been typing this, it's appeared. Download 10.3 now - use a torrent if you can. Now I need to go and find my blank DVD5s...

Included in openSUSE 10.3 will be the latest Helix-enabled version of Banshee. This means you can listen to your favourite Real Audio streams in Banshee. If you want to listen to BBC radio stations, you can download bbc-ra.xspf and save it to ~/.config/banshee/plugins/stations/user - restart Banshee and off you go.

A lot of buzz in the news this morning about a possible November 1^st general election. I've already put a Lib Dems button on my site to show my support. Perhaps it's time I actually joined the party.

Can't quite believe I've not blogged about the situation in Burma yet but then, I didn't blog about much at all last month.

Anyway, as one of the irrepressible.info fragments on my site points out, 'a military machine of 500,000 soldiers denies a whole nation its most basic rights'. As anyone who's watched the news or read a paper (notably The Independent who I think were the first UK paper to pick up the reports that were getting out of the country) recently knows, this has reached appalling new levels in the last week or so and Buddhist monks are now being hauled off to jails in the north of the country.

The Burma Campaign campaigns for human rights and democracy in Burma - get clued up and, if you can get to London or Edinburgh, demonstrate. The Chinese embassy is being targeted as the largest outside investors and supporters of the junta that controls Burma but other nations also have an interest, including India and South Korea.

Survived the CME residential and then back into the swing of things yesterday.

Recently switched to use the Gimmie bar in place of my main GNOME panel and posted a rather long (and growing) wishlist on the development list.

Noticed I'm in the list of requested interviewees for the People of openSUSE category on openSUSE News - very flattered.

My Action Item from last week's openSUSE GNOME meeting was to produce a template spec file that can be applied by an OSC plugin. Should have it produced today.