We got back from a long weekend in Aisne, Northern France. Nine of us went on the Eurostar on Friday afternoon, hiring a minibus in Lille. Great time had by all!
Beautiful weather on Saturday and Sunday, verging on the hot. Barbecues every evening on the patio at our hired place. We went to Chimay, land of excellent Trappist beer and cheese across the border in Belgium.
Photos here.
I'm selling our old telly on eBay. I find myself checking it every hour or so, just to see what the bids are up to. Scarily addictive, I think.
Well it looks like when I eventually return to Australia, I'll have to work for companies with more than 100 employees. Otherwise I could be unfairly dismissed with no right to challenge it.
So where's the logic in that? You've just removed a bunch of skilled people from the labour pool of small-medium companies.
Last night was the Champions League final between AC Milan and Liverpool. It will go down in history as one of the most exciting games of football (for the Aussies and Yanks, football is the game where you, surprisingly, use your feet on the ball) ever.
Milan scored in the first minute and went on to be up 3-0 at half time. Liverpool's manager evidently tore the team a new arsehole because they came out and equalised in about fifteen minutes. Incredibly exciting.
By the end of the second half, with Liverpool's players really flagging, Milan made a couple of attempts on goal that were incredibly knocked back by the Liverpool goalie.
Eventually, the game went to a penalty shootout with Liverpool winning, but they really had to work for it.
Quite looking forward to Australia vs New Zealand next month, though of course the game won't be a patch on the skill and quality of these top teams.
I just resigned from my job. I'm moving to Searchspace who make anti-fraud and anti-money laundering software.
Quite looking forward to new challenges. Very much looking forward to using Framemaker again. After four+ years with Word and then AuthorIT, it will be refreshing to be using software that is almost bug-free. Also they have a very long release cycle, which will be refreshing.
Other advantages include it being in Central London. New Oxford Street, in fact. That means about the same distance but the ride should be a lot nicer, taking in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park and Oxford Street (or the longer but scenic route via St James' Park). Will make a change from riding through crackland.
Went for my appointment at the hospital's fracture clinic this morning. After an x-ray, the doctor said it should be fine now for me to start doing sport and the like. Disturbingly, he said that the x-rays didn't show much healing but he thought it should be okay based on my symptoms. Erm...
Think I'll still take it easy and gradually ramp up the activity.
Went to see The Producers last night with Dad, Holly and Rachel. What a fantastic musical, best I've seen in years. Absolutely hysterical. Couldn't recommend it more.
Highlight: the scene with dancing sparkly Nazis in a swastika pattern.
I spent the weekend tweaking the Ubuntu install on my new laptop and installing Ubuntu on my main desktop. It's very very slick, and unlike Knoppix the power save modes on the monitor actually work. This never really worked on my desktop.
What I need to get going now is my new Iomega Ditto Max drive for backup. It only cost me a fiver, so I'm not too upset if I can't get it going. However, it supposedly works but the documentation for ftape is really crappy.
I scored a nice laptop this week, though it has a problem with the screen and the cable connecting to it. Hopefully I can repair that. It's a PII 300, so quite a nice machine and very compact and light.
I installed Ubuntu on it last night. This is my first real install of Ubuntu, previously I've only played briefly with the live CD.
I have to say I'm well impressed. They've really thought through what's needed for ordinary end users and everything Just Works<tm>. Truly a Linux distribution ready for your Mum.
I've just spent most of the morning helping our DBAs install the Oracle client software on a freshly installed Debian box. Why, oh why, do you need to run some dodgy Java GUI installer to install a fscking database client? Why can't they give, say, a statically compiled binary? A shell script? ANYTHING but this!
Doing the installer in Java just makes the dependencies that much greater. And the Java stuff seems to rely on quite old versions of everything, including C++ libraries and GCC. How dumb.
Sure, Oracle don't formally support Debian as a platform but even on their "supported" RedHat platform you have to jump through hoops to get the thing installed. Why?