Well, I’ve had quite a long period without a post so here’s a quick update. Had xmas at the ‘rent’s with Livejournal:nunfetishist and Livejournal:gwendraith. Now in Edinburgh with Livejournal:gwendraith and we’re expecting Livejournal:gerald_duck and Gabriel for hogmanay. Still, time for a rest before hitting more computers with a “You will fucking work you cunt” stick. My laptop has a duffed filesystem. Livejournal:gwendraith‘s desktop is being reinstalled, her firewall (stargate) which myself and Livejournal:nunfetishist set up last year has developed some HD sector faults so we need to re-jigger that. sigh

So much for the unconditional love of a parent...

Cut — What was it I was going to say?
Oh yes... Bah -- Humbug!

Huntley found guilty of Murder, Carr guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Unshocker http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3312551.stm

Sorry to all those syndicating Livejournal:ppfannounce but due to a bug in the rss (now fixed) all announcements to date will turn up today. I can’t find a way within livejournal to suppress them either :-(

Cut — Careful, dangerous text hidden herein
Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja!... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.

Cut — Well, here's the weekend in brief...
So Friday night was pretty quiet, mostly just pottered around coding, reading, watching distraction and generally vegging out. Saturday saw me get a drastic hair-cut so that I could wear my snuggly hat with impunity. Then the Debian Xmas Meet began and things got geeky. I had a good chat with lots of local geeks, and a couple of less-local ones; planned to meet up with one or two over new-year in Edinburgh and generally had a good time of it. We started at the Regal as is common (although we're thinking of changing this) proceeded to the Salisbury Arms, and ended up in the Live & Let Live by the end of the day. Finally we went to Steve McIntyre's place for a cup of tea/coffee, a beer or two, more chatting about Star Trek (was on telly) and then more Debian geeking, before Livejournal:nunfetishist and I finally went home. It was good to see Livejournal:cjwatson, Livejournal:morayallan, Livejournal:dpash and many others. Sunday was quiet. Livejournal:gerald_duck came over and we played various games, including Mao, Carcasonne, Hearts (which I lost abysmally at), Scrabble (ditto) and I'm sure something else. Again, much chatting, geeking and general fun was had by all. And then.... I slept

Okay, so Livejournal:gerald_duck pointed me at this and all I’ll say is that I’m glad I have my new tinfoil hat to protect me from those pesky flying rats.

Why oh why do spammers try (ineffectively) to make their spams look like they come from someone else? This is an example of a spam I received sent to myself from myself apparently, which really fucks the brain. I desperately want to find these spammers and remove their genitalia (external and internal) using whatever tools and methods are suggested here. What is really worrying, is that the spammer even left traces of their internal network structure in the Received headers. SIGH

Today Pepperfish suffered a catastrophic hardware failure resulting in the need to install a brand new machine. This meant that myself, Livejournal:nunfetishist and a friend of ours Vivek spent many many hours in telehouse in London, sorting out new hardware and porting services across. Hopefully it’s all done now, so I’m off to bed.

Am I the only person already fed up with christmas?

Apparently, this is me: I'm meant to strike out bits which don't apply to me.... Active and dynamic. Decisive and hasty but tends to regret. Attractive and affectionate to oneself. Strong mentality. Loves attention. Diplomatic. Consoling, friendly and tries to solve people's problems. Brave and fearless. Adventurous. Loving and caring. Suave and generous. Emotional. Aggressive. Hasty. Good memory. Motivates oneself and others. Sickness usually of the head and chest. Sexy in a way that only their lover can see.

Cut — quizilla, mmmm

You choose your friends wisely and even though they
may be few in number, they are high in
importance. You feel most comfortable when you can follow the
crowd and let others make decisions. But that's
not to say you can't make up your own mind if
you need to. Faithful and true, Piglets make the best friends.

Which Pooh character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

During a high-powered meeting of top executives in the familiar surroundings of the farm kitchen, a decision was finally reached, regarding the taxonomy of the American government during the reign of the term in office of George Bush Jr. The most applicable term appears to be: idiotocracy It truly is the government of the people idiots, by the people idiots for the people idiots. Spread the news—we finally know what to call them. Update: It seems we’re in good company

Cut — Geek alert!
Well, I have to admit, Xfce4 is rather yummy. Livejournal:brainstewed was I believe the first person to mention it to me, and eventually a night or two ago, having reached the final straw with Gnome 2.4 being irritating at us, we switched. Bob's desktop, my laptop, and my desktop at work now all run Xfce4. We've noticed issues, and they'll have to be fixed as time goes by, but to be honest, the relative speed and smoothness of things offsets the fact that it's not quite as integrated or featureful as gnome. It took us about 5 minutes to work out what file to edit to configure some keybindings we wanted etc. Now it may be the case that we had to edit files, but at least xfce4 doesn't claim to have GUIs for it, only to pull the help when you report a bug that the GUI doesn't seem to be there. All I need now, is a battery applet for the panel, a system load monitor etc. All these exist and will soon be packaged for Debian. I tend to only run packaged stuff so that I can be sure of install/uninstall/upgrade capabilities. Oh yeah, and I need two rows of workspaces or my brain will explode. But that's okay because it's already on their wishlist. If I ever get time to myself I might try helping with hacking on xfwm etc. Until then, I'll re-learn to cope with only a single wrapping row of workspaces.