…drivin’ a truck with my high heels on.

(quick redux of the past week)

Phew. I’ve now finished almost 600 miles of driving which I started last Tuesday with my drive from Cambridgeshire to Edinburgh. Now I enjoy driving quite a bit; but a car full of family and acoutrements can be quite an effort to drive around.

We did however have a nice time visiting the places around Alnmouth and Alnwick. Yesterday we went to Holy Island (Lindisfarne) and although the photos my mother out law took indicate a glorious sunny day; the wind was blowing at gale force two-thousand and we were frozen to the bone.

I’m now relaxing before I get back to work tomorrow for a day or two until the new-years celebrations. The cake worked well and is tasting rather good. Work is going well. Oh and I almost burned the place down. (but we returned early and foiled my cunning plan)—Thus I know that I’m unable to commit arson and thus am utterly beyond reproach. ahem

…und ich gebe zu:

Brought to you with the powers of at and pre-authoring before I went away while listening to the Wise Guys ; today’s posting is meant simply to wish you all the best over your holidays and to make sure that you don’t think I’ve dropped off the face of the earth entirely :-)

• Merry Christmas and a happy new year
• Frohe Weinachten, und ein frohes neues Jahre
• Joyeux Noël et bonne année
• Nadolig llawen, a blwyddyn newydd dda
• חג מולד שמח ושנה טובה

See you all in the new year (or a bit before if I get back to a console before then)

…if he was here right now?

I have now been home from the Mataró conference for just over a day. I had quite a whirlwind two weeks of hard work. I remain in awe of the people who do this sort of level of work for two weeks before the conference also. I really enjoyed myself both on a professional and a personal level. It is a wonderful thing to be friends with your colleagues; and to have so many interesting and dedicated people turning up simply to be part of what we are creating is a very heartening feeling.

I introduced a few more people to Mao and look forward to playing some more games with them at the next conference. Special hello shouts go out to Corey Burger who is doing some wonderful stuff with the Ubuntu documentation team and the quickguide which my father will find very useful; also shouts to the entire distro team and especially to the community builders. Lulu, we’ll miss you.

I spent yesterday vegging out in front of the telly; enjoying immensely our new DVD/CD player with it sounding even more lovely now than when we got it three weeks ago.

Donnie Darko is an exceedingly odd and wonderfully shot and scored film. The Butterfly Effect is also an odd film which benefits over Donnie Darko by having a somewhat easier to follow plotline but which doesn’t have quite the remarkably immersive acting and atmosphere. Both together provided a very entertaining afternoon/evening.

I’ll be off and incommunicado from tomorrow until a little after christmas as I spend time with Rob and his mother in a small cottage in Scotland.

…that which you can put off indefinitely.

Today saw a very strange set of outages of Pepperfish’s upstream ISP’s routing. After a while Loud-n-Clear managed to get enough back running that I was able to move MX services to the new IP range which we’ve been pending putting into action for quite a while now.

Once things were stable again at about 17:00 I began shifting services. Now at 19:22 the only things left unmoved are a couple of SSL websites which I need to concentrate very hard before I move.

All in all, very painless once I forced everyone’s zones on the box (ca. 190 domains) to have a 60 second TTL. I guess I’ll take the hit for the extra DNS traffic for a couple of hours. (TTLs are back to normal now)

And now, I’m off to play in a hellmouth. The things I do to unwind…

…Without you I don’t think I could live.

Tonight I visited mjg59 and together we worked through the little bits between me and my laptop fully appreciating his ACPI love.

Now I have software suspend/resume working, and hibernate/resume working also. All hail Matthew, for his crack is indeed of the highest calibre.