Congrats to Cath and Kev on the birth of their daughter. Megan Elizabeth was born at 10:06 last night (CA Time) 6lb 13oz, 20 in long.

Just seen on the news that they are talking about making UK drivers take a years worth of lessons before being allowed to take their test. They are also talking about restricting night driving and the number of passengers allowed by people who have recently passed their test.

What I fail to understand, is how this will help. I took my test a number of years ago, and believe that whilst not perfect (who is), that I was a reasonably competant driver before the examiner would have passed me. We already have one of the most difficult tests in europe and the US, so why focus on that.

Why in the UK do the poeple in charge always seem to focus on the wrong problem. 99% of drivers who pass their test are fine. The problem is the drivers who drive without care to others, those who race, those who show off the passengers etc.

There has been some worrying things happening on the Charlie front. I didn't want this blog to become a place to rant, so I didn't post. Things aren't looking any better for him, but I have other things on the go, so I thought I would post again .

I managed to get my wireless playing with linux again, so I'm back with linux on the desktop for the continuation of the extended trial . I have most like people been using windows for aaaages. I've tried linux on the desktop before, but never got on with it. Ubuntu seems to be changing that.

An other thing is that a mate at work is looking at building a box similar to a buffalo terastation, but out of off the shelf parts. He's not a linux admin, so I might get a chance to play with linux software raid .

I've also got a couple of my characters on Puzzle Pirates up to being able to battle nav. This means I can go shoot stuff myself

Stop your children coding. If you don't, they might turn in to this

Well

Kev asked if gcc 4 was on bob, and it wasn't, so I spent some time looking around. I think I managed to install something that is not on the RHEL3 up2date server, and that fixed a dependency for a php update unintentionally. This caused the php update to happen, which started a chain of events that nearly resulted in a complete re-install of bob. Ant saved me, having and on there meant I could download a new krb5-libs package, which meant ssh, scp, wget, ftp, lynx and up2date started working again, up untill that point I thought we had lost the fight.

I've finally managed to pursude my new silencers on to my bike today. This means once I've got it all tightened up and run in again, I can get it MOTd and I'll be back on the road

A friend of Clares, and an acquaintance of mine, whom we met through Puzzle Pirates, was involved in a motorcycle accident on tuesday morning. He will be missed by those who knew him and our thoughts are with his family.

I've been a linux advocate for quite some time. I really dislike the Microsoft business attitude as I see it. I like open source software, I like being able to compare ideas. I have been using linux on my servers for years, and about a year ago put ubuntu linux on my laptop. A recent upgrade screwed my wireless networking up and I gave up in disgust and went back to windows temporarily. I admit, that I had forgotten how good a user experience windows actually is. Yes there are faults, but show me software that has no faults. I confess that my biggest problem with windows is Microsoft. As Kev put it 'welcome back to the world of productivity', and for desktop work (not servers) I find myself having to agree.

One of our cats, charlie, hasn't been quite right for a while. Nothing definitive, just wasn't himself. We took him to the vets last tuesday, and had him looked at. He got a couple of injections and picked up for a couple of days. We took him back tonight and they did some bloods. He has a high lymphasite(or something like that) count, and 1 of the chemicals for kidney function was up too. The Vets said that for a normal infaction, one of the other white cell types goes up, but this was ok, so it's not a normal infection apparently. He's also dehydrated so they have kept him in on a drip, and have done some more bloods, which should have some more details. Here's hoping he's alright.

Well. Tonight was the first blockade I've played in on puzzle pirates where it was my flag on the attack.