I have finally received my new laptop. In the end I got a Dell Inspiron 700m. Not my first choice, but it was about the only option to get the features I wanted at the price I wanted. It isn’t as bad as I feared, although it does have a cheap plastic feel to the…

This morning my mother was sworn in as a Justice of the Peace. This meant a trip down to the local court and a very early morning tea afterwards. The judges seem to have a playstation in their tea room, I don’t know if the JPs are allowed to use it. The whole process was…

So, I’m back from Australia without being bitten by any of the wildlife. There were flies though, so it wasn’t as if the fauna was a complete let-down. The kangaroos made an appearance too. So did the rain. The ANU Kioloa campus where we stayed is an old farm with a bunch of bunk-houses and…

From Saturday until Thursday I will be in Australia. In fact I will be in a place called Kioloa. There is no internet or cell-phone coverage and I suspect that finding a power-point for my laptop might be amusing as well. This place manages to have even less night-life than Canberra (which I will be…

There has had to be an extra release of gnome-games this time around since we seem to have relied too heavily on CVS code (librsvg to be specific). Unfortunately make distcheck doesn’t pick up that kind of error. There may still be problems with jrb’s new scm_* based code for interfacing C and scheme if…

My laptops hard-drive has gone from just making clicking noises to actively giving read errors. Something will have to be done soon, very soon. I have two choices: replace the hard drive or get a completely new computer. The first option is a lot cheaper, but the laptop has been used daily for four years…

This weekend my father and I took his MR-2 up to Ruapuna for the classic car club meet. I was merely the pit crew, it is my father who has the money and the racing license. We went up on Friday afternoon and stayed overnight in Rolleston. The racing was on Saturday, which was overcast…

My camera started to malfunction a few months ago. The basic problem was that the hooks that latch the battery door shut had broken off. This meant that the connections to the batteries were bad and that the camera shut itself down while trying to do anything that needs a bit of current. Like taking…

I have to agree with Rich Burridge, Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal is a good read. Although Guards Guards is still my all-time favourite Discworld novel and Good Omens is of course Pratchett’s best (written with Neil Gaiman, for the few people who live under a rock and have never heard of this book). Curtis Hoovey…

I have finally tried Ubuntu. I downloaded the CD about the same time everyone else was installing it but I’ve only just sorted out the boot and partition problems on my G5 which means I could ditch the old Yellowdog 3 installation. It has all been a bit of a farce. I initially installed Yellowdog…