Three days of work turned into an entire week. I hardly slept between Sunday and Friday and was utterly exhausted for the weekend. There's something about this particular customer I find is particularly disruptive to the rest of my life.

Currently compensating for this with a break. Visiting Bryce and Red Hat and doing some product evaluation stuff for work. Getting into the US is a good deal harder than it was last time I was here. Security at the airports involves National Guard with guns and three security checks before getting on the plane.

Apart from harrassing (and being harrassed) by various Red Hat folks and writing a long report on possible technologies Bryce and I visited the Blue Ridge Parkway and Mount Mitchell. It's pretty stunning scenery. Weather here is stupdily warm for early December. Pictures to come, when I finally get around to sorting them out. Put the new digital camera through it's paces and learnt a lot about how it works, at the expense of a LOT of badly taken pictures!

The Digital Camera is currently out-of-order! My pager decided to wake me up at 3am to tell me the battery was running low, and do so every 5 minutes till I raided theonly source of appropriate batteries I could find: the camera.

I have an apology to make to Microsoft. Apparently a fault I thought was with Exchange was actually a fault in the client's FreeBSD/IPFW NAT setup. This doesn't excuse all the other faults though and it's still a lousy product.

I've finally found a use for all that time spent learning Python. Woo!

Gearing myself up for 3 solid days work. Great. I will bloody need a holiday when I've finished, fortunately I have one in just over a week!

Saw The Others on Sat night. Very good. Jumped a couple of times and a mega plot twist at the end.

Finally I've got my Exim talking to customers Exchange. How many RFC non-compliances have I had to work around? *sigh*

Getting Exim to do what I wanted was fun, waiting for the other end (sadly running Exchange) is not so much fun.It is an entirely brain-dead application. Various problems with TLS still remain and nice handy "Subsystem not initialized" messages aren't helping diagnosis very much.

Had a BBQ on Saturday. Not an obvious thing to do in November in South Wales, but all the same it was fun and many things exploded.

Bought a digital camera on eBay.co.uk. Only a cheap one since I'm not good at photography and I don't take a huge number of pictures. We'll see how much I enjoy using it. Need to get some more details about its capabilities.

Heart sank watching the news. Another plane down in New York. Fortunately this had nothing to do with terrorists (apparently) but as someone due to fly into New York in two weeks I'm getting a little anxious now.

It's been a relatively quiet few days. A lot of my time has been spent working on some SMTP-AUTH and TLS stuff with Exim. Why I didn't migrate from Sendmail sooner? I have no idea. Big mistake!

I appear to have become a little bit sucked into Nokia Game. Very sad. It's taking a remarkable amount of time to play and I shall be glad tomorrow to move out of the real-time tunnels hell!

Took some time out yesterday to take part in a weekly meeting of the UK Campaign for Digital Rights. They are doing some interesting work on Copy protection and the EUCD. I have a lot of reading to do (links to come).

Been reading still: Lord of the Rings (part 1), Quiddich through the ages, and PWA. All very good.