My first Entry of 2003 :)

Chrimbo and new years eve went better than expected, especially New Years. Managed to get through half a bottle of After Shock with one of my neighbours on NYE and lived to tell the tale :)

Went on a spending spree yesteday and bought some new skates which totally rule, I should be on commission with the shop I bought them from because I've managed to drum up loads of interest in them when I went skating. I also bought a Nokia 7650 which is a superb phone, I have irda working with it under Linux now but I only seem to be able to transfer files from the phone not to it. No doubt some work is needed there.

My Christmas was nowhere near as productive as I had hoped it would be, but I did some work on the swlug site and played around with some ideas for my own site. I also got bored one night and set up a dns server on my local network and finally got around to setting up procmail.

After being encouraged by parents to remove the large boxes that the new pc came in I am now buried under CDs. Upon emptying the boxes I have 9 completely useless CDs full of Windows software why do they give out so many of these damn cds? Whats more the DVD of Mandrake 9.0 that I got off Linux Format won't boot so I had to burn 3 more CD's. Perhaps I'll build a Coffee table out of them all at some point in the future.

Mandrake 9.0 installed nice and easily, Linux RAID worked first time with minimal effort which is good considering this is the first time that I've played with RAID. I guess I'll write a review for the SWLUG later on and then prepare for wiping it and installing Debian.

I am distressed at my webcam purchase from a few weeks back now, finally got around to setting it up and realised that I'd bought the wrong model. The one I bought only seems to have basic drivers that are at the alpha stage of testing for Linux, I will have to look at these over chrimbo.

Took the opportuinty to go out for a curry on Monday with Robot101 and zx64 whilst they were home for xmas, also leant a spare 17" monitor to Robot101 to use over the holidays as he couldn't carry his on the train.

Went to go and see Andy's latest band play at TJ's I was very impressed will have to go see them next time they play, the other 3 bands that played that night were nowhere near as good. TJ's hasn't changed much either, it shocked me to think that the last time I had been there was probably 3 years ago.

Finally got the case for my new system this week, got an e-mail from Dabs telling me that it was going to be delivered that same day. Naturally no-one was in to sign for it so Parcel Farce decided to return it to the depot that is about 25 minutes drive from my house as opposed to the one that is 5 minutes drive. Left for work at an sickeningly early time the next day in order to allow for picking up the parcel, luckily PF open early although I'm quite disturbed that although it says in bold writing on the card to bring ID along they happily handed the parcel over with me giving just my name and post code.

Work is quite disturbing at the moment because everybody seems to have saved their Holidays until Christmas, this means that theres only about 5 people in the building and we all work in different departments thus hardly ever seeing each other.

I'm Planning to do lots of coding/reading over the next week, must make enforced time off from work useful. xmas/new year don't seem to mean much to me any more anyway, whats more depressing is that I can't remember a time when they did.

hmm, lots of stuff to log.

Work I am now employed as a full time software engineer for the company that I have been contracted to for the last 8 months which means I can now start to do stuff like apply for motgages etc. I'm not entirely sure wether this is a good thing.

Pain In my never ending quest to destroy my body before the year is out I fell over Ice Skating and ended up with 7 stitches in my chin.

Captain Cyborg Kevin Warwick gave a talk at the Cardiff National Museum and Gallery which was quite interesting, I came away with a better opinion of him than I had when I went there. Met people from the swlug before the talk at the Star Trek exhibition and went for food with most of the Swansea swlug regulars at TGI Fridays where the portions were so large that I failed miserably to eat much more than the starter.

Visitor Shane came over from Ireland for a week, we had thought of visiting davej but he was going to be in Mallorca so visited Rob in Sheffield instead. We went to the Devonshire Cat which is a great pub which serves amazing German/Belgium beers, we then headed to the Corporation (Heavy Metal club) for more drinks. Spent the night in the car because we failed to find Rob who was the only one with keys to his flat, found out in the morning that he had been in the flat just fast asleep. He was forgiven as we sobered up.

Magor Broadband Travelled back home from Sheffield on the same night as a LUG meeting so decided to visit my local pub instead of the extra hours drive on to Swansea. Whilst at the pub I overheard "wireless" and "2.4 ghz" coming from a group of people in the corner, when they produced wireless antenas I decided to investigate. Theres now a group of people in Magor who like me are obivously upset at the lack of decent net access in the area and are trying to get a bristol company IAP Broadband to supply wireless broadband to Magor. I left the pub with lots of phone numbers, web/mail addresses and feeling completely freaked out that I had not known about this already. I will have to check the security on my WLAN.

Dabs and Parcel Farce I decided to purchase a new system this week 1.67ghz Athlon, 2 x 40gb hdd, dvd, cdrw etc. The same delivery person made 2 trips to my house to drop off a box each time why they weren't delivered at the same time I know not. The problem is that the third box with the ATX case in it failed to arrive, this means that I'll probably have to wait till next week to get the case therefore spoiling any pc building plans that I had for this weekend.

Pain: Was not at all well on Friday, I managed to guess that having a doctor recoil in shock as she looked into my throat was not a good thing. Was sent home after being told that the thing that hangs down in my mouth had turned blue and I had a swollen spleen, not good. The bus journey home was not plesent, hopefully will be back at work on monday but I have to go for a blood count test first.

Mail: I now have an IMAP server which is nice, what was not nice was spending almost a week (about an hour a day was wasted) trying to find out why login.defs would not change the MAIL environmental variable. It was then that I discovered that ssh doesn't look at login.defs and actually connecting a monitor to the box and logging in locally would work perfectly.