Category: Uncategorized

I just want to say – apologies for the lack of updates over Christmas! I’ve been rather busy the past few days, as you can probably tell.

Here’s a quick overview: on Saturday afternoon, I travelled back to Ipswich to my parents’ house. My sister arrived that evening, as well as one of our “longest standing” friends (we made them stand up all the time… no not really).

On Christmas day we went to church in the morning, and then had a lovely Christmas dinner! And, basically it was quite a family day — very enjoyable though. Probably one of the most enjoyable I’ve had in years. My parents were very pleased with their DVD player!

Anyway. Yesterday, we went to see ‘Peter Pan’ at the Regent Theatre in Ipswich, which was a pantomime with Brian Blessed. It was absolutely fantastic – I’d recommend anyone to go and see it! The guy who played ‘Smee’ absolutely stole the show, and Brian Blessed was brilliant with the audience interaction. Kirsten O’Brien, who played Peter Pan, was fabulous as well. I haven’t had so much fun at a pantomime in years (but seriously, it was a lot of fun).

I’m writing this from London – I’m staying with Philippa until New Year’s Eve, upon which we shall be returning to Colchester. I don’t know whether this will be my last update until then, but if it is — fare thee well, and I may see you soon!

I did a DnB mix for a bit of a laugh today – I don’t usually mix DnB, but I thought I’d do a mix just so that people who are into it could have a bit of a laugh at my mixing!

So here it is… enjoy!

TRACKLIST

01. Basement Jaxx – Good Luck (Roni Size Vocal Mix)
02. D:Facto – Artizan
03. Silver – Turn U Loose
04. Bulletproof – Fallen
05. Rob F – Exile
06. Crisp Biscuit – Don’t Go DnB
07. Matrix – Bad Dreams
08. Digital – Come to Me
09. Dylan – Oracle
10. Prodigy – Smack my Bitch Up (DJ Hype Remix)
11. Stranjah – Natty
12. Cut & Run – Pacific DnB
13. Jaydee – Plastic Dreams (Twisted Individual Remix)

DOWNLOAD

Right-Click, Save As [MP3; about 50megs; 50 minutes long]

I went to see King Kong last night. It wasn’t bad, but … well, I just had the feeling that they could have effectively reduced the length by about a half without missing much. Not that the thing was slow-moving, just that some of the scenes were drawn out a lot. Ok, so the special effects were good, and some of the acting was pretty good… but, to be honest, films don’t really get that ridiculous unless they’re comedies. It just struck me as being a bit forced… I know that a film about a giant monster isn’t going to be particularly realistic, but they tried to add the ‘human’, touchy-feely element into it which I don’t think worked.

It just gets more ridiculous towards the end. Reminded me a bit of ‘The Hulk’ actually, although definitely not as bad as that (couldn’t possibly be).

If I was giving it marks out of 10, I’d probably give it about a 5. Go and see if it you’ve really got nothing else on, but don’t expect it to be the best film you’ve ever seen!

It was the office Christmas party last night! It came in the form of a meal down at the Peacock Inn in Chelsworth (a fairly remote location about ten minutes drive away from where we work). Philippa and I went together. It was good to have a meal with everybody – and it was a lovely meal! I had the turkey (i.e, fairly traditional Christmas dinner). I was really full by the end of it, but still – really good food! The Chocolate Tart I had afterwards was lovely too – usually I find Chocolate stuff can be a bit too sweet and / or stodgy, but that was perfect – nice and light, and the flavour was delicious! So if you get the chance, go to the Peacock Inn 🙂

Anyway. I got named “Employee of the Year” :-O Which was kind of surprising. I suppose I didn’t have much competition (in terms of numbers, not quality!!!) but still. It was quite an honour! So I got a little certificate 🙂

Um, and… I don’t think there’s much else to say really. So I’ll leave it there.

(Incidentally: I wonder what time everyone will be in this morning… 😉

Well, yesterday was the winter equinox — the shortest day of the year! It’s all upwards for the next six months: it should gradually start getting lighter and lighter! Although we still have to put up with January and February (February in particular being one of the most depressing months of the year), at least it shouldn’t be so dark all the time.

Although this won’t affect evenings for some time, hopefully the mornings will start getting lighter and lighter… that is one good thing about getting up at 7:00 AM for work – it’s just that time of day where you can see it getting lighter and lighter!

Anyway, that’s all for the time being. As you were…

Last night I went out for dinner with a whole bunch of people. Philippa’s sister Roz is staying for a couple of days, and Phil wanted her to meet some of our friends so invited a few people out for dinner. We all went down to the Playhouse (steak night!). Anne-Marie, Phil, Roz and I arrived at the Playhouse around 6:30 or a bit later, and Alex, Richard and Matthew arrived a bit later on.

I really enjoyed it … it was quite strange thinking, though, that only two people at the table were students (Richard and Roz). I’m really glad that I’m still around to be in touch with people – even though we’re not students anymore!

And, um, that’s about it. I haven’t been up to anything else that’s particularly interesting. Or, for that matter, anything much at all really…

Ok, so, what did I get up to this weekend? In brief: on Friday evening, I went to see “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” at the cinema with Sarah & Jon and Philippa. On Saturday, in the morning I went into town to get my hair cut, and then in the afternoon lazed around watching Futurama. I had dinner at Philippa’s, Luci was with us as well as she was staying for the weekend. It was good to see her again, albeit briefly 🙂 And then afterwards we dropped Luci off on campus and went to mine to watch some of the Star Wars documentary. Yesterday, in the morning we went to Fordham for ‘Lessons & Carols’, and then had lunch. In the afternoon, we went to Simon’s for mulled wine and mince pies, which was rather nice!

Then, we treated ourselves to a curry from the Bengal Tiger in Wivenhoe, and went round to Alex’s to watch “Love Actually” (the second time I’ve seen it in a month, but still. Elisa hadn’t seen it so Alex wanted her to watch it…)

I think that’s just about it. One more thing though – I said I was going to talk about Narnia!

I have to say, I thought it was brilliant. It was really well done, and quite faithful to the book for the most part! I really think they managed to capture the spirit of the book. And it definitely made me think about some Christian things a bit more!

One thing which Phil pointed out to me which I hadn’t noticed before related to what I was reading about in “Consuming Passion” a few months ago. It’s basically this: in the book (and the film), the demand for sacrifice comes not from Aslan, but from the White Witch. This is a bit different to how a lot of conservative Christian theologians seem to view it, i.e. seeing God as the wrathful one imposing punishment on Jesus (what Steve Chalke called ‘cosmic child abuse’!). Maybe they’re not so different, but in the ‘wrathful’ interpretation wrath seems to be the operative force, whereas in the other interpretation justice seems to be the operative force.

Just some random musings there, I haven’t really solidified any kind of clear thoughts on it yet!

I read an interesting article the other day when I was browsing around the homepage of Fetchmail, and came across the essays section of the site.

It’s about open-source software and security, using the computer game Quake as an example. It’s a very interesting read, if you’re into that kind of thing. Here’s a quote:

The Quake model is made particularly relevant by its open-source connection. Open source advocates (including me) have been making a strong argument over the last two years that open-source software such as Linux and Apache is fundamentally more secure than its closed-source competitors. Cryptographers have long understood that no encryption system can really be considered well-tested until it has been energetically and repeatedly attacked by experts who have full knowledge of the algorithms it uses. Open-source advocates argue that there is nothing special about cryptography but its high stakes — that, in general, open peer review is the only road to systems which are not merely accidentally secure by obscurity, but robustly secure by design.

Read the article…

Well, the internet went back to normal speed about an hour after I wrote that last post. I still don’t know why it didn’t work, but at least it seems to be working OK now (although when I get back home, I’ll probably find that it’s broken again).

Just noticed something random… it appears that the logo for the Fedora Project is very similar to the one for my old school. It’s quite uncanny, actually!

Anyway, time for something I haven’t blogged about in a while:

Why Linux is better than Windows

One thing I’ve noticed recently is a pretty fundamental difference between Linux and Windows. Linux is built on the principle of having a large number of small programs that do what they do very well. Windows is built on the principle of having a smaller number of larger programs… that don’t necessarily do what they do very well. Not everything, at least. In short, Linux is modular, whereas Windows is monolithic.

There are good sides and bad sides to this: in terms of installing new software, modular code isn’t necessarily helpful: in Windows, if I want to install a piece of software I just click “Install”, and it’s basically there. In Linux, I often have to root out various libraries to get something to work… however, it does mean there’s less waste (if several programs use the same library), and modern package managers such as Gentoo’s emerge and Red Hat’s yum make this much easier (actually, once or twice yum hasn’t worked properly but emerge has always worked for me… bit of an unfair comparison though, because I’ve used yum a lot more).

Which brings me on to another point: control. In Linux, you feel as if you are in complete control of your computer. It gets you right down to the nitty-gritty. This, again, can be a good and a bad thing: sometimes you just want things to work, without having to worry about compiling in a bt869 module into your kernel so you can get s-video out on your video card… *ahem*. But sometimes it’s good to have control, it can be frustrating at times but the sense of achievement you get when you’ve got something working is worth it.

Incidentally, with my example above — I think often the case is not so much that Linux is being difficult, just that hardware manufacturer’s don’t provide Linux drivers, meaning you have to fudge it.

Ok, I am not happy with the internet at the moment. Not the internet in general, just the internet at home. I am currently downloading something at the whopping great speed of 2.79K/s. This is on 2Mb (megabit, not megabyte, in case you were wondering) broadband. Add onto that the fact that the internet was actually down all of yesterday evening, and that it’s been down on occasion on and off this past week, and you can understand why I’m not a particularly happy bunny 🙁

Unfortunately, I believe the company we’re with is actually run by one of Paul’s mates, so I won’t name them for the time being. Suffice it to say it’s not one of the major telcos! But nevertheless I’m still rather annoyed… grrrr.