Here is my view of the lunar eclipse from Argyle Street, Glasgow.

Click for a larger image.

Happy new year everyone!

As I've not posted anything here for a long time, I thought I'd just post a photo of the view from my new flat in Glasgow city centre.

Here are some photos from the capital of Montenegro over the last 2 or 3 weeks.

My desk as it look right now, taken on a Sony K750i.

Today I've been doing some work in preparation for going to Montenegro tomorrow. I've been given a Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop with required software installed - compared to my iBook it seems like a desktop PC - Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, every PC legacy port you could think of, but only 1 USB port.

I'm trying to get my contacts transferred to it so I only need to take one laptop with me. My contacts are in Apple Address Book. One of my friends said last night that "Windows is better than Mac becuase Windows is compatible with everything". I'd love if Windows would be compatible with my Address Book backup file, my bluetooth mouse, forwarding X11 applications through SSH (yeah I know it can be done but it's a pain in the ass) and my iSight camera. I'd be happier if it even worked with my Logitech Quickcam which I've lost the CD for. I'm surprised a supposedly modern operating system doesn't work out-of-the-box with 4 year old hardware. What happened to just plugging something in and it works with no human intervention?

Here's the best I've found so far for transferring my contacts from Address Book. It exports Address Book's database to CSV (Comma Separated Values in a text file). This works, but Thunderbird on Windows seems to b0rk at the first unicode character it sees, and Outlook 2007 refuses to open it at all. So I tried opening it in Excel, thinking that importing CSV is a standard feature in spreadsheet applications. Excel's version of importing CSV today seems to be making a spreadsheet with lots or rows and one colum that contains text with lots of commas. So much for the commas separating the values!

Next random thought: Can anyone tell me where the lyrics "I'm a locksmith with the key to fame" came from?
A quick google search will reveal the answer, but I'm surprised there is only one relevant result on Google from the two it vame up with.

And Trevor McDonaldly, the thing that's been annoying me all week... Reduced Fat Crisps.

If I wanted to reduce my fat intake, I certainly wouldn't be eating crisps. However, I eat crisps when I feel like having a snack, but I'll consider cutting crisps out of my diet if confectionery companies continue producing these reduced fat crisps - they taste horrible. 70% less fat and 70% less taste in my opinion.

Find out more about 70% Less Fat crisps on the Walkers website.

It's got horns. 'nuff said. |

The week before last, Agnieszka and I started going to Bellahouston Leisure Centre to play badminton. I've not played for about a year, and I've forgotten most of the rules, but it's all good fun anyway. Once I find my book about it, we'll start following the rules.

Last week, I got my new car - a Lotus Elise convertible which I traded the MG in for. Highly impractical, but so much fun. Here is a photo of me standing next to it, and here is a better photo of an identical one (apart from being left hand drive and having foreign plates on it). It's a 2002 model, and has a low milage.

I got a Samsung D500 mobile phone to replace my Nokia, and as soon as I find a way of getting photos off it, I'll post pics of the new car and maybe tomorrow's Christmas work night out.

I've now being going out with Agnieszka for 4 weeks today, and what a fun 4 weeks they've been :-)

We had a Halloween party last weekend, which had a good turnout. Photos are available here.

Work has been really busy over the past 3 weeks, and I've had a few 10-hour days. I think coffee has been the only reason I've been awake some days.

I've been too tired or spent too much time going out or partying at weekends to get much more mountain biking done. I'll probably squeeze another trip to Pollok Park in soon.

Climbing is fun! I was at the Glasgow Climbing Centre with Neil and Jamie on Monday. It's the first time I've done it since the climbing wall at school. I need to work on my upper body strength (or just learn to climb properly as Ceri points out).

I'm halfway through recovering from an injury to my left thigh which resulted in having a large haemotoma removed, spending several days in hospital and requiring to be on crutches for a few weeks. My attention span hasn't been great over the last two weeks (probably as a result of lack of sleep) so I've not been up to anything interesting.

Photos of the incision and the wound are available.

Today I thought I'd play around with JSP, but so far haven't figured out what to download. The debian box that runs my web server had run out of disk space which didn't help either.

I bought a sextant today. It's an ornimantal one which probably doesn't work very accurately, but looks interesting. I spent yesterday playing Sim City 2000... Oh, the memories!

Saturday involved breakfast at Ikea with ScottMac followed by lots of MTV and coffee. Sunday involved putting Kubuntu onto the laptop. A Debian-based operating system that's aimed at KDE users. Nice! |

I've added a couple of new desktop screenshots to my website. There's someone new leeching the same large JPEG image from sorn.net again. I'll need to think up something more subtle to do to the image this time! Also, Loudounacademy.org.uk had a page of photos from the school. It seems to have been taken down now, but it's mirrored here on sorn.net now. Does anyone know where these pictures came from? We all know that the real Loudoun Academy website is here though ;-)

My new toy this week is Konfabulator (which you can see on my screenshots page). It lets you add useful little "widgets" to your desktop on Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX. It's similar to Karamba on KDE. Being able to import widgets between Karamba and Konfabulator would be nice.

Have you got a spare computer? I'm looking for a cheap (and quiet) second hand computer to use as a router between my network and GlasgowNet and BackNet. If anyone has a spare that they're willing to sell (something like a Pentium 166 is more than adequate), then please post in the guestbook.

I discovered that Sara and Aaron have a blog: http://glasgownews.blogspot.com... then I discovered a photo of Tina and me on it among lots of other good pics.

Today I read that SHA-1 encryption has been broken.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html

I also figured out that half the reason I thought one of my routers was broken was actually an error in the routing table in the Sun server. It seems to lose it's default route if I restart it. It took ages for me to find that since it hardly ever gets restarted.

Other than that, I titied up my desk at work. Woohoo!

Oh, and I've noticed that blogger.com's editor doesn't work well in Safari. It's ability to do fonts, links, etc isn't there.