Oh, yes indeedy.

Friday was spent with the feet up, relaxing with a few beers after a long week. Some Stargate SG1 season 6, oh yes. Ah, relaxation central.

On Saturday I copied some software on to a CD for my Sister, Helen, who got her hands on an iRiver mp3 player but had no software for it. As they only have dial-up I put the drivers and software on the CD along with some standard stuff. Mozilla Firefox, AdAware, SpyBot, AVG and ZoneAlarm. You know, the usual stuff.

So off to Paisley we went, enjoying the surprisingly sunny weather on the unsurprisingly dire public transport service. Damn, I need to get my driving licence.

After the CD handover was complete and shooting the breeze about her shop, we made our goodbyes and nipped into a pub for lunch and a pint. Now, you know that way that if it’s a nice day there’s nothing like a pint in the afternoon? Well, that’s the zone we ended up in. And as we were going to the pub that evening to say goodbye to Neil, a fellow warrior in the ways of Prog who was leaving to work in New Zealand, we decided to head straight there after lunch.

And why not.

So in the Uisge Beatha on Woodlands Rd in Glasgow, we supped cool pints and caught up on some reading. The Conan Chronicles, vol. 1 but Robert E. Howard if you must know…

At eightish everyone else turned up and the evening got under way. Now, here’s where it takes a turn for the worst. As the consumption of many pints takes it’s toll I feel the call of nature and, on my way to relieve myself, hear my name called from the other bar.

And shock horror it’s an unwelcome figure from years ago called Sean. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the people in the world I never wanted to see again, it had to be Sean. And he hasn’t changed. This then made the next hour very tense as Sean has a way of going from barely social to unbearably antisocial in a blink of an eye. *
But, thankfully, he was not to stay for long. Which brightened my whole evening up.

Beyond that, the evening degenerated in to a semi-drunken madness, which was always good.

Sunday saw another day of lounging around in the quest for total relaxation.

Oh, and before I forget, we got our last two wedding presents yesterday. One was really nice and the other was a ceramic Snow Goose. A personal prog joke that one…

BigAl

*[ edit ] The funny thing about writing a blog is that sometimes you can look at something you wrote two years ago and realise that (1) I’m not that person any more and (2) my views at the time were coloured by inexperience and (I’ll admit) immaturity.  Not an easy pill to swallow, that one.

But as I don’t believe in rewriting history, the post shall remain with this additional comment to show that I’m not totally inflexible in my views.  And, I suppose, to admit that sometimes I’m wrong.  Not an easy pill at all.

And as for Sean?

How I felt the day of the post was an accurate reflection of my feelings (however misguided) and time has moved on since then.  “Unbearably antisocial” is a very loaded phrase and, with hindsight, incorrect.  And that’s not necessarily how I feel these days.
Why?  That’s not for me to tell.  You’d have to ask Sean about that… [/ edit ]

I have become a semi-frequently watcher of Channel Five’s ‘The Gadget Show’ (Fridays 7.30pm and repeated later that night, FYI). They’ve covered some interesting topics this series, and by and large their reviews have been interesting, although they have a tendency to try and do too much in a review, which has sometimes negated it’s usefulness.

This past Friday, as also commented by davee, they did a feature on Open Source software, also backed up by a short piece on their website by one of the presenters. They did try and cover an awful lot, looking at OSS on Windows, and and almost throwaway mentions of Linux, and they did suggest that OSS == free, which some of us will recognise as slightly incorrect, but ultimately it was interesting to see what an ‘outsider’ view was.

In comparison to the BBCs review in Click Online, I think they did a really good job. They mentioned all of the ‘big’ mainstay projects (OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and The GIMP), and it was great to see someone mention Knoppix as a way of trying Linux without installing. It was a shame they didn’t look at a couple of distributions, but, then again, their method was probably best for their target audience.

However, probably the best part about the review, can be summed up in some quotes from the online article:

• “And while I maintain that you need to have a certain level of technical knowledge to install something like the £35 Suse Linux, it offers so much for so little, it might actually be worth asking someone else to install it for you.”
• “Why change? How about ‘it’s fun to try something new?’”
• “But I’m in favour of the ‘give it a try because it’s different’ argument.”

The underlying theme of the review was that you might as well give OSS a try, because it’s not going to cost you anything to do so. Well done Channel 5

mrBen