Oh look, there's the Internet!

Oh look, there's the Internet!
Finally figured out how to get my Gentoo laptop to see the internet by sharing the internet connection on my Windows XP machine, via Internet Connection Sharing. Turns out I needed to enable Gateway Mode on my Kerio Personal Firewall, although the firewall is now using a disturbing amount of CPU time. Could be my woefully underpowered machine though... Anyway it works now, which is the main thing.

Pingu!

Pingu!
Got a free Pingu soft toy today from one of our sales reps. Yay! Penguins are cool

[Listening to: STj STU - STj MIX 1]

Dr Who Episode 1 : Rose - Mini Review

Dr Who Episode 1 : Rose - Mini Review
By means that I'm not at liberty to disclose, I was able to watch the first episode of the forthcoming new Dr Who series today. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone, but I can tell you that it is so much better than the old cheesy series used to be. The action is exciting, the effects are greatly improved, and writer has added some great humourous touches.

Billie Piper's acting abilities? I'll give her the benefit of the doubt until I've seen a couple more episodes (which I may be able to get my hands on also....), but Christopher Ecclestone looks like he's going to make a very good Doctor. Also nice to see Camille Coduri, from "Nuns on the Run" and "King Ralph" make another appearance on our screens.

Catching Up

Catching up
Haven't blogged for a while, partly because I've been on holiday, and partly because things have been so busy at work. But here's a little catch-up post

I was on holiday last week at Center Parcs Elveden Forest. Pretty good fun there, lots of activities to do, and lots of wildlife to see. Now I just need to have another week off to get over the exertion of it all!

The buying and selling of houses is going well - everything seems to be going through smoothly and for the most part is now in the hands of the solicitors (Americans: read that as lawyers!), and we're kind of hoping to be able to move in at the beginning of May.

Had a bit of a problem with some referrer spam hitting my website for about 8000 hits, which completely skewed my referrer stats - I've managed to get my stats to ignore the rogue ones for now, but its worrying that such high levels of malicious traffic is coming my way and I don't know how to stop it properly. Suggestions anyone?

Think thats everything for now

Unreleased(?) Synergy demos

Unreleased(?) Synergy demos
Mr Nyh from Atari Forum gave me these Synergy demos to spread. Just need Google to come and index these SYNERGY ATARI ST DEMO SCENE PRODUCTIONS FOR DOWNLOAD (yup, that oughtta do Google!)

House party

House Party
Finally managed to get an offer in on my house. Let's hope it goes through all right.

Also got my new 512MB memory card for my phone today, so I've been encoding ringtones and videos for it like a madman! I love toys....

Snow business

Snow Business
Left work early today due to bad weather conditions affecting the rail network home. My colleagues were a little sceptical of my claims, since there was no snow in London, but a quick look at SouthEastern Trains website confirmed it. The train operator was advising people to head back as soon as possible, since they couldn't guarantee trains later that afternoon and evening. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I managed to get home about 3 hours later, with a brief change of trains. Mid-Kent (Kent being the English county I live in, for my non-British readers!) was thick with snow and still had much more coming down. Hope London gets it soon so that people at work know I wasn't making it up! Looking out the window now as I type, its still coming down pretty hard outside the house.

In other news, I finally managed to get my modem working under Linux. Normally not such a big deal, but this is a horrible little BT Voyager 105, the Linux drivers for which are still only in the very early Alpha stages of development. Took a few kernel re-compiles to get the damned thing to work, but I'm online now, as this blog entry will show. Now I have the long and boring task of downloading and installing all the necessary software patches and updates, plus any other bits of software I want. I still have a working Windows XP partition on the machine as a backup anyway, just in case.

Book woes

Book woes
Good news : I get 2 free books a day from my employer (a publisher)
Better news : there were 4 copies of the "Love Actually" screenplay available today
Even better news : one of them was signed by Richard Curtis himself
Annoyingly bad news : the girl in front of me got it first.