Jack in the Green on Saturday

Morris Dancing around the Town. Starting at Winkle Island on the Bourne, Morris Dancers will be performed far and wide, including Jack in the Green innovators, 'Mad Jacks Morris' and 'Hannah's Cat.'

Der Fenestra

Decided to go down to the Whiterock Hotel for lunch and fell to about computers and beer with a chap I met at the bar over a pint of Olympia, a very nice beer indeed and thoroughly recommended. He introduced me to a girl called Carina, who was having trouble with her computer. She had managed to install a BT dialer which took some getting rid of mainly because her computer like Carina was German and my entire knowledge of the language comes from reading "Battle Picture Library" as a boy!

Did the necessary quicker that I would have thought possible by deleting the HTML files that were running the pretty little dial up the machine was offering, this brought IE6 and Outlook Express back online and all was well. I earned a pint and the gratitude of a foreign student so all in all not a bad day at all.


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The Whiterock Hotel, home of some of the best beers in Hastings.

Let the train make the strain!

I took my daughter back to Bournemouth University today, the journey was long but fairly easy. We made it to Clapham and then straight to Bournemouth without too much fuss and bother and Charis had made efforts to ensure that we were not too heavily loaded, which helped matters along! But it was noticeable that the SWT line was a lot more comfortable then my old commuting line Southern, which seemed to go out of it way to make trains that we hard on the bum not to mention hard on the pocket..

Despite everything and a good trip to boot, it was still hard work, practically an entire day spent on a train. I fully expect to have a sore neck and back for several days as a result of the appalling seats on those Southern trains.

So this is Christmas and what have you done, the old year is over, the new one just begun! Note for Mr Lennon, buy a new calendar mate.

It's been the usual sort of Christmas festivities, I collected Charis from University earlier this month in what proved to be a fairly strenuous exercise in transport and the national rail system.

Preparations for Christmas were pretty much of a muchness and consisted of buying more food and drink than two people could hope to consume, while at the same time failing to have food for basic meals (unless you have somehow come to decide that dinner can be had from a handful of peanuts a bottle of brandy and cheese - which is silly because that is what I had for breakfast!)

I had Ruth and her boyfriend over for boxing along with their mother and James and a fairly pleasant time was had by all. Unfortunately Debbie and James had to head home before Ruth and Chris left which was a shame. But the munchkin seemed to like the presents he had from us and Charis's remote control cyberman went down very well indeed. The trouble and at the same time the wonderful thing about Chrimbo is that days flow gently into one another and all seem the same long long period of relaxation.

Linux Mint 4 Daryna

I was pretty pleased with myself to get my upgraded rig (Core 2 Duo CPU and 775 motherboard) running without loud bangs or other mishaps, but after the reinstall Ubuntu was a little flakey and things which had worked well before now either didn't work well or didn't work at all. In particular my media player of choice VLC seemed to have decided not to play any sounds no matter how much I tinkered. So turning a frown upside down, I decided an install of Linux Mint 4 was the order of the day.

The live CD impressed me, picking up the wireless network first time and playing my collection of avi's, wmv's and ra files with no problems whatsoever.

I can't say it was a completely hassle few experience; the CD stalled the first couple of times I tried to load it but three goes and a second burn and I was in. Trying to install on free space on the HDD resulted in a Grub error, but an install using all the space seemed to do the job.

The install also partitioned my external hard drive, which is a nuisance because I will have delete the partition and probably copy file back to the drive. The partition appears on the desktop as an additional drive.

Visually I like Mint4 although the black desktop background that installed as default was less than inspiring for a first time use. Firefox, Thunderbird and the GIMP all appeared as part of the install. No sign of Konqueror which is a shame.

Linux Mint doesn't have any games installed which was a bit of a disappointment and I am not sure if I can get them from the repositories.

James and Victoria at play!

Lunch with Bill and Rita followed by Hastings Bonfire Society Procession.

Various images from our lunch with Nan and Granddad Thomas and our subsequent trip to the Hastings Bonfire Night ceremony - Saturday 13th October 2007