Have a nice christmas people. I hope you get something nice. 🙂
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Well, Matt Revell has been a little busy with the GIMP and has created this. It is amazing how many people seem to think I look like Adrian Smith from Iron Maiden. Shocking I know, but I will put this kindly image in my gallery.

We went shopping today and got some final presents. Everywhere is in good christmas cheer and it is getting exciting. Tonight we went to the pub and had a drink with Annette and Jon (Sooz’s sister and boyfriend). It was a good night.

I want to get some electronic drums. This is gonna solve the problem of being able to play my kit in our house; I can’t do this due to neighbours. I saw and played on a kit today, but I am looking for one of the better Roland V-Drum kits. I will be looking into this a bit further I think.

Finally, it is good to see yet more people coming onto the charities forum. We are going to work on a more expansive guide hopefully, and it could be interesting. 🙂
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Went to see Arch Enemy tonight in London. It was a good night and they played well even though the singer has got flu, which I also have. I don’t have a runny nose or anything, but I feel pretty bunged up in the head. Not good I tell you.

Good to see the charities articles is still having an effect – I have heard from various people about their efforts in this area and I am pleased that it has caused a reaction. If this article helps one person get a charity using free software, I will be pleased. Also, go and check out the charities forum I have set up on jonobacon.com – it is there to help this need specifically.

Last night I started to write something new. I have started writing my experiences with Linux, free software and computers down into a kind of story. It is not so much a biography (as I am not famous), but it is just a story of how I stumbled across this mad world of free software. It might be interesting, and might not, but I thought it would be interesting to write. When it is finished I will put it online. It will take a while to write as I start back when I was five years old, and I can only write it time permitting.

Right, I need to go and write some more on this before I crash out and get some kip.
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Well, I am now officially finished for 2003. I am chilling out with friends and family and taking it a bit easy. It was good to see the LUG pics have been well recieved, and there are more by David Goodwin at this location. Twas a fun do.

Trig has been posting to the forums again. Good to hear from this scamp who works for ITSLinux. Hopefully he will be down to a LUG meet sometime soon.

Did a gig last night in Northampton. Fun time was had and it seems the main promoter is a coder for Barclays. He is a nice guy and there may be some more writing for me to do. It is good to see the work coming in – keep it up folks. 🙂

My article for Newsforge has been published today also. Seems pretty cool and I am gonna work to get my charities document under a better license so others can update it. I should have that sorted when I start back working next year – rest assured I will make it available though so more people can make use of it.

Right, I am off to put my feet up. 🙂

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I added to batches of photos from two chrismas bashes. The first are the photos from the LUG bash last night and the others are from the chrismas get-together I had with some Uni friends. See the gallery for details.

Woke up today at 10am and felt sick. This most likely due to the 6 cans of Carling, pappadoms, meat samosa, chicken jalprijii, pilau rice, plain nan and ice cream desert. It was a good LUG and we had about 20 odd people there – good fun and we might have a new convert joining us. 🙂

After waking up feeling like I had swallowed a hedgehog, I went downstairs and Aq was up (he stayed over last night). I showed him some stuff to do with Blender as he wants to write a game and then he left. Sooz and I decided to go to the shop to get some milk and a sandwich so we got in my car and started it up. I drove down to the end of the road adjacent to ours and the fecking thing conked out. After no luck trying to get the MagooMobile started we walked back to the house and took Sooz’s car to the shop. A little while later I reluctantly pushed the car back, stomache still squelching, head still hazy. Thats not good, hackers, thats not good.

Working on a chapter now and just getting it ready before christmas. I have so much to do and I am pleased that I have some worked lined up for next year. It is gonna be a busy few months from Jan – July 2004 and some interesting content should be coming out them.

Oh yeah, link for the day. Check out this amazing animation done by a spanish blenderhead. Awesome stuff and you can download the .blend file from here. 🙂 One other thing — I should have a Newsforge article about charities online soon. 🙂

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Today I was fiddling with some of the interactive Blender games on my Windows machine (yes, I have a Windows machine for sound engineering, work and reviews). I was messing around with a few demo’s and needed to reinstall my TNT2 drivers to get them working more smoothly. I have not really tinkered with the game engine so much, but it seems pretty flexible with what you can do. I will be playing with this some more in the future, and hopefully learning Python also.

I have been reading the Qt book that is coming out soon with Prentice Hall. It is a good read and covers some of the WYSIWYG stuff that can be done with QPainter in some detail. I will be messing around with some of this at some point – once again, on my list of stuff to mess with. I would really like to get to grips with WYSIWYG document interface coding; I understand the concepts of it, but not very good at the implementation. I hope this will change at some point.

I made a lot of phone calls today to various people and contacts, wrote an article for Newsforge and worked on some other writing. I also managed to finally get the MasterCare situation sorted out and we should be getting a new telly fairly soon. 🙂

I am now full of chinese and tired. I am gonna go and get some kip as I need to be up early to get some work out of the way and then go to Merry Hill in Dudley to do some chrismas shopping.
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Firstly, I have added a new Blender image to the gallery. It was the result of me fiddling with Blender for an hour or so. It also includes some raytracing which is in the pre-release build of Blender. Remember that I am not a great artist though – this was my first real attempt at some modelling – I modelled the statues using a SubSurf which is like skin. Practice makes perfect, and I am looking forward to my next attempt. 🙂

Today I wrote some words for my book, and I then had a jam with Emelye. We recorded some music and I will see if I can get it on here soon. It is a little different and I played a nylon string acoustic guitar. I am quite pleased with it even if the quality is not so good due to my dodgy setup – I need a new recording PC very soon!

More writing tomorrow and a few other things to finish.
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The weekend is over and we had a great time. Our mock chrismas day went well and everyone had a lot of fun and ate well. We played the post it note on the head game, pictionary, told crap jokes and generally had a good time together. Today (sunday) I had a band practice that was cut a little short to get to Birmingham to see the mighty Dave Gorman and his Googlewhack adventure. Dave Gorman is a funny, funny man, and his one man show is excellent. If you get a chance to go and see it, I highly recommend it – great fun and very entertaining.

Tomorrow I am going to be getting started on some mods to some writing, and I have some things to get out of the work queue. I am also jamming with Emelye tomorrow and we are going to carry on working on a tune we worked on a few weeks back that she wrote.

Oh yes, tonight when I got in I saw that some kind soul has made a recent build of the Blender CVS with the raytracing goodness in there. I made the typical ball and floor scene and set some reflections and it looks great. I have also been looking into the Yafray integration which is coming along. Yafray produces very near photo realism. It is amazing the progress being made in the free 3D front. I am just looking forward to the game engine coming back. 🙂
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Today is our mock chrismas day. This has been a tradition since the start of university, and we all meet up, buy each other a present (we pick names out of the hat to keep it secret), and we eat a quite extroadenary amount of food. There are nine of us today, and I am looking forward to it.

I am quite tired after doing the gig last night – we went on late but it was a good night. Now I am up earlier than normal on a saturday to go and prepare for today. I need to hoover the house and then get the tree up and decorations. We are seeing Dave Gorman tomorrow also. 🙂

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