Some bugger nicked my phone. We went out to the LUG meeting last night, and between leaving the place and getting home, my phone was nicked. We tried to ring it and it was off, so someone has pocketed it and ensured that it is turned off. I know that it is not anyone in the LUG as everyone there last night was the LUG faithfull who have been with us for a few years and I trust all of them incredibly. I was mighty pissed off last night I can tell you.

Anyway, I rung Orange today and I can upgrade my phone for free at an Orange shop. 🙂 This is cool because I might be able to get a new snazzy phone with a colour display and GPRS. 🙂 Seems like this might have a silver lining. 🙂

Good LUG last night. Drunk lots of beer, ate lots of curry and woke up with lots of knackered. I just have an article to get sent off now and a few other things to do.

Oh, and thanks for the comments on the diary entries and rambles by the way – keep them coming. 🙂
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Right, prepare yourself for the bacon review of the third installment of the Matrix. We went to the cinema in wolves, sat down with popcorn and fanta in hand and prepared for the film.

What I was then treated to for the next two hours or so was a complete, engorged, swollen bag of shite. Don’t get me wrong, I watched the first one…was confused, watched the second…got confused again, and then watched this pile of tosh and left with no idea of what has gone on in the past three films. I was at least expecting to understand what the conclusion of the story was, but the three of us left wondering what had just happened, with only Sooz possibly having a clue what went on.

I hate confusing films. I don’t want to go there and sit through two hours of suggestion and possibility, and I don’t see the point in three films worth of suggesion and possibility. When Independence Day came out it was slated due to lack of plot and reliance on snazzy FX to fill the void. In what way exactly, does the matrix differ from this? In the first matrix film (the best of the three in my view) it laid the ground for the story and I thought it was OK. The second one had no plot whatsoever and stupidly long scenes (the dance/sex scene and agent smith fighting scenes), and the third one lacked any plot and point; particularly lacking a conclusion.

The other thing that is a pain in the crevice about these films is this way that people compare it to real life – “oooh, we may be in the matrix now”. Look, get a life dude, we are not in the matrix, its a fecking film! These type of people generally get aroused over manga films and spend way too much time on the net and should realise the matrix is just a story. Even if we are in a matrix like system, how would we know? I am certainly NOT the one…

I am a simple person. I like simple films – I like films that roll along at a pace and slowly drip entertainment into my brain without any kind of mental intervention. If I wanted to think about a story I would read a book. I watch films because I don’t read fiction, and I generally like an easy time over two hours. The matrix took this concept and destroyed it making simpletons such as myself have to figure this stuff out. No thanks.

I honestly thought the final matrix film would give me an overwhelming conclusion to what has happened, but it has left me bemused. Great acting, great FX, great music, but shite storyline and plot. Many people claim this is the greatest thing since star wars, but it will never, never be star wars. Star wars managed to combine a great storyline and impressive visuals/music. I cannot compare the two franchises personally.

I know many of you will like the matrix, and I am happy for you folks, but in my personal opinion, its just not my cup of tea.

I have finished by Blender series now for Linux Format. It is a bit of a shame really, as it was a really fun series to write, but I am pleased that Blender has had a lot of exposure in the magazine. When the final part is published in January, the series will have run for 11 months. I think this is the longest ever Blender series published in a commercial magazine. 🙂

I am currently downloading a stack of ISO’s from the Red Hat Network. I am going to be doing a review of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3.0 for Linux Format, and I have four ISO’s to download. This is the first time I have used the RHN and it is pretty neat. I also called their tech support to ask some questions (an 0800 number) and the guy on the phone was very polite and helpful. I am looking forward to installing it and seeing if it will play with my wireless PCI card. 😉

We are off out tonight to see the Matrix. To be honest, I am not into all this hype about it. It’s an overcomplicated bunch of films with snazzy graphics and confusing plot. The only reason I am going is out of some morbid curiosity…and some popcorn of course. I will let you know the verdict…
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You know, I love Blender. It’s wicked, and everyone should use it. I have just bought the new 2.30 manual that is to be released in late december, and I have been playing with a script called Make Human. It is so simple to create effective looking human meshes. These meshes can be then exported to be used in seperate scenes. I never realised the potential for the Python integration in Blender, but now I see it. 🙂

Lots of work today, and later tonight I am having a jam with cello-wielding Emelye. I had a long practice yesterday with Seraphidian and we finished a new song called Forsake This Hate which sounds pretty cool. 🙂

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Last night we gigged at the Giffard Arms in Wolves. Pretty decent night, if a little quiet – but the main rock night in Wolves was on which clashed. Given the clash, the turnout was better than I expected. 🙂

Well, KDE is all compiled up a working. I got kdenetwork going, and now need to find some time to get the other modules compiled. One module I have compiled is Quanta. With its Visual Page Layout system (VPL – in england this means Visible Panty Line), it seems quite an interesting approach to WYSIWYG. I just hope that the Quanta team really work at making the VPL spit out compliant HTML code. We had a big ‘ol typical LUG rant about this at the last meeting and basically all agreed that WYSIWYG is not so bad so long as it boots out compliant code. Unfortuantly, no WYSIWYG editor seems to do this at the moment. D’oh!

Well, tonight I am going to a friends engagement party. Time to don the shirt and jeans, and it should be fun. Craig is staying over and then tomorrow I have a band practice. Before the practice I have booked a 2 hour jam to do some drumming also. 🙂 I am looking forward to this.

Now I need to go and clear this house up with Sooz. It is a tip.

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Yes, I have not done this for a while. Once upon a time I used to compile this puppy every day and I had pretty much everything from the KDE CVS server compiled and ready on my machine. As I moved away from KDE a bit and went onto other things, I have not been compiling it. Now however things have changed and I have a reason to compile it again.

Things seem to pretty good in KDE HEAD. All the old shit is still in there. Loads of old crappy themes that no one seems to use and the typical a-zillion-and-one configuration options bloating KControl as traditional says it should. Credit where credit is due though, the KDE crew do keep on working hard and creating a great desktop. It is also very stable.

Today I got up at 2.30pm (mind you I had alate night last night). Now, the pizza is ordered and Sooz has just driven onto the drive getting home from work. Time to eat and maybe watch Commando. 🙂

Since the age of nine when I first heard the glory that is Iron Maiden, I have headbanged quite a bit. There I could be seen, out with friends, banging my head to the lucent tones of distorted guitars and thudding double bass drums. With great pleasure I can say that not for a long time, including the many gigs with Seraphidian, have I headbanged quite as much as I did on Saturday night. My god, I thought my neck was going to fall off at one point.

We were treated to the delights of MEtallica, Machine Head, In Flames (I know, in a UK club this is pretty mad), Fear Factory, Slipknot, Slayer etc. Happy happy joy joy. Happy happy nack ache.

In other news, there is lots going on here. I got my copy of Panther today for the Powerbook. Installed three CD’s worth of MacOSX goodness and wallowed in the flory of its interface. ITs a shame that its not free, but I suppose we can’t have everything!

Panther does seem to be a good upgrade, and the inclusion of an X server is nice. Good interface, Safari is pretty decent (apart from a few annoying issues such as no statusbar). All in all a good OS, and I am looking forward to contorting it in the way many OS’s seem to be on my machines.

Oh yeah, and the Wireless still does not work on my Linux laptop. Thanks Ron for the advice, but the AP seems to work with the other machines on the network. It might be a hardware fault on my PCMCIA card.

Right, this is starting to freak me out. My wireless card decided last night to stop working. I can see the card in the PCMCIA services and insmod the driver fine, but in terms of grabbing an IP address…nada.

I have no idea why this is doing it. Consequently, I am sat here with a cable connected to my laptop. I am gonna start looking into it when I have some time, but I am really busy at the moment.

Busy day todat. I got an article on Extreme Programming finished and recieved some additional information to create some case studies for theKompany.com. There are a few other bits and bobs that I need to finish off tonight, and the tomorrow I have an article to finish and some other documents to write.

LUG tonight at the glorious Pie Factory in Tipton. 🙂 Should be cool, and you just can’t say no to a pie with horns on it. 🙂

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Weird…I just went to use my laptop and my wireless seemed to not want to work. I checked that the module was being loaded and it complained that my kernel had been compiled with a different version of gcc to my atmel drivers. I had not done any compiling since the last time it worked, so I have no idea what affected it. I did do a dist-upgrade, so a new ldd or something must have broken it.

Remember what I was saying about hating computers. Naaa…I don’t mean it really. 🙂
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