It's time for a bit of a sit.

Well... Back from Paris and I'm absolutely exhausted.

Not only did we manage to do most of the tourist stuff: Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame, Pont Neuf etc; but we also managed to get around a few alternative bars as well. If you like rock, metal etc then I can highly recommend either the Katabar near the Moulin Rouge or Les Furieux near Bastillle.

Another cunning little trick I picked up is that if you want free internet access from a hotel then make sure your laptop is running Linux. It seems to bypass the credit card sign-up procedure.

Anways... time for a big cup of tea and a bit of a sit.

It's nearly time.

Well... This time tomorrow I'll be in Paris.

I'm really looking forward to, it's our five year anniversary and we've got the weekend away together without the sprog. :)

No really huge developments to report, I've started work on a code demo for applying for games programming jobs. My two options are either an R-Type clone or a 3-D environment walk-around. Still not quite sure which yet. It does get very frustrating when learning a new thing, you just want to be able to do it straight away instead of having to go through all the 'Hello Worlds' and other applications. Ah well...

Fun little site for you to check out if you like musical comedy:

RobP's Page

I can highly recommend the Pachelbel Rant.

Bon Soir!

It's not just grim up north

It has been absolutely awful the last couple of days. The river outside of our house nearly spilled over again. We came within a couple of inches of being flooded during the last lot of bad weather. This is what it looked like from just inside our front door:

Thankfully it wasn't quite as bad this time and the river didn't actually spill over onto the path.

I must say how much I love roleplaying. It's been a hobby of mine for over 20 years now, and it still hasn't lost it's appeal. Now I'm not talking about Dungeons and Dragons here where me and a bunch of my friends sit around battering orcs and collecting gold pieces and xp. At the moment we're playing a game set in the future but in a parallel universe. It's basically futuristic magical steampunk, which is awesome, lots of airships and the like. We've just discovered Atlantis and it turns out that it might be Hell.

I'm still having problems with my wireless network and Linux. I've managed to get it all set up and working, but when I try to use the WPA encryption my laptop won't connect. So I'm left using MAC address filtering which ain't very good if anyone nearby knows how to spoof a MAC address. Despite much googling I still can't seem to get it to work using iwconfig. Hmmm.... Ah well... I'm sure I'll crack it eventually.

I ran into another odd problem the other day while transferring old VHS tapes onto DVD. There appears to be some sort of archaic copy protection system that will not allow me to back up my videos onto dvd. As soon as I start the tape playing and record on the dvd it says 'Copy Protected' and stops the recording. I guess I've become so used to ripping cd's and dvd's that I'd completely forgotten that copy protection is such an issue.

Only for weeks now until we go to Paris or our 5th anniversary. Can't wait, I'm going to have to see how much it's going to cost to do the Eiffel Tower and the Louvres.