Not-so-cool number plates

You know the ones I mean. They look as if they *might* mean something, to somebody, if you could only just work it out. Today's example: B16 NDN. Now I've seen enough private plates to know that B16 is meant to be BIG. But... NDN? Big nuddun? WTF?

Fortunately (in a way) I was behind this vehicle in a queue of traffic, so at one point I came close enough to read the small print under the registration. It said: THE BIG INDIAN.

NDN. INDIAN. Right. Was it worth it?

Who put the "con" in congestion charge?

Here we go then. Our voting packs for the "TIF" proposals (aka the Manchester congestion charging scheme) arrived this morning. We have until December 11 to vote, but ours will be in the post tomorrow.

Various polls on local radio have suggested that a majority of voters will be voting No, but will that really make a difference? Scaremongering tactics among the yes campaigners would have it that this is a one-off chance; all or nothing; say yes now or lose all that lovely transport investment. I don't believe that for one minute. Firstly, I wouldn't put it past them to bring the scheme back under another guise in the event of a "no" result. I'm sure our councillors are quite capable of learning that trick from the EU. The new EU constitution has gone through on the nod, despite being virtually identical to the previous attempt and there being no UK referendum. So watch out for Manchester councils to reinvent the scheme, claim it has nothing to do with the old scheme and therefore doesn't warrant a new vote, and do it anyway.

Secondly, if congestion really IS that bad (it isn't. Industry watchers say that city centre traffic levels have remained virtually unchanged for the past ten years) then everyone will be up in arms in a little while and the money will be found from somewhere. It always is. Usually from the motorists. We all have bottomless pockets, you know.

I don't mind telling you it'll be a NO from me. The alternative is to force Nikki to take the bus to and from work every day - changing her 25 minute round trip into 2 hours - or incur the full daily charge of £5 to give her a lift. That's £1200 a year right out of our increasingly empty pockets. No thanks.

School run madness

I've commented on this before, but today I saw something that really took the biscuit. Being on the roads during the school run is always a nightmare, but I calm myself with the thought that most of the drivers have probably come from distances too far for their kids to walk, and/or not on handy bus routes. Today's candidate for my road rage didn't have any of those excuses.

The car turned out of a house on Alexandra Road South, drove to the junction with Barlow Moor Road, and then turned in to Whalley Range High School for girls. A distance of no more than 400 metres. A parent with a very lazy child, or a very lazy teacher? I don't know. Either way they shouldn't be on the road (and, interestingly, unless they make the return journey before 9.30am, they won't be subject to any congestion charge if the new scheme goes ahead).

My ire was alleviated somewhat on the return journey by the site of another cool number plate: TO 08 OSY. Spaced out to read TOO BOSY. Now is that supposed to be shorthand for too bossy, or should it really have a well-placed screwhead to turn it into too busy? You decide.

Birthday Boy

Happy Birthday to me. A time for reflection, and as luck would have it, I DO have time for reflection. So I'm reflecting. On another year gone by, family, friendships old and new, hearth and home, the world, the news. It would be easy to feel depressed, but I remain (a) philosophical and (b) upbeat. I'm relentlessly upbeat, me. Even in the face of having to spend my birthday in the office, and not receiving any birthday cards from my closest family. Again.

Nikki excepted, of course. Her card is perfect. It is undoubtedly the best birthday card I've ever had. Concisely expressing the most moving and touching of sentiments without being cloying, trite or juvenile. A grown-up card from one grown-up to another (we like to pretend). So thank you for that, my darling; it made my day.

Maybe I'm being needlessly old-fashioned. Maybe the tradition of sending cards is being gradually eroded, from both ends of the generational spectrum. From the aged P who can no longer get out to the shops, to the younger generation who have never been used to sending, or taught by example to send, cards. Instead they are supplanted with phone calls, email messages and scribbled notes on Facebook. But although that may be just dandy for geographically dispersed friends and acquaintances, somehow it just isn't the same when it comes to family. You can't beat the excitement of the plop on the mat, the attempt to guess who it's from by analysing the handwriting, slicing open the brightly coloured envelope and slipping out the contents to read the heartfelt message within.

Still, a happy smiley email is better than nothing I suppose. Anything is better than nothing.

The instant wind-up

I may have mentioned before how easily I lose patience with my mother. It's always been this way, as long as I can remember. Whether walking deliberately across my train set, accusing me of taking her address stamp, or mis-remembering past conversations, this aspect of our relationship has a long history and has remained constant for as long as I can remember. She can make me blow my top with a single sentence. Which for someone as normally even-tempered as myself, is even more annoying and frustrating than if I were the sort of person who regularly "goes off on one."

So I was grateful for the slowly falling snowflakes yesterday morning as we rose early and drank our morning coffee while staring out into the garden and wondering whether it was worth striking up a conversation with someone who can't remember what we've said from one minute to the next. Because those flakes gave us a ready-made excuse to beat a hasty retreat. "Don't want to risk getting stuck on the tops," I said, knowing that we wouldn't be taking the high road home in any case and that the risk of encountering any snow was minute. "We'd better get going."

It's still hard for me to bite my tongue when faced with the kind of provocation we encountered this weekend. It would *almost* be worth the two-hour drive home at midnight after the Chinese to avoid it. But then, there's the element of "duty." More on that another time, maybe. For today, it was tongue-biting, and leaving as quickly as possible, before it became unbearable. The path of least resistance, I think they call it.

Broken China

Our annual pilgrimage to Cropwell Bishop took place yesterday, to experience once again the delights of the Chinese food at the Wheatsheaf.

Last year, we had the "cheap" menu. The one without the aromatic crispy duck. Now for me, no Chinese meal is complete without crispy duck. So last year's performance was a huge disappointment. The cheap menu includes in its place some kind of deep-fried mince served in a lettuce leaf bowl. Totally no substitute. This year we all agreed we'd go for the more expensive menu. The one With Duck. Only guess what? The hoisin sauce was not real hoisin sauce. It was runny, vinegary, and had none of the distinctive flavour of hoisin. So even with The Duck, the meal was not up to the expected standard.

Sure the dim sum were nice. The ribs were nice. The mains were nice. But without a decent helping of duck, with proper sauce, it just ain't the same. Luckily, as always, the company was more than up to standard, so we still had a good time. If we were only going for the food though, I don't think I'd bother again.

Book Review: One Big Damn Puzzler

At last! After a host of books I've struggled and waded and cursed and bled through, here's a book club read I can honestly say I enjoyed. Not that I was expecting to. I almost gave it a miss, and then while I was on Amazon searching out this cover pic for the club website, I read some of the reviews. Some uniformly positive reviews. So I bought it, and they were right. One of the best reads I've had in a long time. Many, many laugh-out-loud moments. A few tears. But most of all some fresh, engaging, original prose with a heap of messages; some hidden, some overt.

The book opens with one of the main characters - a Pacific islander called Managua - having his life's work of translating Hamlet into pidgin English interrupted by the arrival on the island of an American lawyer, William Hardt. He hasn't got much further than: "Is be, or is be not? Is be one big damn puzzler," so the interruption is particularly irksome. He straps on his artificial leg and hobbles off to greet the stranger, whom the entire island are soon referring to as gwanga. This simple act explains why William is there: to gain compensation for the islanders for the landmines that American forces have left scattered around the North of the island, and which have been responsible for a large number of limbs being lost.

But during his stay, William learns that the islanders are not defined by their injuries. He learns about their culture, their beliefs, their morals and their society. So different from anything he's encountered before, and yet not so very different. Told with rare warmth and humour this is a book that will suck you in and take you, like William, to a world you will never forget.

Word Search

We receive quite a few free sheets round here, and most of them are thrown away unread. Occasionally though, one or other of us will find ourselves with a few minutes to waste - waiting for the cafétiere to steep for instance - while one of the rags is still lying around. Today was one such day and led to unintentional hilarity that had us holding our sides to prevent imminent splitting.

The free sheet in question was the "Alexandra News" ("St. Edmund's and S. James' Church - sharing God's love in the Community"). This edition offers a Coffee Break word-search puzzle on the back to keep the kiddies amused:

Oops! Proof read fail. You'll see FART in there as well, although that's just an unfortunate side-effect of having one of the legitimate answers - TRAFFIC - arranged backwards on the line.

Feeling rejected

One of the only nice things about being away is coming home. There are many nice aspects to being back home, but the one I'm going to write about is the downloading of several days' worth of emails and sifting through them to find the handful of interest.

Today I was treated to a couple more rejection emails from agencies. In common with the overwhelming majority of the rejections I've had so far, neither of these two had anything bad to say about the work itself. The first one simply said it wasn't for them (in other words, even in the face of my supposedly careful selection of agents, it was a genre misfit) and the second thanked me very much for considering them but unfortunately they are totally swamped with submissions at present and can't possibly contemplate taking on any more work.

I like to look on this as a good thing. So far no-one has told me it stinks. On the other hand, no-one has enthused over it either. I really would like to have ANY feedback at all. Even bad feedback would tell me more than the bland, neutral kind of rejection I've had up to now.

So for those who like to measure this kind of thing, the "score" so far is 20/0/12. Time to send off some more submissions, I reckon.

On our way 'ome

A considerably more substantial breakfast this morning, as I knew I wouldn't be eating again until we were airborne on the return journey. So I tucked in to a bowl of cereal crunch, a fried egg (freshly fried in front of my eyes by the griddle chef, or whatever they're called), sausage, schnitzel and potato cakes, juice, coffee and a small slice of delicious chocolate cake.

Since the lectures today were repeats of yesterday, in pretty much the same order, there was little value in returning to the conference centre (although coaches were provided for those who still had business to do), so I elected to take a walk into Augsburg and see something of the town.

A light drizzle greeted me as I stepped out of the hotel and turned right onto (what I thought was) the main street. I'm always fascinated by the subtle differences in local architecture when visiting other countries, but I wasn't prepared for the wonderfully eclectic mixture of old and new buildings as I made my way slowly down Gögginger Strasse in the direction of Stuttgart. This one sported an inscription mounted around the top floor, each glass block holding a single letter. Further up the street a private apartment building carried this unusual mural.

The further I walked the stronger the drizzle became, until after about 25 minutes I realised I risked being caught in a downpour and turned back for the hotel. Altogether I was out for about 50 minutes and didn't see any sign of a shopping centre. A later examination of the town centre on googlemaps revealed that I should have turned left rather than right at the end of the road on which the hotel stood.

I spent the rest of the morning in the hotel lobby, reading, caught the coach to Munich airport at 12.30 and arrived back at Stansted shortly before half past four. I could have done without the four-hour drive back to Manchester through the M11/A14 rush-hour traffic, but since it was the only way to get home I gritted my teeth and got on with it. An interesting experience, all things considered, but not one I'd be in any hurry to repeat.

VISIT 2008

After a light breakfast (previous experience of shows like this led me to suspect I'd be able to graze all day) we set off for the short coach trip to the Augsburg Messe where the conference was being held.

Arriving at the hall I battled through the throng of smokers - a crowd never numbering less than a hundred who restricted access throughout the day forcing everyone to run the gamut of secondary smoke and half-stubbed dog ends to get into the building - and registered at the main desk, collecting my conference map, schedule and badge.

The event had been divided into two main areas: Hall 7 where the presentations and expert talks were held, and the main arena housing the partners' and suppliers' stands, the 360 presentation theatre and the restaurant. I spent most of the morning listening to presentations, including one from the CTO, and broke these up with a brief stop at the restaurant for some lunch and to sit in on the 1pm showing of the 360 presentation - a multi-media show incorporating actors and sfx to showcase the history of Fujitsu-Siemens and their latest infrastructure offerings.

Finally at around half past three it was time for my factory tour. Very similar to the one I'd enjoyed on my aforementioned visit to EMC, with a similar set of production lines, automated fabrication machinery, automatic and manual testing, and palettes full of equipment awaiting shipping. Then it was back to the hotel for another free bar (definitely a theme of the event) and the "gala dinner" complete with speech. Short speech, thankfully. I declined the offer of a trip into town, and headed back to my room while the majority of my fellow diners headed for "Peaches" many of them, apparently, not returning until around 4am.

Illusions newly shattered

When I was offered the chance to attend Fujitsu-Siemens Computers "VISIT 2008" event in Augsburg a couple of months back, I jumped at it. Jollies like this are few and far between these days and my memory of such events in the past is uniformly good.

When I learned UK delegates were to be flown to Munich by private jet from Stansted my excitement leapt up a notch. Memories of our most excellent trip a few years ago to visit EMC's factory in Cork were uppermost in my mind: the 8-seater Gulfstream, the stretch limo, the feeling of ultimate luxury. So it was with great expectations that I set off from home just before 8am to ensure I arrived at the Inflite terminal in good time.

The bloom left the rose slightly when I drove past the gate guard on my arrival. "Make sure you don't leave any gaps when you park up," he advised. "We have to get 100 cars in here today."

Sure enough, for my second experience of private jet travel, it wasn't at all what I'd expected. Gone was the 8-seater executive jet; the leather; the gleaming, polished walnut. Gone were the dainty sandwiches with their crusts cut off, served on crested china plates, fresh coffee in china cups. In their place a 30-year-old Boeing 737-200, its seats configured in the worst charter airline style. I swear there wasn't more than nine inches between me and the seat back in front of me, occupied (as they always are) by a man incapable of sitting still for more than five minutes at a stretch. I couldn't even deploy my tray table without breathing in.

The meal, when it came, was the ubiquitous mystery chicken beloved of airlines the world over, served in plastic, along with a schizophrenic dessert that wasn't sure whether it was apple pie or apple crumble. I couldn't tell you what the coffee was like: I didn't dare try it. Having missed my chance of a pee at the airport after consuming a complementary coffee in the lounge, and with a tray table that wouldn't rest less than 25° from the horizontal, it was too risky on all counts.

Touching down at Munich I finally remembered the mantra of seasoned travellers - never pass up a chance for a pee - and leapt for the gents' as we were waiting at the baggage carousel. After an uneventful (but long!) transfer we arrived at the Hotel Dorint in Augsburg, about 70km NW of Munich.

My room - a slightly more upmarket version of hotel rooms the world over - was very pleasant. The hotel is in a cylindrical building of about 35 floors, only the bottom 11 of which are the hotel. The rooms, arranged radially around the central lifts, are wedge shaped, with a walk-in shower nearest the centre, widening into a well-appointed bathroom which then widens further into the main part of the room. Each room has a semilunar balcony which gives the building the appearance of a series of bubbles on a stick (I've since discovered the hotel is known locally as the "corn cob").

With a free bar starting at 7pm and a late arrival owing to traffic and a massive construction project on the autobahn out of Munich there was just time to phone home and confirm my safe arrival before heading downstairs and seeking out some fellow Northerners with whom to sample the local Bavarian ale.

Bankrupt stock

So the government, having contributed to the drink problem in the UK by relaxing the licensing laws (you know it's true, even if their statistics have been cooked to say otherwise), is now demanding an end to happy hours and cheap booze in supermarkets in an effort to cut the cost of policing hordes of drunken idiots in city centres.

When are we going to stop penalising the entire country for the behaviour of an antisocial minority? When are "they" going to start considering the "human rights" of the majority, like me, who enjoy going to the odd happy hour, and/or buying their bargain booze at Morrisons, and are capable of consuming it responsibly without staggering barely conscious into a city centre, puking over a copper or smashing up a bus stop? Why does the government's every reaction to a problem have to have the effect of carpet bombing, when what they need is a tactical strike?

We all have to bump (and all too often grind) our way over hundreds of speed control humps on account of a handful of overexuberant spotty erks going joyriding. A few high-profile deterrent sentences would have sorted the problem out in short order but instead local authorities go for the easy option, causing discomfort and inconvenience to everyone.

Makes me seethe (©1993 Mr. Angry).

I'd forgotten how good this is

I mentioned that we bought some DVDs and music CDs yesterday. Two CDs to be precise, both by King Crimson. I'm still slowly and almost half-heartedly rebuilding my vinyl collection from the 70s and 80s and I was very pleased to discover both their debut album, the famous In The Court of the Crimson King, and Lizard, in HMV.

I couldn't tell you the last time I listened to ITCOTCK all the way through, but regular readers won't be surprised to read that it was probably "over thirty years" ago. No, seriously, that's just irony talking. I certainly played it at one time while living in Alsager, a period which ended 20 years ago this year, and I may even have played it at some stage while living in the village, but it's probably at least ten years since my turntable was connected up and playable.

And as it says at the top there, I'd forgotten how good the album is. And that is "awesomely good." Both musically and from a personal memory standpoint, this is one of my favourite albums - and favourite bands - of all time. Now if I can only find a copy of Starless and Bible Black...

Shop til you drop

I hate shopping. Have I mentioned that before? I mean the kind of shopping where you don't really know what you want, you wander aimlessly around the mall or the city centre streets looking for something that you're not sure exists, battling against crowds and elbows and noise and smells.

That kind of shopping, I hate.

I can just about cope with short bursts as long as I know what I'm going for, where I'm going for it, and we can get in and out and done in as short a time as possible. And sometimes, like today, I realise it's unavoidable.

Because I'm off to Augsburg for a two-day business seminar (plus a day's travelling) on Tuesday and the dress code is business casual in the day time and smart casual in the evening and that gives me a big problem. For months I've been working at home most days, slobbing around in Ts and jogging bottoms. Even on the days I've been hauling myself into the office, I've been wearing jeans. Not a good image for Augsburg; something had to be done.

Then, a miracle happened. We arrived at the Trafford Centre just as it was opening up, went straight to BhS, found two pairs of large-waisted chinos and two decent shirts for not much more than fifty quid, found a few extra Christmas presents for people we'd been struggling with, picked up Christmas cards for close friends and family, had a rather nice panini and coffee while listening to the Sally Army band blowing their way brassily through some Christmas favourites and were home by one o'clock! Result!

If shopping was always this quick/painless/successful I wouldn't have a problem with it.

And really, the fact that we somehow managed to also pick up almost a hundred quid's worth of movie DVDs and music had nothing to do with my feelings of satisfaction.

Dos

It's not an age thing. I've never been able to hold a proper conversation in a crowded pub, even in my twenties. Worse when it's a small group of people sitting round a table. The added distance, measured in inches only, may as well be yards (substitute centimetres and metres if you were born after 1970). Still worse if there's live music playing. Even if, like last night, the music is good.

So we sat there, listening to the lively Portuguese salsa music, and watching the lips move on the people we were supposedly conversing with, trying not to be eaten up by the ubersoft couches in one of the little alcoves, and trying to judge when was the right time to laugh, or nod, or just look attentive. We probably looked like we'd escaped from somewhere clinical. Or that we weren't interested. Which wasn't true at all. The odd word that reached us tantalisingly across the table, fighting and clawing its way to our ears desperate to be heard - epée... choreography... joey... tequila - all sounded like the bones of a fascinating story. But there was no meat. No organs. And no sense at all. So like the carcass of the Christmas turkey picked clean before you press it into the kitchen bin, the conversation was never going to fly.

When live bands do a sound check prior to striking up for their first number, it's traditional to use the word "two" to allow the sound man to set the right level on the mic. That word is chosen because it embodies, in one short simple syllable, everything the engineer needs. The 'plosive' of the initial 't', the transition from 't' to 'oo' and the bass note of the 'oo' itself gives a dynamic soundwave perfectly suited to a mic check.

Only this was a Portuguese band. So their lead singer said "Dos" into the mic a few times, which didn't serve the purpose half as well, but provided a comic touch for anyone with a sense of irony. And that was us as we knocked back the last of our drinks and left the rest of our small group to flap their gums at each other. Dois povos, wending our quiet way out through the hubbub. Boa noite!

Luxury

After only one night, I think we can declare the transformation of the bed a total success. The gentle warmth of the natural duvet - which claims to be warm in winter and cool in summer - is so luxurious neither of us wanted to get up this morning, and the feather topper is a perfect antidote to mattress-induced discomfort.

Does look a bit strange with two long dents in it though. Reminds me of a scene from Psycho.

New beds for old

Shortly after moving in here we decided the main bedroom was large enough to accommodate a super-king bed and Nikki performed her usual miracle of online shopping, finding a sumptuous cherry wood suite including a sleigh bed. We bought the mattress online too, which unfortunately proved to be slightly less of a success. It's the first time I'd bought a bed without trying it out first. Turned out we'd chosen the wrong hardness.

By the time the problem became obvious it was too late to return the mattress, so for two years we've put up with it. In Nikki's case we're convinced it contributed to her frozen shoulder, and I've woken to more dead arms than you can shake a stick at (you certainly wouldn't be able to shake a stick with one. It's dead) as well as a shoulder that might qualify as frozen (or at least slushy) and various aches and pains.

Having spent a couple of nights enjoying the luxury of the master suite in Chesterfield (on two separate occasions), we determined to do something about our discomfort, and that something arrived today in the shape of a luxury feather mattress topper, a duck feather and down 13.5 tog duvet and a pair of duck feather and down pillows. Arriving home we wasted no time in tearing off the existing bedding and replacing it with all the new stuff.

The topper is about two inches deep, but the combined effect of that and the new duvet makes our bed resemble something from The Princess and the Pea. About a foot higher and considerably plumper. (I should refrain from using the word 'plumper' really, as I'm sure it'll attract the attention of totally the wrong sort of reader, but anyway...)

It remains to be seen what effect all this new gear will have on our sleeping, but I think it's odds-on for an early night tonight.

Waking to a new world

I don't very often comment on politics, but on this day of all days maybe it's appropriate.

We woke before 5am this morning. Not because of any excitement about the result of the US election, but simply because we're in a vicious cycle of going to bed early and waking early. And waking early makes us tired, so we fall asleep by 9pm and then wonder if there's any point sitting dozing in front of the telly. So we go to bed early. And wake early.

The result, apparently, became clear at 4am UK time, and was heralded for us by such things as family messages on Facebook ("Go Obama!") and emails from friends in the right timezone. So I thought I'd pop along to the BBC News website and see what they had to say. And what they had to say was firstly that the result was a lot closer than some had predicted, but with several States left to declare Barack Obama was already past the winning post.

Then I made the mistake of reading his victory speech, which is reproduced in full on the BBC webpages. I defy all but the most battle-hardened cynics to read the full text without a tear in their eye. There's a message in there for those cynics too.

Who knows how many bloggers all around the world are recording their thoughts on the dawn of what most of us hope will be a new day, in all senses of the phrase? Mine is just one tiny, insignificant, uneducated voice in that massive melee of humanity, so I will say only this.

There is no doubting the strength and passion of Obama's oratory. Nor do I doubt his sincerity. Uniquely among politicians (for yes, where that breed are concerned, I'm just as cynical as the next guy) I believe there is a man here who says what he means and means what he says. But oratory is one thing, and achievement is another. He knows what he has to do, he knows it will be hard, and he knows he can't do it alone. Let's pray for the miracle he will need if he's to do it at all, in the face of greed, self-interest, corruption, duplicity and malice.

On this very day, 403 years ago, a man tried to change the course of history with kegs full of gunpowder. Let's hope after 400 years America has found a man who can light a metaphorical fire under their administration.

Mandriva - Day 2

Armed with my WEP key, retrieved from my security spreadsheet, I booted into Linux after managing my morning emails.

The configuration went without a hitch, and the wireless network burst into life using the Windows driver and ndiswrapper. I began to wonder whether I'd have been able to read this value using OpenOffice Calc.

The trick I was missing yesterday is that (as far as I can tell) there are two standard ways of navigating the filesystem, and an application can use one or the other. Some apps have an entry for each disk that uses the disk label. I wasn't recognising my original disk because it still has the manufacturer's label (a six-digit numerical value). I'll have to relabel this as "Windows". Other apps - and this includes OpenOffice - navigate below the Linux root only.

In this case - as I remembered eventually - all the hard disks are under /media. hd is my original Windows disk, hd2 and hd3 are the two partitions on the new disk. And there under '/media/hd', as if by magic, is all my familiar filestore.

One problem though. My security spreadsheet is secured with an Excel password, and this seems to crash Calc. It will happily open any of my other spreadsheets, but the password protected one is a certain app killer.

I had a brief poke around at some other applications, including the Gwenview photo viewer and KMail Mail client, but before long it was time to head out to pick the girls up.

On my return I discovered the network had stopped working. I tried reconfiguring it, but this threw some error about not being able to find the ndiswrapper service! I rebooted and the network came back to life, but after 20 minutes or so it fell over again. This time I managed to resuscitate it using the Network Center. Not sure if there's a timeout value somewhere I haven't seen, or it's just a bit flaky.

Anyhow, with a live network I published my first blog entry from Mandriva (the Brideshead book review below), and WROTE my first entry (this one). That's two activities I can tick off my list.

Problems/weirdness so far identified:

1. The automatic update utility is failing to find one of the updates it says I need (rpmdrake)
   
2. Whenever I click on "Help" it ALWAYS says the help file doesn't exist
3. I really need to make a list and attack this in a coherent way, cos at the moment I'm jumping from one cool tool to another. A lot of fun, but not much discipline ;o) I noticed there's a personal organiser included in this distro - KOrganizer - which might be a good place to keep the list!
4. Sometimes when I launch something, it'll say "oh, I need an update" and bugger off somewhere to get it. This has, on occasion, taken 20 minutes.
   

I'm loving it though. And Nat's already said "can you put Linux on my laptop, please?" lol. Probably not until I'm a bit more up to speed meself. I feel like I don't have a clue what I'm doing, but it's too exciting to leave alone.

Mandriva - Day 1

I finally had some free time yesterday to begin playing with Mandriva - my chosen Linux distro.

I'd already downloaded and burnt the CD image I needed. This is "Mandriva One" - which includes everything I need for a basic system and comes as a "live" CD, meaning the system can be booted from the CD before installing onto disk.

So feeling a small frisson of excitement, I booted the CD. About 15 years ago I remember a colleague at work taking the - then extraordinary - step of installing Linux on a works desktop. Back then he'd had trouble getting it started on account of there not being a video driver for the proprietary video card in that model of PC. This was the first time the massive benefits of the open source community had been brought home to me in a concrete way. He posted the spec of the video card on a Linux forum and when he came back into work the next day, someone in the States had written him a driver.

Fifteen years on, and I expected no such problems. Linux has matured into an OS that is suitable for moderately computer literate users to use, and the hardware I'm using has become much less proprietary. What I DID expect to have a problem with, is the fact that I haven't touched any flavour of Unix for about ten years, so I'll be crawling up that learning curve again almost as a novice (but with some dimly remembered snippets of information about file systems, forks, processes, and strangely-named utilities).

Mandriva booted without incident, and I ran through the initial config to set language, keyboard layout, and timezone. Faced with a desktop that was at once familiar and different, I launched Firefox. The Linux version looks very slightly "clunkier" than on Windows but other than that it appeared unchanged. However, I had no network connection. There is no LAN cable in this PC, and the wireless network was not configured. After a few seconds scratching around I found the right place to set up a wireless connection, but the distro did not include a native driver for my Netgear WG111T USB wireless dongle, so (I discovered) I'd need to use the Windows driver with something called an ndiswrapper.

I marked this down for future reference as I figured there wasn't much point doing the configuration while booted from the CD, and moved on to try a Live Install. I quickly learned that I couldn't install onto an NTFS-formatted partition. The boot partition has to have a native Linux filesystem (thus negating my formatting of the new disk earlier in the week). I used the Linux partitioner to recreate a boot partition. This looked extremely scary and reminded me how powerful Linux is and how easy it is to wreck an entire system if you don't keep your wits about you. I was glad I'd chosen to install Linux onto a completely separate disk. It was easy to stay away from doing any damage to Windows, as that is all on "sda" (Mandriva's name for my primary hard disk) while Linux is going on "sdb".

Having created a boot partition I tried the Live Install again, only to find it was asking where I wanted it to put the swap space. I backed out of the install. I'd rather spend some time reading up exactly what I need to do, instead of attacking each new requirement as it arises and getting through the process one painful step at a time.

Before closing down, I took a look at Open Office Writer - the Linux equivalent of MS Word. Again, it looks kind of familiar but with some differences. I had hoped that I'd be able to hold a single central document store and access it from both Windows and Linux (while I'm in this transitory stage), but I couldn't get the Writer file open dialogue to navigate outside the filestore of /usr/guest. I'm hoping this will be a restriction of the CD boot.

It was time to reload Windows and do some reading. I found out where the Netgear driver is, and I read up a few forum entries on installation prerequisites. Apparently, I need:

1. A swap file. Formatted as "Linux swap" and about 512MB in size. One of those dim memories tells me the swap space needs to be at least as big as the PCs memory, so I figured I'd give it a gig.
2. A root partition, mounted as "/" and formatted as "ext3" (Linux has a bewilderingly huge list of alternative file systems, which as a long-time Windows user, where you have the choice of FAT, FAT32, or NTFS, I found somewhat daunting. But as usual with such things, you appear to be able to ignore most of them - which probably have specialist functions - and stick with one or two basic types). The forum said 1GB is "more than enough" for this, but since space isn't a problem for me, and the entry may be outdated, I decided to go with 5GB
   
3. A home partition (where all the user files are kept). This can be "as big as you like" but given that it's readable only by Linux I decided to restrict it to 50GB to start with. At some point once everything is working I'll format the rest of the disk as NTFS and use it for media files, which should be readable by either system

Armed with this new information, I rebooted from the Mandriva CD and completed the Live Install successfully, choosing a graphical GRUB loader to replace the Windows loader. At one point the install told me it had found a whole load of hardware drivers that I didn't need, and asked whether it was OK to leave these out. I figured yeah, why not? Going ahead and rebooting from the hard disk, my first task was to get the wireless connection working. I think some of you will be ahead of me here, but guess what? Yep - the wireless package was one of those things the install had decided I didn't need. Ouch.

I tried to search for a way to install the wireless package from the CD, but with my woefully limited knowledge I couldn't find a way of mounting the CD so it was accessible to the software installer, and using the file browser I couldn't find anything on the CD that looked like it might be a wireless package. Time to reinstall.

I hoped there'd be a way to select individual packages to include - the wireless one was clearly visible in the list - but it is an "all or nothing" exclusion, so this time round obviously I had to elect to include them all. Rebooting AGAIN (this could get boring!) I navigated successfully to the Wireless configuration page and hit my final frustration of the day - I'd forgotten to make a note of our WEP key. I'd run out of time for playing with Mandriva - and almost run out of patience if I'm honest - but I'd learned a lot even though it didn't feel as though I'd achieved much. Better luck next time, hopefully.