I've been trying http://rssfwd.com. Before this I used http://r-mail.org which was okay, but seemed to fail for a lot of feeds. I like Google Reader, but having to go to a different application for just RSS is a pain. I was going for weeks without looking at it. So I am trying email again. It seems to be working for the moment; it has an non HTML layout and (seems) to be able to cope with all the feeds I use.

Was in the Rennie MacIntosh hotel in Glasgow last night. It was a little bit shabby, but not too bad. However, the toilet smelt like they cleaned it with a dead badger. They seemed to have plumbed the shower waste pipe in after the toilet U-bend and the smells came up that way. I couldn't work out why the sewage itself didn't come up also, but it didn't; we should be grateful for small blessings, I suppose.

While I am thinking about it, I've decided to release chapter 1 of my treatise on Italy following my holiday there. I was going to release everything at once, but I haven't found time to write more; so here goes the first.

Woke up this morning (duh, duh, duh, de) to the sound of scratching from outside my window. The first frost of winter was spreading it's chill fingers over Newcastle. And some sod was trying to clear their windscreen at 7 in the morning.

A short while later, I walked out of my house, got onto my bike and rode off. Didn't even have to clean my glasses.

Guys, this is a PDF tool. Why on earth would I need an RSS reader? I mean, what is the point of that? I already have an RSS reader. I just want to read PDF files, nothing more, nothing less.

Craig Venter was on the start the week. I meant to miss it, but ended up listening by random chance. It was strange; he was thoughtful, understated, entirely reasonable and only talk about how great he was once. Unexpected to say the least.

Just put a DVD upside down into my windows machine (there were no labels on it, so this was not hard). Windows hung, then told me explorer was not responding, then killed itself, then rebooted. Impressive.

I was going to see him talk on Sunday at Newcastle but it turns out that he's gone home instead. I'm reasonably irritated about this to be honest. I mean, I know he keeps on coming out with these daft statements, but I was going to see hear what he had to say; more just to experience a piece of history. Maybe a bit pathetic, but his work has helped to define my own working life and it would have been good to see it.

There seems to be a theme running along here. I was hoping to see Bo Diddley earlier this year but then he had a stroke.

Richard Thompson — excellent as always, sold out the Sage again.

I've realised now why I prefer his solo shows to his band shows. As he sells out, he always plays big venues like the Sage which are, basically, horrible. To enjoy a band gig, you need to stand up and dance; failing this jigging about from side to side would work. The best band gig I went to was in Edinburgh; half way through I went to the loo, then spent the rest of the gig standing up at the back and had a great time.

Throw out the chairs!

Had to kill this on Ubuntu also. It's eating my entire disk IO all the time making it not very usuable. For the moment, I've just tried turning off the "watching" and left "indexing" on.

I don't know what "watching" or "indexing" actually does. I'm not impressed; this is not windows; having a nice GUI does not mean that you don't have to write technical documentation.

Last week I went to Dave Cowan's leaving do. No idea who he was, but he decided to get Jess Klein to play. Kindly, he decided to open up the gig to the public which included me.

Jess was excellent again, better than the Cluny I would say. The gig was in the Black Swan centre which I've not been too, and the sound is far better than the Cluny with it's odd shape.

Had a talk with Jess afterwards; I'd had a few pints by this time so I wittered inconsequentially. Ah, well, I guess that she is used to it.

A Vmware upgrade didn't work for me. So I decided to update to Gutsy, the new version of Ubuntu. It mostly worked. Texlive was problematic, but I tracked this down to a copy of language.dat in my TEXINPUTS. Installing from a root console would have solved it, but in the end I just deleted language.dat which shouldn't have been there. Everything else worked straight away, no worries.

Well, except for Xorg of course. It didn't get the widescreen working, nor the track ball scroll wheel emulation. I had to hack the config file by hand. One day, this will all work, but not yet.

One of my bike tyres exploded last night. Rather unusual — in fact, I've never had it happen before. The side wall was a bit knackered. It's loosened from the bead, which slipped off, and the tube went bang. At 100PSI (I haven't gone metric for pressure measures yet!) that's quite a bang. My ear took an hour or two to stop ringing.

Sadly this was just after I finished changing the tube which was, therefore, brand new. Pain.

I reinstituted incremental backups a few days ago. I have a nice, new, big hard-drive now, so I thought why not. My data is actually copied to quite a few machines, so having a backup on the same hard drive as the data is less of a problem that it seems.

Anyway, a few days later, for the first time in ages, I found today that I had deleted a file I really, really needed but was able to recover it. Let this be a lesson. Backups are good.

I did get this working in the end. Basically, my /etc/samba/smb.conf was wrong and needed fiddling with; gnome even provides a GUI for doing this ("Shared Folders"). Setting the domain and the WINS server and everything works.

Fusesmb is great; I have now symlinked in the machines that I want. It only seems to understand paths like //CAMPUS/machine_name/share which is a bit of a pain; paths like //internal/web which work within CS don't work here. I had to find the machine names by ls-lR'ing through the entirety of SMB space. It's also very slow, so listing directories with a symlink to an SMB location can be a pain.

But, given all of this, it's still great. Having a mount at the file system level rather than in the GUI works well for me. I have command line access, it works in Emacs, I can just forget about it and go about my work.

I've also tried encfs, which is encrypted fuse mounted filesystem backed by a "real" file system. Also, straightforward and works like a dream. One satisfied customer.

Well, I was not quite right. Hero does have a story, and it's reasonably engaging, although seems to be an allegory which says that the end justifies the means. Visually beautiful, well, yes, got that bit right.

Lots of art this week. First Blowup, being shown to mark Antonioni's death (he was the director; fraid I'd never heard of him). Not a bad film. Wikipedia says that it "does not follow a conventional narrative structure", which I interpret as it not having a plot. Most of the plot seems to involve unlikely situations which allow for lots of strange angles and artistic shots, with 60s stylism to the fore. Still, the shots were very artistic, which was fun in itself. It's not aged well, but it's an interesting historical view.

The Alvin Ailey dance company played at the Royal Theatre. It started off with a dark and meaningful dance about something, backed with orchestral music and then moved towarded a more dancable (er...) gospel set which got everyone tapping. The dancing wasn't the best I've seen; the acrobat dance wasn't that acrobatic, the grace was evident but not excellent. But it kept me happy for the 2 hour show (with two long interevals!).

24-7 is another Shane Meadows. More engaging than This is England, but with similar territory. Bob Hoskins as a likeble boxing coach, with a dark ending to keep up the griity realism. I like Shane Meadows; although his films have a dark edge, he's got a great sense of humour which is never partronising, warm to his subjects.

Going to watch "Hero" now. Based on previous similar films, I suspect it's going to be visually beautiful without much plot.