Long and rather strange day at work. Seemed to be busy for a great deal of it, much of it involving answering slightly disgruntled emails from 'customers'. Looks like at least one long awaited office storm is about to break...
Went to see The Return of the King tonight. I've never been on the first day of a film before - I figured it would be busy, but I was unprepared for the sheer volume of people squashing into Screen 1 of Weston's rather tiny Odeon. The crowd control problems meant a late start to a long film, but I really didn't notice the moments passing by. I enjoyed every second of the movie - certainly more than I did The Two Towers. I was pleased to see enough 'background mythology' intact to prevent geeks like me being disappointed.
I was surprised by the audience reaction - I'm British, and I'm certainly not used to outbursts of emotion, particularly in the cinema, but there was a great deal of hooting, cheering, clapping and sighing.
As for the much reported problem of people not knowing quite when the end was, I did detect some confusion among the audience. OK, the Shire wasn't scoured, but otherwise I was touched to see that things were seen through to their conclusion, and not ended with a cheesy freezeframe when the ring is destroyed, which was a relief.
Sounds silly, but after over two years, I can't believe the trilogy is over! What will I look forward to next Christmas?
Sloe Gin and the art of Software Development
Posted in Updates on Sunday 14th December 2003 at 9:10pm
A bit of a lazy weekend really. Planned not to do much at all, but ended up out and about on Friday night and ill-advisedly sampled rather too much of a friends (admittedly very good) Sloe Gin.
Felt less then 100% on Saturday as a consequence. Set about downloading Gramps and trying to summarise all of the information on William Kent and his family I have discovered. A trip to the Family Records Centre is the next step, but this time of year isn't the optimum for getting to London - or indeed getting around amid the crowds of festive shoppers once there.
Released a new gnome-pkgview with a couple of tweaks and bug fixes. Seems people who build from source will be bitten by the recent intltool update and its attendant problems. Much help from Fuzzy on #lemmings with testing. This leads to people developing a hairbrained scheme for making it aware of more than just GNOME libs. Its actually a really good idea for other packages to use pkgconfig's .pc files. I remain to be persuaded there is an effective way to get the info for each distribution, but if anyone can find a way, the #lemmings can.
gnome-pkgview is a tool for inspecting the versions of GNOME libraries installed on your system. The information is often useful when submitting bug reports or diagnosing system problems.
Version 1.0.5 (Candlewick) fixes a nasty bug with ${target} substitutions in package descriptions, shows a busy cursor when refreshing the package list on slower systems, and supports detection of further distributions.
 | gnome-pkgview-1.0.5.tar.gz |
 | gnome-pkgview-1.0.5-1.i386.rpm |
 | gnome-pkgview-1.0.5-1.src.rpm |
A gentoo ebuild is available here courtesy of Matt Schick.
gnome-pkgview project page
Its been a bloody strange week. Back to work to find news of surprise marriages, some minor but far-reaching errors in allocations to one of my pet schools, and a need to return to earth after a strange weekend and prepare two impossible-to-win appeal cases.
Since the 'phone lines were eerily quiet (considering we'd sent out thousands of letters last Friday) I found myself pondering longer than was healthy over the appeal cases. Fact is, the headteacher wanted these kids in his school. I didn't disappoint - but it's acknowledged that we did a reasonably good job of defending the indefensible, which is sort of reassuring.
Sort of disconcerted to have two separate people ask me the same question regarding my position on the weekends shock news. I don't like it when I'm expected to have an opinion. Wondering what to do with the weekend ahead, and feeling a bit directionless since I'd been looking forward for months to Belle & Sebastian.
Lost::MikeGTN
I've had a home on the web for more years than I care to remember, and a few kind souls persuade me it's worth persisting with keeping it updated. This current incarnation of the site is centred around the blog posts which began back in 1999 as 'the daylog' and continued through my travels and tribulations during the following years.
I don't get out and about nearly as much these days, but I do try to record significant events and trips for posterity. You may also have arrived here by following the trail to my former music blog Songs Heard On Fast Trains. That content is preserved here too.
