Well, hello.

A few bits of post LRL info and personal stuff. Firstly I’ll be starting a Cisco Certified Network Administrator course in September which should be cool and hopefully not too hard. I guess I must be the prime example of the UK government’s plan for lifeling learning and ‘upskilling’. Maybe I’m bored of sitting on my arse. Maybe I wanted to do it anyway and my company offered to pay 😉

Wolves LUG meeting at the Pie Factory in Tipton last night which was great. I ordered a Desperate Dan Cow Pie, complete with pastry horns on top and it took me about 45 mins to eat. I was so full I couldn’t sit comfortably afterwards. Had to leave early as I was shattered after a late night on Tuesday too.

I picked up a Creative Soundblaster Live Platinum from Wolves Freecycle which is great news. I’m trying to do another jingle for LUG Radio and last time was a nightmare. The good news is that Jokosher has now been packaged for Ubuntu Edgy and I have a sound card with accessible quarter jack sockets. I have already written the drum pattern so now I just have to set up an Edgy machine or take another look at running CVS gstreamer, as the instructions on the Jokosher site didn’t work for me last time.

A few notes on LRL. It appears that TonyTiger didn’t like my suit and I don’t blame him at all. I don’t plan on doing it again next year. He also detailed the first conversation I had with him. Yeah that was pretty much on the nose. That’s a great description of my conversational style when I’m drunk, though at that point I wasn’t that drunk, or at least I didn’t think I was. The thing with this is that when he said the thing about being Jono’s cousin, I missed a few words from what he said and thought he was Jono’s cousin and Jono’s never mentioned any cousins interested in Linux. I didn’t realise he was the Internet’s TonyTiger. Sorry Tony.

Tony also wrote that one of the great things about the Free, Open Source and Linux world is that nobody has any pretensions of grandeur within the community and everyone hangs out together. You can be chatting to someone at the bar or around the venue and then you realise it’s someone whose software you’ve been using for years like Bastien Nocera or someone whose software you’ve been looking at for ages waiting to use it, like Mirco Muller. These people are just like me and you, just happy to talk about this and that and discuss ways we can improve our software, it’s mad. It’s like hanging out with your favourite musicians, or pop stars, or hanging out with the players from your favourite football team as if you’re one of them, or the people at the top of whatever your field of special interest is. I’m honest, I’m a pretty humble, grass roots Linux user. I’m reasonably technically capable, but I’m no developer, I’m no star of the show. I’ve always been a facilitator rather than a leader, I help other people do what they’re good at. It’s really cool that you hang with all of these amazingly intelligent, talented people and they don’t even think to segregate themselves, because we’re all in it together, sharing the same world, same code, same ideals. Wow.