It seems other people are saying more interesting things than me at the moment.

Firstly, Ade went on a course at Microsoft’s UK HQ in Reading on single sign on and *nix to Active Directory authentication etc. Which is something I would like to be able to deploy using free/open tools.

Also Aq reminded me that hotkeys provides similar functionality to lineak. Which is that it makes those extra Internet or multimedia keys on your keyboard do something useful. I’ve used lineak for this before with decent results, but lineak’s gui config frontends are not in Ubuntu at the moment and the lineak team has stopped supporting the Gnome frontend, leaving only the KDE one (or text editor).

He also has an excellent post about the poster campaign by the Conservative Party (aka the Tories, or Tory (singular)) for the forthcoming UK political elections. The Conservative Party are focusing on several contentious issues for their election campaign, one of which is that of immigration. These posters have caused enough outrage that they are being vandalised to great comic effect. Aq has produced a little web app to enable you to create your own Tory poster. Here is mine:

Disclaimer: No Tories were hurt in the making of this poster and no offence is intended to genuine victims. Humour style a la Doug Stanhope, not to be taken literally and I don’t care about your political opinions, I will not approve any screaming insults in my comments.

This brings up an issue that worries me a lot. With the flames of racial tension being fanned by several highly read, sensationalist tabloid newspapers screaming about the issue of immigration, the Conservative Party, as the mainstream right-wing political party and nearest rival to the governing Labour Party, are attempting to draw in some of the extreme right-wing voters to boost their chances of election by campaigning hard on the immigration issue.

After seeing a fantastic documentary about violent racial tensions between 2nd and 3rd generation British blacks and Asians and also between existing UK residents (black, white or Asian) and new, commonly South Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern or Eurasian immigrants, such progressively violent racial attitudes trouble me deeply.

As for me, I feel pretty good today, which is surprising given recent events. I’ve been living under a dark cloud for some time, mostly to do with the increasingly insurmountable university workload. I reached critical mass with my project report (aka dissertation) and got to the point where I thought I was on the brink of genuinely cracking up. I’ve decided that if it makes me that unhappy, it’s not worth the pain and have resolved to go and see my personal tutor to see where I stand. This has lifted an enormous weight from me and I feel a lot better. I have yet to see what state this leaves my degree in. Bad probably.

Just as this occurred and I began to feel well again, my girlfriend’s sister moved from Wolverhampton to Huddersfield and I was the transport. After a heavy farewell celebration on Thursday night, four of us went up there on Friday night, went to a club, slept over and the girlf and I travelled back yesterday evening, before showering, eating and watching the Shawshank Redemption which is an incredible film. It was a pretty hectic few days and I didn’t get to just sit and contemplate my future which I really need to do, but I feel better for the break. I just need to figure out where my future lies now.

I’ve always been a pretty steady, level-headed person and this has really shaken me. The value of your own sanity is not to be underestimated.