Andrew: That’s a nice dress!
Louise: It’s not a dress, it’s a skirt.
Andrew: Oh. That’s a nice skirt then.
Later…
Andrew: I like your new dress, Jessica!
Jessica: That not dress, that skirt.
Andrew: Oh. Silly me.
Jessica: Yes, you silly.
And so it ends. After two and a bit years of watching I have finished re-watching all five seasons of Babylon 5. Well, I say “I” but that should really be “we” because somewhere during the second season Louise joined me in the marathon. I hope she enjoyed rather than endured (as was often the case in the past but that’s her story to tell).
What tickles me is that my original estimate of how long it would take was right on the button. I don’t think Ben’s quite old enough to begin watching it yet, perhaps in a couple of years. I’m conscious that I don’t want to spoil or devalue the experience of Babylon 5 or other things I cherished when I was younger like Star Wars by showing them to him before he’ll appreciate them. I was about to say that he currently thinks that Transformers: Cybertron is the height of entertainment but then I probably would have thought exactly the same at his age. So perhaps I should stop being so precious… my preciousss…
Ahem.
I don’t think I’ll be doing a retrospective review of all of B5 either. I will say this, though: The effects still serve the story well and hardly ever take you out of the experience. The main story arc is still one of the best in television but the character arcs are even better. The fifth season is a lot better than I remembered it and the final episode, Sleeping In Light, still brings a lump to my throat.
My timing is pretty good, too, because I can roll right through and watch Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, which has only just been released.
When I first started this blog I thought I would be writing a lot of technical posts about programming and computing in general but that just hasn’t happened. I think that’s mainly due to the big divide I create between work and home. When I’m home I try (fairly successfully) to forget all about work. I don’t do much programming outside of work these days so when it comes to blogging all the programming thoughts are at the back of my mind. I do engage in computing of the family-tech-support variety, so finally here’s a post dedicated to the subject.
First the fluffy stuff. Lots of people are still stuck with using Windows XP and the default Luna theme looks like it was purchased from an Early Learning Centre. Try finding and installing the Energy Blue theme instead. It’s a lot more restful and manages to calm down the Pimp My Word Doc stylings of Office 2003 to the point where I don’t want to throw up.
My in-laws have just brought a new Lenovo 3000 C200 laptop, which features Windows Vista. Unfortunately it came with so much crap loaded that it ran like a total dog. Rather than try to tame Vista with a meagre half gig of ram or run for cover by installing XP, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.
Everything worked perfectly out of the box apart from the wireless and sound; I never have had much luck with other people’s hardware and Linux. Anyway, a few minutes googling later I came across the solution: For wireless follow these instructions and for sound follow these instructions. Don’t worry if it looks a bit complicated, just enter the commands listed and in 10 minutes everything will be working. This means you can have an operational laptop in around an hour, plus the performance doesn’t suck. Result!
Hopefully future versions of Ubuntu will have these issues resolved and the install or upgrade will be made even easier. If you have a laptop and need help with Ubuntu then I can thoroughly recommend looking for your model on the Laptop Testing Team’s page.
If you’d like to try Ubuntu then one very safe option is Wubi. This is a piece of very clever software that allows you to install a whole other operating system, namely Ubuntu, onto your Windows hard drive without doing anything remotely dangerous or scary sounding like “repartitioning”. When you’re done you can just uninstall like any other Windows application. Amazing!
I don’t know why it is but when people blog they can speak with more honesty and do so more directly than they ever would in an email, phone call or even face to face. And that’s why I love it.
I have to agree with James: Travelling for work sucks. Not that Louise believes me but it loses its appeal very quickly. Every hotel room is the same, it can be lonely, you miss your family, you get tired and it plays havoc with your carbon emissions.
Tim’s stag weekend was great fun, although when it came to go home I felt strangely depressed. The poker, which I had been greatly looking forward to, went very badly. I enjoyed being at the poker table with friends but I was knocked out very early. I’d like to say it was of the bad cards I was dealt but I think I was (and am) impatient and the alcohol probably didn’t help. Lessons to be learnt I’m sure. The problem is that while I like the idea of poker I just don’t get much chance to play and without experience I’m just not going to get any better.
I got to play golf for the first time ever and sucked fairly badly, although I managed six on two consecutive par three holes, so perhaps all is not lost. Most of the times things went badly wrong I just wasn’t concentrating and I think that came from expecting to do badly in the first place. On the few occasions I concentrated and relaxed at the same time I got a lot better. The rest of the time I got play the jolly loser, something I’ve had a degree of practice at. Turns out I’m quite competitive, which isn’t much fun for someone lacking in natural aptitude.
Anyway, enough moaning — it was fun but just over too soon. Perhaps the brevity coupled with too high expectations was where the sadness came from. Now looking forward to the wedding a whole lot. Hmm… must adjust expectations!
I had a couple of interesting conversations. Richard has joined the world of death-by-email. One technique I’m experimenting with to deal with the email fire-hose at work is to use the automatic formatting rules in Outlook to colour grey all emails I’m only copied on. This has an amazing effect, as my brain now regularly skips over all the grey emails. It’s as if they’re not there! The second step is to colour green (red is a bit too alarming, blue too close to black) all emails sent only to me. These have a much higher likelihood of requiring action from me. Together these let me monitor for important emails during the day and I can then deal with the chaff in bulk during a quiet moment when I first get in. Seems to be working so far.