Just looking at jmason's diary - mentioning about the problem with using pubs vs. TV as entertainment - the Irish government recently has decided to tackle it's inflation problem with....controls on the price of beer.

Says a lot about the Irish Nation, no ? And then consider that American's drink four times more alcohol per head, and you'd wonder what the prohibition did for the economy...

Just looking at jmason's diary - mentioning about the problem with using pubs vs. TV as entertainment - the Irish government recently has decided to tackle it's inflation problem with....controls on the price of beer.

Says a lot about the Irish Nation, no ? And then consider that American's drink four times more alcohol per head, and you'd wonder what the prohibition did for the economy...

The books for the ILUG AGM (see below) arrived today. Whoohoo!

Looks like the ILUG AGM should be fun. David Owens, with RedHat Ireland (mainly sales/finance part outfit of RedHat, no techies), has said he'll likely give a talk. Got more freebies to give away too - O'Reilly Associates sent me four t-shirts. No books, but it's not a bad start

I'm glad I'm not a hardware engineer. With software, if it doesn't work, you can recompile it. Hardware....well, I bought me a Vellmann Kit - a Metronome to be exact. Painting by numbers, only you get resistors, little pots, a transistor etc. And it's supposed to all make a variable rate/tone/speed metronome. I spent ages putting it together (never good at soldering), and stuck a battery in it. What happened ? Nothing. No tone, no lighting LED, no Magic Blue Smoke. Nada. Mutter. I keep telling myself "Ah, the battery is dead", but I'm not confident enough to go buy a new battery for it...

Busy babysitting consultants in to make up a proper oracle on HP installation for us. OK, it'll be nice and fault tolerant, but it's a lot more hassle than a MySQL installation. Speaking of, the MySQL database supporting my webmail system has corrupted a table, messing things up no end. I thought this free software lark was supposed to be "Bug free (tm)" ?

Anyway, we are getting some clothes made up for the geeks expected at the ILUG AGM. Seeing as they need toys too, we are trying to get a dose of BBC CDs burned in time - little 50 MB "repair tool" CDs, in a business card form factor. Checkout the linux care site for info on what they have on them (linuxcare made the distro).

Checkout a really cool review of OSes at Neal Stephenson's site. If you haven't read any of his books, buy Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash. They rock.