Another Christmas survived.

It wasn’t half bad, actually – got to catch up with Paul and his missus among other relatives I don’t see too frequently. As usual, the food is plentiful and good.

Sleeping on the couch (as per tradition for me) was not so good and my back is absolutely killing me. Next year I’m either demanding a proper bed or bringing my own ?

I’m now up one apron (!?), a cookbook, a Far Side calendar (I miss Gary Larson too..) and a small Buddha/mini Zen garden. I’m halfway through a bigger one without the candles in it. However it’s a definite improvement over the dead bonsai currently on my outside table ?

The cash also proffered (a good standby for folks unsure of what gifts to buy) have been put to good use in the post Christmas sales – a couple of decent shirts with stuff left over.

I’d also hung onto enough saved cash to upgrade the local network to Gigabit ethernet – an 8-port Linksys and associated NIC for my workstation so far (just a simple Netgear GA311, which has been painless). I’ll likely pick up another for qbert later this week.

I also acquired my brother’s old Logitech Quickcam 3000 – which to my amazement was immediately spotted and configured under Fedora, as it uses the Phillips chipset (pwc kernel driver). I’ve not tinkered too much, just Ekiga (SIP / VoIP software) and a couple of snapshots.

Now, to find a SIP phone app that does half-decent video/audio, is free and cross-platform. I’ve tried OpenWengo and it’s left me unimpressed so far (looks good, not easy to use). I’ve already got the aforementioned Ekiga software but that’s currently Linux-only unless you want to risk a beta for Windows (no, not on Mum’s machine)

Things to look forward to: Holidays for 2 weeks from the New Year. Catch up with Bri and other folks I’ve not seen over the Christmas break. New website design planning (repoview is already ahead, due to it breaking with new python-kid packages ;-))