Ubuntu's alliterative naming has got so ridiculous now that I refuse to acknowledge its existence wherever possible.  Anyway, a new version appeared the other week, so I'm now running 9.10.

Newer KDE, so slightly shinier looking but a few new bugs too - my settings panel seems to lack the ability to turn the sound system off, so I get annoying little noises if I unplug the power cable.  grr. 
Also there's a lovely error about a missing lib if I want to change my window decorations.  It's not missing, I checked.  Ahh, maybe one day kde4 will be 100% usable

Last night I was fiddling around with other appearance settings - background effects, colour schemes, taskbar stuff.  At which point it randomly decided to crash a bit, and take my window decorations with it (ie the title bar, mix/max/close buttons, all that useful stuff).
They wouldn't come back either, leaving me with a particularly unusable desktop covered in windows I couldn't get rid of, and couldn't open any new ones over the top as the menus/taskbar had also died.

Luckily I have a 'backup' window manager installed, in the form of xfce.  That lasted all of a minute of trying to poke at kde's config files, and then oh dear, the entire of X fell over.

Argh.  So, command line it is... nothing doing with configs, so I figured go for some purging and reinstalling.  Which would have been fine, had apt not decided to get stuck complaining about missing package dependencies and then spitting out a lot of angry errors if I tried fixing that.

A lot of reboots and clearing of various caches and temp files and fiddling in recovery mode later, it's back to normal.  So that was one way of wasting an evening!

Fiddling with apt did at least mean I got round to finding the repo for amarok 1.4 - as 2 is the biggest pile of user unfriendly shit I've seen in a long time.  Which is a shame.

Oh yeah, and playing with CSS3 at work has led me to rediscover the joy of drop shadows. mmm.

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Gloucester had some vip guests a week or so ago - the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh!

Not a very exciting visit, and certainly not worth standing outside for an hour and a half waiting for.. I wandered out 10 minutes before they were due, narrowly avoided eye poking injury from some flags, and took a few pictures.  Job done.

Anyway, they sailed up the canal, did a very quick turn around the main Docks basin in front of the flag waving masses, then vanished again. Off to a certain distinctively shaped building in Cheltenham for the afternoon!

Since then, I've been busy as usual doing exciting things (most importantly, paddling the Dart Loop!), which is a bit of a rubbish excuse for not posting this a week ago...  I intend to make more of an effort this month

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I've mentioned the various incompetencies of specsavers before, in great detail... and I had sort of been hoping that it was just the Kings Heath branch being crap.

Apparently not so much. 

Last month I went for an actual eye test.  That started badly when, after 50 minutes sat in the waiting area, I thought I'd go and ask how much longer I'd be waiting.  Only to discover that they'd actually forgotten I was there.  Great.

Eventually got my eye test, which was fine.  Left eye slightly worse, but not really much, and not enough to necessitate new glasses unless I wanted a new pair anyway.  Which I did, because my spare pair (used for kayaking!) are a bit scratched, and held together with gaffer tape in one place and electrical tape in another...

Chose some frames, blah blah, they'll be ready in a week. 

Two weeks and several phone calls later (grr), I go to pick my new glasses up, to discover that I can't actually see through the right lens.  "oh no, they're not wrong, they're what your prescription says, maybe it's just because it's different and you're not used to them".  Nope.

Turns out someone had typoed the prescription, so they were in fact the wrong lenses.  Which worries me, quite a lot.  Prescriptions are important things, and should not be wrong!  A doctor would get in a lot of shit for cocking one up, so I don't think that the opticians should try and shrug it off quite so much.

Anyway, one retest and another a week and a half later, I finally have some new glasses.  yay!  They'd have liked to make me wait another few days, but sod that.

Now I'm thinking that I will go somewhere else next time.  Some quick looking on the internet suggests that I can get my contact lenses much much cheaper as well, which would be nice!

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