It's been a busy week. Last weekend I was up in Birmingham for the kayak club xmas meal/social (so, a drunken night out then), and yesterday I was up in Birmingham yet again for the small matter of a graduation ceremony
Plenty more photos to come if and when I acquire them from various other family cameras.
Birmingham graduation was a lot different to Keele - for starters, this time I actually got to graduate with people I know. I don't think it dragged on as long either.
However, no escape from crazy organists... walking out of my ceremony at Keele, the organist launched into "show me the way to amarillo". Which was unnecessarily cheesy, although also now about the only thing about it that I ever tell anyone.. hmm. Anyway, this time, when we were sat waiting for the ceremony to start they started playing christmas music. Guess how hilariously amusing I found that...
Selly Oak in December is also significantly colder than Keele in July. Funny that.
In between trips to Brum, I've been slightly pre-occupied with being quite ill. That's less fun.
And the fun doesn't stop just yet - today I've handed over what was left of my overdraft to some nice lettings agency people in exchange for the keys to a rather nice flat in Gloucester Docks. So tomorrow is house moving day!
KDE4. I've mentioned it before, although that was a while ago when it was new and really not in a usable state...
New ubuntu came out last month, and I have it running on my work machine. Installed as kubuntu, but after one week I was so fed up with it that I switched to xfce, so it's more xubuntu now - and I've even changed the bootsplash to reflect that
That's all fine, and not especially worth talking about. But the other day I found myself reading Planet Debian or Planet KDE or similar, and some discussion about whether or not it was right to ship intrepid with 4. And I'm tending to agree with the "no" point of view.
The big issue I was having was stability. In that week of use, it completely locked up and crashed three times. Well, I say completely locked up - the mouse would still move. But no reaction to any clicks or keyboard mashing, so the only way out was a hard reboot. Eek.
But there's also still the whole customisation thing. Yes, it's a lot more flexible than the last time I checked. But still nowhere near enough! Options moved around I can cope with and get used to. But stuff like missing context menus, and panels that are far too fixed to their design/size... it's irritating. Also, too many useless widgets, and once again not enough scope for fiddling with them. And so on. I tried, but I just was not getting on with it.
This is the whole point though - it's new and different, so of course 'old' users are going to complain about it. Yes, fair enough - I'd agree if there weren't quite so many actual bugs and broken things. Removing 'complicated' customisation options and making it look a bit like vista (oh, did I say that?) is probably great for attracting new users, but in terms of usability... No.
So yeah, xfce. I can't face full on gnome because it's just too ugly, but I can cope with xfce because it doesn't crash and doesn't annoy me. Wouldn't want it at home though, so I think I'll be sticking with KDE3.5 - and so with Hardy - for a little while. Hopefully 4.2 will be better.
Ah, my parents must love having me around. The past two weekends I've taken over their nice clean (well, it used to be) bath/shower and filled it with wet muddy smelly kayaking kit. yay! And then left it there for several days to dry. It wouldn't all fit in one photo which makes it look less impressive, but nevermind:
Not pictured: helmet, large dry bag and pile of thermals, last seen somewhere on top of the freezer. Also several smaller drybags that were in the kitchen somewhere but I think have now been moved...
Actually last weekend wasn't too bad, because I'd managed to stay upright the whole time. Unlike the weekend before, which involved a roll and two swims. Over lots of rocks. ahem. More of that here - I'm trying to keep my blog from becoming totally padding obsessed, or it'll get even more boring
tags: uni 
