BlogOfTheMoon

David Haworth of the UK Campaign for Digital Rights has written a very good set of comments on the UK's draft implementation of the EUCD. The CDR's own critique of the implementation is also available from their website and makes for insightful reading.

I've had real trouble with PowerQuest's Drive Image 2002. I'm running it on a WinXP Home machine and I've finally managed to make an image of my hard disk, after three attempts. The first time, it worked great, but then the only way that I could get back into the program after that was through safe mode (if I ran it normally, it would just freeze the system, meaning that I had to do a hard reset), and I've been plagued with errors cropping up in the backup process two, maybe three, hours in. Grr. Still, I've got a recent backup now so I'm safe for the next few weeks. After being burned once I'll be making regular backups from now on!

I had a chance to watch Lilo and Stitch the other day and it was absolutely fantastic. I reckon that it might be the best animated Disney film that I've ever seen! The animation was fantastic – the style was quite distinctive, not like your traditional Disney fare at all – and the story was great, coming along at a decent pace and wasn't (very much) bogged down by Disney moralising.

In case you hadn't realised, I really liked this film .

Bugger, I'm exhausted! Thank the gods that it's Friday afternoon. Countdown to the weekend starts here.

Well, issue 38 of TBD has been printed (well, okay, photocopied) and sold. I did a print run of 25 and it looks like we're well on the way to being sold out. In fact, I may need to print a couple more issues. That's great!

Oh, I figured out what was wrong with my Course application system in NS4. I was missing a single </strong> tag. Pfff.

Well, it's finally done. Issue 38 of TBD is finally completed and awaiting photocopying. I'm quite proud of this issue, since it's the first one with me as production editor, so it feels much more like 'my' magazine, my baby. I do tend to accumulate surrogate children, don't I? Which is odd, considering that I don't like the real things very much.

I went to see Signs last night. It was a great film! Suspenseful and genuinely scary. You don't get many of those any more. That makes it two out of three hits IMO for M Night Shyamalan (I didn't like Unbreakable very much). A fine track record indeed.

Brr, winter's definitely here! Methinks it's time to dust down the old hot water bottle again.

I fixed my second bug for MultiZilla yesterday. Check out bug 2130 (fixed) and bug 2306 which I filed and have attached a patch to.

Update: HJ decided that he couldn't wait for my patch, so he fixed bug 2306 himself partly using my code. Oh well, there'll be more bugs :o)

Gah! I discovered that my beautifully crafted course application system doesn't work with Netscape 4.x. Well, more correctly, you can get through the whole thing, but can't fill in the form at the end to let you actually send off your application. Well, that's what happens when you don't test properly.

Murmur, murmur, bloody Netscape 4, murmur, use Mozilla instead, murmur, bloody testing, murmur, murmur.

iO was fun last night. We watched Batman: The Movie – that's the 1960s one with Adam West. It was really bad, but it was a great iO film.

There were a few new faces as well, who I hope that we'll see more of as term goes on, and some freshers who are already becoming part of the furniture :o).

I went to see a Blondie tribute band called Bleachie this evening in the very nice West 13th venue in the Glasgow west end. It was a great gig, but left my ears numb afterwards! And the folks that I went with tell me that this was a quiet gig! Hmm, come to think of it, I don't think that I've ever been to a 'loud' gig. The last one that I was at was The Sounds of Simon and Garfunkel and before that it was The Bush the Tree and Me, both of which were fairly quiet.

I really think that I need to see more bands live though. I live in Glasgow, which has one of the best music scenes in Britain, and I've only been to two, maybe three, gigs this year. Disgraceful.

I'm currently watching Angel season 2 on video and I have to say that I'm enjoying it a lot. There was a dull streak about a third of the way in, but it's picked up very well.

I did a very foolish thing today. I was having problems with my CD-ROM drives not reading discs. So did I sit down and carefully diagnose the problem and find a cure? Did I bugger. I nuked my hard disk and restored a backup made with Drive Image 2002. This was fine, except that the image was a month old!!

I don't mind re-installing software that I've installed since then (not a lot anyway) and the reason that I did it was because I don't have a lot of data that's changed since then, but I had forgotten to backup both my email and the work that I had done for TBD, which was incredibly annoying. So I've lost about month of email and the Freshers' Guide for TBD (but I've got a a backup of that at work at least).

The moral of the story? Think before you go and bloody well wipe your hard disk!

I played Monopoly this evening with Stevie and Joy for the first time in about four or five years. I had forgotten just how ruthless that the game is. A breeding ground for training ruthless capitalists, posing as a fun game for all the family. Maybe.

Okay, I've got rid of that nasty Blogger template and replaced it with something that looks and feels much more like the rest of LordOfTheMoon.com. Any and all feedback is, of course, welcome.

Well, first post, I suppose. I've still got no idea why the heck that I'm doing this. As with all the best ideas, it just seemed like a good idea at the time :o).