So, I promised some more upbeat blogging, and here it comes

It’s been rather a while since I blogged, but not much happened on the German side – the only thing of any real note was that I had a trial thing in the language lab, and it went really well – so I have a meeting tomorrow morning to sort out when I’ll be working there and so on.

Colm went off to San Francisco for a few days to be a poster-boy for Sun’s Niagaras at JavaOne. He had a ball, and came home with something he’s been wanting for rather a long time – a digital SLR camera (a Canon 350D, to be precise, with two lenses, a normal one and a zoom one both zoom ones, to be imprecise ) (See Update below)

That made finding him a birthday present pretty easy – and in the process, I found a new electronics shop, which was kinda cool I wasn’t sure he’d like the camera bag I got him – but I guess I know him better than I trust myself to, because he thought it was brilliant (It’s a Crumpler bag, but I’m not gonna link to it, because their website is just so full of Flash crap )

I managed to bring home close to 35kg of stuff – including a 5l baby-keg of beer for Eoin’s birthday Clearing this place out at the end of my time here will be hellish – but should hopefully be do-able.

The first exciting piece of news when I got home was that dad’s been made an Assistant Commissioner of the St John Ambulance Brigade of Ireland It’s not actually unexpected – he told me the last time I was home that he’d gotten a phone call – but it now seems to be official, and publically known

It was lovely to be home – mum had cooked my favourite dinner and dessert, and I was so happy to see everyone.

The order and days have just blurred into each other a little at this stage, but I got several things achieved. For one, I met the supervisor for my FYP – she’s absolutely lovely, and the project looks fun, challenging, but eminently do-able.

I also upgraded a few WordPress installs, with a different anti-spam plugin for each. NYC got the simplest – you now have to add two single-digit numbers, correctly, in order to be allowed post a comment. Digital Rights Ireland needed something a little less obtrusive, so I left it using Akismet, which comes installed by default, but requires a WordPress API key to activate. Frankly, I don’t like it, and I anticipate getting rid of it in the next few days. It does the job, but it will auto-delete stuff after 15 days, and it doesn’t give me any kind of indication of how sure it is that the stuff in its queue is spam. Frankly, I could have achieved the same basic effect by leaving WordPress as I had it (set to moderate all comments), and procmailing the emails I got to /dev/null.

This blog got the best one of all. It’s called Spam Karma 2, and it’s just spiffy. It gives the spam it catches a score, ala SpamAssassin, highlights them in different shades depending on how sure it is that they are spam, lets me weight the scores as I choose (although I’ve stuck with the defaults, and they seem to work just fine), puts red borders around mails it wants me to moderate (because the score is too high to be spam, but too low to be ham), and mails me once a day to tell me how many spams it’s caught (also configurable ). At the moment, it will also use a very simple captcha as one of its tests, when the comment is being posted, but I’m contemplating turning that off, because I think my spam is probably clearly enough delineated from my ham, and I’d rather not pester the few real commenters I have! Thoughts, anyone?

Colm and I went to two concerts – we’d only really planned to go to the first one – the wonderful fiddle-player Kevin Burke, with Ged Foley on guitar. When we went to pick up the tickets though, we saw that there was one the next night with Liz Carroll and John Doyle (on the same instruments). While both concerts were hugely enjoyable, John Doyle was simply incredible. His guitar-playing was just out of this world – the only person I could think to compare him to was Bela Fleck, who we heard in New York last summer. It was altogether wow.

We also went geocaching – we looked for three caches, and unfortunately found only one But the hunting was fun, and the locations were nice places to go to anyway

Now however, it’s late, and I’ve forgotten all the other things I wanted to blog, so I think it’s time to sleep Good night all

(Oh, yes – the internet is working in my apartment again. Please make offerings to the Supreme Being of your choice, in thanks for this, and in the hopes that it may continue to work!)

Update: I am reliably informed that both the lenses for Colm’s new camera are zoom lenses. So let me restate. One of them is big, and long, and extendible, and zooooooomy. The other looks like a perfectly civilised camera lens