I’m in Helsinki. This is good.

I’m awake. This is not so good

Left Laura’s flat yesterday at 1pm and proceeded to visit pretty much every bomb site via the northern line, to drop her off at Euston so she could return to her parents and then on to Paddington by bus to meet Robot101. Rather surprisingly we managed to meet up without too much hanging around and then catch the slightly slower, but much cheaper Heathrow Connect. The train is on the departures board as being to “Hayes & Harlington. Also stops at Heathrow.” despite heathrow being beyond Hayes. It might as well have added “but don’t tell any one”. I suspect Heathrow Express might have words if they advertised going to Heathrow too much. I really don’t think it is worth paying 14.00GBP over 9.50GBP for the ten minutes less it takes for the non-stop service.

Met up with various other people at Heathrow consisting of Scott James Remnant, Steve McIntyre, Rob Taylor, Phil Hands and Simon Kelley. Flight delayed by 25 minutes, although it was about 18:40 befre we actually took off. Arrived in Helsinki around midnight, only to find it doing some impression of dusk. Surprised to be met by Jesus and other locals so we didn’t need to work out the busses, even though various people had been organised enough to print out the lovely photographic guide to HUT.

It’s now 8am localtime so time for breakfast. It has no right being this bright, this early in the morning.

Would you want to bank with a company that used offshore call centres after things like this?

Yesterday my employers, Runtime Collective, decided that it might be a good idea if one of us attended GUADEC, and as I was the only one that could make it, I am going on a trip to Stuttgart. Yesterday afternoon was spent frantically hunting around for train tickets. Managed to find tickets going out on Saturday evening and a sleeper from Paris to Stuttgart arriving at 6:20 and returning Tuesday night, Wednesday morning. Annoyingly we have seats on the overnight to Stuttgart, but bunk beds on the way back. Fortunately, they had run out of standard Eurostar tickets, so we get to go first class for the same price. Should make up for spending 8 hours trying to sleep in a seat.

Things in particular I want to see are keithp’s talk on the future of X, Owen’s talk on Cairo and jdub’s talk on Project Topaz. Seeing as this is a work trip, mjg59’s powermanagement, the Linux Desktop Migration and the Public Sector Desktops will be required viewing too.

Oh and I’ve managed to drap lauranat along to be my official translator, seeing as my only german phrase is likely to get me arrested for perversion. That and the fact that she would have actually killed me if I’d gone to Germany without her. Now I wonder if I can get work to pay for her train ticket …

Michael Howard would pull out of the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees. Fucker.

Seriously, WTF?

http://maps.google.co.uk/

Seriously, WTF?

Finally got around to watching the director’s cut of Donnie Darko. Overall I think it is an improvement on the theatrical release, especially with the addition of the pages from the Philosophy of Time Travel interspersed throughout the film. It makes it a little easier to understand what is going on and the film feels more like it makes sense.

Two changes bothered me though. One was the changed graphics as time is reversed and the montage during the party. They reminded me a little bit too much of Robocop and Terminator. The other thing, which, for me, really let the film down was the changing of music from Echo and the Bunnymen - The Killing Moon to INXS - Never Tear Us Apart in the opening scenes. I’ve blogged previously about how I really enjoyed the opening scenes to this film and I just didn’t feel that INXS gave the scene the same magical quality that the original did. It is a shame, because it let down what was otherwise a really good Director’s Cut.

Warning: Spoilers

Just finished watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again. I never really agreed with the ending of the film when I watched it at the cinema. Something about it didn’t quite sit right with me. The last 10-15 minutes felt a little bit tacked on and didn’t quite fit with the rest of the film. I don’t know if this is because I wanted it to end differently. I always felt that they shouldn’t have found out that they erased each other. I think they should have just fallen in love with each other without knowing that they had already fallen in and out of love with each other before. I think at the time I felt as if they had rewritten the ending after initial screenings

Having seen it a second time, I think I have changed my mind and think that the ending works a lot better than I thought initially. They decide that they want to be with each other even though they know that they are likely to find massive faults with each other in the future.

I have recently added a patch to irssi-text to fix #274201 (Displays incorrect Chinese characters on input bar). As I don’t use Big5 myself, I can not properly test the patches. I would appriciate it if anyone that does use Big5 can install /debian/irssi-text/irssi-text_0.8.9-6_i386.deb and let me know if it works for them.