I finally completed uploading my favourites from the photos I took in Seattle. Expect more cats, art, flowers and an otter. There’s even a couple depicting yours truly hidden amongst them.

Click either of the photos for the full set.

This bank holiday weekend was the Dot to Dot Festival in Bristol. Dot to Dot features (mostly) lesser known bands and artists across several of Bristol’s venues. Last year there were three venues, the Louisiana, Thekla and Fiddlers. This year the Trinity Centre and Academy were added, making five in total. The Trinity and Academy are both larger than the existing three, which allowed for larger artists to be booked.

So, you know when sometimes things are hyped up. Of course you do. People say, “OMG, like, you haven’t seen so-and-so?! How is this possible?! I need to tell my kids I was there when a person hadn’t, like, you know, seen so-and-so”. And how, invariably, so-and-so doesn’t live up to such hysteria?

Well. Fight Club is not one of those things. I don’t know if I can forgive the people who, upon discovering I’d not seen it, did not stop it with the “OMG!!”, and did not instead get out their DVD of the film— “I don’t care we’re in a god damned pub, stop THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD: this guy hasn’t seen Fight Club.” —and force me to watch it. Right there. It was that good.

I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron onto my work laptop today, the HP Compaq 8510w. This post describes the experience, and covers:

	- the install;
	- what hardware worked and what didn't;
	- bonus: how I got my [rails](http://www.rubyonrails.org/) development environment up and running (ruby/rails/netbeans).

The Install

This went very smoothly, aside from one initial hiccup. Here’s a tip to avoid it:

	- Install from the "Install Ubuntu" option rather than booting into the LiveCD using the "Try" option; when I used the "Try" option, the partitioner refused to work. Booting directly to the install resulted in a working partitioner.

First Boot

What works and what doesn’t on first boot? Live-blogging at its finest! Or it would be, were I to get off my sorry behind and publish after each test rather than at the end of the process.

I am informed one way to become a better writer is to write. Then write some more. And so on. This alarmed me, but not so much as it will alarm you when you discover what I have in store for you today.

Something which has been providing excitement chez Mike is our rather characterful heating system. The system is so old it was probably a little past it by the time I was born; it could charitably be described as temperamental. It provides two (theoretically) discrete services: “Heating” and “Hot Water”, controllable via a so-retro-it-would-hurt-if-it-were-not-actually-from-the-70s control device. In this context, “controllable” should be read as “often not controllable”.