Hello everyone, welcome to another Weekly Rewind. I usually start these by apologising for my lateness but I don’t think I will this time. Not because the update isn’t overdue, or because I’m not sorry about it, but because I think it’s been said enough. The UK temperatures have been pretty low in the last month but thankfully we got some respite this week, we got above 0 degrees C anyway. Apparently the ice and snow is due to return this weekend and bookmakers have closed bets on a white Christmas because apparently it’s a forgone conclusion. Bing Crosby will be happy. Anyway, grab yourself a glass of sherry and join me by the fire for another recap of events in my little world.
I’ll pick up where we left off last time. I was on FLOSS Weekly 144 on December 1st with Randal where we interviewed guest Thomas Goirand about Domain Technologie Control. His company GPLhost offer web hosting to all kinds of clients and have bases in 10 different countries, not bad hey. The control panel software they produce to do this is all completely GPL licensed and Thomas even has it packaged in Debian stable which is no mean feat. He maintains some other Debian packages and is very involved with the distribution. The interview went really well I thought and I had a lot of fun. At one point though I did put him on the spot a bit more than I intended with a question about his licensing choices. I was trying to play Devil’s advocate really as I actually agree with him about the GPL, but I hope I didn’t come off sounding bad. Sometimes you have to ask tough questions to be a good interviewer I believe. I always try to think of what the listening public would want to ask if they could. We owe it to them to represent that perspective and ask questions on their behalf. Thomas was very gracious and I think the interview probably benefited for it. You can download the episode from the TWIT website now if you’re interested.I’ve also been busy as ever with Linux Outlaws. We’ve done a couple of shows since I last updated the blog. I edited the last release, titled “GPL Licensed Feedback” and it is our last live show of the year. Fab is currently appearing in a production of the Shakespeare play Richard III and obviously he’s been pretty tied up with that. We will have our usual round up of the year and possibly some other review shows out before 2011 comes bursting through the door. I honestly don’t know where this year has gone, but then I always seem to feel like that. Time flies when you’re having fun they say, I guess that’s what it is.
I’ve been involved in some more live events with my friends from the How Why DIY group in Liverpool. We put on another Social Media Cafe event December the 8th at the Art & Design Academy in John Moore’s University. It’s a fantastic building I must say and the view of the Metropolitan Cathedral up the hill is stunning . I took a load of microphones and other audio kit over which was used to stream and record the talks, while Adrian and Andy faithfully manned the video cameras as always. They work very hard on all of that. Afterwards we all headed to the Everyman Bistro (a favourite haunt of mine) to enjoy beer and food. A good night all in all.
I haven’t posted any really meaty distro reviews on the blog at all this year and that’s something I’d like to fix in 2011. I got unexpectedly busy with Drupal work this year and it sapped my limited free time. I’ve installed Linux Mint 10 on my laptop now though and I will post a proper review of it over the Christmas period. I also upgraded my phone (HTC Desire) from CyanogenMod 6.0 to 6.1 and I should definitely write about that too. I have some other ideas for decent articles and I hope to start driving traffic back to this site with more regular content. You may have noticed the look of the blog has changed a little lately. I’ve long talked about properly revamping the whole DanLynch.org site so the blog doesn’t feel like a separate entity, this is just a small part. One of the nice side effects of all the website work I’ve been doing for other people is the massive improvement in my knowledge of CSS, amongst other things. I’ll be putting that to good use for my own purposes in the near future.
Another major change planned for 2011 is my relocation to a new flat in the centre of Liverpool. I’ve long wanted to live right in town but various stumbling blocks (chiefly health problems) have delayed me. I think I’m finally in a position to make it happen. With the band improving steadily and other things going on I feel being in the heart of the city will be good for me. It’s only 20mins from where I live now anyway, so it’s not as if I’m emigrating. I’ve been hunting for a flat in recent weeks and that’s still ongoing. I hope to move just after the New Year. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Finally, speaking of the band, we’ve booked a gig for January 8th in nearby Hoylake on the Wirral. This should be a good start to 2011 and I hope we can book many more to develop our skills while earning a little money to cover rent on our rehearsal room at the same time. We’re rehearsing pretty intensely for the gig now and also polishing up new original songs. Expect some new 20lb Sounds releases in the early New Year. It’s an exciting time.
I did another live Rathole Radio last Sunday and enjoyed chatting to friends and playing some tunes. That podcast is out now if you’d like to take a listen. That pretty much brings us right up to date.
Upcoming:
Obviously Christmas is almost upon us now and as usual I’m woefully unprepared, lots of presents to buy. That combined with flat hunting will keep me fairly busy in the next week I expect. There’s also lots of band rehearsals going on and some podcast recording. There’s no Linux Outlaws live show on Monday but we will be recording our end of year wrap up soon so look out for that in your RSS feed. There will also be a live Rathole Radio on Boxing Day which I’m looking forward to very much. I hope you all have a great festive period and get to enjoy it with family and friends. I’ll be reporting back with some more updates before we hit Christmas proper. Until then, that care of yourselves and “joyeux noel” as they say in France 🙂
Dan