In Eason’s of Limerick today, I discovered that Fedora 7 is out - it comes on this month’s Linux Format cover DVD. Needless to say I purchased it.

My main machine is running Fedora Core 4 and I’ve been meaning to upgrade it to FC6 for a while now but haven’t been able to due to time constraints (ie. no bloody time!). It’s crashing a lot recently, which is very annoying. What’s more annoying is I don’t have the time to investigate why and fix it.

Now that Fedora 7 (they’ve apparently dropped the ‘Core’ bit) is out, I’ll have a serious look at that. Apparently it comes with “enhanced wireless networking” (which is timely given my recent upgrade to IFA Telecom broadband and installation of Belkin N1 Wireless Router), Gnome 2.18 and KDE 3.5.6 desktops, and “fast user switching via an OS X-like login name button” to quote Linux Format.

Depending on how successful I am in getting up to speed with the 3 projects I’m working on in the week after I return from next week’s break, I will get round to finally doing the upgrade.

Finally I have something good to report that I can actually report here. Festi’s back stirring his cooking pot again after a whole 8 months in the belly of the whale!

Not that I don’t have anything else to report that’s good. I do, but unfortunately I can’t report it here, or there would be consequences… So I won’t - at least not for the moment.

It’s the end of June, and a long hard slog of a month it’s been - work-wise and personally. It feels as if I’ve spent large tracts of the month immersed, or bogged down rather, in impenetrable programming constructs and program work flows. While I’ve made a fair amount of progress in the database application project I’m working on, it doesn’t feel that way, since every inch, or should I say byte, has been so hard-fought. The other two projects I’m working on are seriously behind schedule also, with the result that I’ve been burning the midnight oil in an effort to reel in some of the backlog. So basically, I’m feeling burnt out right now. I’ve just tonight and some of tomorrow left to make a bit more progress, as I’m off on a week’s break on Sunday with my partner. And not a moment too soon either.

We’re dropping off the children at the grandparents’ in Kerry on Sunday. Then on Monday we make our way to Mulranny in County Mayo where we are attending a three day workshop in Poetry Therapy organised by the Mayo Rape Crisis Centre and run by Professor Geri Chavis. On the way, we hope to drop in on Coole Park (of Lady Gregory and W.B.Yeats fame) for a short visit and to meet up with some friends. So that should prove the perfect way to chill out and recharge the batteries for both of us.

The end of June is upon us, and the weather is like what we get in November. Looking out the window at the teeming rain and looming cloud, the only way I can tell that it is not November is by the foliage on the trees!

Makes me long for the sun and heat. But ever since my experience of living through a 4 year drought in Seville in the early 1990s, I will not complain of the rain. There are worse things than an Irish summer!

On the way back from Ennis on Saturday afternoon while driving behind a bottle-green VW van with the Polish registration WSI 16TK, I saw an empty squashed beer can of the Heineken or Carlsberg variety judging by its colour fly out the passenger side window of the van. The can landed on the road and stayed there - another blot on the landscape.

This sort of behaviour is utterly unacceptable, as it shows a complete lack of respect for our countryside and for the other users of the road. It is bad enough when the culprit is a citizen of this country - it is even more so when the litter-lout is a “guest” in the country.

So, the pig from Poland who threw that empty beer can out the passenger side window hang your head in shame. You are a disgrace to your country, and if that is the respect you show for ours, you don’t deserve to be here at all.

Today being the Summer Solstice, it is the longest day of the year. So Grianstad shona || Happy Solstice to everybody.

Happily, the weather is somewhat better than it was yesterday when we got lots of visious showers. Hopefully the rain will hold off for the rest of the evening.

The weather in the Kilmaley area today has been just miserable - with a steady leakage from the grey blanket that passes for sky, sometimes of the downpour variety and more often of the steady trudging type since before dawn. Sigh!

As it is the last day I will have the attic and the house to myself as my daughter did her final Junior Certificate exam this morning (in Spanish), I took the chance to record some of my poetry on the PowerBook G4 in the attic first thing after breakfast. I got 10 poems recorded in Audacity in the space of an hour. The results aren’t bad, but I think I will need to purchase a good USB microphone for better quality. All I have to do now is import the audio files into GarageBand, and add some backing soundtracks - a bit of a tall order right now given the lack of time and my utter confusion when faced with the GarageBand interface!

On a positive note, I did eventually whip the Windows XP partition on the laptop into line - it is now connecting without a problem to the broadband router. How I did it I’m not sure - I just kept on fiddling with the IP settings on the machine and rebooting and eventually it gave in and connected!

It’s only three days to the Summer Solstice. The weather is characteristically manic, with rain, wind, sun and overcast louring cloud all in the space of hours. I wish I was on holidays. I’m having problems concentrating on what I’m supposed to be doing all day with the result that I’ve only achieved a tiny fraction of what I set out to do. The Windows XP partition on the laptop isn’t helping - it is simply refusing to log onto the network, despite my resetting the IP addresses and rebooting several times. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with the damn thing.

On a happier note, a dear friend that I haven’t seen in 3 years is over on a visit from Australia and I can’t wait to meet up with her and her fiancé. This is supposed to happen some night this week, but nothing has been confirmed as yet.

The Green Party has gone into coalition with Fianna Fáil, and their fascist poodles. What has not been reported by the media is the fact that the 86% that voted for this was 86% of roughly half of the membership. The other half couldn’t for various reasons make it to Dublin mid-week to vote. In my case it was just not possible to drop tools to make the journey, much as I wanted to. I won’t bore you with the details.

In going into government with Fianna Fáil, the Green Party has sacrificed some of its core values and principles in return for a chance to implement some of its policies in the fields of energy and the environment. Exactly how much of its policies the GP will succeed in implementing remains to be seen. Let’s hope it will be extraordinarily successful for all our sakes.
Personally, this past week has been traumatic. The party of which I have been a member for almost a decade has chosen to go into coalition with a party which I despise, and in the process jettisoned a couple of core principles which I hold dear. As a result, I can no longer remain a member of the Green Party. This is not a case of me leaving the Green Party but of the Green Party having left me. To my mind one cannot compromise on a core principle and still claim to hold that principle. That is exactly what the Green Party has done. It’s called being “pragmatic”. Well, that sort of pragmatism is not for me. I will be “clarifying my position” to the Party in due course.

The one positive thing that has come out of all of this is a second poem appropriately entitled “On the Greens going into coalition“. That, and the realisation that I have to be true to myself.

I finally got an N1 Belkin Wireless Router to share my broadband connection this morning. I’ve just finished setting it up and configuring it. I must say it was very straightforward though it’s taken me some time to configure the firewall to the highest security settings for my LAN.

The only problem that occurred was with the Windows XP partition on the laptop which refused to connect to the router even thought it was wired into it - surprise! surprise! Luckily I have the PowerBook G4 which picked up the router wirelessly without a bother, so I could manually configure it. Yet again it’s 10 out of 10 for the PowerBook and Mac OSx and null points for Windows.

Both the main office machine which is a Fedora Core 4 box and the FC4 partition on the laptop picked up the router automatically on reboot. All I have to do now is decide where on the wall to place the router so the signal picked up best from the rest of the house, and then attach it.