Phil & I returned to England on Sunday 6th, not a bad drive, although I was essentially driving off-and-on for twelve hours, I then couldn’t get to sleep that night as I was so awake (we arrived back in Ipswich after 10pm).

Monday 7th we were back at work, Phil in the B&B down the road from me. On the way to work I slid in the wet into the back of a Porsche Boxster, luckily no damage. Lesson: don’t drive whilst half-asleep! We found that Phil didn’t need to come over for the meeting after all – it was announced at 5pm that there would be a phone conference option.

I’m a bit pissed off today as work seems to be stealthily advertising for a new member of our team and the daily rate is more than we’re getting. As my agency are taking so long to get me my renewal paperwork (and pay me!) I’m thinking of quitting and re-applying next year.

I’m starting to worry about space in the car for the France run, as I guess I have to have the passenger seat free, and without my clothes I think I’ve already filled half the boot/backseat full with presents and they still haven’t finished arriving apparently. I guess I’ll get the Xmas shopping in, but doubt I’ll be able to offload much from my aunt’s car.

Once again the 2nd best singer has won the XFactor – probably because a load of teeny boppers with mobile phones voted for the young bloke. It seemed a foregone conclusion about 20mins before the votes were in – there was 1% in it and all the judges seemed to be letting Rhydian down gently in a way.

That’ll be the last time I watch the show past the auditions (which are really funny!) Frankly I’m amazed Leon even made it to the semi’s. It makes you wonder if they do a marketability study on the contestants and fix the results, it wouldn’t be the first time….

I finally managed to get Solaris 9u8 installed under VMWare Server 1.0.4, I don’t know what I did differently, but I managed to get it working on the P4HT and Core2Duo. The only remaining “bug” is that the server doesn’t seem to know its own hostname, despite /etc/hosts, /etc/inet/ipnodes and so on being correct – there seems to be some “shcat” error on boot. Also metastat doesn’t seem to work under VMWare – I can init the slices and metadb but when I reboot prior to attaching the mirrors, I don’t even get as far as the Openboot prompt. It is supposed to work under x86, but VMWare’s Solaris support seems flaky to put it kindly.

I seem to be running out of disk space, out of four 250Gb drives attached to my desktop machine, I have about 30Gb left on each drive! I think I’ll have to take one of the drives back with me to France and offload some of the data onto the fileserver. I’m running out of SATA ports too, so I’m going to have to buy a 500Gb drive soon and maybe another eSATA enclosure for one of the 250Gb’s. I could put my SIL3114A PCI card back in the fileserver to give it another 4 slots, but then its going to become a power issue with 4+ drives per PC.