I’ve 99% got my contract renewed, just waiting for the paperwork now, and then I’m in gainful employment until March 31st at least. I haven’t been paid for last week yet, and I just invoiced for this week!

Been doing some telephone calls at work today and updating some paperwork, quite busy for a testing-free day. I’ve got a cable to send to Phil tomorrow. I might be going to Guildford at the end of the month, so can pop and see Kev.

I finally got around to fitting my NEC AD7173 DVD drive. I flashed it with the 1-2D firmware from Liggy and Dee and now it supports auto-bitsetting and is region-free. I tested it and a 16x DVD+R is now identified as a pressed DVD-ROM by the Xbox!

I went shoe shopping this morning, none of the stuff in the sales was work-dress, so ended up paying 32ukp for a pair that are OK. Did the Tesco’s run and had lunch out. I even popped to Lidl’s, but they didn’t have anything interesting.

I was playing with my TV card last night, I’ve figured out how to get sound to work (via soundcard in!) and how to do realtime software encoding to XviD. Being a regular TV tuner, the WinFast2000 has the advantage over my PVR250 in that your can watch realtime in a nice TVtime window on your desktop, and don’t have to convert everything from MPEG2 first.

I just watched My Brothers Keeper, which was pretty boring, way too long and a bit of an obvious ending.

My USB-to-serial cable arrived at work today, it works a treat with Fedora 5/6 using the built-in kernel drivers, it identifies itself as /dev/ttyUSB0. I tried it with some Cisco and Sun equipment earlier.

I’ve been playing with THC-Hydra today, and some password lists borrowed from John The Ripper.

Just watched The Sarah Jane Adventures pilot episode that I missed on New Years Day, it wasn’t great.

I’m back from France – had a lovely Xmas with the family, nice relax, met Brandy the cat, lots of lovely presents, ate/drank too much….

Now it’s back to work, although it was a little slow today, I’ve got to sort an extension out this week.

Hopefully I will get the USB-serial adaptor tomorrow as the first one hasn’t turned up at the house via 1st Class, they’re sending a replacement Recorded Delivery to work.