Used the winter solstice as an excuse to practice the fine art of the roast dinner and produced a table groaning under the weight of a Yule dinner. As usual i cooked far too much, so i really must find some additional friends to invite along to such things.

Went to finish that last minute crimble shopping for family, shops are hectic as usual, but it all feels kind of wrong somehow, having had the blow-out dinner and present exchanges, and the number of sales that have started already, it seems like this should be the lull between xmas and new year.

Ah well, means theres more time for me to knuckle down to shifting all the mail and services off my old server to the nice new one, before the old one gets turned off in the new year.

An interesting lesson learnt, by observation rather than direct experience, dont write anything in a public blog which you would be embarassed to see repeated infront of people you know.

Link: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00021.html

I feel vindicated in my belief that Gnome has been dumbed down for far too long now, as Linus has just come out with the same sentiment.

I have always liked the gnome desktop more than the kde one, but increasingly it has been harder to find and enable the options that make it behave the way i like, with many of them being removed totally if not just hidden in gconf.

I can understand a need to make the desktop defaults nice and easy for the first time user, but that doesnt justify taking away the options and freedom of choice to have other styles of behaviour, without them you may as well be using Windows.