Almost a year ago, while I was in Australia sorting out a new visa and Elisse was in England - to be leaving shortly - her laptop stopped working. When I got back to the UK I had a look and realised it was just the light for the display wasn't on. If you looked closely in bright light you could see what was on the screen, but the light just wouldn't come on. Since it would have cost at least £50 just for the labor to have it looked at and fixed (assuming it could be diagnosed and fixed in under an hour) nothing was done about it at the time.

Since Elisse & I've been both trying to work on Elysian recently, we've found having only one computer has been a bit difficult. I figured that since the laptop was unusable anyway (it's an early model clam-shell G3 iBook - no external video port) I might as well have a go at fixing it. At worst it would still be unusable - just more permanently so. So I went out and bought a screw driver for anti-tamper screws and grabbed a pull apart I've got for the iBook and have it a shot. It turned out there was a hole in one of the wires to the screen bulb. I found this out by electrocuting myself on it - yes, I had the laptop powered up while it was apart, I had no other way of testing the screen lamp.

I've taped it up and it all appears to be working - touch wood - although I did forget to put the metal thing that sits behind the screen back, oh well.

Last night the Kleiner Trio (working title) held their first performance at a musical society in Farnborough. The concert was a wonderful success, and were received very well, especially at the enjoyable (and delicious!) supper after the concert. It was a real pleasure to play for and meet the local people who are all so keen on live music.

Last week I was fortunate to have worked with Vladimir Ashkenazy when he came to College to conduct Rachmaninov's second piano concerto. He was such a lovely person - so short in the flesh but full of spark and always equipped with jokes (about pianists). Although the one rehearsal we had with him was cut short ("what more is there to do?"), he was so musical that he inspired everyone to play well. I would quite like to adopt him, as a grandfather.

To start the year off musically, I was on another Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra tour during December and January. I hate to sound repetitive but it was a fabulous tour. We went to Spain, the Netherlands and Germany, and highlights included playing Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in the Berlin Philharmonie, Dvorak's New World Symphony in the Kurhaus at Den Haag, playing Bolero with a Dervish Dancer swirling around by the stage, having an auditorium built especially for the orchestra, and rehearsing in it during its construction (i can still taste the dust..) and traveling with a wonderful bunch of people.

So, so far this year has been packed with musical entertainment (always a good thing), and there's more to come with information on my Final Recital (March) to follow shortly.

I met a gentleman at a gig last night who marveled at my musical email address: "fur@elisse.org". Having only communicated with this man via phone and possibly my regular unmusical email, I have been inspired to revive my musical website, since it is now apparent that even 85 year olds can 'google' me with ease.

You have been warned.

I just realised that my web logs have been being deleted from my hosting account after three days, I've fixed that now - it's set to 1000 days.

Since I was looking at logs - and since we have a free domain space on our Sawmill install at work, I loaded up the three days of occasionallyhuman.net logs. To my surprise I'm being linked to by a site called Robots Buy Direct, searching for occasionally human will find my page here. I will also appear at number 4 if you search for robotics simulator which is pretty good considering it's just a line under the heading of things I would like time to work on.

Update on the WoW situation, sure enough I didn't manage to get it running, it was downloading the .12 patch for some reason and kept getting a verification error in one of the files, oh well.

Openned up Adium this morning and got asked to update. Lo and behold Adium 1.0 has finally been released. I've been using the beta of v1 at work for some time, although I don't think I'm using any of the new features. As always the one thing that Adium - and every other chat client that isn't iChat - is missing is video support. It would be fantastic if Adium could do video for all it's supported chat protocols, although I fully understand the reason it doesn't. It would be a massive amount of programming work - oh well, maybe v2.

On another note, I looked towards playing WoW today, since Elisse is going to be out all day. Looks like my install is broken, so I'm reinstalling. I can't believe how long it's taking. The thing comes on 4 CDs and so everything is über compressed and takes about half an hour just to install. Of course then I'll have to download the latest patch, which will take another three hours as I can't just download it from Blizzard's site. It's probably going to put me off playing before I actually unfreeze my account, which would be A Good Thing ™.

Having suffered weeks of watching the "Finglish" (F-ing English) devour god awful towers of hotel imitation English breakfasts in Spain, I was still able to thoroughly enjoy the one artery-clogging tradition that we've embraced in England - the sunday fry-up.

So I'm back, unpacked, accepted the inevitable welcome-back cold (both the illness, and the weather) and now it's time for some photos.

In order of appearance,

• One special morning when the red sun caught the mountains, hotel Melia, Benidorm
• Tagging the Police motorbike :)
• Some scenes from La Nucia, where we rehearsed every day. The beautiful town that I took photos of every day, and having lunch
• New Years Eve. Dinner then dancing in the square (we were live on TV!)
• View of Benidorm beach from the old city, scenes from our nightly haunt "The London Pub"
• The town again, rehearsing with Alina and "in the back of the bus, the back of the bus"
• Coats on the beach in winter.. and travelling in style to the Netherlands
• Our band photo and our "free day" in Drachten ("we're going for a walk, we're going for a walk, to find.. some civilisation")
• We all saw the sunrise in Drachten beacuse we left so bloody early! But it was nice
• In Den Haag - Carla is a monument in our room, the Orchestra plays Bolero at the Kurhaus while a Dervish dancer spins in the corner, Ice skating with Marijana
• We've learned to sleep the second we sit down on transport, hanging out in Berlin for a few hours, back on the road again
• Back in sunny Spain enjoying good food and company, my Spanish family with Benidorm behind them
• Marijana conducting the fountains and people at dinner post our concert in Valencia
• Being crazy after the final concert. Fantastic flutes! Maestro and I, the last night in the London Pub

Elisse is back - has been for almost a week now - which is great. She's not even been too upset about the whole cooking/cleaning/not living in five star hotels thing as well.

But I have some even better news. Evan has been offered a job as Assistant Editor at Mike Reed & Partners Post Production (MRPPP) which I believe is pronounced ‘murp’. So he won't be doing the third year of the Film and Television degree at Swinburne this year after all.

I couple of books arrived from Amazon today, one is the latest edition of the Camel Book, which I've been meaning to get for ages. I've been programming in Perl for years now, but I think I'm still missing some of the fundamentals, and it's a good reference book.

The other book is Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, who's web log I read. In the preface I found my new favourite quote (although I've heard it before):

“...it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics”

I also had cause to create something that could replace my email signature, can you guess what it does?

#!/usr/bin/perl
for(<>){chomp;if(length==10){chop;$o='978'.$_;for($i=0;$i<12;$i++
){$c+=substr($o,$i, 1)*($i%2*2+1);}$o.=(10-$c)%10;print$o."\n";}}

I left the house at around quater to three this afternoon. I returned some time close to half past three, ate some lunch and then sat back down to continue working on the perl module I'm writing. It all worked perfectly before I left, having come back it was all broken, and I haven't changed anything.

Looks like we've got code elves in the house. They go to your terminal while you're away and change bits of your code to break your program. It's very frustrating.

[edit : 46 seconds later]
Actually it was just a small change I made after I returned then forgot about.

I'm very excited about being in the bungalows tonight, back in the icy cold land where they eat white bread with butter and sprinkles for breakfast! Be Organic!

The group is fantastic this time. Everyone is friendly and mad in equal measure, and we´ve had many great hours in the London Bar on London Street (in Benidorm). The barman, from London (Kingston) finds us a constant source of entertainment and is looking forward to our return in a week.

So, adios and watch out for the crazy musical group painting europe red.