Day 4 of jury service. I was picked for a jury yesterday, which we completed within the day. It was a very short trial, although obviously I'm not going to go into any more detail.

I'm waiting now in the assembly area - basically a holding area for jurors waiting to be chosen for a trial, or waiting for their trial to start. As someone mentioned the other day, it's a bit like sitting in a airport lounge waiting for a delayed flight.

The trial itself was remarkably like what is usually shown on television. It particularly put me in mind of the court scenes shown in 'Judge John Deed' - the judge occasionally directing the lawyers, and asking questions of the witnesses when he wanted to; the harsh cross-examination of the defendant by the prosecution lawyer. The bit that was truly novel was that not normally portrayed in such dramas - discussion in the jury room, which clearly I can't go into any further. Suffice to say that I really felt the responsibility of making what was clearly going to be a life changing decision for the defendant. I was a little shocked by how some didn't seem to feel that responsbility. In particular people just desperate for their next cigarette as there was no smoking in the deliberation room. It was also a surprise (although I don't suppose it should have been) to find ourselves locked in with bailiffs standing at the door.

Still, now I'm sat in the assembly area again waiting to see whether I'll be picked for another trial, and it'll start all over again.

My summer holiday is now over, and I've just started my first week of jury service. Now, obviously I'm going to have to be a little careful about what I blog about jury service. So I'll skip over that for the time being and do the summer holiday first.

The holiday was a week away in a cottage half way between Abergavenny and Monmouth. Despite all the rain, we managed glorious sunshine for 3 days, and modestly reasonable weather for the remainder. I'll have to try and work out how to add the coordinates for Google Earth (which is cool - you should try it!) so you can see for yourself. 3 major walks (including our first 'real' hill walking) and 2 smaller ones, plus pony trekking in the Black Mountains.

The list of places we visited is quite long - Puzzlewood, the Blorenge, the sculpture trail in the Forest of Dean, White Castle (which was within walking distance of the cottage), Offa's Dyke Path. We saw a canal lock in operation, got lost up a hill, visited South Wales mining country at Blaenavon (the big pit), and two steam railways. All managed without major rows. It was a fantastic time, and has left us with the urge to go back to this area next year because there was so much we didn't do. Photos will be available next time you visit in the obligatory Harrison family scrap book.

As for jury service. Well so far it mostly involves hanging around in a slightly shabby, crowded, 70's style cafeteria waiting for your name to be called. Nothing controversial to write home about at all.

Upgrading Xorg to 7.2 on FreeBSD 6.2.

I've just successfully followed the instructions in /usr/ports/UPDATING to upgrade my Xorg 6.9 installation to the new modular 7.2 on my main desktop machine (currently running 6.2-RELEASE-p5).

The build went exactly according to the instructions in UPDATING - it just took a looooong time. After the build however I had some problems running the merge script. It barfed on a number of files in /usr/X11R6/ (mostly to do with either gconf or xdm). I moved them to a safe location and re-ran the script which then completed successfully. One of the moved files was Xsetup_0, which removed my xdm configuration. Rather than try to recreate this, I switched to Slim - another login manager available in ports. Prettifies things up a bit, allowing me to run a rather nifty picture of Jupiter from the Nasa site at the login screen, together with anti-aliased fonts.

I also successfully ran the update on my Dell laptop. I initially couldn't get slim working here, it used the wrong resolution. This was because the slim rc script was running before the crontab entry which called 915resolution to hack the video BIOS to allow a resolution of 1280x800

Whilst I'm on the subject of FreeBSD, I've also managed to get HAL working under Xfce 4.4 and Thunar after ignoring it for a long time. Followed some instructions I find on the Thunar documentation pages. In simple terms you need:
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
polkitd_enable="YES"
in rc.conf.
Make sure that Thunar was built with HAL support, and then:
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/thunar-volman && make install clean.

From Thunar you can then fiddle with the settings through Edit->Preferences.

So I now have Thunar auto-mounting my removable media on insertion. Now I need to look at what I can do with my ipod. Ideally I want it to automount and run gtkpod, then on closing gtkpod unmount and use camcontrol to eject it so that I get the "safe to disconnect" message. I think I may be able to do this with sudo and a little bit of scripting. I'll post back when I get it working.

So Blair has finally gone, and Gordon Brown will be his replacement. What to think about this?

Blair has clearly pursued some policies which would have fitted comfortably into Thatcher's agenda, and which I could never have supported. The approach to education is desperately flawed (and aimed at the Daily Mail readers). The NHS has been improved but risks going backwards now. The insanely reactionary criminal justice policies of the last few years (whatever happened to "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"?).

The Iraq war will also forever hang around his neck, no matter what George Bush says in his support. Let's be plain. He lied to the public and to parliament in order to take us into a war without legal sanction, that he personally believed justified. So much for an ethical foreign policy. The death toll since (and I'm thinking Iraqi civilians, not western military personnel) has been such that if he and Bush are not prosecuted for war crimes on leaving office it will make a mockery of having a permanent war crimes tribunal. This is 'justice' determined by the powerful, not by any objective yardstick.

I think his original statement after the local elections, clearly intended to secure his legacy, that he had always done what he thought was right and followed his conscience is fundamentally flawed. I am not convinced that the duty of a leader in a democratic country is to follow what he individually believes to be right, but rather to build consensus and represent.

When I came to reflect on this with Deb, my verdict was that - knowing what I know now - would I vote for Blair again in 1997? Yes. Would I vote for him again in 2001? Probably. Would I have voted for him in 2005? No (and I didn't in reality in 2005 either).

And Gordon is already sounding like an interesting prospect. Most of his statements so far boil down to 'motherhood and apple pie'. Who doesn't want to improve education and the NHS? The devil is in how you go about achieving 'improvement'. I certainly didn't sign up for the way this government has approached education (Jessica has just gone through her year 4 SATS, being hothoused for them by her school who seem purely interested in maintaining their reputation. She got really stressed and upset. She's 8 for heaven's sake! Why is she even sitting tests?).

Final thought. I must say that the grand parade of Blair around the world during his final 6 weeks is really starting to annoy me. It seems to be an exercise in how many world leaders we can get to stand next to Blair and say how wonderful he is. Great for his ego, but I'm not sure that he should have the opportunity to parade his ego in front of us. It seems clear that he was determined not to go in the manner of Thatcher (ie. Ignominiously). Instead we are all expected to fete him out. To pick a phrase I last used 4 years ago "not in my name".

Another day at work. Struggling again to put some kind of EFQM process into action. There are 2 parts to my job. I have a small team to manage, and I have some considerative work looking at budgets. Both are going slowly. The team are very self-contained. Their previous HEO was very hands-off, letting them do what they wanted. I want to be much more involved, and 3 weeks in I'm starting to see the beginnings of friction over this. I've been doing 1-2-1's with them and getting some feedback that they find me a bit intrusive. On the budget side I'm getting busier, but it all still feels a bit like nugatory work, shuffling numbers around for my boss. I'm sticking with it. I went out with some friends from my old job last week, and as they pointed out it's often the case that after promotion the job feels less intense than the work you went through to get the promotion. My ex-Grade 7 was very complimentary about the length of time I'd been working out of grade.

On to the really sad news. Yesterday Rambo the hamster finally died. He was about 3 (which I understand is a good age for a hamster) and had not been well for a while. The day before when we cleaned him out, he was very dopey and tottered around a bit unsteadily without really opening his eyes. Put him back into bed and he just kind of flopped down without moving. He died sometime within the following 24 hours. Alex burst into tears. Jessica was initially fine, then asked when we could get a new on, then burst into tears. She's currently fluctuating between 'can I have a gerbil this time' to being very tearful. He's now safely buried in the back garden, and Deb and I are trying to persuade them that they don't really want another one...

Tired today. Alex decided to get up at 6:15 and go downstairs to watched his recorded Thomas the Tank Engine shows (recorded on our Freeview hard disk recorder from Channel 5). This seems to be code for "I've decided that today is not a school day". The end result was a row as he refused to get dressed - ending up with him biting Deb.

Didn't help that I then sniped at Deb for suggesting that he might get dressed downstairs. Sometimes I can react to changing a routine just as badly as Alex.

So I left for work with him still calming down. I hope Deb managed to get him off to school without too much difficulty.

I've not managed to post this as yet, so it's still currently sitting on my Palm. It was Tuesday when Alex was particularly difficult, and now it's Friday.

Deb's new ipod has now arrived. It's a green new generation 4 gig Nano. She was persuaded after playing around with mine for a bit. We have both begun feeling a bit deprived of music recently. Where we both used to listen to CD's or the radio regularly, the house is usually now silent as Alex won't tolerate music playing in the background.

Right, well blogging with my Palm is working again (I'm writing this in work now!). I now have a choice of blogging applications - Plogit which I've been using for a while, and Vagablog (which was recommended by Blogger's help site). For both, to make them work, I just had to change the server they accessed from www.blogger.com to www2.blogger.com. Strangely enough that made things 'just work'. So now I have a choice of apps for blogging from my Palm.

Been getting involved in another computer game. This one's called OpenTTD and is clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It's a strategy game where you have to build a transport empire. Alex loves it because you can build train and road networks delivering passengers and freight. He thinks it's marvellous. Problem is, it's been taking quite a while to play, and Alex (and me if I'm honest) have been getting a bit obsessed with it. I think it's narking Deb off (understandably). I've got it working on Ubuntu Linux with sound, and FreeBSD without sound (I think it's a problem with playing midi files, but to be honest I'm not that bothered).

Not much done over the weekend. Removed most of a small Eucalyptus tree in the garden which was getting a bit over sized - and found that it has probably damaged the garden wall to the point where it's only the ivy which is holding it up. Ordered a new ipod for Deb, she's been very impressed with my 4gig 2nd generation Nano, so I'm treating her to one to fill with all her 80's rubbish :-). Cooked a nice fish noodle soup on Saturday from the Wagamama cookbook (cod - supposed to be 'sea bass' - marinated in mirin, fish sauce, and soy).

I'm pondering getting more involved in a local autism charity, Merseyside Autistic Children's Society or MACS which, despite the name, is largely Wirral based. Thinking I could some electronic communications stuff with them - run maybe a website and email newsletter etc. This could give reality to my long dormant 'website project'.

And I don't have any particular thougts on the Virginia Tech shootings - other than being amazed that a US pundit thought the problem was that the students hadn't been armed - and that if they had been the problem could have been averted (ie. They would have shot the killer before he killed anyone). To quote a film "Thank you for that fascinating insight into our cultural differences".

Very interesting episode of House the other night. This is a programme Deb and I like quite a bit - Hugh Laurie draws a magnificent character, full of flaws and complexity.

Last night's episode revolved around a child with autism who (it evenually turned out) had acquired a parasite which caused all sorts of symptoms, but very hard to diagnose because they couldn't communicate with the child.

To cut a long story short, it was really encouraging to see a portrayal of life with autism on mainstream tv - without the 'Rain Man' style spin (when I tell people about Alex, I still regularly get asked 'what does he do?). It was just an ordinary life for people coping with autism - rigid schedules, PECS, worry, frustration (one particular scene involved the parents pinning the screaming child down so some tests could be done, which rang a few bells). The unrealistic sudden willingness of the child to attempt to communicate with House only spoiled it a little bit.

Another interesting attempt was the effort to try and portray the world through the eyes of the child - how the world is perceived, with all the over stimulation making it impossible to focus on what someone is asking you to focus on.

All in all, a great effort. Not perfect maybe, but still good to see a (reasonably) realistic portrayal of life with autism.

Grrr...narked off now, because the change to Blogger's API has prevented my old Palm application for blogging from working. I'll have to search around to find one that will work with the new API now...

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More news in work. My role is becoming a little clearer. It will revolve around finance and budgets. So I will have staff responsible for managing various finance related tasks - mostly to do with making payments. I'll hold responsibility for monitoring the budget, and forecasting against staffing. I'd rather have had the other side of my team - which is more to do with monitoring work performance - but I'm sure I can make a go of it. Watch this space. I'm not unhappy, as it allows me to keep my hand in at staff management, whilst also having some analysis work to do. I'll also still be within spitting distance of the local project staff, so we shall see what happens.

Planning a trip to Derby for Easter. Not sure entirely what's there, but hoping we might make it into the Peak District for some walking - assuming the weather's reasonable.

The problem we've been having with the landline has now finally been fixed by BT - so it's possible to call us and make yourself understood without being deafened by the noise on the line. It doesn't knock the broadband connection out either. It's only taken about 4 months to get it sorted, but at least it's done now.

Well, I think that's about it for now. Judo this evening for Jessica - she passed her grading las weekend and is now an Orange belt, so tonight will be her first chance to go wearing her new colour. Alex will probably go shopping with Deb, and I get to cook the tea!