Why do I only seem to blog while on the bus? One of life's great imponderables. I guess it's the only time I really get to myself.

Just started reading "Everyday Life in Byzantium" by Tamara Talbot Rice. Picked up cheaply second hand. Can't find the ISBN so can't update bkkeepr. I'm glad to have left western European medieval history behind for a bit.

Just over a week into summer holidays and the kids are driving Deb crackers Jessica only wants to spend time with her friends (who aren't always available) and Alex just wants to play on computer.

Roll on the weekend.

More pictures of the maize maze.

At the maize maze for Jessica's birthday. A little later than planned, but a good day out in the sunshine.

Currently on my way home from work (another bus journey!). I've been feeling a bit icky, and I've just spoken to my GP. She tells me that I have a viral infection and should go home. What's more, I should isolate myself for a week because of the risk it could be swine flu.

So I'm on my way home, and I guess the swine flu blog starts here (well, not really but you never know...).

Currently sitting in work with a French flag pinned to my desk to celebrate Bastille Day.

We're off line at home again. Something broke at the exchange and we're waiting for BT to send an engineer. Probably won't be fixed until Thursday. Can't make voice calls or get on the 'net.

Life's been too busy to blog much. I'm not reading a lot at the moment. Trying to work on the website I've been plodding through for a while now. Still no where near getting it online.

Work is all project management, which means lots of ups and downs. Don't want to talk about that at the moment.

Feeling quite flat. Need something to energise me.

On the bus home at the moment. Thank goodness it's Friday. Feeling more than a touch groggy after go out for a meal with Deb last night (a night out!) and drinking way too much. Ended up with a row with her parents and them going off in a huff. Hey ho.

Also a bit strung out because Alex is being increasingly difficult in the mornings. He knows he's going to a new school, and is doing one day a week there already. Now he doesn't want to keep going to his old school, and won't get dressed or leave the house.

I suppose this is a good thing in a way - he likes the new school - but life from here to the end of term is going to be tough.

Jessica is going on an adventure sports week away with school next week. No doubt there will be tears to go with the week away from home, but hopefully she'll have a good time.

Gordon Brown continues to limp on. I don't quite know how to feel about this. I agree with the Guardian that it's time for him to go, but it seems clear that he's going to make a fight of it internally - even if he can't seem to manage the same ferocity with the Tories that he does with his own ministers.

I don't actually think the election results were as disastrous as they might have been. Yes, Labour support fell away. But the really interesting point was that the Conservatives didn't pull away. There is still an opening for a Labour leader who can articulate a reforming agenda on the constitution and the economy.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem the Brown is able to do that. And I don't see how they could now easily change leader without the party tearing itself apart and racing into an election.

So it's a slow death under Brown or a short sharp one now under whoever. Which should they choose?

I suppose the only remaining question is whether Brown can limp on until the election, or whether there will now be a steady erosion of authority until he's forced out in 6 months' time. That would surely be the worst outcome

Progress with the Lenovo s10e. I finally bit the bullet and put FreeBSD on it this morning. I couldn't get unetbootin to work at all - it would not boot. So I ended up pulling an external hard drive to bits so that I could hook up an IDE cd drive.

That booted the standard 7.2 release disc 1 ok, and I ran through a normal installation. This model has a normal hard drive, so I didn't need to do anything special for an SSD.

On booting, there are some issues with acpi that I haven't got figured yet. It won't, for instance, power off. It only halts, then needing a button press.

The broadcom wireless chip is not supported. I downloaded the driver from the Lenovo site and extracted it on a Windows machine. I then had to to use icon to convert the inf file from utf to ascii before feeding bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys to ndisgen. This created a kernel module which when loaded created ndis0. This can be treated like a normal wireless device, and I'm now up and running. It seems to need a separate "ifconfig ndis0 up" command after boot to work, so I'll need to work that into a boot script at some point

Back home from the weekend excursion, and back to work.

I'm sitting on the train at the moment on my way back from a meeting in Manchester. It wasn't riveting unfortunately - even though I was chairing it.

Work feels a little steadier this week. There are still some issues, but it doesn't seem as manic as last week.

I have a new toy at home, a Lenovo s10e. It's a netbook, and it's very nice Very nice indeed. I've been struggling with the SuSE Linux it came installed with though. I'd love to put FreeBSD on it, but I'm nervous. Particularly about the wireless card. I'm trying to build up the courage to have a go If I do I'll post my progress here - especially as there doesn't seem to be much info on the web at the moment about running FreeBSD on this machine