Thanks to matt for finding this machine super cheap on eBay and for Simon for hosting my box for the last 5 years.

Currently the machine is in the server room at my office so I'm currently looking for cheap colo in london.

I took the opportunity to reinstall etch as I moved to the new box and also finally ditched me bespoke iptables scripts in favour of shorewall.

On one day I came back from the slopes to find over a foot of snow built up against the front door.

Apart from snow we had an incredible place to stay with such luxuries as our own sauna and hot hub! And a fully stocked liqueur cabinet. Lots of nights playing racing demon and snapscat, including the last night on which I actually managed to win (thanks mostly to Jo going home early).

We stayed on the far side of the Les Gets mountain where we shared a chair lift with a few other chalets. This meant the on powder days (which were every day!) we always got first tracks down the runs that lead to our house. On most days we have first tracks on two different black runs and tree runs for a good hour before most others arrived to destroy our virgin powder. There was also a nice snow park just over the peak towards Les Gets but due to the amount of powder that fell it was only open on one day. This meant I was stuck on small kickers. I'm starting to really nail bigger backside 180s (about time!) but still not consistent 360. Something for Les 2 Alpes in the summer.

Also, the reason this post update is a little late is that superduper.net moved location while I was away and for various reasons was down for almost a week :( Enough for the my mail to start bouncing, so sorry to anyone who got a bounce. Time to re-subscribe to all those debian lists that don't tolerate bounces.

Pyblosxom is written in python, which doesn't guarantee its greatness, but it helps. It also has tons of plugins, some of which are installed here already. Notably the booklist plugin allows people to see what I'm reading, what I've read, and what I thought of each book. It also pulls cover images direct from amazon. Very cool.

So, the upshot is that there should be a lot more postings to this blog coming up. Since the last port was well over a year ago I can't really get any worse at updating it. I'm going to try and blog more about what I'm doing with GNU/linux as well as stuff going on in my life. I'm also planning to turn my hand rolled photo gallery into a pyblosxom plugin.

I spent a bit more time looking at CSS this week and gave the site a little revamp. You may notice some tricks from Paul Sowden, Nicholas Theodorakis and Eric Meyer. The site now uses a little bit of javascript to change CSS styles and store the selection in a cookie. If you have cookies disabled you will always get the default style, sorry.

The photo section has also been improved with lots of whiz-bang stuff. Images will appear to load faster thanks to some javascript preloading. Next feature is to make a javascript slideshow that doesn't need a page reload simply to change the current image.

Outlook users, please let me know how this works out, you shouldn't see any warning messages regarding the certificate anymore.