I just spent the best part of last week in Wales. My girlfriend's family came over from California to visit, and so we've been travelling around visiting various places. I reckon we must have notched up about 1000 miles (including the two trips to Heathrow) in our whistle-stop tour of the Midlands and North Wales.

The weather in Wales particularly was amazing. We took a walk up around Cwm Idwal on Thursday and I got this shot, with which I'm really rather pleased.

My parents have also had the builders in this week on their house, and some major structural work is going on (pics to follow).

Well, summer appears to be almost upon us and I'm planning on getting out and about in the countryside with my camera over the next few weeks.. so expect more!

As previously advertised, we went of to Wales again this weekend, to get in some more serious walking.

We camped down at Llyn Gwynant, at the foot of Snowdon, but on Saturday took the long walk from Ogwen Cottage up and over Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach. I have only done that particular walk once before, a good few years ago, and attempting it again certainly made me feel a bit older! Still, we managed it and felt pretty pleased with ourselves (if a little tired) by the end of the 6 and a half hours.

The photos from the weekend are up on Flickr, and I've also added a new section of this site with more details of this and future walks. Click here to take a look.

The weather was also wonderful once more, and that made the camping great fun. I got to try out my new Trangia 27-8 stove, which is a fantastic little meths-burning lightweight piece of equipment. Mmmm... fried egg sandwich anyone?

At last, I've had an offer accepted on a really nice house. Assuming all goes to plan, I'll soon be the owner of a nice two bedroomed Edwardian terraced house in Stirchley.

I'm really quite excited, as I've been renting for around 18 months in Birmingham, since selling my place up in Yorkshire, going off travelling, and settling back here in Brum to go back to university. Anyway, I decided to do a little research online into Stirchley - to see if there were any local websites or any blogs or other webby things. It seems that there's not much. BirminghamUK.com has a page about Stirchley, with a picture of one of its many many Indian restaurants. There are in fact two such establishments within about one minute's walk of my potential new house... yum.

A rather odd thing which did turn up on my ask.com search (I was actually quite taken in by their marketing strategy of asking why most people rely on just one search engine, when they wouldn't rely on (say) one source for their news, or research), was this site offering a method by which people in Stirchley could get in touch with "Orientals and East Europeans" for dates. One of the charming adverts posted on the page reads:

"Ive been told by many people that I'm very easy to get along with, are a very good listener. I'm very clean as well as Drug Disease-free. I'm docile, physically affectionate (as well as emotionally), caring, passionate, sensitive, intelligent."

"Docile", "drug and disease free"? Well, you've got to aim high, I suppose...

Another site which I quite like about this city is BirminghamItsNotShit.co.uk. This site very aptly advocates Birmingham as a fun and happening place, in just the way that Brummies would. It's genius. You can even buy from a vast range of BirminghamItsNotShit goodies, such as t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets and the like. Brilliant. I've also noticed that this very blog of mine has found its way onto the list of Birmingham-based blogs headed by the title "Brum Blogs - they're alright". Thanks for the link guys!

Oh, and talking about links to my blog, I'm also now on the Birmingham Linux User Group's Planet, an aggregator for the blogs of some of the group's members.

Right... I'd better do some work... will write more about the house as the situation unfolds.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've made the switch over from using Gentoo to Kubuntu, the KDE offering from the Ubuntu Project. Firstly, I installed it on my desktop machine at home (which I don't really rely on) and then on my laptop, which I use for my work. I have to say, that I'm impressed. For a committed GNU/Linux user like myself, choice of distribution is one of the most key decisions to be made.

Although I've been using GNU/Linux since I first started at university back in 1998, ever since I wrote this blog post last June, it's been my only installed system. I've tried quite a few distros over the years, having mainly used SuSE (it had a small 'u' back then), but have been really quite disappointed with the direction it's new owner Novell is taking. Ever since then, I've been using Gentoo.

Gentoo really is a good distribution, I think. It is unashamedly technical, and the documentation can be a bit tough at times, though I've always appreciated the fact that it doesn't hide "what's under the hood". Pretty much everything on a Gentoo system is set up by the user during the installation, which compiles everything from source, tuned to your hardware and preferences. This can obviously take quite a long time, but I'd always believed that it's worth it for the extra control. The result for someone with a bit of technical knowledge (or a willingness to learn) and a bit of time, is very satisfying.

Kubuntu, on the other hand, is quite the antithesis of Gentoo. It hides pretty much all the aspects of the install, and I didn't even know what software was installed until I had a look through the package manifest in Adept (a graphical front-end to APT). Although this approach appears to be what most people prefer, it feels a little weird to me to have handed control of the system over to an automated process. I wrote in a comment back in June about the potential implications of not getting the balance right between so-called "user friendliness" and an understanding of how a computer can work for you. Are the Ubuntu folks going to far?

Well, to date there's very little I haven't been able to do with my Kubuntu system that I could with Gentoo, and a lot more that I can (without the endless fiddling, at least). I'm still trying to figure out exactly where I need to set certain environment variables (there will inevitably be differences in the set-up, which I will learn), but I'm optimistic about my switch.

So, why did I leave the Gentoo world behind? Well, the primary reason in fact was far from technical. I have been really quite put off by the various goings on in the Gentoo community. I've been a lurker on the Gentoo-dev mailing list for a while, and there is very little respect amongst the volunteers on there. Take a look at pretty much any thread between February and April of this year to see the flame wars, bans, threats, insults, resignations, pleas and self-important ego-boosting to see just what I mean. Gentoo is a great system, but a few of the people who ended up in control are managing to wreck both software and reputation fast. Of the rest, it seems that some are fighting to keep the thing afloat, while others are just leaving.

Conversely, my interactions with the Ubuntu community to date (though limited) have been very friendly indeed, even if many of the folks are a little less technical. And that is by no means a criticism - it's genuinely nice to see GNU/Linux communities which are not just made up of hackers.

The Ubuntu Project is also a little closer to my own ethical beliefs about software. Gentoo to me always had a technical focus, wheras Ubuntu (like Debian) is more about software freedom. I'm really pleased to see such a quality and easy-to-use distribution having such strong ethical roots. It could quite easily have not been this way, and we could potentially have another kind of beast on our hands.

So, congratulations to the community on their release of *buntu 7.04, the Feisty Fawn.

About six months ago I joined what is commonly known as a "box scheme". Abel & Cole deliver a box full of seasonal organic vegetables direct to my front door every Tuesday for just £11 a week. It's easy and the veggies taste so much better than the stuff you get in a supermarket.

Since we get whatever is in season, I'm never really sure what's going to arrive until it does. But, I haven't been disappointed yet, and quite often I'll get some foodstuff which I've never even seen before, let alone tasted or would have thought to buy.

This week was my first experience with globe artichokes... I had no idea how to cook or eat them. Luckily, Abel & Cole's website has a recipe section and my girlfriend has also had some experience with the rather complicated method of stripping the leaves with your bottom teeth in order to get to the flesh. Tricky, they are, but tasty too and well worth the extra effort.

In fact, I've upped my order to the next box size up as of next week, as I'm getting through them well before the week's ended. So, if you're interested, then take a look at their website... oh and if you do sign up, mention my name as I'll get a free bottle of wine for the recommendation!