/var/log/orava

Fortunately I’ve done PC upgrades often enough to expect trouble automatically, so when I upgraded my home computer with a new motherboard, new memory and a new graphics card I wasn’t expecting a smooth ride. The cause for the upgrade was my desire for more gaming graphics power, and since my old mobo had AGP/DDR connections this seemed like a good time to also upgrade to a modern PCIe/DDR2 motherboard. So I did.

Installation went fine mechanically, though my microATX case is a bit cramped. Still, everything fit after some tweaking. When I booted up to Win XP I got what I was halfway expecting: a boot failure, due to the changed chipset etc (boot gets going, then stops and the thing reboots). So I’ll need to try and repair the rig with a Windows XP install disk in repair mode, fair enough – and if all else fails I have backups of the important stuff and can always do a clean reinstall.

Next up, boot to Linux. That failed too, complaining about failure to detect (SATA) disk. After some cursing (I was sure I had remembered to compile in the needed drivers), I discovered that the BIOS defaults to non-native SATA mode for backwards compatibility reasons. Duh. After fixing that, Linux booted fine to text mode. Hooray! X11 didn’t start up, but that was to be expected.

The next day I tried to get X to work, and finally had to revert to the base “vesa” driver – the current incarnation of the Gentoo “ati” and/or “radeonhd” drivers don’t support the 4850HD yet, and the ATI binary drivers aren’t compatible with the recently-released xorg 1.5.0 I’m running. Oh well, at least I get X/KDE via the vesa driver, it’s not like I need accelerated graphics in Linux much anyway right now.

Whle I was doing this the machine froze up a few times, which started to worry me. So I did the first thing I always do when random freezes happen: I fired up memtest86+. Lo and behold, it started showing red “memory fail” results almost at once. I tried with the memory in different slots, and with different memory timings. No go. In the end I had to concude that the memory was just plain bad. That, or there’s some wierd incompatibility with my new motherboard which should support DDR2 800 dual channel according to specs.

…so today it was back to Verkkokauppa. After explaining the situation I got a refund on the memory and grabbed a replacement 2GB from the store – this time “plain basic” DD2 667, in case it’s some motherboard bug with the 800’s or something. Tonight, if I have time, I’ll try things out again.

“If I have time” because my flight to Prague for the VTES EC tournament leaves pretty early tomorrow morning and I still have a ton of prep plus packing to do for that. Looking forward to the trip; I have three more or less tournament-ready decks with me and intend to quickly put together a few more decks for casual play. Never been to Prague before, I’m told it’s a great city though I hear varying opinions about how expensive it is nowadays. I guess it can’t be too bad since I’m coming from Helsinki, one of the most expensive cities in the world at the moment. Hell, even Paris didn’t seem bad in comparison.

I’m not really happy with Gallery. The built-in themes either look crappy or are full of bugs (or both), the permission system is confusing and seems to work in a wonky fashion, and it has way more functionality than I really need or want.

Anyone know of any alternate software for running a web photo gallery? I’m reluctant to try Flickr, for a variety of reasons, I’d rather host photos on my own server. I don’t need much special functionality, just something that looks at least decent and is usable – both of which are quite subjective things, of course.

Maybe I’ll just have to roll my own, if nothing else surfaces. Or play around some more with Gallery, to see if I can get it to act more to my liking.

Ever since we moved to the new house, we’ve had intermittent problems with our ADSL connection. The connection is a “ServerLink” 8/1M connection from Netsonic (includes static IP, the critical component), with the actual connection being provided by Elisa. In the beginning what happened was that every now and then, the line would drop and stay down until the ADSL box was rebooted – really nasty if you’re running a server. We switched the old ADSL box for a Telewell one, and that one is able to recover from the drops; now all that happens is that the line drops every now and then, and then recovers some 30 sec - 1 min later. For a lot of uses this is quite ok, but since it usually kills ssh connections and (most critically :) kills Eve connections, it’s still a headache.

I’ve tried looking over the ADSL connection settings, and while I don’t understand all the switches there everything seems ok. The logs just say “carrier dropped” or something like that. Hmph.

I finally emailed the other people who life at our house company (“taloyhtiö”, whatever that is in English). As a reply I was told that another guy had also had problems a year ago, he had contacted Elisa and had been told that since our switching center is in Hämeenkylä (quite a distance away), they cannot guarantee an error-free 8M transfer rate. They had reduced the max bandwidth for that guy to 3.5M and the problems had gone away. I’ll have to ask Elisa about this, and if the above is still true then do the same for us. We don’t need the max download rate all that often anyway, and we’d much rather have a steady, slower link than a slightly flaky faster one. A bit annoying, in any case – why do they sell an 8M connection to an area they apparently know can’t handle it?

Serves us right, of course, for living in the middle of the forest…

In other news: spent Sunday playing VTES at a friend’s place along with lots of other people, was fun. My Lasombra combat deck sucked on all too many levels, it’s going back into the redesign pile. The Samedi deck is doing ok-ish, but is having flow problems – have some ideas about that. Daughters of Cacophony anarch voter is starting to work nicely, but is suffering from master jam (understandable, since it had a ton of them). Will have to figure out what to cut.

Oh, and I have to note that even though the recent Superbowl left me cold (I’m not much into watching organized sports, and have no idea how football rules even work), I’m finding another sports event very entertaining: the US presidential race. He’s running for the finish line! But no, she has him tackled, there’s only a pile of flailing hands and feet visible! Who’s that mystery man, sprinting past the defense line? And now for a word from our sponsors!

I’m personally rooting for Barack Obama. He’s smart, has lots of views I can agree with (not all, of course), and is an excellent public speaker. For example, check out this speech about religion and atheism (40min video stream). Besides the fact that it takes balls to talk about religion’s role in politics at all in the current climate, the fact that he talks about atheists and evangelists both in a non-confrontational manner (barring some pointed and deserved digs) is a big plus. Something about his measured call for discourse, reason and moderation on all sides strikes a chord with me. As an atheist, this is a sensibly religious person I feel I could have a real talk with. Which is something.

This is all from the sidelines, of course, since I can’t vote in the U.S. elections. To be honest, all three of the current main candidates (Obama, Clinton and McCain) seem to have something to recommend them, none of them feels like an idiot. So for the first time in 8 years, there’s a real chance the U.S. might get a reasonably good president. Whoever that ends up being.

In any case, most of the world is watching.

Haven’t written here for a while… had a nice Christmas & New Years, there was an interesting VTES tournament, lots of stuff to write about.

… but as it happens, I’ll get to that later, due to a weird coincidence. During lunch at work yesterday I was thinking about good programmers, and why they seem to be so rare. Then last night I ran into an article (via Slashdot) on how to recognize a good programmer – and it was spot on, and pretty much mirrored my own thoughts on the subject.

Thing is, most IT companies want to recruit good programmers. Many of them think they have them. In actual fact, what they tend to have is what Daniel in the article calls “career programmers”: the people who do it just as a job. They don’t have any real interest in programming, it’s just something they know well enough to get hired (but often no better than that). These people will never spontaneously teach themselves new tech, most of the time they are blithely unaware of what the “new tech” even is at any given moment. They code with the “least effort required” style; if they can cut+paste existing code that’s always the preferred solution, regardless of suitability. If they are forced to write something from scratch, they will take forever to do it, and produce something that only works with some very loose definition of “works”. They never produce elegant code, in fact they are somewhat confused by the very concept.

There’s nothing wrong, as such, with doing programming as “just another job”, without any real interest in it. It pays the bills, and there’s enough demand for programmers that even mediocre ones tend to find jobs. Problem is, it’s also a trap of sorts: the actually competent people in the company will come to realize that a given person isn’t all that hot, and the management will also probably realize it at some point, just by looking at how much the person actually gets done. This usually results in the person being given the simple, repetitive jobs (routine maintenance, implementing a new slightly different version of something that already exists, that sort of thing). This is natural, since you simply can’t give anything actually complicated to these people; it will either never get done or will be implemented in a way that will need a total rewrite in order to work. So people like this end up painting themselves into a corner, where all they will ever get to do is boring, routine stuff. For some people this is fine, for some it isn’t (and they eventually move to something more suited for them).

Don’t take this as complaining about newbie programmers, it’s not. The critical difference is what’s #1 in the article, too: “passion”. Good programmers are fascinated by the tech they use, and constantly look for new and better ways of doing things. They teach themselves stuff constantly. A good beginning programmer is not a problem, since he’ll be constantly improving himself; you just need to point him in the right direction sometimes. These people ask questions, and ask the right kinds of questions. Career programmers can’t be bothered; if they don’t know something, they expect their employer to get them on a training course (which of course won’t do much to help).

Naturally, things aren’t this black and white. There are good programmers who as totally stuck in a rut, and see everything through a lens of a single technology. There are mediocre programmers who are slowly crawling towards being competent; they might not have the real drive, but they don’t feel like sitting still either. In addition, technical skill is just part of the equation – some good programmers are insufferable prima donnas, some have way too much of a “my way or the highway” attitude, some have a total lack of all social skills… nothing is ever totally cut and dry. I consider myself to be a good programmer, but I’ve been known to have some of those faults at times. I’ve gotten better. Mostly.

Anyway, the truth of the matter is that good programmers are very hard to recruit. They are rare, they tend to already have jobs they are happy with, and they tend to be picky about recruitment terms. They also tend to be somewhat tricky to keep, since they usually want to work on cool stuff. And let’s be honest here, 95% of all IT business is anything but. Every single company pretends they have revolutionary new ideas and highly valuable proprietary information, but in reality their “valuable IP” can usually be written on the back on a napkin, with large font. Sure, some companies actually are creating interesting new stuff, but most aren’t. So, it’s a challenge to find something that’s interesting enough to keep your good people… interested.

The classic “Mythical Man Month” remarked that good programmers can be multiple times more productive than mediocre ones. That’s still true… but it’s not quite that simple. Good programmers (and, I suppose, all real professionals) are very productive when they are doing something they find interesting and/or challenging. Give them routine work, and chances are they they won’t be all they productive – they’ll be bored out of their minds, and thinking about other stuff.

So… I guess it boils down to “good people are hard to find”. Nothing new there. It was just funny reading that article, having thought about the subject just previously. Another facet was reading Zed’s infamous rant some days ago; though it’s a bit of a stupid and misguided rant, the part which struck true was the complaint that some consulting companies provide people who are… not very good in reality, and charge a silly price for it. At worst, I’ve seen and heard of cases where the management refuses to provide decent workstations or software for their own people, and is stupidly tight with money in all respects… but then some crisis or another crops up, and suddenly it’s ok to hire a consulting company for huge amounts of cash. The saddest thing here is that more often than not, the consultants will totally fuck everything up. Mediocre people working for a project they have no real interest in, for a limited time – it would be a surprise to see anything actually good come out of that. At best, you get a pile of “more or less works” code that’s a nightmare to maintain. And who does the maintenance? That’s right, the in-house folks.

I could comment more here on Zed’s Rails rant, but I’ll mostly pass – this has turned out long enough as is. What I will say is that I agree with Daniel’s reaction. Rails is a smart framework, and lots of smart people like it. Lots of smart people also hate it, and lots of dim people also seem to like it, perhaps thinking it’s the Visual Basic of the web world and that it will let them design web apps without understanding the technology. It isn’t and it won’t.

In case you are wondering, this post isn’t aimed at any particular company or person. It’s just a commentary of what I’ve seen, over decades in the business.

I love programming and IT, still. I’m glad to be doing it, and getting paid to do it. But oh boy, the idiocy I’ve seen at times…

I haven’t read all that much fiction lately; I’m a fairly slow reader compared to some, and I’ve also read a lot of roleplaying sourcebooks which further cut down on fiction. Anyway, the Akateeminen bookstore had (and maybe still has?) a 20% sale on all paperbacks, prompting me to pay them a visit and grab few – well, 8 or so – books that had been on my “should buy” list.

Last night I finished the first of those, Alastair Reynold’s Pushing Ice. Quite a ride. As one SF Site review says:

Alastair Reynolds’s novels are reliably fascinating at the “big idea” level. He’s got a truly first rate hard-SF imagination, and the chops to take cool ideas and reveal them via action plots, often hiding the really neat ideas convincingly until the end. He is a “light speed limit” author, and fascinated with Deep Time. And all this describes Pushing Ice quite excellently.

Quite. It starts off fairly low-key and low-tech, for a Reynolds book: in the year 2057, Janus – one of Saturn’s moons – suddenly starts behaving in a decidedly un-moonlike manner and accelerates towards Spica. The ice miner ship Rockhopper is the only ship in position to rendezvous, and despite some crew misgivings is diverted to investigate. Needless to say, things get dangerous and weird at a very fast pace, and without spoiling things I’ll just note that there are quite a few surprising plot turns along the way.

Central to the story is also the relation between captain Bella Lind and her friend, engineer Svetlana Borghesian. It’s perhaps not totally believable all the time and gets a little too long-term bitchy, but it still grounds all the ultra-tech in a human foundation. As always, Reynolds’ characters are not quite 3d enough, but it’s not bad – he’s a lot better at characterization than many other hard-sf writers are.

While I’ve always liked Reynolds (his debut Revelation Space kicked serious ass), this is maybe the most intresting thing I’ve read from him in a while; Century Rain, which I’ve also heard good things about, is still in the reading list pile. Sense of wonder, twists you don’t see coming, and enough action to keep things moving: what else can you ask of a summer book?

On to something else: I’ve always said that Nokia’s mobile phone UIs suck. I still hold by that claim, they suck mightily. Anyone who works at Nokia and has anything to do with UI design: game over, you’ve failed, sorry no bonus. Try sheepherding, it’s much more relaxing and people will hate you less.

The newer Symbian phones are actually more difficult to use than my ancient 7110 – and that’s no mean feat. My current theory is that the Nokia UI R&D department is actually manned by aliens who have no idea how actual humans think or work, but are trying to figure it out with fiendish experiments in UI design. That, or it’s drunk gerbils. Not sure.

Anyway… my “personal work phone”, a Nokia 6630, suffered a hardware breakdown during the weekend; the screen just started blinking and became unreadable. Luckily there’s still warranty left, so I took it to a shop and they sent it off for repairs, “it’ll take 2-3 weeks” I’m told. So we scrounged around at work for some phone I could use in the interim, and found an older Siemens phone. Mistake.

Now, as I’ve said, Nokia sucks in the UI department. But compared to the Siemens, it’s like sweet nectar from heaven. That thing is totally fucking awful, there is no logic to any part of it. Buttons change semantic meaning totally at random, the menus are confusing (if you can even find them), and to top it off, the damn thing just froze when someone tried to call it earlier, total software crash. It’s so bad that at the moment I’m charging the batteries on my ancient 7110 (yes, the “Matrix phone”, and yes, mine still works). I’d much rather use that stone-age piece of tech than suffer one more day with the craptastic Siemens.

Sigh. Why can’t we get a nice mobile phone that has both a good UI and reasonable technical specs? Don’t mention the iPhone, please, since in order for the iPhone to be even worth mentioning here in Finland it would need:

• 3G
• MMS
• lack of lock-in to a single provider
• reasonable price (300-400e max)

At the moment it looks like the iPhone will be a fancy dud, at least here in Europe where expectations of what a mobile phone needs to do are considerably higher than in the U.S. Pay 600-700e for a provider-locked phone without reasonable modern network support? What sort of idiot, other than the random Apple fanboy, would do that?

So the wait continues.

Phew, we spent a staggering 11 or so hours cleaning up the old place. It’s amazing how much work there is in really cleaning a (fairly) big house, especially since removing all the furniture exposes all those places where our normal not-that-great cleaning has never reached. I’m sure that civilizations have risen and died in those piles of dust…

Anyway, that job is done, and a big thank you to the people who were over to help. The house now contains just this server, which will move sometime Thursday.

So note: this site, along with swordschool.com (on the same server) will go offline sometime this Thursday, probably in the evening. The Elisa guys have said that they will activate the new connection at the new place on Friday, but it’s anyone’s guess whether or not that will happen on schedule – in addition to which, Janka & I are heading off to the wild North for some snowboarding on Friday, so it will probably be up to our housemates to set up the network. That, also, may or may not work.

So be prepared for this server to be offline from this Thursday until next Tuesday/Wednesday. The break might be (much) shorter, but I can’t guarantee anything on that count. It might also be longer, if the bits refuse to move along the tubes that the Internet is made of.

In other words: until next Wednesday or so, text messages etc of “hey, orava.org/swordschool.com is down!” will be met with a resounding silence – partly because the answer would just be “no shit, Sherlock” and partly because we hope to be gliding/bouncing down sunny slopes on snowboards and other implements of destruction, ignoring stuff like that.

While cleaning, we moved the server downstairs, and it’s now been having network problems on and off. Today I replaces the ADSL cable and the network cable into new store-bought ones, it might have “just” been a cable problem. No idea what the real cause is/was, to tell the truth, could be anything.

Easter is approaching and so is the traditional Easter Egg VTES Tournament. It’s not really a tournament, but there are easter eggs involved. Here’s how it works: we gather in a suitable place (pub, usually), and everyone brings VTES decks and lots of chocolate easter eggs. We play normally, except that the old Jyhad ante rules are in effect; chocolate eggs are used as ante. Yes, you can use the ante-increasing votes to push the amount of eggs up :). When you oust someone, you get their chocolate. Wheee!

The year we’ll again be congregating at Punavuoren Ahven, sometime around 12:00 - 14:00. The place opens at noon, and I have the cabinet reserved from 14:00 onwards (though it will no doubt be empty before that). I’ll be there by 14:00 latest, probably a bit earlier. Everyone welcome, just grab a deck or two and a pile of easter eggs.

In other news, moving frenzy has taken over our house, there are boxes scattered around the ground floor hallway and we’ve already moved a pile of books (and a wooden giraffe!) to the new home. The moving day “proper” is Sunday the 15th, by then we’ll have everything packed up ready to move and rent a big van. Tons of stuff on the todo list, trying to work through them one at a time.

I’m trying to move a few boxes of stuff every day now, every little helps in reducing the amount of work needed on the 15th.

Seems our network will move almost 2 weeks after we do, on the 27th. That means almost 2 weeks without home Internet access – looks like an emergency. We’ll have to (gasp) read, watch DVDs, play single-player games, talk, and do all those things people did in the Dark Ages (sans the witch-burning). Much chaos and hand-waving predicted.

As a result of the server move, this site (and swordschool.com) will be offline for at least a day (26th-27th), possibly quite a bit longer; Janka and I are going to Ruka for Vappu and if the server hookup isn’t done quite early on the 27th, it will have to wait until we get back on the 2nd of May. It may be that one of the housemates can hook things up, but I would not bank money on that.

Just to remind people: the Sword of Caine prerelease is approaching fast, be there this Saturday (17.3.) at 10am or miss out. An entry fee of 20e gets you 12 boosters (6 x SoC, 6 x 3rd ed), the tournament deck will be build (only) from these cards. Three rounds, no finals. More info on the VTES page.

Should be a fun event, the new cards look pretty cool. More power for the Black Hand… what’s not to like? There are also a couple of cards in there with interesting mechanics, they let you ambush vampires who hunt without it being an action, and do damage to vampires who have previously cast a lot of votes. Hunting with massive stealth is no longer all that safe (or even a way to cycle stealth), and the old Awe + Voter Cap combo just got a small bit riskier. We’ll see if these have any effect on the metagame.

Lots of stuff happening around here. Yesterday I spent 6 hours doing rapier, and then joined the others to check out a house that’s on sale (yes, we’re shopping for a house). Didn’t like the house, but did leave an offer for another one that we did like, now we’re waiting to see how the seller reacts. A bit scary, but fun. No details here yet, sorry, I’ll post links if and only if the deal finalizes :).

In other news, a bunch of games coming up. Tomorrow we’re (finally) playing a bit of Exalted, then on Sunday I’m running the Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37 scenario for a bunch of friends (cabbage soup and vodka optional), and next week’s Thursday is again allocated for Exalted.

Oh, and I have a new computer – or to be more precise, a new combination of new and old parts. Working very well except for some memory issues, I’m getting some faster memory today which should fix things. More on this later, when everything is running smoothly (one hopes).

Hmph, my decision to minimize spending so I could zero my Visa debt at some point is off to a rocky start. First in the line of “give me money!” events is my dentist – a recent chipped tooth prompted me to finally go to a checkup after lots of procrastination. Result: two new fillings and some cleanup work, and a hefty dental bill. It’s a private clinic, very nice but costly even though Kela does pay a part of that bill back later.

By the way, starting the day with a visit to the dentist isn’t that bad. Usually, the rest of the day seems quite rosy in comparison.

Next up in the cash sink department is my (home) computer. It’s been getting steadily worse, and all signs point to a motherboard error; “something somewhere has broken down”. Now, it’s an old mobo and processor and has been my performance bottleneck for quite a while now. On the other hand, I had hoped to limp along with it for a while yet, that’s why I recently upgraded my graphics card to a modern card with an AGP connector… and now a card with a PCI-e connector would be much easier to fit in. Oh well.

I looked over my options, and with some help from Jari found a set of components that should upgrade my computer to something relatively modern: a nice backward-compatible ASRock microATX mobo, E6400 Core 2 Duo processor, Antec HTPC microATX case, Zalman cpu fan, Seagate 320g SATA drive, and some cabling and replacement 120mm fans for the case. The cost wasn’t bad, 540e for the whole pile, and the result should be a nice, fast computer with a small(ish) form factor and low heat. The new mobo can use my (old) DDR400 memory, so no need to upgrade those. Being able to throw away the broken old mobo, Atlon XP and crappy ATA drives will be nice. Well, maybe not literally “throw away” except for the mobo, but still.

Like the dentist thing, this isn’t really an optional purchase, having a working computer at home is pretty much a must for me and this was the close to the cheapest compromise I could think of. Sure, I could have shaved some more euros here and there, but it didn’t seem worth it. On the plus side, maybe now my graphics card can perform like it’s supposed to, the old processor was a big bottleneck for a lot of stuff. We’ll see. right now the critical thing is getting a computer that works and is stable. Performance is just a nice extra.

I’ll have to struggle along with the old computer for at least a week, still, some of the components will take Verkkokauppa a bit of time to get.

… and of course, just when I decided to cut down on purchases, Amazon and Chaosium both decided to deliver piles of books I had ordered quite some time ago and almost forgotten about. Oh well, they are already paid for, can’t complain. More stuff on the (rpg) reading pile:

• Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37: a Chaosium monograph detailing a Cthulhu scenario set in Stalin’s USSR. Read this over the weekend and liked it, seems like a fun (and grim) oneshot scenario to run for a bunch of comrades. Vodka optional.

• End Time: another monograph, this one about a future where the stars have become (almost) “right” and the Old Ones have done their thing. The last remnants of humanity huddle on Mars, and things are generally not going well. This isn’t a “ready” product, it’s a snapshot of the things that got written for a discontinued Pagan book. Some interesting ideas here, though it’s a jumble and typoes and other mistakes abound. Could be used as the framework for a “Cthulhu on Mars” game.

• The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep: a hardcover reprint of the old classic campaign. Haven’t read this yet, but it’s supposed to be pretty good. Too bad I missed out on the reprint of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, there’s supposed to be another reprint on the way but we’ll see…

• Compass of Celestial Directions I: The Blessed Isle: the only 2nd ed Exalted sourcebook I was missing. So far, all the 2nd ed books have been really good. Overall, the are much better organized and written more clearly than the 1st ed books. The first edition does win out on flavor, sometimes, so I’ve also read most of those just for the “fluff”, even the ones that have been superceded by the new books. Read Aspect Book: Fire over the weekend and it proved to be yet another good read. Some people hate the caste/aspect books because they are “only” tales told from the perspective of 5 different characters, with minimal “crunch”. I like them for precisely that reason, I find they make the world come alive much better than pages of dry explanation text. Then again, I’m one of those people who actually enjoys gaming fiction, so take this with a grain of salt (or two). YMMV.

• Pandora’s Book and Strange Alchemies: the two continuation books for Promethean. The core book made such a positive impression on me that I want to read more. Interesting game, if quite strange in several ways.

So… maybe now I get back to “spend less money”. One can always hope.

…sortof.

Back at work, feeling mostly ok bar the runny nose and a small cough. Someone reorganized some of the cubicle walls and shelves while I was away, and somehow the tiny change has made this small office much nicer and more full of light. Me likes. That and the nice weather outside combine to make me feel pretty positive this morning (despite that damn runny nose).

Didn’t get much constructive done on Sunday and Monday, but did manage to read a bit (the new Exalted sourcebook White and Black Treatise was surprisingly good) and watched a ton of TV stuff that had been piling up on my hard drive. Dexter, recommended to me by many people, was very good – I wasn’t totally sold initially, but it grabbed me quite fast. Haven’t read the books it’s based on (Darkly Dreaming Dexter and others), but the character of Dexter, portrayed brilliantly by Michael C. Hall from Six Feet Under, is what drives the show: a forensics analyst who is also a serial killer. And he’s the good guy here. Pretty twisted, lots of dark humor, and an interesting plot… recommended. Not for the squeamish, though.

Besides Dexter, I watched the latest episodes of Heroes, Veronica Mars, 24, Desperate Housewives, Supernatural and others. All good stuff, and just the kind of light entertainment you need when you’re home sick.

On a less positive note, my computer has been acting up lately. For a while now it has refused to shut down properly (I have to use the hard power switch at the back) – that one I attribute to the new DVD drive, I think my BIOS doesn’t like it for some reason. On Sunday, however, the whole USB interface started acting up and my mouse and keyboard started either locking up or rebooting at random intervals. This happened on both Windows and Linux, and seemed to be related to heat and CPU activity, the machine had been on for quite a long time at that point. Playing EVE was quite impossible, after about 5 minutes the mouse would always lock up. Hmph. The whole thing *is* old by current standards, could very well be that I’d need to replace my motherboard and CPU with something less antique. The bad thing is that I would also need to replace my hard drive, memory and probably some other stuff too… we’ll see.