That blooms into the demon flower.

• You know, I'm thinking diffrentcolours has a point. (courtesy arkady; not work or brainsafe.)

I am appalled that I missed mentioning last Friday's date with Arkady at the Oakdale Arms Beer Festival. By crikey I approve. Also met timeplease and asked how the hell he went from academic geek to publican. It's amazing what beer fandom can achieve. Cheers to hairyears for the considerable *pint*age. Or half-*pint*age — it's a beer festival, after all.

Today I got MediaWiki running at home. And we got Samba working on our FreeBSD boxes. I can now play music on tinny laptop speakers anywhere in the house!

redcountess has been going hog wild on the new Mac. First upgrade purchase will definitely be a new hard drive. A USB 2 card is likely. We don't yet have a shrine to Steve Jobs in the corner, though the stack of Mac stuff is likely to count soon.

One thing we would like geekly advice on is KVM switches. Or VM switches, using the Mac keyboard (USB) on the Mac and the Microsoft Natural keyboard (PS/2) on the PC. Not switching the keyboard, even an old KVM would do if the video quality is good. (As I understand, it's almost entirely down to the video cables, not the switchbox itself.) If anyone has a spare, our zero-budget condition would most welcome it.