My body hates Mondays. Over the weekend I get up at 9am or later. My coffee consumption is also minimal. This morning I was up at the usual 5:30am and was on my 4th cup of coffee before 10am. And we're not talking weak coffee - my cow orkers have been known to pour the pot out if it doesn't meet with their approval for strength. This thunking between the weekend and my weekday routine means that Mondays are sort of a blur for me. Thankfully I seem to fall into more of a rhythm by Tuesday.

(This post is a substitute for any technical content. I'll try to think of some soonish.)

The UK mirror service is great. They run a whole bunch of mirrors that mean I don't have to use transatlantic bandwidth to get stuff. Like, say, the latest Linux kernel. However they have a really annoying way of displaying indexes over HTTP, where they won't put everything on the same page and instead break it up. Which I find really annoying. To the point that I'm favouring www.ie.kernel.org over www.uk.kernel.org when I want to browse for the right file rather than manually typing it in. Is it just me annoyed by this?

I finally found some time over Christmas to solve the onak issue with dynamic backends (#413762). It took a lot longer than it should have to get something new out. And TBH that's pretty much the way onak has been. It gets spurts of development activity when I find some free time, and then nothing happens for months (or years) on end. However, as I've been asked if it's a dead project, it's not. I know that SKS is a perfectly acceptable keyserver and probably the one that's most used out there, but I still have a soft spot for onak and various ideas about things that need done for it. And I'm always happy to receive comments, suggestions or (even better) patches.

The mail client that made me realise there were worse options than Outlook was Notes. The operating system that's making me realise there are worse options than Windows is AIX. What are IBM on?

In particular, please tell me how I can list all the SCSI devices connected to an AIX box, including those that AIX is refusing to talk to. Or, ideally, tell me how to get AIX to bitch about SCSI devices it finds but can't talk to. Solaris manages a useful (if cryptic) error message. Windows manages to have a way to list devices, once you realise it can't cope with luns beyond 254. Linux has the lovely sg interface. AIX just has bloody silence.

Katherine and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary over the weekend. We still don't think marriage has changed us or our relationship that much; having lived together for many years beforehand was really a much bigger step.

A number of fairly major other events have happened to me in the past year, which I don't think either of us could have predicated.

• We moved house to Castlerock. We knew this was likely for Katherine (she spent her first year at UU living in Portstewart and had been looking for somewhere new), but I didn't think I'd be moving back to NI just yet. Unfortunately we're still trying to sell the house in Norwich. :(
• Simon and I sold Black Cat. Really couldn't have predicted that this time last year.
• I got a new job with 3PAR in Belfast. I suppose that relates to the BCN sale, but if you'd asked me last year if I'd be looking for a new job, let alone have one, this year I'd have said no!

All in all I think I'm in a better place than I was last year. 5:30 starts are painful (it's 2 hours door to door with trains at 6am or 8am and nothing in between), but at least I get to come home to Katherine rather than an empty house, and it's nice to be working in an office again rather than on my own. We will eventually get the Castlerock house sorted (there are still lots of things in boxes, the TV isn't even hooked up, the wireless coverage is patchy in the study, the kitchen isn't quite finished yet, the living room is barely started yet, need I go on?). And I'm sure it'll stop raining for at least one day during the year. Please?