Long-due update

So... I'm cooking dinner and following the German elections coverage.

Unfortunately we (my parents and I) missed the deadline for registration to vote (by post, since we're abroad anyway)... very annoyed at that since it looks to be a *very* close election. And a very strange one. There doesn't seem to be any hope of not getting a conservative-led government, which in my world is generally the worst possible outcome. But hell, the conservatives sure tried to prevent that. I've never seen such a concerted and very nearly successful effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory... either way, with the current estimates, it seems there's no way for a majority government to form. Most possible coalitions have already been declared impossible by the parties involved (Socialist-Labour-Green, Labour-Green-Liberal, Labour-Conservative, etc.). However, since neither of the coalitions that the parties *would* agree to (Red(Labour)-Green or Conservative-Liberal) are going to reach a majority, almost the only possibility is the so-called Great Coalition, i.e. Conservative-Labour, which neither party actually wants.

But honestly, looking at the advantage they had when the election was called (an exceptional enough event, it's only been three years since the last one), it's absolutely amazing how much ground the conservatives have managed to lose in this campaign.

In other news, my HTPC/video recorder project has actually made some progress. I couldn't get Linux to do much, so my current prototype setup is Windows XP and MediaPortal. I've had to buy a new TV card, a Hauppauge PVR-150, since MediaPortal much prefers working with hardware MPEG encoders rather than having to do its own encoding (and the new card came with a remote, which is mandatory..). I'll tentatively state that this combination is working now, the MediaPortal interface is very nice, but the system isn't as responsive as I'd like and seems occasionally unstable. I hope I'll be able to resolve at least some of this, though I don't really have any illusions that this will be as polished and finished as any ready-built brand-name PVR. It will have a lot more features and flexibility, though, of course.

The start of the academic year in Exeter is already casting its shadows, as our fantastic Students' Guild has AGAIN managed to leave out the OODS freshers' walk from the programme booklet for freshers' week. The last time this happened, only TWO fucking years ago, all of 18 people turned up for that event - and we'd booked two 50-seater coaches. Last year, they managed to print it. Approximately 120 people turned up. So we're working on some last-minute propaganda, which is mostly my job as Publicity Officer. We're also going to insist that the Guild pay for the coaches as a way to compensate us for the income lost due to all the tickets to our walk we probably won't sell. On a related note, I've actually done some work on the OODS website. Please don't hit me for using a tables-based layout... I don't know CSS well enough, so all I've done so far is tweak and update the material left to me by my predecessor (whom I don't want to blame for this either, since she was kinda pressured into taking the position and never had much time to work on it).