As usual, I had all sorts of thoughts over the weekend, but didn't bother to go online to post them. Liz and I saw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Friday night, with an enthusiastic crowd of Potter fanatics. Luckily, none of them were in full wizard or Quidditch costumes. The movie itself is much better than the first one: scarier, funnier, more exciting, better effects, and so on. The Quidditch match was particularly good, and I'm not the first person who thought it reminiscent of the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi. It's a long wait until the next movie comes out, so I'll have to be satisfied in the meantime with LOTR. That's not a bad thing.

I've been getting more and more into this whole Linux thing. I've installed Red Hat Linux 8 on a desktop PC at work and now on my laptop (dual-boot with Windows XP), so I can take it home with me. I've even recompiled the kernel to enable NTFS support, so I can mount the XP partition and access my MP3s and other files in Linux. I wish I had more ways to use Linux, instead of just as a substitute to Windows. It's great, and I enjoy having the chance to "roll my own" programs and setup, but Windows does so much out of the box, while Linux needs to be configured, that it can be a pain sometimes. It's definitely an OS for geeks, even with RH 8's ease of installation and Windows-like interface. At least I'm learning a new skill set that might come in handy someday. If enough of us get behind the idea, we could migrate some of the more exposed web and e-mail servers here at the office to Linux. That would certainly give me a chance to apply what I've learned so far.