As the title says, it's my birthday today - 26th to be precise, so I think I'm going to have a bit of a natter today - old folks do that kind of thing ;-)

So far, it's been a bit of a tiring day, I'm on very earlies at work, so have been up since 5:45am. I was however pleasantly surprised this morning when I got in - I had an email telling me I don't have to do any work today, other than that on my shift. I was told I had to go over to our DR site to do some training on one of the new features coming to Solaris 10 - Service Management Fascility (SMF). This was pretty good, and I've got day two of it tomorrow, so no work then either.

This course has loads of useful info about SMF which one can't ignore, but I'll get into that on one of my techie pages where I plan on detailing the info we've got. It's been given to us in a "go and show the world this" format - it's $hit hot and needs to be known. So watch this space.

As for other things today - well, it's dubya's (George Bush) re-inauguration. It's bound to be a cracker - some people are for his re-election, some are not, but the best thing of all he's bound to add another expression to his list of mis-readings. Apparently his speech is going to be 17 minutes long (does the Queen even natter for that long?) and one of the things he'll be saying is "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world"- ummm, what, by using American force to invade any country with tyrannic leaders (read "large oil supplies")? For some reason, I can't see a "war president" doing this very well. Oh well, only time will tell. I may have to eat my words.

Another thing occuring today, which I think is quite cool, is that Ireland are going metric on the roads. Granted, they've had a very strange system for ages where the speeds have all been in miles per hour, whilst the road signs depicting distances have been in kilometres, but it's nice to see something is being done about it. It's also being used as a stealthy way to lower speed limits on small roads.

Coming from South Africa, I just don't do imperial very well. Firstly, I haven't been brought up with it, and secondly, its not very logical. The imperial system doesn't have a common base like decimal does (base 10), so it's hard to work out simple things like how many inches in a foot, feet in a mile, miles in a furlong, furlongs in a who-knows-what or ounces in a pound, pounds in a stone etc. I'm used to telling people I weigh 97kg, but in the UK they look at me blankly and I have try and put that into stone - this involves converting my weight in kgs into pounds (multiply by approx 2.2) and then convert that into stone (divide by 14). What a palaver. I just say it in kgs and smile.

Will the UK every go completely metric, I don't think so, there will be complete outrage if they had to drop the pint (568ml) in favour or half a litre (500ml) in all the pubs, but there again it's a perfect opportunity for the government to add another stealth tax (pay for a pint, get 500ml).

Oh well, I best not get into that now. I'm off out for dinner tonight, so should be nicely stuffed with some georgeous Japanese food - yup, we're going to Wagamama's again.

Well, thats it... now I think I'm getting into this habit of nattering, next I'll be doing things like falling asleep midway through...