Maintaining a ‘little britain’ in the US

So at the start of the year I moved from London over to Boston. In that time I’ve slowly figured out the way of life over here, but of course at the same time I’ve been trying to keep in touch with British culture. So what does my ‘little britain’ consist of…. The first stage is to find a house in a place with a solid English name – in my case Cambridge. Next up is finding a good source of news (ie not Fox) – the excellant BBC news is great for online news, and more recently I got the BBC World Service streaming straight to my SqueezeBox. On that topic, SqueezeBox is setup out of the box to receive 100’s of radio stations from all over the world, so I can still listen to favourites like Virgin Radio – although it tends to lead to timezone confusion – from about 7 in the evening US time, you’re listening to the UK graveyard shift of DJ’s – oh, and you get all the UK advertising still which is a little amuzing. Back to news though – I discovered you can also get a The Guardian Weekly edition delivered anywhere in the world – a high density / condensed round-up of the weeks happenings.

While back in the UK a couple of weeks ago I paid a visit to the Plymouth Gin Distillery which is England’s oldest Gin distiller having been in operation since at least 1793. Even today every Royal Navy ship commissioned is provided with a wooden casket containing two bottles of the special “Navy Strength” (100% proof – 57% by volume) gin – so named because it is the concentration at which gin can be spilt on gunpowder and still be able to ignite the powder. Well you can’t get the navy strength version over here, but a number of liquor stores carry the regular Plymouth Gin. For a summer’s afternoon though, one should really be drinking Pimm’s – the drink of choice at garden parties, or events like Royal Ascot & Wimbledon – its not well known over here, but its surprisingly easily available none the less.

Back to Fedora related news, we’ve been working hard developing the capabilities in libvirt and virt-manager, racing to be ready with a really useful tool for managing Xen VMs in Fedora Core 6. Virt-manager didn’t make it into FC6-test2 (primarily thanks to an inconveniently timed 2-week vacation on my part ;-), but I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to slip it in before test3. Since the 0.1.5 release 2 weeks back, we’ve got the serial console embedded directly in the app, added ability to tune memory allocation & number of CPUs on the fly, and designed & mostly implemented a wizard for creating new VMs (a GUI equivalent of the xenguest-install.py script), so things are looking very promising on the features front.