After almost whining (I should use LiveJournal) about the lack of some expected people, I thought I’d post something a bit more positive.

Before I go on Tim Dobson (call him “dobby”) would prefer me to distinguish between:

  • ManLUG, that has a an associated mailing list and fairly formal meetings on the third Saturday of the month; and

  • #manlug, which refers to either the group of people, some of whom frequent ManLUG meetings, who hang around in the IRC channel of the same name, the channel itself, or the confusingly named “ManLUG Social” that I prefer to call “#manlug Currybeer”.

#manlug is very much related to ManLUG. The channel originally contained just ManLUG attendees, but we diversified. Some people previously had some involvement with ManLUG or its mailing lists, and stuck around in the IRC channel even after leaving. We’ve occasionally had people from South Cheshire GNU Users, and I’m sure we’ll start to see some more users from the recently started Manchester Free Software group too, as we now also pimp the curry there.

Now, onto curry review…

The turnout was good. Ben Higginbottom now lives out of Manchester, but makes an effort to come along, and it was nice to see Mark Johnson again (I bet he enjoyed the chance to get out too).

Discussion included some BIOS implementation, some other things that I didn’t catch all of, with a brief interlude of Eee PC shiny talk.

We went to Shere Khan for curry. With the reputation of not being as clean as one might wish for a place that serves food from a few years back, and my own not so nice experience of poor quality but expensive food, in my mind, I was hesitant about eating there. It turned out to be not so bad. It has been refurbished not so long ago. While it looks a bit more swish from the outside, the inside looks much as every other restaurant around. The toilets were clean, and there was no sign of any messiness, that I saw, elsewhere.

When seated, a couple of us found that we were also not given too much space between the table and window or banister. The service was ok in general, but not as attentive as they should have been. The music was loud. Apparently we should eat, and not talk. We did ask them to turn the volume down a touch, and they did, but it seemed to gradually increase back beyond the original level later. The food didn’t take too long to arrive, and we all got to tuck in at about the same time.

Poppadoms were first issue as usual. They had some green stuff instead of lime pickle. For starters, I wanted a “chicken tangri”, but they didn’t have any. Ben H had a similar problem with his preferred starter. Instead, I went for “reshmi kebab”, which I quite liked. For my main course I had a “lamb handi”. Also nice.

After curry it was back to Hardy’s for a couple more beers. All in all, a pleasant night.