I installed Thunderbird last week as a replacement for Outlook Express. The principal reason was security, a secondary reason was to reduce the amount of bloated Micro$oft software on my computer and a third reason was to see if it was a big an improvement on OE as Firefox was on Internet Explorer.

Pros

• Easy to install
• Easy to copy email from OE (and other mail tools)
• Easy to copy server and account settings from OE (and other mail tools)
• Superb junk mail filtering that probably means I can ditch my knowspam account
• Good keyboard navigation and keyboard short cuts (eg, 'n' takes you to the next unread message, 'j' marks an email message as junk)

Cons

• Impossible to copy OE message rules to TB filters.
• TB filters are defined on an email account basis so if I wanted to put all my CSS emails into a single folder for each of my 3 POP accounts I would have to define the same rule/filter 3 times. Under OE I would only have to have done this once.
• Can only define one SMTP server

And today I had a particularly annoying problem. The same newsgroup posting appeared 4 times, I could not mark 2 of these posts as read. Then all the messages from that group were marked as unread. Then TB crashed. This happened several times. In the end I had to unsubsubcribe from the group, subscribe again and mark all the messages as read. A particularly annoying feature is that when you restart TB after a crash it displays by default a feedback form wizard so you can tell the folks who wrote TB about the problem. This is probably a good idea but really irritating when you just want to get back to work. I switched that feature off.
I'll stick with TB for a while longer but at the moment it seems to be a moderate improvement over OE, not a quantum one.

Went to see The Aviator last night. An impressive film alright but didn't really give you too much information about the man himself. A quick look at the Wiki entry for Howard Hughes revealed more that the film left out: 2 marriages, syphillis that may have been the cause of his OCD in later life and so on. But even the Wiki has probably just scratched the surface, the man was obviously very clever but why did he never get his high school diploma?

My new neighbours held a house warming party and invited all their neighbours round as well as their own friends and family. It was the first time that I had spoken to some of my neighbours. The topic turned to Vodka who it seems is well known to them. In one apartment she is known as Mona ("moaner"), in another as Billie (after the singer) and in another as Blaze. She receives food from all of them hence her low-slung belly. Embarrassingly I was asked more than once "is she pregnant?" Later in the evening Vodka joined the paty herself, nonchalantly walking in to an apartment with 50+ people in it and settled herself on the sofa ignoring the loud music but probably quite interested in the chicken drumsticks near by.

The end of January...hooray! Already the days are getting longer.

Prince Andrew, probable son of Queen Elizabeth II and Lord Carnarvon (aka earl of Porchester, aka Henry George Reginald Molyneux Herbert) is in trouble with the National Audit Office over his travelling expenses for last year. The Prince likes to use the RAF as his own personal taxi service rather than more mundane options like train or car.

Yesterday I was reading the paper version of The Independent. I was intrigued by a British experiment of the 1930's where over 150 schools taught pupils outside in all weathers in the belief that "fresh air" would prevent TB. You can read the online version of that article here. Today I had a taste of that myself as I struggled to write Javscript at my laptop while local double glazing company Polarglaze replaced all my windows. In what must be the coldest day of the year so far, snow frequently blew in the house. The new windows are as great as the old ones were bad. The old ones were just 3mm thick in bare aluminium frames and were frequently covered in condensation. The new ones are Pilkington K "bounce the heat back into the room" jobbies in smart white frames.

Apple. Your life in a small plastic case.

Want to know the time and date?

Wanker. Sorry, I mean stupid wanker.

Thatcher pleads guilty. Heh heh. I blame the parents. It's such a shame he plea bargained to just a fine because I like the idea of a Thatcher in jail.

The Chinese State Circus are in town for a few days so, for the 4th time in 10 years, I went to see them. Every time I see them the acts have changed completely (bar one) and every new act is just as amazing and as impressive as the new ones, just thinking them up must be a feat in itself. The only act that they keep is the number-of-people-on-one-bicycle, an act for which they hold the world record (12 if I counted them correctly). My favourite acts of the show were the "balancing chairs" act and the "juggling with urns".

Watched the Marcel Theroux (how many more Theroux's are there?) documentary The End Of the World as We Know It last night. Pretty depressing. Irreversible damage to the planet may be done in as little as 20 years from now (i.e., within our lifetime but longer than the lifetime of most political administrations) due to high carbon emissions and what little we are doing about it is simply too little. Various alternative energy forms (tidal, wind, etc) were looked at and rejected as not being efficient enough as well as having other problems.

James Lovelock, father of the Green Movement and originator of the Gaia Theory proposed that nuclear power is the safest and most effective energy source. Marcel then visited Chernobyl to see what it's like there nearly 20 years after the disaster there. That was pretty harrowing but we were told how the "occasional Chernobyl" would still be less harmful to the planet than our current usage of fossil fuels. I felt encouraged by the return of animals and plant life to an evacuated town near Chernobyl: at least flora and fauna could survive our attempts to break the planet even if we don't.

Whilst "safe" nuclear fuel may be possible it is currently a political kiss of death for any political party. so who will build them? If countries do build new nuclear power plants, how will they dispose of the waste? What happens if the waste gets in the "wrong hands"?

As if this wasn't enough Marcel then flitted over to India to point out that as developing countries like India and China become more affluent and more industrial their energy demands will increase and further add to climate change effects.

Sadly, most people in Britain wanted to complain to the BBC about the screening of Jerry Springer The Opera rather than hassle their MP about saving the planet.

It should be no surprise that Addenbrookes comes near the top of MRSA league tables. I have a friend who works there and is often told to clean a ward to "MRSA standard" by herself despite such a task requiring 3 people. Moving cleaners to different wards on different days (which also happens) suggests that the hospital is short of cleaners, not good. It is also damaging to morale for the cleaners, with the same ward(s) to clean people can take pride in their job and be held responsible for their work. Now Unison has highlighted this problem too saying that the fight against MRSA needs more cleaners.

A superb blog article flaming astrology today by qwghlm. I'd never thought of it as fraud before, I wonder if astrologists can be sued if a horoscope is shown to be false?

There is nothing more depressing than taking down the Christmas tree and decorations. Even more so if, like me, you have had a great Christmas. If you've had a crap one then you can take the decorations down and console yourself with things like "bah, humbug" or "let's get on with the new year". If you've had a good one then you'll just wish it was still going on.
Anyhow, the tree has been taken to the recycling centre and the decorations are in various carrier bags waiting for me to find somewhere to stow them for the year. So long Christmas 2004, you really were a great one.

I attended the Romanian Orthodox Holy Liturgy service today (and part of the Morning Mass too) at St Dunstan-in-the-West church in Fleet St, London. It's very different to a Baptist or Anglican service. The biggest difference perhaps is how traditional or "untopical" it is. Apart from a few brief words at the end about the tsunami it could have been a service held at any time over the last 500 years. At a time when when Anglicans, Catholics, Budhists and Muslims are working together to provide aid and having to deal with the question of "why does God allow such suffering?" The Orthodox Church seems to have side stepped the question altogether and made the comment that "we should help these people even though they are not Christians". I believe there was a collection point in the church for the tsunami although I didn't see it. Having said that it was a lovely church, full of worshippers and the bit where all the babies being spoonfed wine was a cute thing to see.

Left it too late to book something for New Year's Eve but managed to get into Anatolia's which had a very attractive belly dancer dancing around (and on) the tables...I wish I'd taken my camera. Good food too. The only downer was that the place wanted to close before Midnight. Anyhow, it was a good night out and we got home in time to toast in the new year and watch some of the plenty of fireworks at midnight too.

Some random recollections of Christmas 2004...

• Getting all the gift shopping done in good time
• Tesco's not being too crowded on Christmas Eve
• Watching A Christmas Carol
• Decorating a real Christmas tree that doesn't seem to have lost a single needle in over 2 weeks
  
• Getting some lovely presents (and no duff ones!)
• Having the 'fridge so full of food that some food had to be kept in the boot of the car
  
• Cooking my first turkey and it turned out perfectly (thanks to Saint Delia)
• Eating far too much

And of course the Asia Earthquake/Tsunami disaster; watching the initial and hopelessly optimistic death toll estimate of 500 rise to over 120,000 and realising just how minor the emergencies in my last post really are.

1. Yesterday morning I was walking back over Midsummer Common after buying the last present for someone. I started to cross the bridge that leads to Mitcham's Corner when I heard a child scream. The scream was followed by a man shouting. My first instinct was that a child was being shouted at and that I probably didn't want to get get involved. A moment later I saw a woman running away from the child and man and the I assumed that this was a major domestic argument that I definitelly didnt want to be involved in. Another moment later and I saw the still screaming child, his face covered in blood. I ran across the road still trying to process the data of the situation. Man -father- hysterical shouting English and German, trying to comfort the boy. To me: "you have a phone?". Yes, I said as I dialled 999 and handed it to the woman "you talk to them". I found a pack of unopened tissues in my day-sack and passed them to the man who trying -in vain - to stem the blood escaping from the boy's forehead. More people appeared. Everyone offering to help but no one knowing the name of the road that we were on and the Emergency Operator insistent that she needed to know exactly where we were. Someone else had called 999 too and I found myself talking to another Operator on someone else's phone while the boy's mother talked to the first operator on my phone. Oh well, it wouldn't hurt if they sent 2 ambulances would it? Slowly the boy calmed down and his bleeding slowed too. His father calmed down too which was good, his German shouting was annoying me. As well as telling the Father to maintain pressure with the tissues I suggested he do up the boy's coat to help prevent shock which he did. One passer by kept waffling about the risk of infection from the tissues and everyone managed to avoid saying "fuck off mate" to him. Another person said that the ambulance shouldnt take him to Addenbrookes because that was "so far away". Yeah, like 5 miles, 5 miles in an ambulance with flashing lights and a siren. Where else would you take him? An ambulance turned up (very quickly I thought) and I said my goodbyes. A few minutes later I saw another ambulance racing to the scene. Hopefully the boy (4 years old) is fine now. I guess he might have a scar on his forehead but then he'll be like Harry Potter so he'll be cool.

2. Came back from Tesco's this morning doing the last of the food shopping. Couldn't get into my flat, one of the locks on the front door jammed. Had to force open the bathroom window and climb in. Surprisingly difficult: high window, opens from the top only and only a small amount. Also had to avoid all the lotions and potions on the window sill inside. I knocked one which fell into the bath. Did it break? No, but it chipped the enamel of the bath, curses. I ache all over after that. Burglars must be very fit. Door lock has worked perfectly since then. Grrr. Still, at least I didn't have to pay for a locksmith's call out fee.

Both these things (for me anyway) are minor in the Grand Scheme of Things and had (for me anyway) happy endings.

Best Wishes for Christmas.

Ex-policeman jailed for indecency. Towards the end of that article: "Swabs taken from his webcam showed evidence he had been pleasuring himself, the court heard."

Oh how lovely, the Duke of Gloucester, who happens to be President of the Institute of Advanced Motorists is banned from driving for speeding.

OK, so you've nicked 22 million quid. Now comes the hard part: laundering it. Actually I'm glad to see the Police have said that "professional" criminals planned the robbery, I'd hate to think that just anyone could do a robbery like that.

My faithful artificial tree (11 years service) is up in Orkney so we bought a real one for the Cambridge flat. My first real tree since I was a child. Here it is all nicely decorated.

So, Blunkett has resigned. Could this be part of the real reason why? "It's a good day to bury bad legislation".

Quoting liberally from a cam.misc post we can see how Blunkett changed his tune as time went on:

- I had no contact with the IND letter and only checked the application myself. It did not go through my office.

- I brought the application in to the office and got someone to read it to me there (for some reason) but it did not go through my office.

- Someone in my office must have got it and acted on the application anyway (how would they know the link with Blunkett though?). But I had (definite statement) no contact with the IND letter.

- I was always aware of the letter.

And then he starts using the fatal words "I have no recollection..." which is a key phrase to use when you've been caught bang to rights; especially when what he fails to recollect has evidentially been shown to be true.

Over a year ago Vodka knocked a glass of water over my Sony laptop. After a few hours in front of the fire the laptop dried out enough to boot up but the keyboard never worked properly again. Until I got the new Toshiba P-25 earlier this year I struggled to use that Sony with a thumping great USB keyboard. At the time of the accident I was based in Orkney and didn't want to post the laptop to Sony for repair (although under warranty I couldn't really expect them to fix it for gratis) so I just put up with external keyboard. Since returning to England I discovered that Sony no longer supply new keyboards for that model and second hand ones would cost between £50 and £95 +VAT + delivery from companies if and when they became available.

Last Friday I got lucky. I saw a broken model on Ebay. I contacted the seller who sold laptop spares and he offered to sell me a keyboard for £50 inclusive (the one on Ebay had been stripped). It arrived today along with a DVD-R/CD-RW that I bought from him (mine couldn't burn CDs either) and both items were fitted in less than 15 minutes, easy-peasy.

It seems strange to have that laptop working again. But what shall I do with it now? It has been the server for my home network and could remain so although I have an old desktop (purchased in 1998) that would probably do that job as well as another desktop purchased in 2000 that would definitely do that job. Should I use it as a second, smaller laptop or should I just sell it while it has some real value still? Decisions, decisions.

Other recent Ebay purchases include a tiny Belkin wireless mouse for £20 (half the PC-World price) and a Belkin KVM switch. I'm also pursuing some SAAB parts.

It doesn't get much better than this: Kilroy-Silk attacked with slurry.

Here are 2 pictures of a house in Balham. They put up their decorations at the end of October. Charming aren't they? So discrete, so tasteful. I'm also interested in why such a modest house has CCTV and an iron grille in front of the main door.

This is why I am often late meeting deadlines.

I just bought another DVD player (my third since 2000). This one cost a mere £29.99 from Amazon. I've seen some in the stores for less than 20 quid but wanted a multi region model. Can the companies selling the for £20 really make any profit on them. The new player, seems to play anything that you put in it (CDs, MP3, JPEG, etc, etc) and stands just 1.5 inches high. Amazing.

I finally succumbed and bought a TV a couple of weeks ago for the Cambridge apartment. So far, very little on terrestial TV has caught my eye (I tend to use the radio function more) but that Cillit Bang commercial is a bit wierd. Low budget, badly made commercials going out at prime time and what's with the name Cillit Bang anyway? However, someone has made a Cillit Bang FAQ, so now I can stop wondering.

It started to snow yesterday evening, unfortunately it didn't last the night but it was fun while it lasted. My neighbours, who are from South America somewhere seemed to really like it!

Drinking with a mate in my local boozer yesterday evening when a regular propping up the bar suddenly needed some support herself. She collapsed onto the floor and started having a fit. Another customer went to her aid and asked the bar maid to call for medical help. What happened next amzed us.
The barmaid said something along the lines of "no, she'll be alright, this often happens....just put this [damp and dirty] tea towel under her head till she feels better". The poor lady then lay there in front of the main doors while several regulars stood over her - drinking and smoking - discussing her condition. I wonder how I would have reacted if I had walked into the pub at that point and seen this?

A short while later we left and went home for dinner, my friend purchasing a very nice red wine and an even better dessert wine from Bachanalia to accompany our meal. Mmmmm, wine.

Vodka much better today. Wooziness all gone, she removed her bandage herself and I have maanged to get most of today's tablet inside her.

It's great when she does one of her great big 180degree yawns now: just the one fang tooth and her breath is a lot fresher too.

Took Vodka to the local vet last week. I hated doing this in Orkney since it meant a long drive for her and so a lot of earache for me. Now the nearest vet is just 5 minutes drive away. Last week she got her annual jabs and a quick "once over". A consequence of the once over was that she really needed her teeth cleaning which requires a general anasthetic. I took her to the vets for this operation this morning. She wasn't a happy camper, no food for 12 hours and then a drive. Ive also asked for a micro chip to be fitted in case she gets lost in the future.

I was expecting to get a phone call around midday telling that she was fine and could be collected. Instead I got a call at 10am which didn't bode well. Two of her teeth would need to be removed, that broken fang (canine) tooth that always did so much damage to whatever she bit and a molar at the back somewhere. This was to prevent future infections in those teeth. I gave the go ahead and looked forward to a few more hours of peace.

I eventually collected Vodka at 4pm. A very sorry looking cat. Patches of both front paws shaved (one in a bandage) , stitches in the mouth, an incessant mewling sound and a lack of coordination. The nurse looked even worse having had to put up with Vodka for several hours "she doesn't like us at all". I received instructions on looking after Vodka (keep her indoors for the night, take the bandage off tomorrow and give her one of these [bloody big] tablets every day for a week".

Back home Vodka looked even more pitiful and sorry for herself and I regretted taking her to the vet at all, not least because I was over £167 poorer and now had an unhappy cat.

My thanks to Buckingham and Stanley for the superb job they did fitting a new clutch to my car recently. It's just a shame they forgot to tighten up the starter motor which fell out while parked in Tesco Leytonstone car park this evening. My thanks to the AA man who identified the problem:
"It's you starter motor Sir"
"Broken?"
"I couldnt say Sir"
"Oh?"
"Perhaps if I fit it back in place we can tell"
"What?! Is this consistent with having a new clutch fitted?"
"Yes mate"
It's the first time that I've ever called the AA out and they have actually fixed a problem rather than just towing the car somewhere.
Anyhow the car was sorted and I got a nice breakdown report to take to Buckingham and Stanley later this week.

FFS.

US rivals condemn Bin Laden threats. Bush and Kerry condemn the new Bin Laden video. Why doesn't Kerry just ask Bush "why is this man still alive and at liberty?".

Waiter Rant and Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane. I wonder if there is are any British ones?

I was stopped by a nice American lady yesterday who asked me for directions to Kings College because she was having trouble with her tourist map. I looked at the map for about 30seconds before I said "Ma'am, this is a map of London". To be fair, it was open at Kings Cross. Oh how we chortled. I then gave her the necessary directions and off she went.

10.45 am Wednesday. I am driving round Cambridge running some errands before meeting a friend for an afternoon's "refreshment". I decide not to drive along the ringroad because of the traffic and decide to nip 2 junctions down the motorway instead. Before I can get anywhere near the motorway the clutch on the car fails. Completely. I pull over into a convenient layby and try putting the car in gear with the engine off. Fine. Until I start the car. Then the gear is spat back out into neutral. The car is f*cked. I advise my passenger to go get a taxi if she wants to keep her appointment and, seeing my annoyance at the whole situation, she does just that.
I call my garage and ask if they have a recovery vehicle. They don't, "health and safety". I call the AA who surprise me pleasantly by estimating that they will be no more than an hour. I settle down to wait. I curse and think, why did this happen at the worst possible time. Then common sense comes back to me. This is most certainly not the worst possible time. The worst possible time might have been last night driving up the M11 in the dark and rain with a car full of luggage. It might have been in 10 minutes time back on the motorway. It's not even the worst possible place. That would have been on the ringroad or, again, the motorway. I also found the only layby on this stretch of road. I am parked safely without causing any problems to the flow of traffic. And of course, I could be in Iraq.
I also have to concede that the failure of the clutch should not have come as a surprise. It has been giving problems for months and I was just trying to wait to get paid for a project before replacing it.
I call my friend who is also running late and he appreciates the opportunity to catch a later train. I need a car tomorrow and call Budget Car Rental. Despite the name they are pretty good (and budget) and I sort out a car for 2 days. With this car I intend to give a learner driver friend some extra practice behind the wheel - the car will be similar enough to the one that she is learning on - totally against the hire regulations of course but never mind.
Even before the AA man turns up I seem to have got my life sorted after this major disaster. Mr AA turns up ahead of schedule and accepts my word that the clutch is broken. It's nice when people do that rather than saying something like "well let me try it.....ah yes, the clutch is broken". He hooks my car up to his van with a rigid bar and offers me two bits of advice: "dont forget to steer mate and dont get hypnotised by my flashing lights". Good advice in indeed. 15 minutes and an interesting tow later we arrive at the garage. The garage, Buckingham and Stanley, are their usual professional selves and even make me a real cup of coffee when I get there. This is possibly to sweeten the announcement of the £700 repair bill.
A short while later I am in Cambridge centre again. An apologetic gift bought for my passenger, a Big Mac lining my stomach and I am ready for an afternoon's drinking :)

I've been pretty busy with work just lately although I found time to add a PHP driven stylesheet switcher to this site. It's based on something from alistapart.com but with a couple of tweaks. Now all I need are some decent stylesheets to switch in and then I'll have my own CSS Zen Garden!

Gmail recently gave me 6 invites. Halfway through sending them out they gave me 3 more. Does this mean that I am a true geek or are Gmail accounts just so passe now? (It's sad that I'd like it to be the former!).

Blogger has been playing up recently and whilst I have been happy with it overall their recent technical problems have given me the extra incentive to develop my own PHP/MySQL blog. Re-inventing the wheel? Most certainly but it'll be my wheel, mine, mine! More seriously, it will be a useful learning exercise and a good thing to have in a techie portfolio. I'll also be looking forward to writing an HTML parser in perl to convert the old blog into something that can be put into MySQL.

Yay! Scaled Composites wins the X-Prize.

Updated my site template to include a CSS file for print styles. Now it should be possible to print any page and see a version of the web page "sanitised" for paper. Read more...

Last year I visited Romania a couple of weeks after Easter and found that it had only just finished there. They celebrate it at a different date to the west. After speaking with a Romanian priest last night (and then surfing the web) I finally found out why.

The Gregorian calendar (which we use today) was brought in because of a perceived need to reform the method of calculating the dates of Easter, which was then done using the Julian calendar. This was all brought about by Pope Gregory (geddit?) in the 16th Century.
The Eastern Orthodox churches rejected this and carried on calculating the date for Easter using the old method. Now, the Gregorian calendar is the international standard but some of the Orthodox churches still calculate Easter using the Julian calendar. Mystery solved!

I don't often blog The Orcadian and when I do it's only because they've reported something that seems very strange or very dull to the ROTW. Today I'm including an article in the latter category. I have to include it rather than link to it since The Orcadian hasn't yet grasped the concept of storing news items in a database and this article will vanish -or at least be very hard to find in just a few days time. Anyhow here it is:

Stamp of approval from Hoy meeting

A new development group in Hoy hopes to pull the island "up by its boot straps". The public meeting held in North Walls Centre last night, organised by the steering group, which is set to form an association as a limited company, gave a stamp of approval to go ahead to secure the future of both Hoy and Walls. Lindsay Hall, chairman of the group, said: "We are keen that everyone feels fully informed which direction we are going. We want to generate the islands so they continue to thrive through the 21st century."

I may be doing Lindsay (who I know and respect) a dis-service but WTF is this all about? Exactly how does one "generate an island?", why the plural for islands? - they have been the same island for as long as the (natural) causeway has existed. Continue to thrive? I think they have been in a slow state of decline since the Royal Navy said goodbye in 1955. And why oh why when I copy and paste such a seemingly simple looking piece of HTML into my diary do I get 4 validation errors? Invalid characters and a stupid use of a table, how hard can it be to write "proper" HTML?

Bono's speech to the Labour Party conference was the most mature, most intelligent and the most moving speech that I have ever heard by a "rock star". I wish I'd been there.

I would also quite like to have been in the Mojave desert yesterday too to watch Spaceship One's first qualifying flight for the X-Prize. Surely they must now win the prize with their second attempt mext week? I wish I could get more excited about Britain's contender, Starchaser, but, having spoken to a couple of rocket scientists in Cambridge I can't.

Everyone in Cambridge knows that NTL suck and most people who have used one of services at one time have their own "NTL story" in the same way that our grandparents had their own "blitz story". Now it seems that NTL have started to be more honest about themselves on one of their customer srvice lines. :)

The news we (Celtel shareholders) have all been waiting for:

The Telegraph: Celtel prepares for £1bn float

The Sunday Times: Out of Africa ... the £1.1bn London mobile telecom float

The Independent: African phone group readies £1.1bn float

Update: I have added a Celtel page for all future Celtel news.

I did a little work on my site to make it more accessible. 2 hours work and I achieved AA level (all priority 1 and 2 checkpoints satisfied) accessibility against the WCAG 1.0 using the automatic checker at the Cynthia Says Portal, maybe even AAA (I got 2 warnings but no failures at priority 3). Obviously automatic checkers for accessibility have to be taken with a pinch of salt but it's very encouraging. I'll write more about this elsewhere.

I managed to attend 2 (well 1.5) of the Just 10 gigs. I was very impressed with the presentations of J. John.

Today's really useful (and free) bit of software is wget, which has enabled me to mirror a site without having to write a line of perl code.

This is choice.

I've been working with Javascript for a couple of weeks now. An e-commerce site that I'm working on has to be available in 2 forms:

• a web based system built on a CMS (dynamic pages created from a database)
• a CD based (offline) version used on laptops by the client's sales reps

As much as I tend to dislike Javascript[1], it is the simplest solution (installing a webserver on the laptops is the other solution) and so I've been building a Javascript shopping basket and search engine for the offline version of the site. Clearly there was no point in reinventing the wheel and I googled around for examples of each on the web.

I'm amazed at the crap software that people put on websites for others to download. An early rejected shopping basket was the one supplied by Whorl called JShop. This is the free version of the "professional" product. A common bug in shopping carts is that they often allow you to enter a negative quantity of an item. A good cart either rejects it or doesn't allow it in the first place. A bad one allows negative input and then this leads to negative prices and the totals get screwed up. JShop goes a step further, not only does it allow negative quantities but, as well as a negative price, negative shipping! In effect they pay you to buy the item or, you become the supplier perhaps. The HTML supplied was pretty dire too. To be fair, I was looking at V2.1 which, although the latest version, was written in the last millenium.

I eventually settled on the system from NOP Design. Professionally written and documented, easy to configure and deploy. I don't even have to acknowledge them on the finished product. Nice one guys.

Now Javascript search engines are a different matter. First, Javascript can't search files, can't open files, can't read files. Therefore a Javascript search engine is impossible. What is possible is an index array of "important" or "key" words that appear in a particular HTML file. My e-commerce project is particularly suited to that since most of the stock consists of books, sheet music and CDs. So my keywords would be things like ISBN, Author, Title, Product Number. Also, each product gets it's own page. With over 14,000 products this is going to be a big file (about 1.5Mb) but it's not being accessed over the web so thats not an issue. Of course the file has to be generated automatically too. I looked at several attempts at this that were published on the web, the worst being one by Felgall. Exactly how does this work? I eventually gave up and wrote my own (although afterwards I found one on a forum that looked ok). I'll post my own effort soon and then someone can complain about how crap that is! I am actually quite pleased with it; 14,000+ products and still PDQ, no browser-detection code used (but works on IE6, Opera7 and FF0.9), almost XHTML 1.0 compliant, no frames nor tables.

[1]OK, I don't dislike Javascript really. I just dislike the way that it is used a lot of the time, either for frivolous stuff that just annoys me when I visit a site or for really important stuff that should really be done by something server-side. Shopping baskets are a good example of important stuff.

I knew it had to exist somewhere; a blog dedicated to commenting upon the toilet paper that is the Daily Mail.

Vodka spends a lot of time watching squirrels now. Her attempts to catch them are getting better but still unsuccessful. One day Vodka, one day...

I've been using the FireFox Web Developer Extension for a couple of weeks now. It on of those free bits of software that quickly becomes almost indispensable.

Talking lamp-posts. Whatever next? Swedes losing their tempers with US lawyers?

I downloaded a free 30 day trial version IBM's Home Page Reader. Although as a sighted person I can never really judge it properly it is still proving to be very educational, far more so than just reading accessibility guidelines. Expect to see changes to my sites soon (sorry, no pun intended).

For just $142 a portrait of your pet with Jesus can be yours!
I saved $142 by making my own portrait of Vodka. It took all of 3 minutes.

As an indicator of how much warmer it is in Cambridge compared to Orkney (despite what I used to tell people when I lived in Orkney) Vodka has been moulting heavily since her return. Hopefully this will stop when she reaches a comfortable temperature.

Back home, very tired. Vodka survived the journey too and seems happy enough. I let her out of her box for most of the drive. She either sat on the rear parcel shelf or on my lap. Not exactly the best thing for road safety but the roads were quiet and she complained less than when she was in her box.

I enjoyed good weather in Orkney all week: sunny, breezy, not cold. Today it has all gone a bit Pete Tong. A real storm has moved across Orkney cancelling the ferries. I won't be able to leave until tomorrow afternoon.
The Longhope lifeboat has been out in a F12 to rescue a yacht in conditions described as the worst for decades.
I spent the day indoors living in the house that I spent all week cleaning for my new tenant, very relaxing.

It was a surprise - albeit an amusing one - to learn that Mark Thatcher had been arrested because of possible financial support for a failed coup in Africa. Somehow it was less of a surprise to learn that one of the other people who has supported the mercenary in question previously is one J Archer. Curiously enough Jeffrey declined to comment on this to the BBC. Few things would give me greater pleasure than to see either (but preferably both) of them languishing in an awful jail in Black Africa. Sadly, I expect that this will never happen.
I was also amused by someone on BBC's Newnight referring to the supporters of such mercenaries as "bucaneers". What a wonderfully romantic euphemism for paying someone to overthrow a government (which would almost certainly involve killing people) in the hope of greater financial return later.

Drove up to Orkney overnight to catch the 0945 ferry from Gills Bay. Needed 4 stops overall, the 4th was when I started to fall asleep at the wheel just past Invergordon. I was annoyed I let that happen since I had rested between Perth and Inverness already. Still, better safe and sorry, etc, etc.

Weather in Orkney: cool, grey, miserable. Feels like November.

I do not wish to diminish the Olympics but Bob Brown's victory in the Run Across America 2004 is a real achievement.

Despite having lived in Cambridge (on and off) for 6 years I didn't visit the University's Botanic Garden until yesterday. One highlight was the Titan Arum which is about to flower, when it does it will stink to high heaven. Note to self: make more of an effort to visit the Garden's regularly and take a camera.

You have to hand it to the Americans. Our right-wing, drivel-speaking, female self-publicist idiot is the lovely Ann Widdecombe and the Americans have the plain Ann Coulter. [I am being ironic]. I'm not going to give the blonde bigot any more web-space except to ask: "why are you seeking to raise $15,000 on via the Amazon honour payment system on your site?"

And what's this? A few years ago while on holiday in Chiantishire Tony Blair saved a swimmer from drowning (or something similar) and now John Prescott's gone and leapt to the aid of a kayaker. Nice one John. Beat that Mr Howard! :)

Apart from the Iraq body count thing there is now no more javascript on my site. I replaced the old last modified javascript code:

if(Date.parse(document.lastModified) != 0)
{
var lm = new Date(document.lastModified);
var monthday = lm.getDate();
var month = lm.getMonth()+1;
var year = lm.getYear();
if (year < year =" year+1900;">
}

with the neater and simpler PHP getlastmod function:

<?php
// outputs e.g. 'Last modified: March 04 1998 20:43:59.'
echo "This page last modified: " . date ("F d Y (H:i:s).", getlastmod());
?>

It has an important advantage over javascript; with javascript if I changed the code in one of the template files then all the pages showed a last modified date equal to the date of that change. That was undesirable. The PHP function works in the required manner.

What was the catalyst for this? Well, apart from being a good thing to do I was experimenting with Amaya , the free WYSIWYG web page editor and browser built by W3C. I was hoping that a browser built by the standards people would be The browser to have. Unfortunately, every site I look at looks different (specifically, worse) in Amaya than it does in FF, IE or Opera. This is true even for sites that have valid HTML and CSS.

In particular Amaya gave this message about my site:

line 149, char 0: junk after document element

The junk being my javascript last modified code.
I also got an interesting error about text-justify (which had a warning attached to it in the CSS validator), the fix was surprising but I'll write that up some other time.

We all know "something" about the Sydney Olympics website case....I knew that the Sydney Organising Commitee of Olympic Games (SOCOG) were tried in court because someone complained that the site wasn't accessible. I found Tom Worthington's page about it today when I decided to learn more about it. Tom was one of the technical experts for the complainant.

It makes interesting, and frankly amusing, reading. The complainant, Maguire, was blind and couldn't use the site because of some missing ALT tags, an image map and the layout of some tables. His technical experts asked for certain information about the website to be made available to them but SOCOG refused claiming the information was “highly commercially sensitive information within the knowledge of SOCOG and its contractor” . The information was nothing more than a sample page of a table in electronic format, the content plan of the site, the number of templates used, details of the tools used to generate the site and detailed calculations behind certain ball park figures. I don't know what the ball park figures were about but the rest of it sounds very non-commercial and could probably even be determined largely by looking at the site's code.
At one point SOCOG tried to pass the blame onto the contractor that built the site who was IBM. That IBM built the site makes me laugh anyway but even more so when, as part of the court case, the site was tested using the Bobby tool. As you'll doubtless know, Bobby is sponsored by IBM.

In August 2000 (just before the start of the olympics) SOCOG was found guilty of providing a non-accessible site and ordered to fix the problems. The estimates and costs for this repair work are pretty amusing, perhaps I should consider working on sites in Australia. Basically, Maguire's people estimated the costs at 1900A$ per day for 15.5 man days based on the technical experts estimates of how many templates there were. This made a total of 30,000A$ or just under 12,000GBP (at today's rates). They assumed that the templates would take 10 minutes each to fix and that there were 357 of them. SOCOG had claimed that there were over 1200 templates and each would take 2 hours to fix!

Anyhow, SOCOG (or IBM) failed to fix all the problems and in November 2000 was fined 20,000A$. Interestingly, no web designers from IBM or SOCOG gave evidence to the commission as to who, how or why the web site was designed the way it was, maybe they just didn't take the whole thing seriously.

I know that 5 years ago accessibility wasn't such a well known issue and that support for CSS wasn't so good but even so.

Fortunately the Greeks seemed to have learnt from this for the 2004 Olympics.

Phone call earlier today...

AOL Call Centre Operator: Good Afternoon, Lee speaking. How may I improve your on-line experience?
Me: By closing my AOL account please.
AOL Call Centre Operator:..oh, ok.

I opened an AOL account 2 years ago with AOL V7.0 which offered value for money and the software wasn't too painful to use. When V8.0 the whole experience sucked royally and AOL on BT Home Highway (ISDN-lite) was like analog with any other ISP. I moved to broadband with Bulldog when I moved back to Cambridge and was just too lazy to move everything off of the AOL email account. But I did it today and took great delight in removing that 70Mb folder full of crap off each of my PCs.

I have a lot of respect for David Blunkett but I really wish that he wouldn't play up to the media and knee-jerk new legislation like this: A rapist wins £7m on the lottery whilst on temporary release. Ironic? Yes. Unfair? Yes. Shakes one's belief in Karma and God? Yes. But does new legislation really have to be brought in because of it? How many prisoners win substantial sums on the lottery? The resources used to bring in this new legislation could be better used banging up criminals who are currently walking around freely. Anyone can win it, it's a gamble, it's.. well it's a lottery isn't it.

We're taking so much prozac now the stuff is actually finding it's way into our drinking water.

The thieves who stole 54 litres of hydrofluoric acid the other day wisely returned it. Phew, lethal stuff with plenty of potential for terrorism. Maybe some companies should be a tad more careful, no?

Hired an "independent" punter and asked him to teach us to punt. We discovered that it was very much harder than it looks.

Yay, the daleks will be coming back after all. They work for you looks like a good site to see how hard your MP works for you (or not, as the case may be). It would be better though if rather than being based around your MP (or MP that you enter a postcode for anyway) you could search on any MP or find the best/worst according to certain criteria such how many votes they have attended.

I had to disable the scrolling news feature on my banner from Iraq Body Count.Org. Apparently it only works properly on IE if you remove the DOCTYPE. This is the first time that I've seen something work better on non-compliant code than on compliant (well, DOCTYPE'd anyway) code. Tut, tut.

Petals round the rose is a Flash version of a traditional game played with 5 dice.

How strong is digital memory for cameras? Pretty strong aparently.

We finally allowed one of the many "punt pimps" from Scudamores in Cambridge to talk us into a punt tour. Given how hot it was it wasn't a bad way to pass the afternoon. I made an album of the pictures from the afternoon plus a few from earlier in the year, more can be seen in my account at Photobox.

Why do software bugs always appear 30 minutes before you install at a client site and/or in the first 10 minutes of use by a client?

My client took delivery of his VBA scripts today. We found some bugs, he had some ideas for enhancements. I spent 2hours fixing the bugs and adding the enhancements. Happy client, happy me.

I didnt think the industry had fallen onto hard times this much. Is that even minimum wage?

Someone posted a CSS problem in a forum today and I resolved that I would discover the solution. They claimed that the links in their code didn't show properly in Firefox but did in IE.
A quick check with both browsers showed that they were correct, also Opera didn't handle the links as the designer intended either.
A quick look at the code revealed that the misbehaving links were nested 6 deep in some ids. This seemed too complicated to debug so I made a small test HTML file and a small CSS file (the original CSS fle was 25 lines long) containing the relevant snippets of code. I got the same problems in Firefox and Opera.
I hadn't run the validators until now because I had seen that the original CSS file had some hacks in it to make it work properly in IE but now was the time to do it. The CSS validator threw up a confusing error that I didn't understand until I stared at the code for about 10 minutes. The code is now shown here:

#LeftNav
{
}
#LeftNav a, #LeftNav a:visisted, #LeftNav a:active
{
color:#000000;
font-size:0.85em;
text-decoration:none;
font-weight:bold;
}

#LeftNav a:hover
{
text-decoration:underline;
}

Yep, misspelling of the word visited. Presumably Firefox and Opera disregard the entire rule whereas IE just dumped the visited/visisted bit (I'm assuming that IE doesn't have a built in spell checker!) Given that the links in the HTML file didn't exist it hadn't been possible to see this effect.

So, what can we learn from this?

• Validate code at every stage to remove errors whilst they can be easily seen.
• If the code gets too big to debug then break it down into smaller chunks.
• Always validate and always act on what the validator says.
• Don't look for browser problems straight away...the problem may be simpler than that.

I shouldn't do this I know. It doesn't prove anything but well...I cannot resist:

I am a big fan of Tom Watson's site. It's informative, it's fun, it provides an insight into the workings of parliament. The site has no superfluous stuff...its just good old content. His site may just be a blog but that blog allows him to converse easily with the voting public who can reply to him via that blog just as easily. Beneath the hood we see that the code has a DOCTYPE and aims at XHTML Transitional although it fails the validator (mostly due to some dodgy links). It comes as no surprise to learn that Tom's site has recently won a - well deserved - New Statesman New Media Award.

And now look at Ann Widdecombe's site. On the front page there are pictures of 2 of her cats and a plug for a charity that helps donkeys in Israel. Remember, this is her MP site, not a personal one. Beneath the hood; Frames! What the f@%k! No DOCTYPE either. And this is a site designed for her by Palace Computing. I guess the background colour of their site gives away their own political affiliations and again frames and no DOCTYPE. Splendid advert for the opposition chaps, absolutely splendid.

I finished some Excel VBA programming for a charity in Cambridge. I haven't used VBA for about 4 years (Excel 97 I guess) and it all seems very different now. I struggled a bit but got there in the end. I made a page of Excel links for future reference.

I remember the first time that I saw Excel: it was in 1987 and running on an Apple Mac. I think it was also the first time that I had seen a mouse. I was blown away by both bits of technology.

According to a BBC article Lord Tebbit claims that the conservative party should "shift further to the right" and claimed that "only a return to the Thatcherite agenda of the 1980s can save the party from defeat".

I would dearly love to know what thought processes led him those conclusions, presumably nostalgia for the 1980's. The tories lose a small number voters to the far right , sure. Given that thse people move to the BNP you would think that the tories would be pleased to see them go. Most of it's lost supporters moved to the Lib Dems and New Labour. Shifting to the right will not regain these people, only sound policies will.

I have no wish to see another Conservative government but I believe that a strong opposition is always a good thing and Michael Howard seems to be doing his best to achieve that. Support from Heseltine, Portillo and others will hopefully prevent Howard from doing a Very Stupid Thing Indeed in listening to Tebbit.

In any case, for as long as the tories criticise their leader (whoever he happens to be) like this rather than supporting him they will not be seen as "team players" and hopefully will not be considered as a credible, mature alternative to the current government.

Last night I made a big pan of Delia Smith's potato and leek soup. Easy to make and delicious. Although the recipe is available online at her site I got it from her my old faithful copy of her illustrated cookery course.

Currently I am more hacked off with Range Rover drivers than Mercedes drivers. Several of the former today demonstrated complete lack of consideration for other road users with a "might is right" attitude. I'm toying with a "name and shame" page on this site for them...heh, heh.

I downloaded the Magpie RSS parser at the weekend and felt quite chuffed that I got it to work and could have a newsfeed on my site. Then in my PHP class on Monday we built our own RSS readers. Obviously mine's a good deal simpler than Magpie. Now all I need are some decent newsfeeds to read. I'd really like something to provide up to date weather information for a local area (e.g., Orkney) but the Meteorological Office don't seem to provide anything like that.

Oh, and I have a gmail address now courtesy of Blogger, deryck.thake@gmail.com.

I installed M$ Outlook the other day. It was just sitting there on the M$ Office CD and I thought that I may as well as get my money's worth. I figured that migrating from Outlook Express (OE) to, ...errr, O might be problematic so I was careful to back up everything first.

Installation was easy. Copying email across was surprisingly easy, copying email accounts was also easy (although a "Copy All Accounts" option would have been nice), only setting up the Newsgroup stuff proved difficult.

In fact, for me, it was a show-stopper.
First off, where was the "News" button? No button. After asking the Help I found that I had to add the button manually, which I did.
I pressed the button and guess what appeared? OE. Not just a trimmed down, news only, OE but the whole thing including my email accounts. Great, 2 mail readers at once.
I disabled the email options and restarted O. Clicked on the News button, I end up in a folder somewhere deep in C:/Program Files. Delete button, add button again, same thing.

At this point I decide that O is too much hassle and remove it. Sigh.

2 days getting up at 5am and driving around central London during the rush hour (and then working) have left me cream-crackered. It does have a big compensation though. :)

Somone vented his anger at Cambridgeshire County Council via Ebay with this auction.

No daleks. Bummer.

Depressingly a software engineer with 8 years experience and formerly on £30k posted his availability on alt.cam.misc to any potential employers at a salary of £16k to "undercut the competition". I'm not sure if he is being innovative or a touch naive but good luck to him anyway.

A good thing about Cambridge is that there is always interesting stuff going on and alt.cam.misc is often a good way to find out about it. Last week a Doctor from The Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Addenbrookes hospital asked for volunteers to have their brains scanned using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as part of research to learn more about how the brain works. Volunteers get paid and receive a picture of their brain. It sounded too good to resist and so I volunteered.

I was pretty well suited as a candidate; I am not claustrophobic and neither do I have any metal inside me.

So this afternoon I spent nearly 2 hours inside this device undergoing several scans each lasting up to 15 minutes. It's hard to describe what it feels like inside the scanner but it is probably what a loaded torpedo feels like. There isn't much room in there and while the scanning is taking place your head has to be absolutely still (so of course thats when your starts to nose itch!). Up above your eyes (you lie horizontally) is a mirror slightly angled so that you can see out the back of the scanner. This serves 2 purposes, it helps prevent claustrophobia (by creating the illusion of space) and enables you to see a screen. I was offered a choice of DVD to watch during the scanning. I had a choice of Disney movies and chose "A Bug's Life" (which I got mixed up with Antz). Having the film to watch really helps although you are unable to hear the soundtrack when the device is scanning due to the noise (you have ear plus and then headphones on top of them via which you can hear the radiographer and the film).

Watching A Bug's Life in an MRI scanner in the name of science, how very fucking Cambridge.

I got paid £27 for the time in there and I get a picture of my brain plus a CD with a sequence of pictures on it. Chatting with the research doctor and the radiographer after I asked "does anyone ever freak out in there?" The young doctor assured me that no, no one ever did. When he'd finished the more experienced radiographer said yes, it happens all the time. I can understand why.

If you don't know what an MRI scanner looks like, there is a picture of one in this article.

Update, 6th July: I received a CD of images of my brain through the post and Deryck's Brain Page!.

Need a holiday? Me too. This looks like a good idea.

Apparently 10-15% of surfers have Javascript disabled. Can anyone confirm (or not) this rumour? TIA.

There are 114 browsers apparently, according to www.download.com. Wow.

The re-design of my personal site (i.e., the thing you're looking at now) got a boost when I found a great PHP script for adding a breadcrumb trail. I found it via Hot Scripts which I found via a post on alt.html.

The guys at B3TA are always good for a laugh and last night this brought tears to my eyes. So stupid, so crude, so simple, and yet, so funny. It is definitely NOT work-safe.

This is the first piece of artwork that I saw about England's demise from the Euro 2004 Championship. Doubtless there will be more.

First private craft into space, what an achievement and how quaint that headline will seem in a few decades time. I am trying to visit the company's website but it's slow to load right now, probably the servers are straining under all the hits.

There is a touching news ietm at the BBC about Harry "Chippy" McNeish the carpenter on Shackleton's 1914-1916 Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Despite the good work of the chippy Shackleton denied the man the Polar Medal. He also had the man's cat shot along with the team of dogs. McNeish never got over the cat business but now some recompense has been made.

"Tables are bad! ... Except when used for tabular data"....thats what all the good books and gurus tell us and, yes, they're right. Deciding what is tabular data can be difficult sometimes though. This quote from alt.html helped me a lot:

My personal test is this: Do all the items in a row or column have something special in common? If so, table markup is fine. If not, it's being abused.

I haven't blogged for 3 weeks. The first week I was in Orkney, selling a car, petting the pets, etc. When I came back I got stuck into work again.

I have been reading Jeffry Zeldman's book, Designing with Web Standards. A massively informative and enjoyable read on web standards (and I never thought I would write a sentence with standards and enjoyable in it).

I discovered the joy of subscribing to alt.html, a place where any html related enquiry can be answered it seems. Alt.html.critique is good too although I don't have the nerve to post the newly revamped www.longhope.co.uk on there yet. Those guys take no prisoners!

Yesterday I found web pages that suck. Another useful resource for learning good site design. I appreciated the sections what would Amazon do? and Google is God. Don't piss her off. Despite this site's usefulness I have to say that it is not the best designed site in the world. Is that meant to be irony?

Today's bank holiday started at 0530 to make a trip to London. Being bank holiday though the roads were empty and I was back home just after 0900. And what better way to spend a bank holiday than working on making this site XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant? I'm nearly there. just a few photo albums to finish.

Next is a couple of hours sleep before a 12 hour drive to Orkney where I have to take care of a few things. It's a short visit, back in London Friday lunchtime to meet a mate for beer.

Some people believed it was wrong from the start and some are realizing it now. The NY Times seems particularly cut up about it in a soul searching article. Also, the Daily Telegraph's article shows that Boris Johnson is not completely stupid either. What a mess we made.

Bands have often tried to promote a message, political or otherwise. I wonder what message Dogs Die In Hot Cars are pushing? I heard of them for the first time on Radio 1 today. Not that I can judge but their website -whilst probably technically clever -is really irritating. A few minutes later I heard the Beastie Boys being referred to as something like "one of the best bands around". IIRC they have been around since 1986 (which must make them ancient!) and were ridiculed for the meaningless lyrics of Fight For Your Right (to Party). Also, IIRC their hard image took a dent on their '80s tour of the UK when fans stormed the stage and gave them "a bit of a fright". How times change. It's sad that I can remember this sort of trivia.

The Daily Mail and The Sun seem to be having an identity crisis today. Reporting the arrest of Abu Hamza The Sun's front page headline was The Bin Laden of Britain while the Mail led with Will he get off the hook? Surely such a witty headline belongs in The Sun? And shouldn't The Sun's gloomy headline be in The Mail (along with all the other doom and gloom that only that paper can seem to find)?

And it's pedantic I know but does the Mail have to use AM and PM in conjunction with 24 hour format times on it's online reports? There's an example here.

I had a couple of good(?) days working on CSS. I think I am finally getting to understand it. I was particularly inspired by the CSS Zen Garden website. I have also been gettin back into running each evening. A side benefit of that is that I sleep well. I installed a new version of Paintshop Pro 7 (with some extras) on my Toshiba and started playing around with picture tubes (and other features to create this. OK, the mountains suck but I think there is some potential here to create artwork.

I have been on ADSL with Bulldog now for 3 days. It is superb. At one point I was downloading a file at 150k/sec although 50k/sec is more typical (AOL dial-up gives me about 5k/sec). How did I manage without broadband for so long?

Following McDonalds new advertising campaign and the whole Supersize Me thing we felt drawn to the American Embassy at the weekend for a good ol' burger. That bit of a paper that they put on the tray to soak up the grease also contains interesting nutritional information for anyone who cares to look. Cheeseburger: 299 calories, Big Mac: 493 calories, Big Tasty (whatever that is): 804 calories. A regular coke contains 108 calories but a diet coke contains just 1. All very interesting.

My beautiful Yamaha Fazer 600 has been sold. I hope the new owner appreciates it. Now that summer is here I need to brush up my riding skills and think about buying a less powerful bike.

I have a new laptop, a Toshiba P25 S520 with 17" screen. The Toshiba was purchased for me in the US by Darren and carried nonchalantly through the green channel by Steven. Thanks Guys. I am just soooo glad to not have to use that Sony anymore.

How's this for car security? And how's this for a piece of American nostalgia?

Been installing and configuring OpenCMS with a friend for a project. Now my head hurts, as well as the aformentioned 100% Java Open Source CMS, we had to mess around with Tomcat and MySQL.

Still having problems with a CSS, still I have learnt a lot about these in a short time.

It's official, Cambridge has a nutter on the loose. He's struck near my home twice. Let's hope the bastard is caught soon.

Why did someone bother to write this site? It's amusing for about 5 seconds and then you think "..and?".

James Trusler, the world's fastest text-messager has just beaten his own record. Here's what all those abbreviations that you see in messages and in chatrooms mean.

This article doesn't say a lot for human nature or is it a culture thing?

I installed and set up Firefox today. It really is very lovely. I have a perception that it is both more secure and faster than IE.

There really is no excuse for getting caught out by Sasser like this. Shame on you UK Coastguard for getting caught out too.

Here's why war is bad; it brings out the worst in people. Just when we thought things couldn't get much worse in Iraq.

Back home, British police and security services in new incompetence shock. Poor Kurds, haven't they been through enough?

And, again. I have no wish to see members of the UK Royal Family become the victims of terrorists, no really, I simply can't face another royal funeral.

The more astute will notice that I have just discovered the Observer's website.

Went to "An audience with Alastair Campbell" last night. Mildly disappointed, there were some amusing parts; the safe introduction with a discussion about John Prescott thumping someone in the last election, the safe dig at overweight Americans but nothing too controversial or mind blowing. A few things he said seemed just plain wrong "I'm not interested in what the press say". Huh? You were a journalist and then press secretary. His belief that the world was a better place without Saddam seemed without justification especially when he later remarked that he was not optimistic about the Middle East. Some of his criticisms of the press were spot on; the convergence of the broadsheets and the tabloids now competing for the same market, the over-simplification of news, the use of polls to reduce everything to Yes/No.

Perhaps though the important thing to take from it was his last message; for people to not be complacent about things and to take more interest, have more involvement, in politics.

This is my funny site of the day: Chavscum, enjoy.

Sigh, so long without a posting.....

I will fill in the 3 month gap elsewhere.

I got some more photos back from Photobox. They are a superb company, good prints, good service, fast turnaround, and well priced (standard size prints between 19p and 27p depending on how you choose to pay). Photobox is definitely on my hit list.

I am still looking at open source CMS, I could probably spend the rest of my life doing so if I chose.

I checked the place where I deposited the rat poison...gone! I thought it had been quieter the last few days. I put some more poison down just in case the rats decide to come back for seconds.

Fire practice last night was first aid. We couldn't take it seriously, spinning babies, using the bandages to make ouselves look like Bin Laden and a few less than satisfactory ways of seeing a casualty is just sleeping or unconcious.

Over the last few evenings I have heard intermittent scratching and other noises in the walls of this house. I suspected that it was rats (mice would be quieter I think, silent even) and last night I heard the distinctive "screeee, screeee!" of a rat (or two) admidst the scratchings. Both Vodka and Ginge were overtaken by curiousity and sat by the wall for a long time, both of them saucer-eyed, Ginge even tried to pull away the plasterboard.

The last thing I want is a bloody rat on me when I'm sleeping so now the cats have been upgraded from Pet/Companion status, they are bodyguards. Vodka sleeps on my bed next to (which she does most nights anyway) and Ginge sleeps somewhere in the room. Vodka is a proficient ratter, she has been credited with killing a rat "almost as big as herself", and Ginge is no slouch either.

So, the cats are my defences and today I acquired my offensive capabilities from a farming shop in Kirkwall; rat poison or, more precisely, Slaymore Rodenticide!

According to the instructions "sachets should be placed in situations which are inaccessible to non-targets". The terminology reminds me of the Defence industry or possibly a Terminator film......."Black cat excessively miaowing: non-target. Ginger cat, no tail: non-target. Human, blue padded boiler-suit: non-target". Rodent in the wall: target".

Hopefully I can deploy the pellets of death without the cats getting them and hopefully the rats will die in the walls (they dessicate) and won't get eaten by the cats.

The other evening I was having a drink with one of the builders of the new fire station and he claimed to have seen a rat bigger than a rabbit. With luck (and chemistry/biology) my rats will never reach that size.

Very clear today with frost and ice on the ground all day. In the morning I was calibrating my telescope in the garden and I actually felt warm in the sun. Late in the afternoon I wnet for a run and was impressed by the calm and stillness everywhere. Even the smoke from the chimneys was just hanging, suspended, in the air.

The northern lights were "on" again tonight, just greens this time. I took my camera and tripod down onto the beach and was able to take some pictures this time, they can be seen here. It was almost surreal watching the northern lights while a seal splashed just yards away from me. Other than that the bay was completely silent.

The "Merry Dancers" (northern lights) were superb tonight.

F8 winds blowing from a westerly direction, this means the cat flap is almost permanently in the horizontal (open) position.

Updated the pictures on www.longhope.co.uk, well it's been 3 years! Another calm, sunny day.

Saturday 15th November
My snowboarding boots sold for £51 on Ebay! Yay! Calm day, after a run I cycled round South Walls and took some pictures. Still lots of seals around, one right outside the Custom House making that strange noise that they make.

Friday 14th November
In town this afternoon to collect a WC and basin from Jewsons, I don't trust Groats to deliver them without damaging them. Plus plenty of other things to do in town too.

Still catching up and busy with the house. Today some porpoises were in the bay, they were too quick for my camera so I had to be content with a picture of some seals basking just along from my house. It's here. Having got the Canon and the big 500mm lens out I thought I'd try for a picture of the moon at night, it's here. I'm really proud of it, it's my first decent astrophotography effort. :)

I haven't blogged for 3 weeks, 2 of those I was away in Inverness. I'm still catching up with things but pictures from the trip can be seen on the following links...... Dunrobin Castle, Inverness, Loch Ness, Culloden. More pictures to be added.

My new and long awaited (well, 3 weeks) running shoes arrived last night and were christened this morning with my "standard" 3.5 mile run, no problems. The run cleared a mild hangover from post-FB drinking too. Incidentally, I am currently running about 14 miles per week.

Monday 29th September
I found a dead bird in the hall this morning, it's heart literally torn out. Vodka was sitting on the kitchen table trying to look innocent. A bird feather attached to her fur established her guilt as surely as a smoking gun.

Sunday 28th September
A beautiful day so I took my new camera (and my older camera) up to Ward Hill which I climbed in just over an hour...its interesting, the walk is difficult to be sure, but mentally difficult too. I will post the pictures in the Longhope site in a few days.

Website of the day: The Skeptic's Dictionary

Friday 27th September
I bought a 3 month old Canon EOS-10D digital SLR camera with 750300mm USM zoom lens from Ebay the other and today it arrived! It's brilliant and a bargain at half the new price too. The seller was helpful and seemed genuine.

Added a picture of Vodka playing with a mouse to her page. While I was at it I regenerated the whole page using that web generator program. I do like that program, maybe the guy who wrote it could rewrite the XP operating system one day? :))

Friday 19th September
I have been dreading this day all week.....taking Vodka to the vet! It was as bad as I expected, continual miaowing the whole time in the car although I did get a bit of a break on the ferry. Anyhow the vet said she is fine, gave me some cream for her wounds, updated her vaccinations and charged me £77 for the privilege. Vodka stayed in the vet's kennels while I shopped and then we both went home.

Sigh, I haven't blogged for nearly a month. Luckily I have a diary of recent events.....

Monday September 15th
BA exercise on the Hoy Head. Very tiring, very useful. I was number one for the first time. Then we sojourned to the pub where I drank 4 pints (the most for some time) and felt decidely rough the next day.

Sunday September 14th
Lovely day so I went for a walk to the greenheads in the afternoon. Very pleasant. I will post some pics on the longhope.co.uk site sometime.

Wednesday September 10th
First RNLI exercise for absolutely ages. A lot of new (and very young) faces on the crew now. Nothing demanding, fortunately.

Monday 8th September
Pump exercise, used the pump to empty out a sheep dip. Somehow we all got wet and stank. We had to hose each other down with water from a hydrant before we could go home.

Sunday 7th September
A beautiful day for being outdoors and I got stuck in a classroom revising First Aid. Actually it wasn't too bad and I did get paid for it too. I learnt something new; a defibrilator actually stops the heart. The brain then restarts it and hopefully restarts it with a regular rhythm. This is why CPR is important, the brain needs oxygen to survive.

Uneventful weekend, just painting and stuff. A BA exercise tonight on the Thorsvoe ferry, tiring but good fun (and useful). I've been running every day for the last 3 or 4 days. I really find the MP3 player helps me train.

Flying south tomorrow and then to Bucharest the next day. :)

The chicks are pretty much fully grown now. They are also moulting. Every time I go into the garden I see a fresh pile of feathers and think "OMG, a cat must have killed a chick" but then I do a head count (all present and correct) and realise that I have been duped, again.

I burnt some more rubbish tonight (3rd bonfire in 8 days). I am impressed with how fire resistant carpet is, it burns well but takes a lot of heat to get it going.

My old domain server company (A1) has now migrated the domains across. Now I just have to sort out the email side then deal with longhope.co.uk and then the longhope emails. Moving this diary across was without problems and easy to do, well done blogger!

I haven't blogged for a few days because I am supposed to be my sites are supposed to be in transistion from one server to another and I didn't want to duplicate effort, nor lose a blog. However, this project has hit a problem and so I'm now blogging again. No lifeboat exercise tonight, apparently something planned for Saturday, hopefully something interesting.

The good summer weather seems to have left us, showers and strong wind today. Some great rainbows in the afternoon.

Monday 11th August
Went for an early morning run (too many midges in the evening now) and then went shopping in town, uneventful. Fire practice in the evening; a lecture on Health and Safety, deadly dull.

Sunday 10th August
The Fun Day. Actually I didn't find it that much fun, it was mostly a kiddies thing, although I did enter a race. I drank some beer, took some pictures and left before the midges did too much damage.

Friday 8th August
At this time of year we are prone to 2 things, midges and early morning/late afternoon fog. We have both now. The evening was spent setting up the beer tent for Sunday's Fun Day. This task was followed by a few beers. :)

Wednesday 6th August
Managed to ride both bikes today (but not at the same time!) and took the VN all the way to Rackwick. Hottest temperature ever today in Orkney, 24.6 deg C.

Saturday 2nd August

I spent much of the day cleaning up my PC. By deleting old software, unwanted files, etc I was able to free up 500Mb of space. I then moved some files (mostly data) from the C: partition to the mostly empty D: partition leaving C: containing just programs. I then defragged C: and it does seem to run a peedy bit quicker.

I've also been beefing up my internet security. I've installed Norton firewall which is great for defeating virus and other intrusions but not so good for it's spam control. To defeat the spammers, I've registered with http://knowspam.net which seems to work really well. As well as receiving your mail through them you can also send mail through their SMTP server which gets round a major longhope.co.uk/postcast/AOL problem that I've had. Now that I have a great solution to that problem I can start to migrate longhope.co.uk and deryckthake.com to a single server. I can also ditch postcast which was slowing up my boot-up process and had to be checked every once in a while just to make sure it was doing what it was supposed to. Currently Knowpspam is defeating 20 spams a day.

I checked how good my firewall set up was against the "shields up" facility at www.grc.com. This is a good site to learn about internet security. I particularly liked their little free program "ShootTheMessenger" which switches off the messenger service to stop those annoying spam pop-ups.

Duena broke her arm yesterday. Sometimes life seems so unfair to the people who deserve better luck. Get well soon sweetheart :*.

On a lighter note....many Orcadian bet on the local boy, Cameron, at the start of Big Brother 4. The odds were then 33/1. Cameron duly won and the local bookies are crying their eyes out over their losses!

I have been planning to consolidate on all the companies that I use to access the internet and host sites. A good friend runs a server and can provide a service that is both competitively priced and "customer focussed". I've been slow to migrate things across to him, partly because I'm busy and partly through customer loyalty to one supplier, zetnet. Well, zetnet just signed their death warrant a few days ago. Back in May I paid the renewal for the longhope.co.uk domain which would expire on 4th July this year. I paid online and although I never got a confirmation it appeared on my credit card statement ok ("The Bargain Centre - Lerwick"?!). Last night I was testing the new Norton stuff particularly it's spam filtering and how it would affect (if at all) my use of the postcast server to send longhope.co.uk mail via AOL. It was very frustrating, nothing worked. I couldn't send email as deryck@longhope.co.uk and anything sent to deryck@longhope.co.uk was 100% filtered (I assumed). I was cursing Norton but after a while the truth began to dawn on me....longhope.co.uk was no longer recognised on the internet. The site had gone, email sent to it got bounced, etc, etc. I found the invoice and my CC statement, yes I really had paid this.

So this morning, Zetnet Sales get an unhappy customer on the phone demanding his domain back ASAP. Mr Sales Guy tells me he has no record of the payment, I tell him that I do. He promises to investigate. I ask him to reinstate the domain while he is doing that because I am losing email and some friends rely on the site for business. He promises me it will take just 10 minutes to find the transaction and then he will email me (on another account) with his news. Basically, he is more concerned about the £20 than making me happy. Two hours later there still has been no email so I phone back. Its been sorted, the domain is back and thats it, no apology or explanation. So Zetnet, here are your crimes.....

1. You lost a customer payment and consequently deprived them of a service that they had paid for and relied upon.
2. You only issued one invoice and no further reminders which would have alerted me that there was a problem.
3. You do not issue confirmation for on-line sales and so I was not bothered when I did not receive any confirmation, again lack of confirmation could have alerted me to a problem.
4. You are a well established and respected ISP and yet you collect credit card transactions under the name The Bargain Centre!!!
5. Your sales staff do not contact people in the timescales that they promise to.
6. Your sales staff are more concerned with revenue than customers.

Zetnet, you are the weakest link, goodbye!

Combined with this I experienced a weird HTML problem on this site which wasted many hours last night. I did not got to bed until gone 2AM.

Despite that, today was a productive day. Plenty of painting and stuff achieved. I ran 3.5 miles, cycled and received my trophies and certificate for the Hoy Half Marathon. You can see them here. The big one goes back next year (if it gets won by someone else), the small one is mine to keep. I've never won a trophy before. I also dumped a load of magazines off at the waiting room surgery, its always nice when you can avoid putting something in the bin.

In town today, no drama although the car parks were all full :(.

The chicks are no longer under the guidance of their mother. She doesn't hang around with the chicks much and when its feeding time she tries to steal their food now, before she would make sure that they got enough to eat. The other white hen has vanished too.

Ive added Norton Firewall to my PC. Reviews of it vary between very good and very bad, I'm not sure why. It seems to do what I want although I still get bothered by pop-ups.

Hotels and flights booked for my next trip to Bucharest. :D

I hate colds, I feel like I have a piece of barbed wire in my throat.

I added some of my Grand Canyon pictures to the artwork galleries, click here to see them.

The chicks are getting bolder by the day. They no longer follow Mum around around the whole time and often go exploring by themselves.

Feeling hungover today, also got a sore throat and a cold. The cats have taken pity on me and not given me too hard a time today.

We had the wedding of the year -Robbie and Donna's- yesterday evening. I drove round to collect the bride, her father and bridesmaids at 6pm. Due to passing showers everything was put back by almost an hour but it was a wise postponement, the rest of the evening had good weather. I drove them all to the pier where a great many people had turned up to see what was going on. Weaving my way through all the parked cars and wellwishers wasn't easy but I managed it. Like a good chauffeur I held the door open while my passengers disembarked and after they had got out I closed it again. Unfortunately I didnt check to see that the train of the dress was out of the car and I shut the dress in the door, eeek! No harm done though and they continued their journey down the jetty to the Thomas McCunn, an old Longhope lifeboat where they joined the groom, family, the minister and crew. The boat set sail followed by the Jenny Lee which had friends on board and then by a small fishing boat (name unknown) on which Trevor and I were taking pictures and video respectively. The ceremony went without a hitch and we toasted the happy couple with whiskey and champagne.

Back at the pier and I drove the newlyweds and the bridesmaids back to their house for the official photos and then up to Stromabank for an evening of drink, food, drink, music and more drink. It seemed like the entire island was at the pub. I am not sure how much I drank although I was probably already over the limit driving to the pier at 7pm, ooops.

Ive added a picture of the taxi in its ribbons to the taxi page, here, and will add some wedding pictures later.

Today has been a slow day, spent mostly rehydrating although I did do some warnishing in the afternoon and post a couple of pictures at the Rendersosity site.

The taxi was washed and polished today. White ribbons adorn the bonnet and all handles, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!.

While I was washing the taxi I heard loud squawking from an unseen chicken. Suddenly all the chicks came running from the back of the house onto the main lawn. There was no sign of the mother so I went to investigate. The black and brown cockerel had the same idea and rushed towards the sound of the squawking making his own war cry. As I turned the corner I saw a cat fleeing as fast as he could from the 2 birds. I was impressed by way the mother defended the chicks and by the way the cockerel rushed to defend the mother. I think the cat was the one I call "ratbag", he's a mangy looking stray (similar to Vodka but with longer fur which has a brown tinge to it). He's been sleeping in the garage and I've been leaving food for him there.

A guy came round selling aerial photographs of houses taken last year. The one of the Custom House was well composed but I didn't really like it. I told him I didn't want to pay the £48 for a framed pic, he offered me an unframed pic for £30, I declined. I wish I had said "if I want a picture of the house mate, I'll hire a plane and do the job myself!". It's sad that we only think of these replies after the person has gone. These photographs seem