As if the news that the Arctic ice is disappearing fast wasn’t bad enough, today an 82-year-old man was detained under the Terrorism Act for heckling at the Labour Party conference. Unbelievable. Depressing.
Due to changes forced on us by our ISP, this blog will be moving to a new address as of Wednesday.
I’m going to have a bash at hooking up neworbit.org as the permanent address. This works at the moment, but in a fairly inelegant way, so I wouldn’t suggest using it by default quite yet.
I’ve just seen that the new series of Scrapheap Challenge starts this Sunday. Louise will be so pleased!
While putting the link in above, I noticed that the page says that the scrapheap is located in Basingstoke. I could have sworn it was just down the road in Wokingham. I wonder if they’ve moved site for this series? I will watch with interest!
Update: Yes, it appears that they’ve moved the site of the scrapheap for the new series. That makes me a little sad; it felt nice to know a secret about the show. Oh well. Tonight’s show was a corker and next week looks even better!
Before I forget, I’ve been listening to Demon Days by Gorillaz for the last few weeks and it’s great! If you liked the last album, you should definitely give this one a listen. My favourite tracks are Dirty Harry and All Alone. It’s also worth checking out for Dennis Hopper’s monologue on Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey’s Head.
Jessica has just learnt to roll from her back on to her front. She’s been able to sit up for weeks now, but just didn’t seem interested in anything as active as rolling over. But now her curiosity has gotten the better of her and she wants to pick up things that are out of reach.
So, Jessica’s really starting to develop fast now. Meanwhile, Ben’s got the hang of colours at last. He’s also learnt that the word “bum” is funny. Rolling-round-on-the-floor type funny. Oh well…
My brain still seems to be oriented around the three school terms in the year, so it’s only now that it wants to address my original plan for a Lord-Of-The-Rings-A-Thon to celebrate my 30th birthday.
The day in question is Saturday 3rd December. This leaves at least one shopping weekend before Christmas. It also allows Mark to see Reading vs. Brighton at home the following weekend.
If we’re going to watch all three films in one day, I think we should pace ourselves, which means starting early, say 9am. Bacon butties all round then stick The Fellowship of the Ring on at about 9.30am. Including a 15 minute break at the disk change, that’ll take us through to 1.15pm. If we take an hour for lunch, we’ll have The Two Towers on at 2.15pm finishing at 6.15pm. Another hour for dinner, means The Return of the King will start at 7.15pm and take us through to 11.45pm.
Blimey.
Assuming you don’t think this is a really bad idea, I’m open to suggestions on what we should have for lunch and dinner. I’m not sure eating out is really an option, given the schedule. Even getting take away might be a push, and to be honest, I quite fancy something like a homemade curry.
So, who’s up for it?
Update: Louise has just suggested that I take a deposit from each person. Anyone who leaves or falls asleep before the end of the film looses their deposit. Thoughts?
Update: I’m officially moving the day to Saturday 10th December as more people can make it then.
I’m about a week behind on this, but Google Maps has satellite imagery of New Orleans allowing you to see the city before and after the arrival of Katrina.
If you’re new to this whole blog reading game, you may not be aware that there are some clever bits of software out there that can help you keep up-to-date with your favourite blogs — or in fact many “normal” web sites — automatically, without the need to keep coming back to the actual site.
If you use Firefox and you see a little orange icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the browser window, you can click this to create a Live Bookmark — a special folder of bookmarks that automatically updates to show the latest stories or posts.
If you use Thunderbird you can add an RSS News & Blogs account that makes the updates arrive in your inbox as if they were emails. Better still, you can create saved search folders to help you find the updates you’re really interested in.
There are lots of other dedicated applications that can help you do this, just Google for feed reader.
There are also web sites, such as BlogLines that help you do this without any more software than the browsers you’re (probably) using right now to read this.
Yesterday was sunny and warm, so when I got back from work, Louise and I walked round to pick Ben up from his child minder. As we left, he looked back over his shoulder, waved and said “Bye!” before skipping off. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with a rucksack on his back, it was hard to believe he’s only two years old.
Louise has noticed that he’s started using contractions like “can’t” and more complex grammatical words like “am”, as in “Mummy am not stuck”. Before, he would have just said “Mummy not stuck”. “No” and “not” have become some of his favourite words and he just seems to like contradicting you for the hell of it.
Jessica is obviously starting to feel the pressure to perform: She cut her second tooth a week or two ago and can now sit up almost indefinitely — as long as Ben doesn’t “help” her to lay down. She has also taken to solids with far more relish than I remember Ben ever doing, by which I mean she enjoys eating, not that she helps herself to the mango chutney.