Category: Uncategorized

Apparently some of Spike Milligan’s work is “going mobile” – i.e. being released as mobile ringtones, wallpapers etc.

In order to celebrate the occasion I decided to post up a few Spike Milligan quotes:

• Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.
• Are you going to come along quietly, or am I going to have to use ear plugs?
• I thought I’d begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
• Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light.

(Source)

I was listening to Goon Show episode the other day – I think they’re on BBC 7, or whatever newfangled digital radio thingum the BBC have these days – in the evenings.

I’ll have to dig some of my old tapes out now and have a listen!

I’ve added caching to this blog using the excellent WP-Super-Cache plugin for WordPress, after reading yesterday’s blog post by Jeff Atwood.

I don’t know whether it will make much difference in terms of what you actually notice, but it will at least help out in the extremely unlikely event that this site gets a large number of hits. Anyway, as usual – any problems, let me know!

I’ve also added a stats plugin for WordPress, so I’ll be able to see how people are reaching this blog and what they’re reading. Admittedly I could have known that already by looking at the awstats output provided by my web server, but that’s just too much effort! :p

I don’t know what’s been going on with Firefox lately, but it’s crashed quite a few times. This is unusual – normally it’s pretty rock solid for me: although it’s slower than other browsers, it is at least fairly stable.

But the past few weeks, on my work PC it crashes occasionally when I’m trying to open a new tab. I don’t particularly know why, other than it might be something to do with not having very much memory available (I’m running SQL Server 2000, Tomcat, Eclipse etc on a machine with 1.5GB RAM).

It’s a bit strange – hopefully Firefox 3 will resolve the issues! Strangely enough, I don’t get the same issue when browsing at home – and when I did a cursory search for the issue I found quite a few people using Ubuntu! So either I’m lucky, or this is just some bizarre problem with my configuration, or Firefox just doesn’t like lack of memory.

Computers, don’t you just love ’em?

Note: I should just like to point out that Firefox is still my favourite browser, even if it does crash occasionally on my work machine!

This weekend was quite… “weddingy”. I know that’s not a word, but I just made it up. So there.

On Friday night we didn’t have much in the way of weddings to do – Phil was out helping at the Fordham youth group 21, and I … well, I stayed in and didn’t do much!

On Saturday evening, we went out to a wedding reception for one of Phil’s colleagues. It was good fun! We stayed for most of the evening, and danced the night away… the DJ was pretty good and played all the cheesy classics. The only problem was, he played a lot of good stuff while we were eating, which meant we couldn’t get up and dance! Ah well.

On Sunday morning we went to church, and then afterwards had AJ round for lunch. We were discussing helping out at 21 – neither of us have done any youth work before, but we’re going to start helping out on a fornightly basis. A bit scary, but I think it will be enjoyable!

In the evening, I went out to Ian’s stag night dinner in Ipswich. I got a lift over with Matthew, we made up the Colchester contingent! We went to an indian resturant called Dhaka. The food was good but it was quite on the pricey side. Anyway, we had a good evening, and it was also good to meet some of Ian’s friends from Ipswich.

Afterwards, I came back home and watched “Planet of the Ood”, this week’s Doctor Who, which I’d recorded on Saturday. I thought it was a really good episode, even if some of it didn’t quite make sense to me (the whole ‘Doctor being chased by a giant grabber’ scene didn’t quite work for me). It also had some more references to the lack of bees on earth, and the Doctor’s song “ending” … all in all, this series is shaping up to be pretty good!

The traffic around Colchester during rush hour is getting ridiculous. Take this morning, for example.

Time it would take to drive to work without any traffic: 25 minutes
Time it took this morning: 1 hour (I set off at 7:45 and got in at 8:45).

I just find it really frustrating sitting in traffic, not doing anything – at least when you’re waiting for a train you can sit and read. And, of course, with all the new flats and houses they’re building in Colchester the situation can only get worse!

Ah, it’s being so cheerful that keeps you going…

I do believe that there are a couple of things they could do to improve the traffic situation a bit, mainly strategic placement of traffic lights. If they put some lights on a couple of roundabouts, I reckon it would help with traffic flow going from town out towards the A12 in the London direction. Or at least make it a bit fairer.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to get my bike license…

I’ve decided that the time has come for me to stop pretending that I’m any good at web design, and actually bite the bullet and use somebody else’s design skills for once.

Fortunately for me, using WordPress there are literally hundreds of available templates you can use for free.

I’ve chosen one which I like, I think it looks good, but I may change it from time to time!

Let me know if you have any problems.

Well, I suppose it’s time to post up a quick review of what happened last week! Philippa’s parents came up to help us do some decorating – we wanted to do the whole of the spare room in one week. The spare room had previously been rather a bright shade of pink, so we wanted to change it to something a little bit more mellow – “warm apricot” was the colour we chose for the walls. Anyway, it’s fair to say that we had a very successful week: the room is now painted (including the ceiling, skirting boards and door – not all the same colour, I hasten to add…) and looks very nice.

We also managed to do various other little jobs around the house and garden, so all in all it was quite a productive week.

The weekend was pretty busy as well! Phil’s sister Roz came up on Thursday and stayed until Saturday. On Friday evening we all went out for a meal at the Yew Tree in Great Horkesley (which was very nice, by the way, thanks for the recommendation Simon!) Afterwards, Phil’s parents went home and Roz came back with us.

She stayed overnight, and on Saturday morning we went into town to do a bit of shopping. I bought a couple of new CDs (‘We Live and Die in These Towns’ by The Enemy, and ‘Stabat Mater’ by Karl Jenkins) as well as a couple of new clothes.

In the afternoon Roz went home, and I headed down to London for Phil P’s stag do. We all went out for a meal at “Planet Hollywood”, which was very nice – albeit a bit on the expensive side! Afterwards, I went for a drink with Alex (everyone else had gone home… bunch of lightweights).

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning as per usual, and then afterwards we were invited round to the Savilles for lunch which was rather nice. We didn’t get back home until late afternoon, and we spent most of the rest of the evening clearing up the spare room (i.e., putting back everything we’d had to take out with the decorating).

Also we watched “Doctor Who”. I was actually quite impressed by this week’s episode – it was well written, and explored some very interesting themes. Just how much can the Doctor change time? Will it be a running theme in this series? They could do a lot with it… good stuff.

Covers of songs, that is to say.

In my guitar learning, I’ve been looking out some old songs to play, and I came across Joe’s “committee song” (to the tune of “Can’t take my eyes off of you” by Andy Williams)… it certainly brought back a few memories (“At last Linja’s arrived / at just a quarter past five” and “And although we’ve just finished / Joe’s got just one more thing” being two of my favourite lines).

Anyway, I was looking around the internet for chords to the song, and I stumbled on a cover version I’d never heard before, played by Muse! If you haven’t heard it already, you should definitely watch it on YouTube. It’s a whole new slant on the song, but I really like it!

If only other cover versions were of this kind of standard…

I’ve written a new article on FocusOnFaith entitled “The Ten Commandments, Part II: Idolatry“.

If you enjoyed the previous article in the series, why not pop over and have a read? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or starting a new thread in the forum (hint hint).

As I may have already mentioned, this week we are off work to do some decorating. Phil’s parents are up and are helping us out. We’ve been quite productive so far! The main goal of this week is to repaint the violently pink room (otherwise known as the spare room).

We bought some paint at the weekend, and we’ve been busy preparing and painting the past couple of days. All the walls now have two coats of paint and look really good, all that’s left to do is paint the skirting boards and radiator. So we’re not doing badly!

There are a few other little jobs that we want to do but we’ll have to see how it goes.

I realise that was a pretty pointless post, but it does at least explain why I don’t have very much time to blog this week 🙂