I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a routine by Bill Bailey where he looks at the influence of cockney music on the output of classical composers. If not, you can watch it on YouTube — it’s definitely worth seeing, particularly if you like classical music! (Plus, the rest of what I am about to…

Sorry that I haven’t updated much over the past few days… it’s all been fairly quiet really! Nothing much has happened here… On Saturday we did a bit of shopping during the day, in the evening we went round to a work colleague of Philippa’s for dinner. On Sunday we went to church in the…

I took my iPod into work on Monday, as per usual, and got it out ready to listen to some music. I usually listen via WinAmp, with my headphones plugged into the computer, but playing the music straight off the iPod. Unfortunately, this time something was wrong. My iPod was displaying an icon something like…

It’s been a fairly busy weekend, once again! On Friday, I spent the evening sanding down the radiator in our bedroom (what fun!) to prepare it for painting. On Saturday, I spent most of the day painting the last wall in our bedroom which needed to be painted… it took a long time, but I…

I recently watched (or at least listened to) a debate between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins, which you can find on here if you would also like to watch it. One of the things which Richard Dawkins mentions there, and also Christopher Hitchens mentioned in his debate with McGrath which I mentioned earlier, is the…

A guide to overcomplicating things, taken from my experiences recently: Become the webmaster for a church website. Add a new “Listen to Sermons” section to the website where MP3s of sermons go. People just browse sermons by directory structure. Decide that it’s not good enough, and re-write it using a MySQL database. Decide that it’s…

This weekend, we went down to see Phil’s parents. Phil went down during the day on Friday (she took the day off work), and I drove down on Friday evening. On Saturday we had a fairly relaxed day. There were a few little bits and pieces we needed to do in town, but it was…

I had a thought one my way into work this morning. Why don’t Essex County Council set up a new website in the style of Wikipedia, with lots of information about Essex in it. What could they call it? Ricky-pedia (said in a Southend style accent)…

… no, I’m not going completely mad. You just can’t make this sort of thing up — flaming squirrels blowing up cars! Well, OK, one flaming (on fire) squirrel. Setting fire to one car (which thus caused an explosion of sorts). Still, it wouldn’t make quite as interesting a headline otherwise!

Last week, Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” was released. I started the upgrade procedure yesterday. Now, the upgrade procedure is one of the things I have a serious gripe with about Ubuntu. You can’t just start it upgrading and then leave it for the duration. You actually have to be there the entire time, in case…