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…

I’ve just found a link on Richard Dawkins’ website to a video of a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath. Christopher Hitchens is the author of a book entitled “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, which I believe they were discussing (I didn’t bother reading the introduction, I skipped straight to the…

Last night, I heard a talk by Andy Saville about “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. Now, I will admit up-front that I haven’t actually read “The God Delusion”… I have, however, read through a couple of articles on the subject as well as listening to Andy’s talk. I don’t think you necessarily need to…

This weekend was busy again… no surprises there really! On Friday evening I was stripping wallpaper in our bedroom, and managed to get it finished! On Saturday, it was a matter of painting for most of the day, but in the evening we were able to go down to Wivenhoe to meet Alex, Elisa, Steve…

Just a quick post to say that I have joined Colchester Linux User Group. I wasn’t aware there was one, but I gather that there wasn’t one until relatively recently. I’ve been wondering about a local LUG for a while, showing support to the free / open-source software community, so I’m glad there is one…

I’ve just noticed that Google Reader now has a new ‘trends’ page. This allows you to see trends about what blogs you’ve been reading, and when. This is the summary from my trends page: “From your 32 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 261 items, starred 0 items, shared 0 items, and emailed…