The photos are uploaded. And now I’m going to bed. Work tomorrow, doh!

Good things about Christmas this year include sherry trifle, walks with the dog and generally having family around. It’s all been a nice change from last year.

Today we took Casper down to Dulas Beach, where he got very, very wet. We had my mum round to the house again for a few hours in the afternoon as well as a few lovely guests. Boxing Day is all about the company, but less about the gross over-consumption of food.

I’m here in Wales until the end of the week, before heading down to London for New Year In The Bush! Getting more back to normality tomorrow though, with the car to wash and a kitchen floor to take up.

But before then, there’s more alcohol to drink. Mmm, Tia Maria.

A little while ago, I changed the commenting policy on wabson to stop the spam that had started apprearing on the blog. I don’t think I ever mentioned this to anybody, however, so here’s the deal.

1. Anybody who hasn’t commented on a previous blog entry needs to be approved by me and your comments will be held in moderation until I do this.
2. If you have commented before then your comment should be approved automatically, so long as you put in the same email address each time.
3. WordPress will never publish your email address on the public site, so don’t be afraid about typing it in.

I hate comment moderation, but something needed to be done to stop the spam and this is clearly less evil than filtering everything. As I say, just make sure you put the same email in each time, please :-).

Of course having said this, I haven’t had any spam comments in the last week or so. Is it spammer holiday season, perhaps?

OK, so I finally gave in and created myself a Flickr account. Signing up was relatively easy and seeing as I already had an old Yahoo! ID that I occasionally use I didn’t even have to go through the registration process for that.

Now all I have to do is work out how to get the photos I blog about looking good on the blog itself…

More photo-age in Melbourne today!

I glanced down at a fifty pence coin lying on the floor today and was struck by how remarkable an object it is. Quite unlike any Morrocan dirams, Slovenian tolars, Croatian kunas, Polish crowns or (heaven forbid) euros, it’s just quite British.

It’s good to be back.

Tomorrow I’m off up to Northampton where I shall be reunited with my computer and the USB lead for my camera which will allow me to download the gigabyte or so of photos that I managed to take whilst away (out of which I hope to be able to extract at least two good ones).

We landed at Luton at 3am this morning, having just flew over London on our way back from Gran Canaria. By the time we got through the normal post-flight rigmarole it was about 3.45 (I’m not sure if they were checking our passports more thouroughly, given the circumstances) and WHSmith had all the early editions of today’s papers.

Between us, we picked up a good cross-section and began reading all about yesterday’s horrors, the details of which hadn’t been too clear from the limited satellite coverage we’d been able to see before we left at the other end. Only then did the true extent of what had happened really start to sink in.

I got back to Northampton at about 6am in the end, too tired to read any more of the gory details, too tired to comprehend it all. I slept for a bit, I woke up again early this afternoon and started reading yesterday’s blogs. I’m glad that everyone I know down in London seems to be OK.

I’ll probably go through it some more tomorrow, but for now that’s all I need to know. There’s only so much you can get through when you’re sat in front of a computer with a tiny screen, no mouse and a 56k internet connection.

Incidentally, the holiday was good.

I was going to blog about the fact that I had to stand outside Costcutter for ten minutes this morning, or about my runner number for the Two Castles run coming through in the post yesterday, but suddenly those two topics seem a little inconsequential.

Apparently this has been on the radio quite a lot this morning, but I think I got into work too early to hear it. Kylie Minogue has been diagnosed with breast cancer and is having to cut short the Showgirl tour as a result.

It’s hard to believe that someone we watched perform as she did for two hours the other week is going through this so soon afterwards. It’s stange, but I feel some kind of connection with all of this, in a way I didn’t even get when the Pope died last month. That just felt foreign and remote, something I couldn’t connect with. This just seems so real. And shocking.

Is this what live music does for you? Either way, here’s hoping she’s better soon.

Last week the government IT agency BECTA finally published their assessment of the potential benefits of using open source software in schools. The report contains some surprising conclusions – even for longstanding open source advocates like myself – such as the finding that primary schools could cut their computer budgets by nearly half if they were to replace their proprietary (read Microsoft) systems with OSS alternatives.

As you might expect Microsoft have rubbished the report, citing a number of shortcomings in the research carried out by BECTA. But even if the points Microsoft make are vaid, it’s difficult to see how they can possibly claim that their solutions provide better value for money for schools in the face of the evidence.

Sure, open source software isn’t a magic ticket that’ll guarantee you save money, but if you know what you’re doing with it then the evidence seems to point to a number of potential benefits.

And the most interesting thing about this report? According to the meta-information embedded in the PDF file on BECTA’s web site, it was produced on by Quark Express on a Mac. That’s a proprietary software package, running on a proprietary OS running on proprietary hardware. Still, I guess it proves that they’re not just a bunch of open source zealots 🙂

Long time no blog. Meh.

I did ten kilometres in the gym in total yesterday. Five kilometres of cycling, three of rowing and another two on the treadmill. I’d have done more on the treadmill if there’d been some free earlier on, before I tired myself out doing other things. I don’t hurt too much today though, which has got to be good. Maybe I’ll have a delayed reaction tomorrow or something.

Also, Planet Afterlife has been changed around so that it only requires a single cron job running on my work PC. The new cron job runs a script to build the HTML and RSS files and FTP them up to my UNIX web space on mimosa. This means that Planet Afterlife will still work if my PC’s IP address changes, as the process is no longer dependent on mimosa being able to wget the files off it.

Warwick people may be interested in a story about blog censorship, via Blogging Pro. But as it’s related to work it’s probably best that I don’t say why…

The courier with my replacement phone was supposed to turn up sometime between one o’clock and five o’ clock today. Naturally, he turned up at one minute past one and went away again when I wasn’t here.

So I phoned up Orange when I got in fifteen minutes later, only to be told that they can’t contact the courier and neither can they arrange for a new delivery date until the courier notifies them that the delivery failed at the end of his shift at around five o’ clock. Bastards.

To help calm myself down slightly, I went over to the Union to have a game of pool with Pat. Only to discover that (a) most of the tables weren’t working, (b) the few that were have been modified so as to require 70p (up by a whole ten pence!) and (c) the one we used in the end wouldn’t give us the last red ball, so we had to play without it.

/me wonders what else can go wrong today…