At Home with John and Debbie

I’m still very sceptical about social networking sites, but I’ve joined Facebook anyway.
If you’re on it, add me as a friend. Even if we don’t know each other, it’s allowed. See, when I accept, I can explain how I know you “He cyberstalked me by reading my blog”.
Then (if you qualify) you can join […]

Mum and Dad were having some problems with their new desktop PC. We arranged an evening for me to talk Dad through them on the phone, and as the evening approached I grew more and more apprehensive at the prospect of administrating Windows Vista (with which I am not really familiar) by proxy, with […]

A little camp - (Flickr user ukslim).

The rain had stopped momenatarily when I got home last night, so I took the opportunity to put up my festival tent between the scaffolding poles in Steve’s garden.
The aim of the exercise was to check it was still OK — whether anyb bits had gone missing while […]

Pfft, mashup makes it sound all sophisticated. It’s three lines of HTML.
The BBC runs a webcam that gazes over the Glastonbury Festival site, so you can watch it slowly mutate from a valley spoilt only by agriculture, into a valley spoilt by a huge festival, and back.
This year the service spans three cameras, and […]

In keeping with tradition, we held a Eurovision Drinking Contest. Altogether there were 20 of us, meaning one country each and four left over. These four became communal countries: when they scored, everyone got a drink.
This year’s innovation was the bagged local speciality. Instead of having to get up and go to the kitchen […]

Debbie and I settled down to watch the Eurovision qualifiers last night. They are most important, because they dictate to a great extent what food and drink we have to gather for Saturday’s final.
The highlights included Israel’s cartoon knees-up, Georgia’s rather experimental electronic arrangement, Andorra’s Busted!-alikes and Belgium’s glorious performance by the house band […]

I’ve been using Bloglines to follow RSS feeds for some time, and it’s been good to me, but I tried Google Reader just to see, and I’m going to stick with it for a while.
One nice feature is that you can click “share” on any item, whereupon it shows up in a public “shared […]

I quite enjoy voting.
But yesterday, I realised that I had no idea who to vote for. Admittedly I have been out of the country, but I had been back a week, and no canvassers had visited me, and nobody had put any leaflets through my door.
So I didn’t vote. How could I. Studiers of […]

Debbie picked me up from work last night, and we drove directly to Walsall. OK, not quite directly: we paused at Frankley Services to eat sandwiches I’d bought from Boots earlier.
The occasion: the MFA league cup final. Having already sewn up the league, this was our chance for the double.
You can find the match […]

“Nine. Effty-nine. Eleven. Two. Ninety-dee. Seventy-four. Eety-three. Fifty-bee. Deety-eight. Forty-one. Fifty-six. Ceety-five. Sixty-three. Fifty-six. Eighty-eight. Ceety.”
Does it make sense that I could get in trouble for repeating (and arguably, obfuscating) the above Very Secret Number?