Thoroughly enjoying ' Margave of the Marshes' and pleased to see The Chameleons get a mention: For David Fielding of The Chameleons, that meant loitering outside Broadcasting House in order to press their tape directly into John’s paw. In the case of The Chameleons, John thought he was the victim of a practical joke after listening to their demo: the recording was so accomplished that he suspected he had been given a cassette of an established band. ...

I subscribe to a fair number of blogs. Some of those bloggers use Blogger (despite my WordPress evangelism). Some of those Blogger bloggers are technical types who would normally seize any chance to play with newly announced beta software. Curiously, not a single one of them has experimented with the recently announced Blogger beta which includes exciting new developments like ‘Labels’, drag’n’drop page design, private blogs (where you can be assured no-one is reading), multiple authors, additional templates, RSS feeds and ‘instant’ publishing. ...

Holy Father It is 23 years and 7 months since my last confession. Since then, I have downloaded Ethereal and started to sniff packets off the network. I know it was wrong but we had worked for a week on this problem. We had all exhaustively checked everything (twice) and we were tired, hungry and increasingly desperate. I fervently wished this was a conventional database problem or even an unconventional Siebel problem but the symptoms, the controlled tests and all the hard evidence increasingly pointed to ’the network'. ...

There are more signs, warnings, instructions and speed limits in Richmond Park than the nearby South Circular. The Parks Police really are destroying the park for all those who simply want to enjoy it.

Preloadr is an interesting, free utility that allows seamless manipulation of Flickr photos. The standard features (crop, resize, flip, rotate, sharpen, brightness) are there but red eye removal is absent which seems a curious, but important, omission.