After two months and two days, the music has stopped, the theme rotation carousel has travelled full circle and finally come to a halt. WordPress.com offers a total of 40 themes (37 when I started) and I have experimented and laboriously captured screenshots of every single one. I have tried out all the WP themes as they became available but it was interesting to live with each theme for a day or so. ...

The scheduling goddess has granted me a second successive week in Birmingham; West Bromwich to be precise. I was shocked to discover that, following my unfavourable review last December, the Days Inn Hotel has subsequently been taken over by the budget chain, Premier Travel Inn. My greeting at reception wasn’t too promising: ‘Ah - Good evening Mr. Brightside. A double smoking room, I believe’. ‘Err no. I booked a single, non-smoking room if you have one please.’ ...

The Sandbox theme recently added to WordPress is pleasant enough but the original themes developed by Scott Wallick from plaintxt.org are absolutely superb. Clean, white, minimalist, striking, understated and refreshingly different from the thousands of themes out there.

I am interested in IT, technology and gadgets. Not obsessed but interested and curious. Recently, I find colleagues making increasing use of technology in the workplace to try to help distributed teams to communicate more effectively. Or maybe they’re just geeks who are afraid to pick up a telephone. People use Web conferencing to share desktops. This is an excellent use of technology. For example, I recently tried to help a customer in Copenhagen by remotely accessing the servers over the network from my kitchen fully equipped home office. The speed was slightly sluggish and the experience was a little frustrating at times but certainly much better than laboriously dictating (’l’ ’s’ ‘space’ ‘slash’ ’t’ ’m’ ‘p’) over the phone or getting on a plane. ...

Take my advice. Never buy flowers for your wife. Ever. I am working at home, trying to finish a report. I don’t have a home office so I work on the kitchen table. For the last couple of days, two things have been slowly nagging away at me like a dripping tap. My wireless mouse sometimes loses the will to carry on working at such a frantic pace. It squeakily demands a cup of coffee or just half an hour of ‘Richard and Judy’. I stoutly refuse so the mouse pointer slowly descends vertically down the screen which is fairly irritating and virus-like. ...