What a terrible holiday period for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. By the time, we had opened all our presents, stuffed ourselves with turkey, fallen out over charades and finally slumped in front of ‘Gavin & Stacey’, Umar should have been sitting at the right hand of Allah, surrounded by a variety of 57 vestal virgins, clad in white silk lingerie, feeding him grapes, tending to his every whim, straddling… [That’s enough vestal virgin fantasies - Ed]. Even worse, the young man does not have much to look forward to in the coming weeks of 2010. ...

People never ask me ‘Hey Norman - where has your glamorous globe trotting lifestyle as a IT consultant taken you this year ?’ January - Bergen February - Berne, Blackpool March - Madrid, Cairo April - Slough, Macclesfield May - Lisbon June - Warsaw July - Brisbane, Perth, Broome, Darwin (holiday) August - Brentford September - Sunderland October - Swindon November - Dusseldorf December - Kitchen Table

Cary Millsap posts a brilliant article about his approach to performance troubleshooting that resonated loudly with me. When I first started working at Siebel, a standard review was a production health check that consisted of meetings with key project staff (Siebel Administrator, DBA, systems and network admins, project manager, developers) coupled with some standard checks on key Web, Siebel and Oracle configuration parameters. At the tail end of one engagement where I had precious little to note or report on, I asked to meet with an end user for a brief chat. The response was surprising and not dissimilar to the standard retorts Cary describes. ...

I have been running Linux Mint for 8 weeks now and I’ve been delighted with it. My desktop PC is fast and responsive and I am hugely impressed by the sheer amount and quality of software available for Linux. Printing, scanning, wireless networking, audio, DVD writing and all my USB devices just work. I don’t have a virus scanner consuming memory and chewing clock cycles. I am no longer considering a memory upgrade as Linux works fine with my paltry 512MB. ...

The first (and probably the last) in a very occasional series. ‘Channel 5. Thursday night’. Arsenal fans taunting Liverpool on their unwanted appearance in the Europa Cup.

After buying most of my Christmas presents from them, Amazon kindly gave me a £2 voucher to spend in the MP3 download store. As the festive season of hosting friends and family approaches, I decided on a ’easy listening’, ‘middle of the road’ purchase suitable for all the family to act as a quiet backdrop while we gather to play charades around the fire. ‘Killing Joke’ by ‘Killing Joke’ was one of the first vinyl records I ever bought and, as always, I was introduced to the band by the wonderful John Peel. I was intrigued by the cover art which I still think is brilliant. ...

‘Dear Father - It is 6 weeks since my last confession. Since then I have…’ Installed Thunderbird 3 which handles all my work email. This upgrade went smoothly enough although there were some minor glitches with server authentication and message filters. Thunderbird 3 adds tabs, UI enhancements, IMAP synchronisation, much needed improvements to the address book in addition to faster searching. Upgraded my desktop PC to Linux Mint 8. Again, this went smoothly enough, mainly because I did a full blown install while carefully preserving my user data. Until Linux upgrades are ‘rolling’ and as easy as applying a Windows Service Pack, Linux will never succeed in the mainstream. ...

I’m not a big fan of American soccer. Neither am I a great fan of women’s football wherever it is played. Elizabeth Lambert has just changed that state of affairs. The rumour mill back home claims that Alex Ferguson is planning an audacious £34 million bid in January to replace Vidic.

This conversation didn’t actually take place but it could have. Last week, friends and I were discussing µblogging in the pub. Well not µblogging exactly but two ladies had recently discovered Facebook and were talking about the pros and cons of this wonderful social network. One lady said: ‘Oh and another thing - I really don’t like the ‘Jenny is…’ status update. I just don’t get it.' The other lady replied ‘Yeah - that bit is stupid. I am hardly going to write down ‘Marilyn is…just off to Asda for the weekend shop'. ...

A few years ago, on a Wednesday night, I returned from work and Norma told me in passing that she had got a man coming to clean our carpets for free. Ten minutes later, I found myself welcoming not one but two Kirby salesmen into my house. What followed was possibly the worst 96 minutes of my life (with the possible exception of yesterday’s fixture at Anfield). I am normally polite and well mannered so I dutifully sat with my cup of tea and listened to the sales guy’s pitch about the miscellaneous wonders of the Kirby vacuum cleaner. ...