Dear Fat Controller Occasionally, I use South West Trains to commute from my home in sunny Norbiton into the City of London. However before you say anything, don’t worry, I am not a merchant banker despite what my friends say. Today, in an attempt to secure a seat, I delayed my departure slightly and caught the legendary 08:36 service from Norbiton. Unfortunately, I narrowly missed a highly prized seat when a rather forceful gentleman, who boarded after me, miraculously managed to reach the last vacant seat 0.74 seconds before me. Bastard. ...

This blog and the handful of modules I use has been upgraded to the final version of Drupal 7.0 which was released today. I was quite pleased that I used Drupal 7 from the early beta versions and then tracked the D7 release candidates as this gave me valuable experience in upgrading Drupal 7 relatively quickly while preserving my additional modules without losing all my data which always helps. It’s worth noting that although I barely scratch the surface of Drupal 7’s wide range of functionality, the quality, reliability and performance of Drupal 7 was perfectly fine for this blog. ...

Steve Rubel has resolved to return to feed reading in 2011. However, I have been using Google Reader since 2007 and use it daily to catch up with the tech and sports news in addition to my favourite blogs. I honestly can’t imagine life without it. I was also interested by a recent article (prompted by the demise of delicio.us) that described the use of Google Reader as a bookmarking service.

Steve Rubel sings the praises of Markdown and good old fashioned text editors. I agree and for a long time have dithered over whether to write all of my blog posts in Markdown. This makes sense as it simplifies the syntax and theoretically should make writing content easier and quicker. I was particularly struck by Caius Durling’s use of Markdown on his Habari blog and the use of the plaintext plugin to reveal the raw Markdown. ...

Manchester, near England - Wednesday 5 January 2011 The footballing world was left reeling yesterday at shock news emanating from Manchester City’s training facility at Carrington. A local man, Frank Booth explains: ‘I always pass the City training ground on my way to work so I always check out the players going through their drills. Yesterday I was quite shocked to see all the players smiling and laughing. I couldn’t believe my eyes so I stopped for a closer look. ...