I always was led to believe that Bobby Charlton and George Best didn’t get on. I read it in books and interviews and heard it from various different sources. Of course, this fact wasn’t a total surprise as the two gentlemen did appear to be completely different personalities with rather contrasting interests and, err, hobbies. A month ago, I saw Charlton interviewed by Michael Parkinson where he recounted his memories of the Munich air crash. Charlton also talked about the frustration of playing alongside Best: ...

Monday 3 December Get up very early and drive to Birmingham. 09:40-10:30 ‘30 years at Oracle’ - Tom Kyte. I own a couple of Kyte’s excellent books and various sources report he is an excellent speaker. 10:40-11:00 Visit a few stands. A quick game of ‘spot the colleague’ and ask 27 different companies ‘How can XYZ help me grow my business ?’ 11:15-12:00 ‘Siebel Keynote’ - David Mills. Possible sales and marketing fluff alert. Need to sit at the back adjacent to an aisle to allow a potential rapid escape to ‘Oracle RAC versus Oracle Data Guard - which should I use for Disaster Recovery and which should I use for High Availability ?’. ...

Occasionally, people take the time to comment on this blog which is always welcome. However, the vast majority of comments however are not so thinly veiled advertisements by spammers. Unfortunately, due to recent problems with Spam Karma, I have had to revert to Akismet to block this torrent of pharmaceutical, financial, pornographic and vacuum cleaner spam. This means I have a few more comments held in moderation for judgement. The family convene every night with a cup of Horlicks to sit in judgement on the assorted comments. Norma kindly takes the minutes and Norman Junior twitters the whole event (live). ...

After a detailed, comprehensive ‘root and branch’ inspection, the English FA have discovered that the organisation bears no resemblance to a national Football Association and is, in fact, a Christmas tree - a mid-range Norwegian pine (non-drop) to be precise. MS Explorer is listing badly. Passengers have been advised to disembark and board Mozilla Firefox instead. Croatia may have beaten England twice twice in the qualifying campaign but never mind. At least the marvellous Ing-er-land fans booed their national anthem to motivate their players and the singer improvised an amusing change to the verse. ...

Last night at approximately 18:12, I turned right onto the A4 (Great West Road) heading in an easterly direction towards Chiswick when I noticed a white police van behind me with flashing headlights and blue light spinning. The police van pulled out to overtake me, then suddenly pulled back into my lane and pulled up to a halt to assist a broken down vehicle which had hazard lights on and was stationary in the nearside lane. ...

I subscribe to multiple blogs (163 to be precise) and Google Reader makes tracking all of those sites trivial. Reader’s keyboard shortcuts mean scanning for new content and reading blog articles is also easy and quick. Occasionally, I also leave comments on a much smaller subset of those blogs in addition to blogs I may encounter but may not necessarily subscribe to. After posting your comment, it is imperative to be able to follow any subsequent discussions in case someone violently (dis)agrees with you or simply to hear other people’s viewpoint on the same subject. ...

I don’t know whether Ask have changed their agency but I think this advert is a marked improvement on the previous campaign. Imagine you were a tourist looking to visit London, which site would you choose ?

Just installed SezWho on this blog. At least, it imported all existing comments (unlike Disqus). I would like to change the red colour to blend in with the theme but haven’t worked out how. Now just rate each other nicely or you will be sent to bed without any tea and the plug-in will be removed. Any feedback, just shout or comment. Another interesting service but, again, the problem is that it needs to be installed on the majority of blogs/wikis/forums in the world to be truly useful. I think marketeers call it ’traction’. Pity the support email supplied is totally broken but still. ...

I am still in shock at not being shortlisted for the ‘Best UK Blog’ but I decided to swallow my pride and enjoy a few hours enjoying the high quality content of the 10 finalists: Ian Dale’s Diary - A tagline of ‘Commentary, analysis and gossip from the heart of Westminster’ completely turned me off and I closed the Firefox tab before I was subjected to any more torture. Guy Fawkes - Hoping for top tips to blow up the Houses of Parliament but just got more politics. Yawn. Neil Clark - The winner apparently. Anti-war hack with a lot of posts urging readers to vote for him. EU Referendum - Simply couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to click through. Pub Philosopher - Promising title but yet more (right wing) politics. May as well buy the Daily Mail. The Devil’s Kitchen - Considered outpourings on the wit and wisdom of David Cameron. No thanks. Baggage Reclaim - Much better. A blog recording amusing anecdotes from an anonymous baggage handler at LHR. Oh no - wait a minute - it’s just a blog about dating and ‘relationships’. Nourishing Obscurity - Promising title but this excerpt completely lost me: ‘I see that the current crop of parents lost their moral compass long ago and this is the first generation to grow up “moral-code-lite”. Bright Meadow - Soft porn alert ‘She loved how the amber glinted off his bones’. I daren’t read any more. Particularly as I am on a formal warning from my employer. Kickette - At last. A discerning blog all about football. Only this one is about celebrity footballers (Fat Frank), their tiresome girlfriends and pictures of Ronaldo with his shirt off. I was so depressed that I decided to kill myself compile my own list of the definitive, real, undisputed ‘Top 10 UK (and Irish) blogs’ in strict alphabetic order: ...

I decided to save Oracle Corporation lots of money by not attending Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Initially, my manager spent a lot of time trying to dissuade me but as soon as he uttered the words ‘Billy Joel’ and ‘Prince’, I immediately volunteered for some billable work in Sunderland to help pay for Doug’s complimentary red sleeping bags. Doug Burns, Tim Hall and John Scott seem to have a real problem conquering jet lag while Mark Rittman just does ’the British thing and goes down the pub’. While I don’t travel to the States that often, I did attend a Microsoft training course in Seattle last year. As I don’t sleep on planes, I do recall being quite tired when we disembarked and slightly annoyed when my colleague volunteered to navigate and let me concentrate on driving. ...