Norman - Your next post will be in the style of Micro-Blogging… Monday - NSCR. Plaintive request from a customer to truncate a Siebel intersection table. Siebel’s official stance on the use of any direct SQL to modify data in Siebel base tables is well documented. However, for reasons that are too lengthy and tedious to divulge here, this particular request was approved. Mainly because they deposited £2500 into my offshore account. ...

London - 5 November 2007 The football world was left reeling after Norman Brightside was fired last night. The long serving manager of Whiteside Wanderers was summarily dismissed when the club released a terse statement on their website. ‘36 points. That’s rubbish. You’re fired.’ After a pre-season of great promise, big money transfers and high expectations from fans, Whiteside Wanderers have endured a poor start to the season and are positioned second from bottom after a string of inconsistent performances and bad results. ...

Q: Who on earth could manage to screw up a Cup draw involving just four teams ? A: The Scottish FA. Reminds me of a funny Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch where the draw is made for the FA Cup Final. ‘Number 2 - Arsenal …will play Number 1 - Liverpool and that completes the draw for the FA Cup Final. '

Tumblr update is imminent. First impressions are excellent. Timestamps. Archives. Tags. Channels. Markdown. No comments though.

I was rather hoping Disqus would be a 100% plug-in replacement for the woefully inadequate coComment so I could simply track all the comments I leave on assorted blogs and easily monitor other comment threads of interest. An RSS feed of such comment activity would be an ideal element to feed into the Tumble dryer. Disqus launched yesterday and as it was written in Django, looks OK and isn’t too invasive or distracting (c.f BlogRush), I have enabled the WordPress plugin on this blog. ...

On May 21 2007, this newspaper published an article that was somehow misconstrued by some idiotic readers to imply that the funds raised to assist with the search for the missing girl, Madeleine McCann, were being misused by Gerry and Kate McCann to fund baby sitting services and countless bottles of Rioja (Gran Reserve 1987 vintage) for British holidaymakers (aka Tapas Bar 7) in sunny Portugal. In the light of several hundred complaints from outraged readers and the threat of legal action from the McCann’s Press Office (which is absolutely not funded from the Find Madeleine fund whatsoever), this newspaper is pleased to offer a full and unequivocal apology to Gerry and Kate McCann on today’s front page. ...

Sadly, the world’s first and most prolific blogger, the Reverend Robert Shields has passed away in America aged 89. Shields was the author of the world’s longest diary consisting of a staggering 37 million words. Shields was truly the world’s first blogger with his first recorded entry in April 1927 beating Dave Winer by 3 months. Nor was Robert Shields afraid of including trivia and useless information in his journals. For example, how many blogs (or Tumblelogs for that matter) record blood pressure readings (Shields despised silly mood emoticons), make any effort to fastidiously record every single visit to the lavatory (Shields had dozens of imaginative ways to describe the act of urination) or have the thoughtfulness to detail every single piece of junk mail ever received. ...

Successfully upgraded WordPress to version 2.3.1 in four clicks using the excellent WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Note to self: Dust off CV and apply for this job on Monday morning. Any client who is interested in people ‘running projects from cradle to grave’ intrigues me.

I am bored of tormenting myself, conjuring up full blown blog posts, pouring over non-existent Adsense revenues and analyzing traffic statistics so I have started a Tumblelog. There is something very appealing about Kottke’s definition of a Tumblelog as ‘a quick and dirty stream of consciousness.’ A Tumblelog can be a short, snappy blog and can also aggregate different RSS feeds (Google Shared Stuff and Items, del.icio.us, last.fm, Flickr and even this blog). Why, Tumblr even has built-in support for quotes. ...