Steve has an admirable habit of titling (almost) all of his posts with a line from a song. Just went to the post office. I was in luck. Just one lady, with a baby in a pushchair, posting a small parcel. Or so I thought. ‘First class, please’ ‘That’s £2.57 please’. ‘Oh - hang on. Do you think I should send this recorded ?’ [ She didn’t ask what benefits recorded delivery offered versus registered or plain first class. Even more odd was the postmaster’s reply ] ...

Back in the old days, things were very simple. You filmed endless hours of footage with your analog camcorder; your summer holidays, opening Christmas presents around the tree, your child’s first steps and birthday parties. Then, the night before you set out on your next summer holiday, the wife utters words that strike fear into the very heart of your soul: ‘Charge the camcorder batteries and have you transferred all the tapes to video so we can re-use them ?’ ...

One of the reasons I decided to put Adsense on this blog was out of sheer curiosity. There are plenty of Google sponsored case studies available from American shoe shops that significantly increased sales and revenues using Adsense. Successful blogger John Chow is totally and refreshingly transparent with all his various revenue streams but I didn’t have a clue what income (if any) a small-time blogger might expect. So, here - drum roll, please - are the revenue figures for this blog for the first 3 months ...

Morwenna Banks, who plays Vicky in Saxondale, is superb. While she gets some of the best lines in the comedy series, co-written by Steve Coogan like ‘Tell him to put some jam on his shoes and invite his trousers down for tea.’ …her delivery and timing is absolutely brilliant.

‘My name is Norman and I am a blogoholic.’ Two years ago, I started this blog purely as an experiment to see what all the fuss was about. Two years ago, I didn’t even know what blogging was. I certainly didn’t expect that I would still be doing it two years later. I didn’t anticipate that I would subsequently play with themes, plug-ins, spend money on a domain, migrate to my own WordPress blog and eventually add Adsense. ...

After recent horrific events, I was forced to flee the country so I took my family (and a couple of young hangers-on) for a relaxing break at CenterParcs near Eindhoven. For those readers with (young) families, CenterParcs in Holland is very similar to the setup in the UK except that the prices are lower and staff are actually friendly and helpful. For those readers without families, CenterParcs is probably not for you. Anyway, I have returned refreshed, invigorated and raring to go. I am currently wading through my backlog of email. Then I will quickly review the week’s football news and my Fantasy League team selections, watch ‘Saxondale’ and then normal blogging service will be resumed as I ease myself gently back into work and scale my ivory tower. ...

Oracle 11g has recently been released so it’s time for everyone to submit their colourful screenshots into the ‘Oracle 11g banner version’ competition. Well, nearly everyone. Apologies for the delay but, finally, I am proud to present my paltry, monochrome effort. I just installed Oracle 11g onto a VMware server running Redhat Enterprise Linux 4.0. It actually took me more time to configure VMware tools and successfully share the folder staging the distribution than to install and configure Oracle. ...

Thanks for bringing us Joy Division, New Order, The Hacienda and your faith and passion for Manchester. From The Times: ‘His name change to Anthony H. Wilson was, he once said, to’ “wind up all the people in Manchester who think I’m a flash t***.” 57 years young. Much too soon. RIP.

Create tables, resize, add rows and columns, preview the output and add the finishing touches in Google Docs. Then simply paste the HTML into the WordPress WYSIYG editor.

Less than two minutes to index a new article. Impressive.