Yet another trackback test. One year and four days after I thought I understood the difference between pings and trackbacks, this short podcast shows me that I didn’t.

Last night, I enjoyed a pleasant evening in this pub with a few friends. We watched a mediocre team in white draw with a mediocre team in orange and blue socks. Beer arrived on a regular basis from the downstairs bar via the dumb waiter. Inexplicably, towards the end of the evening, conversation turned to songs about the death of a father:- The Verve - Drugs Don’t Work The Streets - Never Went To Church Mike And The Mechanics - The Living Years U2 - Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own Billy Bragg - Tank Park Salute We finally left the pub and someone asked ‘What are the chances of finding a curry house around here ?’. We looked across the street and our prayers were answered. Weird. ...

I am working in Oxford and booked into this small hotel overnight. I arrived at 18.30 and rang the bell. No one is home. I phoned the company who made the booking to get the phone number. They call the hotel on my behalf. Guess what. No one is home. The helpful man from LateRooms asked if I could wait around in the cold for 30 minutes to ‘see if someone turns up’. ...

Bluehost have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.5 so I ignored this warning and clicked ‘Upgrade’ Click on Upgrade only if no files, languages, themes have been modified you haven’t added mods to this installation of WordPress After all, the whole point of hosting a blog is to add plugins and modify themes. I find it slightly odd that Bluehost have no blog or other means of communicating the availability of these upgrades. ...

I forgot to pack my WordPress hosted images when moving my blog. Thankfully, this isn’t as important (or embarrassing) as carefully packing and then promptly forgetting your suitcase when attending a week long conference away from home. However, thanks to the Google image archive, my photo blog has now been restored to its full glory. Yesterday, I visited a customer in sunny Glasgow, near Scotland. This was very poor planning on my part. I really should have delayed this trip by 7 days which would have allowed me to gatecrash the Oracle blogger meet-up at UKOUG. ...

Next year, I will be attending an unusual fireworks display in Sunderland. A long trip from London, admittedly but I am absolutely certain it will be worth it. ‘The body naturally produces methane gas, so combine that with the firework and the exploding effect with methane’s flammability…’

I never used to work from home much. When the kids were younger, my wife was at home and without an office, quiet room or even a shed, I found it difficult to concentrate. Accessing the work network over dial-up also was a significant constraint. Now things are different. My children are both at secondary school and leave the house before I do. My wife also works and I have a broadband connection and VPN access to the office network. So, occasionally, I can save two hours commuting, sit down with a decent cup of tea, be productive and still be back home in time for tea. ...

The observant reader will have noticed some minor changes to the sidebar. The thousands of one hit wonders from Google won’t. Popular posts (widget) Related posts (widget) ‘Archives’ gets a run in the first team, displacing the rarely used ‘Calendar’ and ‘Categories’. I prefer using widgets to having to actually edit (and risk breaking) the PHP code. Widgets always work with any theme. Also, I thought it was odd that Google Analytics hadn’t tracked a single outgoing link since I installed this plugin. This turned out to be a bug fixed by the most recent version. ...

A few years ago, on a Saturday morning, I was crossing the road to the local shop with my daughter, Norma Jean. We held hands to cross halfway and paused. Suddenly, spontaneously, without warning, Norma Jean decided to burst across the road. Unfortunately, a car simultaneously decided to sharply turn left without indicating. It all happened quickly - very quickly. The car ran over Norma’s foot and she collapsed. The car stopped and the lady pleaded: ‘Oh God. I didn’t see her. I didn’t see her. I’m sorry. She just ran out.’ ...

4 November 1986. League Cup 3rd round replay. Attendance 17,914. Southampton 4 Manchester United 1 (Davenport). Ron Atkinson’s last game in charge and I was there. The United team that night was: Chris Turner Mike Duxbury Arthur Albiston Paul McGrath Graeme Hogg Remi Moses Jesper Olsen Norman Whiteside Frank Stapleton Peter Davenport Colin Gibson Subs: Kevin Moran, Nicky Wood I was partly responsible for Ron Atkinson’s departure. The seeds were sown the previous season when United won the opening 10 games of the 1985-1986 season, fuelling expectation that United might actually win the title. However, I was foolish enough to attend game number 11. Inevitably, that game was a 1-1 draw at Luton and ended the run. United finished 4th that season behind Liverpool and the writing was on the wall for Ron Atkinson. ...