A few months ago, I was shocked and amazed to receive an email from Friends Reunited entitled ‘Janet Oldsgate has sent you a private message’. God, I was so excited, I could hardly contain myself. The adrenaline started flowing, I broke out in a hot sweat and clicked through like I had never clicked through before. Oh no. What is my darned password for Friends Reunited ? I looked it up on the Palm - nothing. I looked in Thunderbird under ‘Infrequently used Web sites’ - nothing. I tried a couple of the usual suspects but no joy. Then I remembered the password was in fact, ‘JOldsgate73!’. This password was a deliberate and incredibly secure choice to prevent a repeat of the unfortunate incident when my wife hacked my Friends Reunited account and modified my ‘Profile’ in an oh so amusing and hilarious fashion. My, how we laughed. ...

I am worried about those developers at WordPress. They have to eat food, drink coffee and wear clothes but how are they ever going to make any money ? There isn’t even a ‘Donate’ button anywhere on the site. WordPress.com provide me with a hosted blogging platform which I think it is very good; better than Blogger, better than Bloglines, better than Yahoo 360’, better than most of the competition. ...

The Glazer takeover was not the end of an era. Manchester United is a PLC not a football club. The departure of Roy Keane was not the end of an era. Players (even great ones) come and players go. The death of George Best was not the end of an era. Death and taxes. However, last night’s 2-1 defeat to Benfica in Lisbon just might be.

Ricky Gervais is one of my favourite comedians (The Office, Extras) and has produced the first in a series of podcasts for The Grauniad with Stephen Merchant (co-writer) and Karl Pilkington (who has a hard time). The podcast is 30 minutes of chat and improvisation but very funny.

Scobleizer’s trip to the Guinness brewery reminds me of a similar visit I enjoyed many years ago with a few friends. After enduring the 45 minute tour of the Dublin brewery, we finally settled back to enjoy the free samples which were willingly dispensed in 1/2 pint glasses of sheer perfection. After a while (seven halves), I sensed the barmaid was about to ask ‘Shouldn’t you lads be moving on now ?’ but one of our party got in first with ‘Have you not got any pint glasses back there ?’ ...

Don’t know where, don’t know when but SonicStage 3.3 is available. Includes ATRAC Lossless format, ripping WMA CD’s, wider range of bitrates for ATRAC3Plus and MP3. However, SonicStage remains the only software application in the modern world without a ‘Check for updates’ option.

The Killers - Smile Like You Mean It U2 - City of Blinding Lights Wonder if Brandon got up and played the piano when U2 recently supported The Killers.

In a previous article, I wanted to add a trackback to properly cite an article on Ben Gillbank’s blog about his Regulus theme. I couldn’t find the trackback URL but, as ever, WordPress is doing all the donkey work for me and now I see my posting does indeed appear as a comment in Ben’s original article. No manual intervention, head scratching or wasted time. Exactly as it should be.

I quite enjoy the idea of BlogShares.com which a fantasy stock market for blogs. BlogShares places a notional value on your blog based on the number (and value) of inbound and outbound links. Shares in blogs can then be traded. BlogShares is also useful for identifying blogs by people with similar interests. For example, most Oracle technically minded people usually link to Tom Kyte’s excellent blog and their blogs are also worth reading. ...

Those nice people at WordPress have opened up WordPress.com to the masses and added a couple of new themes. I really like the ‘Regulus’ theme from Ben Gillbanks because it looks clear and uncluttered, the tag line is displayed and the RSS feeds for the blog and comments are obvious. The only polite suggestions for improvement would be to relocate ‘Blog Roll’ under the ‘Archive’ and ‘Categories’ to let the main body text occupy more of the screen and for ‘Message ssage’ to be fixed in the ‘Comments’ section. ...