Not a brilliant week if you are a United fan… A few years ago, I was drinking in the Chelsea Potter on the Kings Road and a mate said ‘That’s George Best sitting over there’. I replied ‘Yeah, right’. I looked across to the bar and saw a plump, bearded figure sitting on a barstool, clad in a hideous blue shell-suit, sipping a Coke. I was stupefied. After a while, he finished his drink and left. I was still gawping at him like a lovestruck teenager and I swore he smiled at me on his way out. ...

Don’t bother. Focus on content. If people care, they will comment.

Last week, I initiated the transfer of the last of my pension funds into my Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPP). This should be a relatively straightforward transfer of the Protected Rights element of a former pension plan. The first step was a response from the pension company receiving the funds. They need me to fill in a form explicitly stating that I did not request any financial advice about this transfer to guard them against mis-selling claims. ...

In an earlier post, I moaned about Dell’s opaque pricing model on their UK Web site. However, people (especially me) are very quick to moan and complain but often slow to give thanks and appreciation. I subsequently contacted Dell Customer Services to complain that the invoice was for a different amount agreed on the phone (strong case) and the fact I discovered that I could configure an identical PC for an even lower price (weaker argument). ...

There is nothing more tedious than a blog that starts: Mood: Restless. Currently listening to: X&Y, Coldplay However I have just burned a CD in ATRAC3Plus format using Sony SonicStage which contains 15 albums ! The Killers - Hot Fuss Interpol - Antics Snow Patrol - Final Straw British Sea Power - The Decline of British Sea Power The Chameleons - Live at the Academy (2 discs) Morrissey - Beethoven is Deaf Radiohead - The Bends R.E.M - Reveal Ride - Nowhere Idlewild - The Remote Part New Order - Get Ready Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights Nirvana - Never Mind The Chameleons - Strip The Fall - Psykick Dance Hall (3 discs) There was even 3MB left free. I don’t care that ATRAC is a lossy format. I am used to listening to bootlegs on TDK 90’s that sound as though they were recorded in a bunker. ...

Things I like about Wordpress after a couple of days… The dashboard summary which includes ‘Incoming Links’, recent posts and comments at a glance. Wordpress also provides? basic statistics (hits, entry page, referrer). It looks like the data? is automatically cleaned of spiders and bots so the figures you get are more likely to relate to actual human beings. You can also remove hits incurred as part of administration. Being able to easily and quickly define a hierarchy of categories and tag your posts. I thought that the RSS feed for an individual category is really good as it means that Oracle types can choose to only subscribe to that element of the blog (and ignore football, music and gadgets). Categories also helps navigation. If someone wrote a gem of an article two years ago about Linux, you are more likely to be able to find it using categories rather than trawling through the complete blog. RSS feed for comments. Clean, quick, intuitive, well designed interface. The post editor which includes a WYSIWYG preview. I used to dislike the? fact that the Blogger Preview used a larger font so? sub-consciously I didn’t view it? as the finished article. The Blogger Preview, Close, Edit, Preview? cycle required a lot of key clicks and wasted time. The Wordpress preview is precisely that. Automatic pings to ping-o-matic (and on to 15 services including Technorati). The fact that pasting in text from Blogger preserved the hyperlinks. I am still perplexed as to how that worked. Posting seems much quicker compared to Blogger. No more waiting and nervously watching ‘This may take a while if you have a large blog’. Indenting quoted text correctly uses the ‘blockquote’ tag. Support for trackbacks and pingbacks as opposed to Blogger’s backlinks. Support for breaking long posts using ‘More’. The price. Minor things I don’t like so much ...

So, you can now buy the program for last Sunday’s Manchester United game against Chelsea in WH Smiths. I used to go to Old Trafford every fortnight in the late 70’s and 80’s (Stretford Paddock, Stretford End, United Road). Part of the experience was travelling there, getting to the ground early, securing your position on a barrier, reading the program, the atmosphere building, the smell of pies and bovril, the chanting, the opposition fans, the players warming up, the tension, the goals, the celebrations, the moaning, everything. ...

I was investigating the bewildering world of trackbacks, pingbacks and blog comments and found that my existing provider, blogger.com, supports backlinks (inbound links to a specific article from a Google search) but not trackbacks. Then I discovered Wordpress.org which is a blogging tool that supports proper trackbacks, pingbacks (and a whole lot more besides). Although Wordpress is a freely available OpenSource PHP based application, I would need to upgrade my current web hosting to include PHP (for the massive sum of an additional 4GBP per month). ...

I have got an old radio cassette in my car with a aerial mounted in the rear windscreen. The MW reception is pretty poor and if you go under a bridge, the interference nearly makes your ears bleed. As I listen to Radio 5 Live quite a lot, this is rather irritating. After months of prevaricating and thinking, I impetuously went out and bought a Sony DAB6650. This is a DAB radio (with FM/MW/LW as well) and a CD player. The unit looks and sounds great and I now have access to lots of different DAB stations. ...

Dear Reader We had some great times on blogger together but all good things must come to an end. I just feel we need a break from each another. I need some time to think and some personal space (on Wordpress) and there is no other ISP involved. Please - believe me. The Web site hits were bubbling up nicely, the feedburner circulation peaked at 14 and we even had a couple of people referring to and commenting on this blog. ...