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weekend roundup

Phew - what a relief. I often spend a night in the pub or a whole weekend at a beer festival and am completely flummoxed by such trick questions on my return such as ‘Well - what did you actually talk about ?’ or worse, ‘How are Janet, Jonathan, Jennifer and Jocasta ?’

A peculiar challenge for modern day parents: How do you ask your teenage son to tidy his room ? Seems straightforward but not so easy when he gave you the silent treatment for 10 whole years just because you gave consent for his tonsils to be removed. Let’s just hope his schoolmates don’t take the mickey out of his surname.

Welcome to England

‘Oh look Henry. Over to the right. Isn’t that Nelson’s Column ?’

ode to Tom

You never press ‘Publish’ any more
When I read your feed
There’s no articles like before
In your blog
You’re trying hard not to show it
But baby, baby I know it
You’ve lost that blogging feeling
Oh, that blogging feeling
You’ve lost that blogging feeling
Now it’s gone, gone, gone
Oh Tom

Now there’s no comments
In your blog when I read you
And Tom you’re forgetting to comment
Little things I do
It makes me just feel like crying baby
‘Cause Tom, something beautiful’s dying

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Adsense update

After a promising start, the recent introduction of Adsense on this blog is seriously floundering. I am bitterly disappointed with the financial returns in June and my wife is seriously doubting the wisdom of my decision to resign from a highly paid job in IT consultancy in favour of professional blogging on the kitchen table.

Consequently, after an extraordinary board meeting, I have decided that desperate measures are necessary. I have cashed in my £12.50 Adwords vouchers bundled with my Bluehost account and launched a brilliant, inspired, marketing campaign aimed at driving traffic to this site, increasing e-commerce sales and boosting the click through rate.

review of the Virgin Media V+ box

I upgraded to a Virgin Media V+ service three months ago. Although I have had some initial teething problems, I am pretty satisfied with the V+ service.

The V+ box is a personal video recorder (PVR) similar to the Sky Plus service. The V+ box contains a 160GB hard drive which can store 80 hours of recorded TV programs.

Recording a TV program is very easy. You simply navigate through the 7 day TV guide, select the desired TV program and hit ‘Record’. You get the option to either record the individual broadcast or the series (if appropriate).

pictures of a Virgin Media V+ box

Lots of people stumble onto this blog hoping to find technical information, reviews and images of a black Virgin Media V+ set top box.

I presume this is either husbands trying to convince the wife that the box will comply with the aesthetics in the lounge or geeks trying to look at all those connectors on the back.

Whoever you are, whatever you are, these pictures are for all you people out there.

Safari browser available for Windows

The Safari Web browser on Macintosh currently accounts for a paltry 4.34% of visits to this blog. It will be interesting to see whether this figure increases now Apple have released a version of Safari for Windows.

I’ve downloaded Safari and while I like the fonts and appearance, I probably use too many Firefox add-ons to make the change permanently.

Surbiton Trophy

I was going to spend Saturday compiling very important guidelines for the formatting, style and content of comments but decided to go and watch the Ladies final and Men’s semi-finals at the Surbiton Trophy instead.

I packed a lovely picnic (much to the envy of my neighbours), took a proper camera and enjoyed three matches in the sun:

• Brenda Schultz McCarthy (36 years old, 6 foot tall) beat Ayumi Morita (17 years old, 5 foot tall) in three entertaining sets.
• The eventual winner, Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, edged out the Australian 4th seed in a tight match featuring many impressive aces.
• Dodged for cover as 6'10" Croatian, Ivo Karlovic, smashed his way past a bewildered American, Robbie Kendrick (whose lovely girlfriend was sitting next to me).

June spawned a monster

Graham started a technical blog and Andy used the Drupal theme on his new WordPress blog.

I felt left out so I decided to start a technical blog on Drupal with a WordPress theme.

recycle pool

Welcome to the long delayed and much anticipated issue 2 of ‘Recycle Pool’.

We did have a world famous guest writer lined up for this month’s edition but, unfortunately, he got cold feet and decided to pull out at the last minute.

Eddie Awad gets ready to tumble by sharing interesting snippets from his feeds and travels on the Web.

Graham decides to start a technical blog focussed on three letter acronyms (CRM and SOA). Brave man, particularly as his wife is expecting a new arrival - imminently.