Month: February 2001

long long day. my body is tired and my head is full.

VERY BIG ANNOUNCEMENT
Yes! Grayblog merchandise is now available!
Rush over to the new Grayblog shop and purchase t-shirts, mugs and mousemats!
Adorn your desk, mug tree and chest with a picture of my lovely visage!
Declare your allegiance to Grayblog!
Show your undying love for Graybo!
Hurry! Go now!
(Prices are in US dollars, but they work out pretty well – as a guide, US$15 is roughly equal to GB£10. However, the shipping charge from California to the UK is a bit steep, so I suggest you pool your order with friends to keep it down.)

TPL update: 44 points, taking me to 708. Very respectable considering that a third of my team didn’t play.

I know what I meant to say earlier and didn’t. I was driving to work this morning (which, in itself, is unusual as I usually use a combination of foot and train) when I was following an unremarkable blue Escort estate. In the back of this car, not in a cage or anything, was a very very handsome owl, staring out the back window at me. He was definitely real and very much alive – he turned his head to look at things and blinked once or twice. And seemed very calm and quite used to sitting in a car.
Beats those irritating nodding Homer Simpson toys any day.

watch this site for a very big announcement tomorrow. still working on the details, but should have it sorted by lunch time.

just been for a couple of beers with the posse, and promised that I would say nice things about DA – well, DA, you’re nice.
Is that ok?

today’s rant is on the subject of the Foot-and-Mouth crisis.
Some people I’ve spoken to do not seem to have grasped the magnitude of this, and also how easy it is for them to spread the disease just by going for a walk. And I can imagine the farmers’ fears at the moment, mainly because we experienced a similar, smaller and unpublicised scare last year. A nursery only 500 metres from here suffered an infestation of a pest called Thrips palmi. MAFF/PHSI officials were swarming around the area, checking for the spread of the pest and trying to eradicate it. Essentially, if you get this thing in your plants, you have to destroy your crops, and, if eradication is unsuccessful, your glasshouses have to be destroyed and there was even talk of covering the ground under 10cm of concrete.
Of course, as you can imagine, all the neighbouring nursery owners (this is a big area for horticulture) were beside themselves with worry. This pest can fly or be carried on the wind. And there is no insurance cover available for this kind of thing (farmers are now lobbying government to put pressure on insurers to provide that sort of cover).
And imagine the equivalent happening to your business – I know some of the people who read this are in the IT industry – well, it’s like you getting a virus on your PC, and the government coming along and stopping you trading and destroying all your PCs and equipment, and then getting in touch with all your business associates, checking them out and doing the same to them. Scary.
So spare a thought for the farmers. Don’t go walking in the countryside. And try to imagine it happening to you.
Rant ends.

last night was a *very* late night, so late it was well advanced into today by the time I climbed under my duvet. This morning I am, officially, a zombie. But it was worth it for some very high quality time.

Meg posts pictures of the blogmeet on Friday. You can see my visage there. And those of other people.

ok – I’m getting *really* tired of using Blogger. Whilst I think it is good to support a small company that provide a useful product, that product ceases to be useful if it can not be relied upon to function well at all times. That’s why I use Easyspace to host this site because they are reliable, even if they are not the cheapest.
So I’m off to download Greymatter.