I’m currently selling a splendid Diesel ladies’ leather jacket over at eBay because it doesn’t match my heels it doesn’t fit Hels any more. The sale finishes next Thursday evening. If you’re interested, email me and I’ll send you the link.
Chris Adams to leave Sussex
Not entirely surprising news, but certainly a loss to Sussex as he was instrumental in giving the team a focus and guiding the younger players. Any bets on the next captain?
Hoooraaay! Moon Meat Mines On The Moon!
Utterly utterly brilliant! Blode 7: Blode and the Moon Meat Mine. I think Joel may have been snorting dandruff.
If anyone wants to buy me a Blode plushie for an early Christmas present, you’d be my friend until at least next week.
S1K
The Sol 1K Problem. via Sore Eyes.
Sausages
Discovery of the week: saying "sausages" in the style of the dog that was on That’s Life!, oh, twenty five years ago, has the ability to reduce my son to giggle fits.
Rural fuel
This story sounds awfully familiar. Our home is heated with bottled gas which is even more expensive than either bulk-delivered LPG or oil, the options described in the article. Each bottle costs us nearly £40 and, in deep mid-winter when there is nightly frost, we can get through a bottle in six days. Do the maths. We can’t upgrade to either of the bulk options without investing in a (costly) tank plus associated plumbing. You find that, after the first bill arrives, you quickly learn to put on a thicker sweater insted of turning up the thermostat. Our wood-fuelled stove is also a great friend.
In addition, as the article hints, those of us living in rural areas, even though we are only a short distance from two small towns, have to use cars every day as there is no realistic public transport alternative. There is a weekday bus, but it runs only once per hour, goes only to one of the neighbouring towns and starts too late and finishes too early to be of any value to commuters. Bizarrely, it calls at the nearby railway station before coming to our village, so you can’t use it to hook up with the rail service. I’ve never actually counted them all, but our road consists of 31 properties but yet must be home to at least sixty cars. Parking is a nightmare.
Now, I’m not expecting government handouts to help us out (although there could be more help to encourage people to insulate their homes and make them more fuel-efficient – this would both help them financially and reduce emissions). But a realisation of the problem in government and elsewhere would be a good thing. As suggested in the article, villages like ours are often home to those on very low wages (farm workers, for example) and how they manage, I really don’t know (actually, I do – they have wood-fuelled stoves and take wood home from the farm as a "perk". But that doesn’t heat your water or cook your dinner).
Google and IE7 favicons
IE7 is much better at displaying favicons in the address bar than previous versions. (I’ve been using IE7 for a little while and can generally recommend it – it seems robust and the tabbed browsing is every bit as good as Firefox. Plus the increased emphasis on plug-ins means that IE7 will, at the very least, keep pace with Firefox – I expect a speelchucker plug-in sometime soon in one of the MS regular update thingies, but in the meantime I’ve downloaded IESpell).
I’ve noticed that most major websites now have a favicon (Yahoo!, BBC, grayblog, etc.), but not Google. For a company where branding and identity are so important, I find this puzzling.
EDIT: well, that’s made me look stupid, hasn’t it? Earlier, IE7 wasn’t displaying a Google favicon. I’ve rebooted since then and now it does. Shall we just say that Google clearly only thought to add one this afternoon after reading this post?
Amusing spam
It’s not often that spam makes me smile these days. However, I’ve just been told in an email from Mr Collins Potty (no kidding!) that I’ve won £1.5million in the Watford Lottery. Watford is, of course, famous for many wonderful things, but I don’t believe that a multi-million lottery is one of them.
SatNav
I’m still not convinced that SatNav is a good idea. Here is more evidence to prove that I’m better off with a map.
Quarter of a million
Sometime in the next day or two, visitor number 250,000 will come by this site. My advice: hit refresh repeatedly until it happens.