…grayblog…

Category: grayblog.co.uk

  • Catch up

    I’ve really been neglecting you readers lately, haven’t I? Umm, well, sorry. But hey, I’ve been somewhat busy lately:

    • Last weekend: up to Stafford with Tom to spend the weekend with Jo and Bob. Excellent time had by all.
    • Last weekend and this week: much concern about SiL, who has been really quite unwell. But she seems to be making a steady recovery, which is good.
    • Tuesday: an all-day meeting with my New Zealand sub-agent, who is in the country at the moment.
    • Wednesday: a day out with H to the Chelsea Flower Show. We dressed in our finest summer clothes and were subjected to repeated heavy showers, with the result that we looked like a pair of muddy drowned rats. But it was worth it. Not sure that it is worth paying £35 a head to get in, though, particularly when you have to sit on the floor to eat your sandwiches and drink your tea because the catering facilities are so inadequate. They were absolutely awful when I last went ten years ago and have only improved marginally.
    • Thursday: catching up in the office.
    • Friday: to Chichester for a haircut and to distribute publicity materials for my event coming up at West Dean at the end of June.
    • Saturday: Charlie and the Peet came for lunch – a thoroughly relaxing and wine-filled event.
    • yesterday: up early to go to Heathrow to meet some American colleagues of their plane, collect plants, deliver them to a nursery near my parents and then join my parents for Sunday lunch and some plant talk.
    • today: dozy sleeping and much talk of "we really should go for a walk" and "the lawn needs mowing" or "I really must start on the front garden", but it’s chucking down with rain (between burst of intense hot sunshine) – that’s my excuse, anyway.

    There are many, many things that I really should find time to write about, but I’m not sure when that will happen. If you’re very lucky, I’ll provide you with some photos, as a picture is worth a thousand words (or several thousand, if your usualy verbage is as poor as that which generally graces these pages).

  • Still alive…

    …just very busy. More soon.

  • Give money

    Following some silliness over at Gordon’s site, I’ve finally updated the support grayblog page.

  • Downtime

    Apologies if you found this site to be out of action this morning – it was offline for about ten minutes whilst I upgraded to WP2.0.2. I’ve upgraded my work site too. Yay me.

  • Four minute nuisance

    I have Akismet installed on this blog. Today, it caught its 50,000th spam comment since installation. That’s 50,000 spams in just 139 days or 360 spam comments per day – one every four minutes. Which begs two questions – if everyone used Akismet, would spam commenting stop? And how does anyone survive *without* Akismet?

  • Redesign and upgrades

    I’m currently redesigning my work website, moving the whole thing across to WordPress and using the Pages feature to generate the non-blog content. So far, it’s been a mostly enjoyable experience, with only the discovery that forms break TinyMCE to spoil the party. I’ll let you know when I launch it.

    Meanwhile, I notice that there is a WordPress security update. How tiresome. Guess I’d best get it.

    In other news, we had a builder pop round this morning. He actually turned up when he said he would. Amazing.

  • By Jove, he’s done it!

    Look! Look! Working archives! Yay!

    Very large amounts of gratitude should be directed towards Mr Pete Dot Nu. He’s a lovely young man.

  • In demand

    I’ve been invited to be interviewed on Radio Kent on Saturday morning (Radio Kent being rather imprecisely named as it covers a not inconsiderable part of Sussex). The Pat Marsh show is doing a feature on blogs and blogging between 11.15 and 11.45 and wanted me to chat on that subject, but I’ve declined the invitation as I’m keeping my diary clear in case I have to take H to the hospital at a moment’s notice (the baby being due to arrive any day now). But it might be worth listening to – I hope they don’t focus too much on the geeky and egotistical aspects of blogging and talk a little about their value for information and community (two factors which have always been and probably always will be sadly lacking from this site!).

    And we all remember the issue of Computer Active for 3 May 2001 that featured this site, don’t we?

  • Happy 2006

    For the first time since 1986 (I think – understandably, my memory is a little hazy in this regard), I didn’t go out for New Year’s Eve. Although we had tickets for the cheesey disco at The Pub Next Door, Hels and I are full of a particularly unpleasant cold, so we decided to stay in and in fact retired at 9.30 – ridiculously early. Having said that, I do feel better this morning, so perhaps an early night paid off.

    Today we have spent the morning tidying the house in preparation for the arrival of the parents for NYD lunch – a suitably low key way to spend the day.

    Of course, you’ll all be expecting a review of the year. Well, here it is:

    In general, 2005 has been a year of consolidation and was always going to struggle to live up to the excitement of 2004 – but there has been excitement enough for us. Both home life and work life have been successfully consolidated, although we’d like to have more money coming in in both areas. And, thankfully, 2005 has generally not featured much in the way of bad news, certainly not anything that I’m still dwelling on now.

    As for 2006, clearly there is one event that is going to dwarf all else. Becoming parents is going to change our lives in ways that we probably have yet to even imagine. I think we are reasonably prepared for what is coming – certainly from a practical point of view, we have pretty much everything under control (all saving the final touches to the nursery).

    As for resolutions, I’m not a huge fan of making promises that I know I probably won’t live up to, but here goes anyway:

    • finish the garden. This is a major project that could take weeks or months, involving relocating our car parking area and moving large quantities of soil by shovel and wheelbarrow – but it will radically improve the look of our house.
    • get some learning done. Not sure what yet – something towards my MCIM or Chartered Marketer status would be good. Perhaps some language learning. I’ve even been thinking about learning shorthand.
    • really get on top of business. There have been moments this year where my business has led me and I’ve not been leading the business – clearly that must change, although I think I’m ending the year in a much better position to that which I started it in.
    • to update grayblog more regularly, probably with more photos. And hopefully not just of the cats or the baby.
    • to take more exercise and lose a little weight. We eat healthily in terms of what we eat, but fall down on how much we eat. Which in itself is not a problem, but when coupled with my increasingly sedentary lifestyle has resulted in a noticeable bulge. This year, the bulge will go and probably by means of increased activity. Doing the garden will help that.

    Crumbs. That’s enough for one year!

    Anyway, happy new year to all of you who come here regularly and particularly to those who are good enough to comment. Blogging remains good fun, both writing and reading, so I fully expect to still be here in another twelve months. I might even fix the archives!

    Meanwhile, go and check out the good news at Uborka.

  • WordPress upgrade

    I’m now running WP2.0 which seems to have cured the Akismet problem, but still leaves my archives in a dysfunctional state. I’ll see if I can find time to have a go at them again – it’s been a long time since they worked properly.