…I promise. In the meantime, here is the testcard a photo of Oustreham port at dawn.

I like the way that my rather knackered Nokia, struggling with the low light conditions, has produced a fine piece of pointillist art.

Sometime during the night, Akismet caught the 150,000th spam comment to be sent to this site.

The last 50,000 have taken 104 days to arrive, compared with 95 days for the previous 50,000 and 139 days for the first 50,000. In the last 104 days, an average of 480 spam comments have been submitted each day, which equates to one every three minutes. If it wasn’t for Akismet, I think I would have given up on blogging by now.

Three years ago today, I saw a very beautiful, tall, blonde woman for the first time. She was wearing black leather boots with killer heels, which she’d bought just for the occasion. The fact that she could barely walk in them was neither here nor there.

We’d celebrate this anniversary, if only we both didn’t have filthy colds. Bah! Still, we have our wedding anniversary next week, so hopefully we will recover by then.

Today is our wedding anniversary. We have celebrated by taking Tom to  a children’s farm, having tea and cake in a tearoom and collecting some sweet chestnuts (something that we did on the slopes of Mount Etna during our honeymoon). Tonight we’re going out for dinner.

Low key, but just right.

Huge congratulations to Sarah and Paul who became parents to Emily Grace yesterday. Mum and baby are reportedly doing well, and I’m sure that Dad is still trying to get his head around the concept - even though you have nine months to get ready, nothing really prepares you.

Sometime in the next day or two, visitor number 250,000 will come by this site. My advice: hit refresh repeatedly until it happens.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

The Sol 1K Problem. via Sore Eyes.

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.

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?

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.