Bagel Belly Blog

Databases

Just finished a really good article on PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. Commercial Databases, which is a useful summary of the differences between PostgreSQL and MySQL. Having used both side-by-side and had to administer both, I'm firmly convinced that PostgreSQL is the better database, but it's good to see a balanced comparison.

ecto powered

Another new version of ecto is out, with various bugfixes, etc. I particularly like that it now ships with a folder of buttons, like the one on the right. A nice touch.

Pain

Taiji. All day today. All day tomorrow. Ouch.

Certainly regained my central equilibrium though.

Taking flight

Tickets booked for next weekend. I get to visit another country I've never been to before. Excitement! Only a very short trip this time, but hopefully I'll get to take a look at some of the major sights. Time to go and buy myself a "Teach yourself the language" book now, I guess. Can I learn a language in a week?

Strange days

Today I finally returned various things to my ex partner. Books, clothes, things that I didn't feel it appropriate to hang on to or to throw away.

A relationship that lasted a year and a half. The things were packed in 15 minutes last weekend. Life, love, hopes summed up in a pile of boxes.

I dropped the various boxes off this morning, and received the obligatory boxes back in return - my clothes, my toiletries. Funny how a relationship can be summarised in the contents of those boxes.

I spent the day fighting my emotions. The thoughts, fears, feelings of loss that I put off since December all fighting to overwhelm me. When I saw her I immediately remembered why emotionally, intellectually, and physically I invested so much, thinking "this is the one", hoping that I had finally found the person with whom I would share my life, my dreams, my aspirations.

I made a stupid, obvious business mistake today. Annoyingly, it was one I could and should have been prepared for, as well. In a meeting where it transpires I should have been fully focussed, I got reminiscing and thinking about what was and what could have been, and before I knew it, we'd stumbled into a blatant trap in the dialogue that was taking place. No real harm done, but a frustrating hiccup nevertheless, because I know better and I let myself get distracted. Mind you, in my defence, the meeting was maybe 100 metres from where my ex was probably working. Maybe my mistake was trying to end things and begin things on the same day.

Irony on irony. The developments of the last few weeks are going to change things dramatically, significantly. No "what if", but ... things would certainly have been different.

So as I sit surrounded by the boxes that clinically describe the end of the relationship, and as the tears that I've fought off all day finally arrive, I find I don't have any wise insights or solemn words to offer. No sense of perspective here, or of closure, or finality. Just unhappiness and loss.

Treo 600

I won't be buying a Treo 600. It's just become available in the UK at a price of £525 plus shipping. In America, the most expensive I could find it is $699.00. According to the Universal Currency Converter, that's £389.48.

That sucks. A £135 charge for being in the UK? No thanks!

Music

When I was a kid, I used to be quite into music - I played, I sung, I could read music, the lot. I certainly wasn't any kind of prodigy, but I enjoyed it and didn't do too badly. After playing the recorder family to death, I wanted a more exciting challenge, and asked my teacher to let me learn the piano. I was told that, since I didn't have a piano at home, I wouldn't be allowed to, despite the fact that I was willing to stay late at school every day to practice there. I was offered the chance to learn violin instead, which I did in a desultory way for a couple of months before we moved house and I ended up at a less musical school.

So, I'm really excited about the fact that I'm now going to get the chance to learn that I was denied as a youngster. And I'm going to be taught by a former concert pianist, no less. And I'm going to be learning on a six foot Steinway. And I'm going to be playing Bach. I had my first lesson yesterday, and I can't wait to play some more. It's funny hearing the dusty attic doors of my memory creaking open, and seeing the dusty remnants of my music knowledge creeping back into my brain. It's even funnier staring at my fingers on the keyboard, trying to work out which one to move, and what key to play.

I'm so excited!

BSOD

The Microsoft patch bonanza killed my PC.

The latest security update causes a bluescreen on booting, with the friendly message:
STOP: c0000135 {Unable to Locate DLL}
The dynamic link library winsrv could not be found in the specified path Default Load Path.

I guess this is Microsoft's idea of security, eh? If your computer won't boot, it's got to be pretty secure ... (the only way to secure Windows box is to switch it off, after all).

The Microsoft Knowledge Base solution didn't work so I'm sat waiting for Win2k to reinstall now. Just what I planned to be doing on a Saturday evening. Lovely.

It's good to be reminded every so often of why I don't like Windows and why I prefer to avoid it at all costs. Unfortunately the accounting software I use (Quickbooks) only works in Windows - there's no UK version for the Mac. So looks like I'm stuck with the Redmond torture for now.

Update 1: it's 9pm, and I now have Win2k installed. It only took two hours. I now have Internet Explorer Service Pack 1 and 6 critical updates to install - not including the one that broke things last time. I love Windows. I love Windows. I LOVE WINDOWS!

Update 2: it's 9.15. Windows 2000 service pack 4. Lovely.

Update 3: It's 10pm. After Service Pack 4, I now have 16 critical updates. Ah, happy me.

Urgh:
Cumulative Security Update for Outlook Express 6 Service Pack 1 (KB837009)
Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 (KB832894)
Critical Update for Windows Media Player Script Commands (KB828026)
Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB837001)
Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB828741)
Security Update for Microsoft Data Access Components (KB832483)
Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB828749)
Security Update for Microsoft Windows 2000 (KB828035)
Security Update for Microsoft Windows 2000 (KB825119)
Security Update for Microsoft Windows 2000 (KB826232)
Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB824105)
Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB823182)
823559: Security Update for Microsoft Windows
816093: Security Update Microsoft Virtual Machine (Microsoft VM)
814078: Security Update (Microsoft Jscript version 5.6, Windows 2000, Windows XP)
Critical Update for Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 (KB831167)
Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB835732)

Update 4: 10.45pm. Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB835732) killed my computer again. At least I know what not to install now :-(

Update 5: 11.37pm.

From Microsoft:

Removal Information

To remove this update, use the Add or Remove Programs tool in Control Panel.

System administrators can also use the Spuninst.exe utility to remove this security update. The Spuninst.exe utility is located in the %Windir%\$NTUninstallKB835732$\Spuninst folder.

From the Windows 2000 repair console:
C:\WINNT\$NTUNINSTALLKB835732$\SPUNINST>spuninst.exe
The command is not recognized Type HELP for a list of supported commands.

<expletive/> Microsoft and their <expletive/> shoddy software and their <expletive/> <expletive/> <expletive/> security updates and their <expletive/> <expletive/> <expletive/> <expletive/> <expletive/> <expletive/>. I'm going home to bed. That's five hours of my life that <expletive/> Microsoft owe me. <expletive/>.

The Toll of a New Machine

An article in Fast Company on the rise of the machines reminded me about a recent shopping experience in Sainsbury's. I was shocked and amazed to see that checkout automation has reached this country. It seems like a good idea, though I'm not sure it was any faster than the staffed checkouts. Interestingly, the Sainsbury's method involves weighing the bags constantly as you fill them, to make sure you don't forget to scan any of your shopping. Which inevitably slows the process down, as you get a lot of "unexpected item in bag, please remove" warnings.

Last time I came across automated checkouts was America, where the process was a lot more relaxed - scan, throw in bag, feed money to machine. I wonder how the scan at the end model compares to the scan-as-you-go that some supermarkets tried over here?

Random photos

No time to write anything much this evening, so two photos I took: one this morning, and one this evening. This was the first chance I had to take a snap of the cherry trees dotted around the John Innes Centre - I've been meaning to snap them for a few weeks now, but it's always been raining or my camera's battery has been too flat. I think I need quite a bit more practice with the camera - despite lots of cropping, something about this picture still doesn't seem quite right.

The second picture I took as I was walking home across the fields. Today is the first day so far this year that it's been warm, dry and sunny enough to walk to and from work without a coat. The swans from last summer are back, and I'm going to do my best to try and get a decent picture of them before the year is out. This probably means I'll be forced to buy a better camera with a more powerful optical zoom - the 2x zoom on my current camera isn't good enough.

Wireless

Alex writes about his adventures in going wireless. I'm not sure how he's resisted the lure for so long ...

I thought I was late to the party when I got wifi in late 2002. Back then, I'd not really seen the point - "it's slower than cat5, and I still need a wire for power" - but within five minutes of trying a wireless card when I was working away from the office, I was hooked. Within three hours, I'd already gone to the nearest store and bought a couple of Linksys cards. The minute I got back to Norwich, I went out and bought a broadband router. Those routers can now be found in the office, at my house, David's house, my sister's house and my parents' house.

Like Alex, I found getting the wifi cards up and running in Debian to be a serious trial of patience. It took days. Kernel recompiles. Endless configuration tweaks. Hunts for the right version of pcmcia-cs, kernel, wlan-ng, etc. And these are with fairly mainstream, fairly old makes of card.

To this day, my Debian laptop will cheerfully automatically connect to my home router but fails to find the office one without manual configuration. I briefly tried upgrading to the latest 2.6 linux kernel, but that broke wireless completely. I tried an install of Fedora, to see if that would work. After the initial appearance of success I reported, it broke on a reboot. So I went back to the Debian installation that I got working through sheer luck. And so I don't touch it any more.

By comparison, it takes approximately 10 seconds to get up and running on any network with the Mac. Not that I want to diminish Alex's masochistic pleasure, or anything.

End of an era

So, the UK Mirror Service is coming to an end. A sad day for Lancaster University and the University of Kent, and the end of an era. I remember the mirror service in various incarnations through the years.

When I first went to university in 1992, I was a fan of HENSA as a source of software for my Amiga. Back then, there was no shiny web interface. It was all FTP, and files on HENSA tended to be broken into convenient 1.44mb chunks for easily fitting on floppy disks.

Sad to see it go. Can't wait to see what replaces it.

Play ball

Timothy Falconer writes this timely tale:

So many things gotta come together before you can realize a dream. You can have the right idea, you can have terrific designs, you can have a prototype, a business plan, and a market just bursting to buy, but if you take your eye off the ball [...] you've got nothing.

Boing, boing, boing.

Who you gonna call?

On a Bank Holiday, when all branches are closed, there must be another way to get at my money. Thank goodness I'm a user of Online Banking. Think again, kid ... the service (which is flakey at the best of times, doesn't support the latest browsers, and regularly sends Internet Explorer into a death spiral) is out of action, too!

I didn't know Bank Holidays applied to computers!

I've been thinking of switching bank for a long time now, as NatWest have been fobbing me off with assurances they'll support other browsers for more than six months. So, what banks play nice, and support Mac and Linux users?

NTHell

Just been trying to track down the NTL support phone number so I can report my broken broadband. Whilst on their site, I noticed the "service status" link was more prominent than it used to be. Having taken a look, I see:

5 April 2004 11:46: On the morning of Wednesday 7th April between midnight and 6am, the following work will take place:-
Network upgrades will result in a brief loss of service in the following areas :- Norwich, Runcorn, Brighton and Fareham.

Urgh. That'll be why it was dead all morning then.

The virus damage spreads

I've been catching up on email, including the Cocoon mailing lists, since my network at home is out of action this morning (all praise NTHell!). There were a couple of threads on cocoon-dev about virus messages that got through to the list by appearing to be from me. I also got an email late yesterday from someone on the ALUG list. A couple of days ago, some nice person sent me 178 emails saying "stop sending damn virus!!!!!" or words to that effect.

So now, viruses have gone beyond the initial damage and destruction they cause - trashing unprotected Windows machines, which I am not overly bothered about - and onto meta-destruction: making uneducated people think I'm an infected Windows user, causing disruption on mailing lists, (possibly forcing me to re-subscribe to all my lists from a different (currently virus-free) email address), generating "bounced mail", "trapped virus", and "hey Andrew, I think you've got a virus" messages.

Meanwhile, my server-side spam filter is doing an admirable job, but it doesn't catch the virus mutation that sends attachments without filename extensions, and it doesn't block .zip extensions, since they are conceivably going to be in business emails. I'm still getting over a hundred viruses creeping through the filter each day. I can't just nuke the email address, since it's on several thousand business cards that I have handed (or have yet to hand) out.

Paul asked me the other day: "do you think this is the beginning of the end for email?" My response was "no, this is the middle of the end. We're making good progress down that road."

We're doomed, doomed, I tell you!

Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh, my!

It's April, and the showers are here with a vengeance. Yesterday as David and I left the office, we got hit by the mother of all storms, as it raced across Norwich. A bit of rain, and a lot of hail. As fast as it started, it stopped again. And as the storm moved off, it gave us this spectacular rainbow. And then a double rainbow. At which point my camera battery died, so you'll have to take my word for it!

Currently listening to Cat Walk from the album Dakar by John Coltrane

Arghhhh

Damn you, stega.

Unhappy Mac

Pop quiz, hotshot. Your Mac's combo drive has just broken. You're frustrated, and want to speak to someone at Apple right away to find out what your options are. You need the Mac fixed with a minimum of downtime. What do you do, what do you do?

You could spend 15 futile minutes searching on the Apple web site, to try and find a contact telephone number or email address, or any details at all about starting the repair process. I wouldn't bother. (I only found the details there afterwards.)

Or, you could spend 10 minutes searching through the documentation that came with the Mac, and try to find a telephone number in there. At first, you'll discard the glossy sales materials promoting AppleCare - after all, it's just trying to get you to buy extended warranty, right? Then you'll go back to it after the limited warranty brochure, quickstart guide and getting started documentation have been thoroughly searched. There, on the back in small print, is the number you need.

Next, you call the number. After listening to an apparently suicidal Irish guy reading out your options, you'll spend 5 minutes on hold trying not to listen to barely audible music that sounds distorted and like it's playing from the bottom of the ocean. Finally, an operator picks up the call!

At this point, you discover the crackling noise is not just a fault with the hold music, but with the line itself. And, you've guessed it, you're talking to a guy in India. (I guess the lines to India are overloaded, hence the distortion.) There's some confusion while you try and establish what your "Customer Number" is. On the invoice in front of you is printed: Customer No: (number). Apparently that number is not the right one, you need an Apple Support Customer Number. Silly you.

After 10 minutes of giving them your name, full address (longitude AND latitude), laptop serial number, your age, weight, what you had for breakfast and the colour of your eyes, you'll be given the mystical Apple Support Customer Number. Guard it with your life, as it will save you pain in the future.

Phew. So, what do Apple have to say about my knackered combo drive? (Broken, no less, by the foolish playing of a classical music CD borrowed from the UEA CD Library. Turns out the sticky plastic holding the RFID tags on have warped the CD, making it concave and eminently mechanism-knackering.)

I was told that my problem required a repair under warranty. Before letting them book a pick-up and repair, I asked if there were any service centres nearby. Great news! There's one in Ipswich, Getech. That's just down the road (or train track). Hurrah! Rejoice! All is not lost, perhaps.

So I called Getech, to see if I could drop by with my unhappy Mac and get it fixed. Unfortunately, they don't offer a "while you wait" repair service. I'd have to drop my laptop off and it would enter a service queue. It may get seen that day if I'm lucky, but more likely the following day. When the fault is diagnosed, they then have to order parts from Apple - because Apple don't let them carry parts in stock - which usually takes a couple of days. The part would then be fitted, and the laptop shipped back to me.

So it's looking like at least a week for a simple "replace the combo drive" task. Suddenly this overpriced shiny lump of metal is looking like less of a luxury and more of a liability.

Oh, and when I was dealing with the Apple support line, I was asked "How's the experience been with working with the Apple computer?". My answer was a taciturn "Fine". After this experience, I'd like to qualify it: "Fine, until I needed to get it fixed. Can I have a commodity Intel box now?".

Impire

A fascinating transcription of a talk by Niall Ferguson. In the talk, Niall describes all the good things about the EU - economically it's on a par with the USA (maybe even slightly ahead); demographically it will be bigger from May 1st, when 10 new countries join; culturally, the EU is at least an equal; politically, the EU can challenge the US; diplomatically, the EU keeps us from a unipolar world.

Niall then comes back to his supposition about the European empire at the beginning - "it's "impire," with an "i". It's about what happens when a political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery, exporting power, implodes--when the energies come from outside into that entity" - and he states: "... in reality the European Union is an entity on the brink of decline and perhaps ultimately even of dissolution".

Niall makes a reasonable argument, and raises some interesting points. I don't think he's right - but I think I need to do some background reading before explaining why.

Spring clean

Time to get rid of stuff.

Mail me if you want any of this, or need more details. You have to collect it, as I don't have a car.

• Canon BJC-4000. Don't have a parallel port.
• Tower AT case.
• Acorn 3010
• Apple LC (68000) with keyboard, mouse, 14" colour monitor, 40mb HD
• Various empty PC Desktop cases
• Monochrome monitor, probably 12"
• Graphics cards, sound cards, 486 motherboards

Currently listening to It Will Be from the album Visions by Jakatta

Music makes me happy

1381 Artists, 435 Albums, 5531 songs, 16.9 days, 23.86GB.

Inexorable growth. Time to rip my CD singles.

Currently listening to Snyper from the album Wide Angle by Hybrid

We continue

Yet another switcher! Is there no end to this? :-)

John is making the jump to the land of sanity, reason and really cool graphics. He ordered himself a 15" powerbook last night. So, time to pull together a definitive list of Mac software (and fix the linkrot), so he can go download it all in advance.

Editors and word processors:

• NeoOffice (OpenOffice with better Mac support)


• JEdit (my preferred editor)


• SubEthaEdit (pair programming extreme!)


• BBEdit (you should at least try "the definitive" Mac editor, before deciding it's too damned expensive)


• <oXygen/> XML editor (try it standalone, then plug it into Eclipse ...)


• Eclipse (the behemoth IDE, that'll make you lust for a G5 desktop)

Net apps:

• NetNewswire (essential RSS reader)


• XChat Aqua (old school)


• Azureus or BitTorrent


• Limewire or Poisoned


• Huevos (quick access to Google)


• ecto and MovableType (for all your blogging needs)


• Rendezvous Browser (see who's offering what on the LAN)


• Firefox and Opera

Multimedia:

• VLC (Video the OSS way)
• Windows Media Player (urgh)
• ViewIt (simple image viewer)
• RealPlayer (urgh)
• Steam for BBC radio, and Audio Hijack

System utilities:

• Anacron


• PostgreSQL


• DarwinPorts, then ... wget, lynx, nano, cvs, subversion, gimp2, ImageMagick, rsync, etc. (Don't mix DarwinPorts with fink. Do one or the other. I like DarwinPorts ... this week.)


• Ext2FSx (if you need to talk to Linux disks ...)


• Diablotin (lets you enable/disable custom startup items, amongst other things)


• TinkerTool (tweak preferences in OS X)

Enhance iLife:

• Clutter (to put cover art on your tunes)


• Better HTML Export and Template Manager (to get your photos on the web from iPhoto)


• Logorrhea (and turn on "log all chats" in iChat)


• MailEnhancer (to get per-account signatures)


• iTunes scripts, particularly Now Playing in iChat


• Crm4Mac (when it's stabilised and released)


• Address-o-sync (synchronise selected contacts with other people over Rendezvous)

Games:

• Age of Mythology


• Quinn (Tetris)


• bzFlag (ubiquitous tank bang bang boom)


• AirBurst (think Frozen Bubble on acid. And, hello, what's this? Frozen Bubble for OS X!)

Utilities / desktop enhancements:

• SSH Agent


• MenuMeters (keep an eye on system load, memory usage, etc.)


• Combine PDFs (glue separate PDFs together. Really useful, since PDF is ubiquitous in OS X)


• Desktop Manager (for virtual desktops)


• Konfabulator, with at least The Weather, iPodRemote, Analogue Clock, Waste Basket, iChat Bezel, and What To Do


• SlimBatteryMonitor


• Salling Clicker (control your laptop from your phone)


• QuickSilver (free version of Launchpad - lets you hit Apple-Space and type first few characters of the application you want to start)


• WhatSize (track down disk hogs)


• Fugu (graphical scp, if you like that sort of thing)


• Share2Blue2th (give your mobile access to the internet via the laptop)


• AP Grapher (track strength of wireless signals)

Interoperability:

• VirtualPC


• Remote Desktop Connection


• X11

Applications:

• ganttproject

This is a summary of previous blog posts, Mac Toys, what's on my powerbook?, the powerbook redux, diary of a switcher #10 on editors, and diary of a switcher #8.

To get up to speed while you're waiting for the powerbook to arrive, go read some of the Mac resources I gathered in diary of a switcher #2.

Finally, don't forget to go buy a "second skin" neoprene cover for your powerbook, too. When you get the shiny new machine, you'll want to keep it that way!

Currently listening to High Life from the album Wide Angle by Hybrid

Taking the trash out

I'd had enough. I finally snapped. After a week where my intake of spam and virus mail had hit over 300 a day, I decided it was time to act. Even with whitelists, I found I was still scanning the trash for false positives. I quickly came to the conclusion I should just dump mail with attachments containing .pif, .cmd, .bat, etc.

Following on from Sylvain's comment on my whitelists post, I put in place a pretty harsh system-wide filter to block the worst of the crap. I also took the opportunity to drop into place a block for spammers who harvested my email address from newsgroups.

The only thing I'm undecided on is whether I should send automated replies to junked email or not. I could do with figuring out if there's a standard subject line prefix, so others can junk the automated messages in turn.

You can keep an eye on how the filter is doing, and compare with my previous virus blocking attempts. Wonder how quickly the junk filter will overtake sobig?

It should be a quiet week next week. Hopefully email will become usable again.

I wonder

According to a survey published in the Telegraph, only one person in 600 can name all seven wonders of the world.

This got me wondering. Paul and I just tried to list them... we got:

• Taj Mahal
• Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• Great Wall of China
• The Sphinx

Pretty pathetic. And mostly wrong.

Can you name them?

(Read on for answers)

Ok, it seems according to the Telegraph that there are two lists of wonders of the world. (I guess "14 wonders of the world" just wasn't catchy enough). Split between ancient and modern. Here they are. Remember this, they'll be in a pub quiz, you can bet your life.

Ancient wonders:

• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• Pharos of Alexandria
• Zeus at Olympia
• Colossus of Rhodes
• The Great Pyramid
• Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
• Temple of Artemis, Ephesus

I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't heard of some of those.

The modern wonders - clearly the decision-making process for this version of the list was presided over by Americans - are:

• The Empire State Building
• The Golden Gate Bridge
• The Taj Mahal
• The Statue of Liberty
• Niagra Falls
• Table Mountain
• Sydney Opera House

So now you know.

CVS and DarwinPorts

I learnt something new about CVS last night: it's possible to track checkouts as well as commits.

cvs history -o -u andrew
O 2000-06-05 13:05 +0000 andrew
=.= <remote>/*

Cool. My first checkout from the Luminas repository was allegedly June 2000...

I'm trying to get gimp2 up and running on the Powerbook, since I'm not feeling particularly tempted to pay up for Photoshop. I'm trying to get the darwinports version (sudo port install gimp2), but it's proving to be a PITA. It seems darwinports are not overly good at tracking updates to packages ... so far I've fixed several problems by removing the "work" (ie build) directories from the CVS checkout directory and then reinstalling packages like atk.

In the darwinports directory, sudo find . -name work -a -type d -exec rm '-r' '{}' ';' improved the situation (followed by a swift cvs update). Now I'm just waiting for GTK2 to finish building ...

Frenetic

It's been a busy time. Not much chance for blogging. Between writing bids, babysitting, working on business plans, attending meetings and schmoozing at various functions, I've barely been home in the week or so.

So, here's what's been going on.

Last weekend I spent some quality time with my nephews, since my sister was out of action after an operation. I'd forgotten how kids are just big bundles of frenetic energy. I discovered just how unfit I've become recently. I left Huntingdon with the utmost respect for all parents everywhere, and wondering how my parents survive the rigours of grandparenthood on a daily basis.

Monday was London, chatting with some fine people from JISC. A positive meeting, and a relief to see they think much the same as we do when it comes to frameworks and architectures. I took a different route from London, leaving from King's Cross, as I had to go home via Huntingdon. I've seen this platform sign before, but it never fails to make me smile. From the trailers I've seen, it looks like the next Harry Potter film might actually be quite good.

On Tuesday, there was a show-and-tell exhibition at the Genome Building, where our office is. We got a chance to finally find out what our neighbours are up to (funny how you can nod hello in the corridor for months, but it takes copious wine and canapés before you finally have a conversation with them). We also made some very useful contacts - a lot of local movers and shakers - and learnt some interesting things about what's happening in the region, too.

In a kind of schmoozathon, we then did a mad sprint into the centre of Norwich for the local "Last Tuesday" event - where the entrepreneurs of the region gather at the end of each month for an orgy of beer and business. Again, some useful contacts, and us Luminas boys (and honorary Luminas boy, Paul) were the very epitome of gregarious social butterflies. Although it could just have seemed like that, after all the wine. Anyway, amongst the people we met was Nige of what not to web, who I mention here because of the bare-faced cheek of their approach to winning customers. "Your website's crap! We can help!" is almost as subtle as the David Casal Patented Approach: "what you're doing is suicide".

On Wednesday, the first cleaned and repaired face of St Paul's was unveiled. I mention it here only to have an excuse to post this picture of St Paul's. We also managed to get some documents out the door which had been bugging us for some time. To celebrate, we (of course) headed to the pub, where I played pool for the first time in far too long. Sadly, it's not like riding a bike. I appear to have lost any semblance of ability at the game. I guess this means I'll need to get more practice.

Yesterday was yet another day of chaos, as we raced to meet a Royal Mail-imposed deadline. This was followed by a lengthy debate on the shape of our website, and a plan of action that will hopefully see it brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century. About time, too.