All characters listed are entirely fictional. No really.

So yes, an eventful weekend for many by the sounds of things. My thoughts go out to those of you whose weekend wasn't as nice as mine was - I hope things get better no matter what form of getting better that needs to take.

For me however, this weekend was one of celebration, as we spent the weekend in Taunton at the wedding of Becky's sister. It was, without much in the way of hyperbole a perfect day - the weather was gorgeous despite warnings of rain, with a lovely breeze meaning things weren't too hot, the setting for both the wedding and the reception were both beautiful and in all honestly I can't think of a single thing that went wrong all day.

For anyone who may be considering wedding venues, let me tell you that Hestercombe House in Taunton is by far the best place for a reception that I've ever been too. Not only does it look great, but the staff were bloody amazing all day long and their service was exceptional. I know that extra effort was put in for our food because Becky was Sister of The Bride, but still, they did us a three course vegan meal that would have put some restaurants to shame, as well as providing us with finger food on arrival and G&B chocolate in place of the regular chocolate table decorations. It was spot on, and after we got talking to one of the organisers, turns out that they're well placed to cater for just about any food allergy or different diet. If they cater for coeliacs, seafood allergies etc. etc. as well as they did for us animal dodgers, then everyone would eat well. What's more, they didn't make a fuss about the whole thing, and we felt perfectly normal all day.

And then we moved on to the drinks. Twas a lovely night for drinking, and obviously being in Somerset there was cider available. In fact Sheppey's cider had provided some nice laminated cider bottle labels that got uses as table markers, so there was something of a cider theme to the whole event anyway. So I had a couple of ciders and listened the jazz band they had playing, and the evening went by rather quickly...

Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, it was then that I spotted the single malt. Now thankfully nothing really untoward came of it, but let's just say that recovering from it yesterday took all day. But it was worth it though, because the whole event was awesome and it would have been a shame to approach it like I have other night's out - stone cold sober because I'm driving. So yes, a bad head yesterday was a small price to pay. Just don't show me any alcohol for the next couple of days because the thought of it's making me twitch a bit, ok?

So, to conclude, many thanks to Pat and Lisa, as well as both sets of parents for making it a great day and letting us share in the celebration. I very much whether they'll ever read this but still, thanks :-)

Woman who display 'Woman are so much better than men' motivational posters, mugs, calendars etc. are not taking part in any sort of sexual debate but merely being superficial ignorant twats who are no better the men who have posters of their football team pissing on the shirt of a rival.

Wow, glad that's off my chest.

Particularly annoyed by this story which was covered in detail on local news and is here in brief on the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/8105811.stm

They key detail here is this line - "in making the payment order, a judge at Exeter Crown Court took into account the possible effect a larger amount could have on the local economy."

What we have here, as far as I can tell, is a judge laying down a comparatively light sentence to a company because they're big contributors to the local economy, as to fine them more (essentially to make them bankrupt) would put a lot of people out of work. Never mind the fact that this article still suggests they're about £3 million up on the deal overall, the fact is that this company has been judged differently under the law than another would because of their important position - surely that's a mockery of the idea of one law for all?

I mean, it'd suck if lots of people lost their jobs because of this, but then what the article doesn't say but the TV report did is that considering the scale of the con, many of the ships and crews would have also had to be in on the scam in the first place, meaning that if they lost their job, well it was their fault, wasn't it?

So anyway, bad decision here IMO - breaking the law is breaking the law and the punishment should be the same for all regardless of the consequences of enforcing it.

It's been a while since I've done anything like a full update, so here we go...

Only kidding. It's not like anything actually important's happened, so it's pretty much same old, same old. Work's going ok at the moment, quite quiet over the last couple of weeks. We're starting to upgrade everyone to Office 2003 this coming week, but it's really baby steps and I doubt we'll roll it out to more than a dozen people. I say roll out but because we run terminal servers it's rally more just pointing people to a server with the new software on, so the amount of work involved in the switchover itself isn't huge. We're even doing all that remotely, as the first office going over is Plymouth, so instead of travelling down there we're just logging onto the machines from Exeter and updating the necessary files. Pretty easy really.

I do have a couple of job applications in though. It would appear that there are still jobs going in IT locally and there's a few things about which wouldn't be much of a leap for me which are paying a bit more than I'm on at the moment. So fingers crossed, even if the chances of me getting one of the jobs (with the NHS) are incredibly minor. There is one promising one though, about which I may hear back about as soon as tomorrow.

The good news is that if I do get an interview, I have a new suit to go in, as I'm gearing up for Becky's sister's wedding which is now only three weeks away. It's quite a big wedding up at Hestercombe House in Taunton, and I think Becky's sister is getting a little carried away with the whole thing. Still, we're only guests so I reckon we can handle it for just the one day, though Becky's going to the Hen Do next week which doesn't sound particularly fun. At least there's only the one sister and I'm an only child...

On the technology front, I'm currently recommending Rainmeter for prettifying your desktop, Songbird for prettifying your music and the Palm Pre for prettifying your pocket (your pocket of the future, not being released in the UK yet, naturally). And Windows 7, obviously. Because it's the first thing MS have done in a long while worthy of being called good, and that's something worth mentioning.

I'll write something politics at some point. Everything's all crazy at the minute though - I'm not sure what analysis there really is to be had. I'm even reading suggestions that Labour might not lose the next election, so I'll wait till those crazy ideas have gone away and maybe I'll write something then...

I think it's Mat that usually posts these, but I'll get in first:

New Dr Who Companion. Yes Please.

I'm strangely interested in the new season of Dr Who now. Can't think why...

In a pub as best as I can tell. So not much's changed there then...

Almost been a year since Exeter was almost bombed. Now there's a low-key Devon announcement for you.

There is no hog like the whole hog, so in a fit of whimsy last night I replaced my perfectly acceptable Windows XP setup with Windows 7 RC. Which has been out what, five days? Anyway, I thought, there's no point looking at in on a laptop or through virtualisation, the only way I'm going to find out whether I like it is to use it.

And it's done pretty well so far. I've had a few run-ins with permissions on a few things but that's not resolved and there was an annoying error with Firefox that actually turned out to not be Windows 7s fault. Other than that, it's peaches.

The best thing about it so far, apart from it being pretty and everything, is how intuitive everything feels. It's obviously quite different in layout from XP, and might be very similar to Vista but I couldn't really tell you. What I can tell you is that after a few hours poking around that night, everything is pretty much where I would expect it to be. A lot of it is hidden, because heaven forbid you try to get under the hood of windows, but it's always been that way and it's to be expected from something designed to stand up to rigors of 'regular' users.

Finally, and I have no idea why it should be the case, but my PC is now running at a sustained 3 degrees celsisus cooler than it was on XP. So 7 must actually be using less CPU time or just lying to my fan. Either way, cool is cool.

The plan, at least for the moment, is to take advantage of Microsofts generosity for the time being then buy a new PC with 7 pre-installed when the time limit runs out next year. I'll be due a new PC then, so it seems to make sense. Whether I get antsy about buying rather than building a PC for the first time in a decade before then or not is currently undecided. Suffice to say there's no real cash saving any more, so I'm sure if it's worth the hassle building my own machine when I could get someone else to do it for me with (presumably) some sort of warranty.

Anyway, at the moment it's all about how floofy 7 is. [say it softly] Well done Microsoft.

We had to take Goldsmith back to the RSPCA today.

It's been six weeks since we first adopted him, and through all of that time he hasn't managed to spend more than a couple of minutes in the same room as Hali without one or the other starting something. We tried introducing them slowly, swapping rooms around and setting things up so they could smell but not see each other. When that failed, we tried pheromone diffusers to see if they helped; they didn't. Finally, we saw if letting them out in the garden together made any sort of difference but even then they just say at either end of the yard and hissed at each other.

Now we've spoke to a lot of people and many of them have cats who are like this with each other - they don't spend any time together and avoid each other whenever they can. Unfortunately we don't think that's particularly pleasant for either cat. And there's always the nagging thought in your mind when you're out the house that you're going to come back to a murder scene...

So, with great sadness, we took him back to the RSPCA. We can only hope that someone else will adopt him soon, but unfortunately one of the main reasons we chose him over another cat was because his age and colour make him the sort of cat that people don't want to adopt.

Good Luck Goldsmith, may your next home before successful than your last :-(

Fine, piss off the lot of you, see if I care...

Just keep tagging everything back to LJ and I'll keep up with you that way :-)

The funniest thing about shopping at Waitrose is that a few months back we tried doing a weekly shop at Aldi to see if we could save any money over the usual Sainsbury's visit. That didn't work and now, because they sell vegan iced buns and the full range of Fullers beers we've just done a weekly shop at the hideously expensive Waitroses. Which better not form into a habit for the sake of both our banks balances...

It was very good though - certainly possible to do a full shop there in a way that wasn't possible in Aldi. (Not that Aldi was bad I hasten to add, in fact we got a lot of really nice things there that we couldn't get anywhere else, just that it wasn't possible to get everything we needed for a full week there.) There's certainly a better availability of the kind of things we like to eat, as well as good support for soya milk/tofu/fake meats/that sort of thing, despite being much smaller than our nearest big Sainsbury's.

In fact, the only real problem is that the nearest Waitrose is in Sidmouth which is about ten miles away whereas Sainsburys is in Exeter. It's not that it really takes long to get there, just that it isn't that convenient, and, like I said, that's probably a good thing because it did get quite expensive there. And not just because we bought a dozen or so bottles of assorted beer and cider either...

Which was where I was for most of yesterday, ably accompanied by Becky, and also Chris, Alice who invited us along in the first place. Odo, Robin, Gavin and Ewan rounded off the party, so it was a pretty good sized group of us standing around drinking beer and dodging the odd shower.

I got lucky and only really had one beer all afternoon that wasn't that good, and a couple of the darker Porters I had were really, really nice. A few of the others ended up with beers that didn't taste so great or didn't taste of anything at all, but in general I'd have to say the quality of beers of offer was pretty high. The Chinese we got take away from was pretty decent too, despite half of my noodles blowing away in the wind... In fact, the only slightly annoying part of the day was the cost of the sodding bus to get us to St Davids - £3.30 return was only £1.50 cheaper than the cost of the return train ticket! Moral of the story - fuck buses.

So today's basically catching up on the things we put off yesterday - shopping, cleaning and all that jazz. Thankfully I'm not sporting a massive headache from yesterday's booze, so it's not been too bad so far. And we've got Wednesday off to take Goldsmith to the vet, so it's not like there won't be time to do things then that don't get done today. Bank holiday weekend next weekend too...

PS - Both half pint glasses got back to the house safe and sound thanks to Becky's soon to be patented box-with-some-tissue-stuffed-in-it device. That's cool because they're actually quite nice glasses; would have been a shame to drop them on the way home like Becky's workmate apparently did on his doorstep last time around :-)

Whatever that means...

I have the urge to say something but don't actually have anything to say. Suffice to say everything is going, well, without comment.

Work ok, cats ok (well, actually no, cats basically hating each other, but we're working on that and it's still earlyish days, so nothing major to report), Becky and me both ok, generally getting along just about fine. So yeah, nothing to report other than there's nothing to report.

Probably be back next month to say much the same thing :-)

So I've been off work all week, and to give me something to do (and to take advantage off all the overtime pay from setting up our new office at work) I treated myself to a second hand Nokia N800 off of eBay. I say second hand, but to be honest, the condition of the unit itself is perfect and having upgraded to the latest version of the operating software and added my own memory cards, it's very much a new device.

After a week of poking around, it is now my internet radio player, my RSS feed reader, my mobile email device, a portable gaming device (Civ never looked so good), and a hackable, expandable Linux machine all rolled into one. With some small expenditure on some larger SD cards, it will very easily also be my media player and Sat Nav.

It's plain awesome. There's no other way to put it. The amount of free software out there for it and the fact that it's actual Linux not just Linux based means that it can do, basically, whatever the hell you want it to. It's only really limited by what's out there for Linux, and Linux is, well, quite extensive. If it had a SIM card slot and could be used as a phone, well, Nokia would go out of business because there wouldn't be need for 60-odd types of phone when this one would have them beaten hands down. As it is, it's kind of Nokia's half-forgotten bastard stepchild, but all that really means is that they're dirt cheap on eBay.

If'n you want something cool to mess around with and you've got a few quid going spare, get one. The 770 is even cheaper though it's a bit older and doesn't quite have the expandability, the 810 is better still but just a tad outside of my price range for something I wasn't sure I was going to like. Even if it fills only one or two of the rolls I plan to use it for though, mine will have been a sound investment...

Next weekend or sometime in the following week, we shall be taking delivery of the following furball:




This is Goldsmith, an older cat and hopefully a good companion for Hali who can be a little skittish around other cats. By getting an older and very placid cat, we're hoping to minimise the probability that they won't get on...

And he is massively unconcerned, just so long as you're stroking him and there's food around :-)