Rob's Ego Trip!

The funniest thing at the moment is all the talk about Michael Howard on Tom Watson's blog. If I was a cynic, I'd say that Labour are worried that they might actually have some serious competition for the first time since they came to power.

I've no real view on Michael Howard except that I am aware that crime reduced whilst he was Home Secretary, but I am sure that over the next year, we will hear enough about him to actually form a view. Certainly he won't have the IDS problem of everyone saying "who?" whenever his name is mentioned.

seems to have gripped the Tory party. Of course it could all come to nothing but if they do manage to only have one candidate, that'd be good. Of course I really pity the poor sod who has to try and persuade us that the Conservatives aren't a lot of back-stabbing children, but at least he'll have more time to do it.

I'm quite glad he got the top end of votes that was expected as I thought he was quite a good leader. He is also one of the few politicians that don't sound smarmy when they talk to you. Obviously the Tory party has to find another leader whom they won't stab in the back - pretty tall order there I think!

The worst thing about the whole business is that the Government is getting away with the mismangement of so much with so little challenge.

Who do you think the next leader of the Tory party will be then?

On another note, how can a company lose 50 MILLION pounds and still be in business?!?! I've never understoond how that works...

Sorry Georgina for being so busy today when you needed to "talk" on ICQ.

I've just found flares.co.uk Oldies but goldies and I needed a laugh today.

Day 2 has commenced and doesn't feel to have been as successful as day 1. This is mainly because Jon has only "hit the spot" once today and missed 3 times. On the flip side, he has been much better at telling us he needs his potty even if he is telling us slightly too late!

Today was the first day of Jon's potty training. Didn't go too badly - "only" 3 mopping ups! By about lunchtime, Jon was getting a little bored of sitting on the potty so regularly (and so were we!). Then he managed to successfully pee in the potty, so we had a big celebration which cheered him up no end and made the rest of the day that much easier for us!

The only thing we want to know now is how long it's gonna be until an "accident" is unlikely!

Good bye Concorde!


(image courtesy of www.howstuffworks.com)

I don't particularly care if IDS stays or goes, I just wish that the Tories would make up their minds and concentrate on telling me why I should vote for them. At the moment I have lots of reasons why I do not want to vote Labour but I don't have any reasons why I should vote Conservative.

It's interesting how much can go wrong in one day when I'm not here! I spent the first 2 or so hours this morning dealing with issues that arose yesterday... Then I've spent the rest of the day being nicely productive and am quite happy with what I've got done today with the new Jobbags pages.

I went shopping in Birmingham and bought a new jumper... see how exciting my life can be at times!

Hightlight of the day was going to pick up Jon from nursery. He was thrilled that both mummy and daddy where there to pick him up!

It appears that more US senators are waking up to the dangers of the US-PARIOT act and are proposing some safeguards. Reading through the list proposed, I think that the proposals can only be for the good.

Matt Goss has a new single! I didn't realise that he was still doing music as I've only ever heard about his brother recently.

Also, yesterday the Treasury Minister gave an official denial to the talk about capital gains tax on the sale of your house. Now that it's been officially denied, I think we can safely assume that the Government's thinking about it... What really gets me is that after around 60 tax rises since 1997, they are still spending more than they earn!

Clearly being prime minister is a stressful job and I hope Mr Blair gets over his scare quickly. I imagine that his children were particularly worried over the last couple of days and hope that they're reassured by the news that it's unlikely to happen again. However, having a heart scare surely will change his outlook on life? I'm sure it would change mine and I certainly wouldn't be actively seeking stressful situations "just in case". It's not easy if you really enjoy your job either, though looking at how Mr Blair has aged in the last few years, maybe it's not that enjoyable being prime minister?

Our microwave finally died on us today. Well, I say "us" when I mean "me"! Our fry up breakfast was late as a result, but still very nice!

This afternoon armed with some of our own cash and some of my mum's generosity, we went shopping for a new one. The most noticible thing was that silver is "in". Most of the microwaves for sale today are silver. So we bought one! It's a nice Sharp combination one that appears to do everything and is very nice. I even used it this evening to defrost the mince for chile-con-carne :)

According to BBC News, Aaron Caffrey has been cleared of a computer attack on a US port authority's computers. His defence hinged upon his insistance that someone else did it using his computer via a Trogan computer "back-door". In my opinion, it is good that he was acquitted. With the state of security on Windows computers, the fact that an attack originated at a given computer is certainly no proof that the owner of the computer is to blame. On the flip side, there certainly should be some onus on computer owners and Microsoft to ensure that computers can't be hijacked so easily. It would help if Microsoft wrote software with a security mindset and so we wouldn't have to deal with so many patches on what seems like a weekly basis. Anyone who runs a Windows computer without a firewall and up to date virus scanner deserves all they get anyway!

Incidentally, I installed 7 security patches on our live server today :)

There's a preview of the new Mozilla.org website that's been designed by Dave Shea, the guy behind CSS Zen Garden.

Dave's design looks very very nice and his thoughts on how important it is to have competition in the web-browser market are well thoought out too.

Mozilla Firebird 0.7 is now out too - go get it and see the web without popup!

Getting a decision out of the top brass of my company is like getting blood out of a stone, but I was assured yesterday that things would be changing.

Seems like they have as today I was given a pay rise! I've only been chasing for a definititive pay review for the last 4 months. It appears that the error I made was letting the MD deal with it... now that someone who's prepared to make a decision is controlling it, a decision was made and my paycheque will be larger :)

An article in the Register today points out that searches from Google can end up with empty Trackback articles in the results list. The article blames the inventors of Trackback and similar technolgies for this phenomenon. I think they've missed the boat here. Surely it's a result of Google's search technology not being good enough? Google became the number 1 search engine because their "PageRank" technology resulted in better search results than their competitors. Now, their technology is inferior for the current state of the web, and so I think that they need to innovate or lose their crown to another search engine that can deal with today's web.

As you may or may not know, I'm not a fan of Jack Straw as I find him smarmy and wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. However, according to The Register, Jack Straw understands the issues surrounding Blunkett's ID cards. More accurately, I suspect he's worked out the cost in terms of votes, but that's good enough for me if we end up kicking the stupid idea out.

We spent the weekend up with Jen & Tim and it was Leah's 4th birthday party yesterday. We went to a place called "Smiles & Faces" which is a big room with a climbing frame/ball pit/slide/lots of fun place. Leah seemed to have a really good time, as did Jon.

Today, my mum and Jen cooked us a really nice Sunday lunch which went down a treat. The journey home wasn't too good, we left at 3pm and got home at 7! Four hours to travel 130 miles!

very quiet here in the office - only Tegan, Paul and myself in. Might actually get some work done today!

From BBC News:

"The Terminator star also warned fans he would have "no time for movies"."

His movies have been getting worse, so I don't think I'll be missing any future one...

Does anyone else find it fascinating that Clinton was damned for having a consensual relationship with a woman who is not his wife and Arnie can be elected after having sexually harrassing many women?

According to The Register, the mobile networks in Iraq will be GSM. This is good as all the surrounding countries use GSM and having the US CDMA standard there would have have been a nightmare for the users.

Nice to see a sensible decision made for a change.

Norm Coleman wants some due process to be added to the RIAA situation.

Nana(Jacky) & Sam are visiting us today mainly to see Jon. With a little bit of cunning, Jacky also brought round some boxes that Georgina was storing at her mum's so we had to accept them. They've gone into the garage with all the other boxes. One day we will sort them all out!

We went out for Sunday lunch at the local Beefeater. It was quite a nice lunch with large portions, and reasonably cheap. Jon behaved himself very well too and a good time was had by all.

I'm currently setting up another site separate to the-allens.net for the software I write. I thought that rather than coding all the pages, this time I'd use a content management system instead. The only criteria I imposed was that it must be free, not impose a "box" layout and produce a site that is "search engine friendly". By this I mean that all pages are accessible using urls without a ? in them as Google and other search engines don't spider pages with ? in them. After a bit of searching, I found Drupal and Xaraya. I'm giving Drupal a go first as it appears a more mature product, but we'll see.

David Kay, the head of the ISG has asked for more time to search for evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Isn't that what Hans Blicks asked for before we went to war?

The ISG has spent millions of US dollars and found next to nothing. They have found no weapons of mass destruction but have found some evidence that Iraq wanted to "resucitate" it's wmd program.

Tony Blair and the Government told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They did not say that Iraq may have them in the future; no, they said that they could be deployed within 45 minutes of the order to fire being given. You therefore have to draw the conclusion that Tony Blair and the Government was wrong when it told us this.

So who is to blame?

There are two choices: Tony Blair and the Government or the British Intelligence agencies. If we believe Tony Blair's assertion that the Government didn't "embellish" or "exaggerate" the intelligence reports, then our intelligence organisations should be investigated for incompetence and those responsible for the faulty reports should be fired.

Getting a little bored with my current in-car CDs, last night I created a new MP3 CD using MusicMatch. Playing it today, it seems that over half the MP3s have come out unplayable. I now need to determine if it was the ripping process that buggered up or the burning, so that's what I'll do tonight.

Our Tony said yesterday that he doesn't have a reverse gear. So he never makes mistakes then? What do they say? ah, yes...