Rob's Ego Trip!

2004 was a good one, with any luck, 2005 will build on it :)

Comments are working again, I think! Seems that I had to re-register the plugins with nucleus to get it to recognise them.

*phew*

Now all I have to do is come up with something controversial so that I actually get some comments :)

We had a great time!
We stated Christmas day to the sound of Jon's excitement that Santa had actually come. We're not actually sure that Jon was convinced that he would. For the first time in living memory, Georgina jumped out of bed so she could watch him open the presents in his stocking. I stayed in bed listening to lots of "wow"s and "wow wee"s which was great. His enthusiasm is infectious. After we all got up, Georgina and I had a bacon sandwich whilst we opened the presents under the tree. I got some cool loot, with Georgina sorting out my wardrobe and Ross & Amy helping me understand design issues (Thanks guys!)

We then all piled in the car and drove to Jen's in Blackburn. Christmas Day is a great day for driving as there's so few cars on the roads, hence we made good time! The highlight of the afternoon was, of course, the dinner! Tim (with mum's help) made an excellent Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. It was so good that Jon ate lots too! We then opened more presents and Jon and Ben were overwhelmed with more loot! I also got some cool stuff :)

All in all, a very good day.

On St Stephen's day, we went over to Georgina's Aunt and Uncle's house for lunch. Georgina's Nanna was also there. Jon behaved impeccibly and another excellent lunch was enjoyed :)

Today, Georgina has been tidying up as we are expecting he uncle tomorrow. We also bought an artificial Christmas tree at Homebase (75% off!) for next year as I reacted badly to the live one this year. I have no intention of having rashes on both arms again!

I see that nearly a whole week has gone past without me noticing! It's clearly been a busy week with the highlight being the demise of the wireless network card in my laptop. I rely on the laptop with wireless network when I'm working from home, so replaced it remarkably quickly!

Yesterday we had a few drinks at work to celebrate the end of the year - no more work til January now!

Hmm.. the transfer of this site to a new server has broken the comment system... will fix when I can!

I've been doing some minor perl programming to convert the standard MT security code plugin to use plain text rather than an image. This is the same conversion that I did on this blog too, but obviously I used a nucleus plugin as the basis :)

I understand that using plain text is not as "secure" as using an image, but it's much easier to copy/paste as a user than trying to work out what the number and letters on the image are. I wouldn't want to make the barrier to entry for posting a comment too hard!

Now I seem to be on a spammer's list , I've implemented some comment control stuff :)

Again, Chris Lightfoot sums up what I'm thinking about ID cards:

"At root, I don't think that it's the government's business to tell me who I am. The government are our servants, not our masters, and we oughtn't to let them forget that. Just as -- see Saki stories passim -- the Edwardian upper classes assigned names of convenience to their servants, David Blunkett intends to assign names of convenience to us. There's no good reason to let him do that, and I don't see why we should.

In more detail: the conceit of the ID cards scheme is that each person should have only one identity; that that identity is given them by the state and recorded authoritatively in the National Identity Register; that each person must notify the state of any changes to it, and such changes will be accepted at the discretion of the government; and that that failure to comply as prescribed by the law will result in various and novel penalties intended to result in compliance with these rules."

Read the rest for more thoughts on why this whole ID card thing is bad.

We had our company Christmas lunch today as a couple of our team are taking leave from the 15th. We went to the Nightingale pub and it was great :)

Lord Butler states the obvious. I bet noone in the current government listens though.

The company moved today!

Unfortunately, the new office doesn't have ADSl yet (next week or so...), so I set up our main "internal" servers over at the boss's house as he has ADSL there and then got a networked dial up connection working in the new office. I have a feeling that working from home will be a reality next week!

Not a good week.. after Jon being ill over the weekend, now Georgina and I am suffering from the same thing :(

Georgina went out partying on Friday night and Jon was ill :( He was sick 4 or so times during the night and not very with it all day Saturday. Some sort of tummy bug presumably as he was back to normal by this afternoon.

I've also managed to get the text for Ben's naming ceremony up on the site. Georgina's been a real star scanning in all the good photos from the disposable cameras that we had on the day. It has really brought home the usefulness of digital!

From The Register:

"Computer problems have left police forces in England and Wales unable to run national fingerprint checks for more than a week."

Won't it be fun when this sort of thing happens to the national ID database...