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!

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 :)

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…