Christmas is now over, and I'm back at work. The kids go back to school in about a week's time.

The day itself was OK. We did very little either on Christmas Day or Boxing Day. Watched TV, played with the children's new games, generally had fun. On the 27th we went out for a walk - did a couple of miles across some frosty ground which was very refreshing and great fun until Jessica stuck her foot through the ice in a puddle and got wet - and then complained all the way back that she was uncomfortable and that she hated the walk.

Sunday was even more fun when we went to IKEA. Bought a new table, although typically they didn't have any of the chairs we wanted in stock, and we'll therefore have to go back at some point. This seems to be typical at the moment. Whenever we've gone there they never have what we want in stock. Or at least only some of it (which is even more frustrating).

Anyway, back at work and preparing for a bunch load of project work that I'm going to have to do in the New Year. Quite looking forward to it in some ways, although I've sold myself as being really good at projects, so there will be a lot of pressure on me to 'perform'.

I also have an interview for an accelerated development programme in the New Year, which I'm hoping to tie in with a visit to the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy. Should be interesting.

Deb is going for a MRI scan shortly, but I'll say no more about that until there's a bit more to tell. She's a little unnerved though.

That's all for now. I've had a bit of a saga trying to get pictures of Jessica in the school play onto the blog, but I'll have another go over the weekend.

Sitting in work on the last day before the Christmas break. I'm struggling to keep myself motivated to do all the project documentation and planning work that I'm supposed to be doing. It's very quiet here and I'm trying hard not to count the minutes.

I'm in work throughout except for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day - although I do have a couple of days off planned for after the New Year.

I always find this time of year depressing. Everything plods slowly on and by the time the big day arrives you're pretty much tearing your hair out.

We haven't decided what to do with the kids presents as yet. There was a plan at one stage to unexpectedly drop them on the solstice, but we didn't go for it. The problem is that Jessica gets over excited. She basically doesn't sleep on Christmas Eve at all. I think last year she was up at 4am, but under strict orders not to wake anyone else until 6am, but of course you can hear her moving around etc.. And then she's as grumpy as hell for the rest of the day. It really takes the shine off to be honest. So we haven't ruled out giving them presents on Christmas Eve as a surprise. I'm not sure how things will go.

We've tried again not to do presents for the grown ups. Deb has made an agreement with her family that they only buy presents for the kids. It's easier for her because both her brother and sister have children. I find this really awkward with my family. I'm trying to convert to doing Oxfam Unwrapped, which is something I really like the idea of, but I don't seem able to get it right.

Back to writing my business case. Then the milestones. Then the recruitment schedule. Then the workflow plan. Yippee for Christmas.

Visit by the parents the weekend before last. Seemed to go fairly well. Mind you, the kids did their usual in Toys 'R' Us. Mum wanted to take them out and buy them something. But of course, the children couldn't make it that easy! Enter big rows about what they were or weren't allowed to choose - made worse by Jessica choosing something that we had already bought for her for Christmas (which I then had to own up to to avoid serious meltdown).

Anyway, a nice tea in a pub down the road and they went home on the Sunday. It went OK.

Last weekend we went to visit Deb's sister Claire, stopping to return to Ironbridge on the way and staying one night in a hotel to break the journey.

Ironbridge was OK, although the kids didn't enjoy it as much as they did first time around. Jessica had a face on her all the way around. Even Enguinity which was always going to be the favourite didn't seem to enthuse them as much as it had done.

The hotel (a Premier Inn) was fabulous. We've not done hotels in a while because of the strain of all sleeping in one room. But they had given us a large 'L' shaped room and it went really well.

Claire has just had her second baby. He was very contented, and newborn. I almost said cute, but I'm not sure that any newborn is really cute as such.

The long and short of it is that we're now all really tired. The last week in the run down to the end of school before Christmas is going to be really hard, just to keep the feet moving.

The good news is that I've worked out how to get BBC iPlayer programmes onto my Palm TX so that I can watch them on the bus. But that'll have to wait for another day.

The latest spider in Liverpool, at Exchange Flags.

Brief trip to Sheffield today for a written test to accompany my application for an accelerated development programme. This is something that would facilitate a number of postings over 3 years with the aim of getting promotion. I filled in the form at the last minute a few weeks ago, and everyone who applies has to undergo this test.

If I'd known the type of test involved, I probably wouldn't have bothered. It was one of those psychometric things - here's a sequence of 5 pictures, choose the next one in the sequence.

I am spectacularly awful at these tests. It's been sometime since I took one, and I just can't seem to get the hang of them. Needless to say, today's test went just as badly. I am not therefore expecting great things from this application. Results expected in the week before Christmas. Yippee.

Not too impressed with Sheffield as a town either. Much of it was very run down, but with some small pockets which had been regenerated. I'll post a picture of the art just outside the train station later. It was a great sight just after getting off the train. But as soon as you went past it there were a number of derelict buildings. So a mixed bag really.

I've just added Webcalendar to my server at home, so that I can share my diary across the home network. Installed from FreeBSD ports on the 6.3-RELEASE system it works without problem. I combine this with jpilot I can export the calendar from my Palm TX to iCal format and then upload it to Webcalendar. I'm not sure Deb was impressed when I set up her side of the PC to view my calendar (she asked if I was looking for a secretary!) but I'm working on it.

(typed from the train on the way home from Sheffield).

Walking near Willington. One of our favourite short circular walks.

Yo Sushi has now arrived in Liverpool, and is one of our favourite restaurants - it's already overtaking Wagamama (!). Here's a snap of the food going past.

On top of Moel Famau

This was posted by mobile from my mobile 'phone. It shows me and Jessica on top of Moel Famau in North Wales, proving that the superlambanana was really there at the top.

The main point was to test that I could send a picture by email from my mobile 'phone (a Samsung E250).

For anyone else failing to do this and getting this message:

Technical details of permanent failure:
Your mail message format is invalid; please try again.

the trick was to add a message body (blank, or just a subject line was not enough). And then it went through without problem.

Look forward to lots more pictures here!

On leave for half term, and finding things a bit grim at the moment. Something about the clocks going back which leaves me feeling low. It's happened every year for the last few years now, and seems to be something I've picked up from Deb, who feels the same.

Still, we managed to make it up to Dinas Bran yesterday. Just outside Llangollen, this is a castle on a very steep hill. The weather alternated between bright sunshine and showers. We managed to get caught in a couple of showers, and Alex slipped over in a field and got covered in mud. Typical Harrison day out really.

It was Thomas the Tank Engine weekend, and Alex enjoyed seeing the steam trains. We even managed to avoid actually going on them, which was a first. Although I don't think Alex was particularly happy about that.

Now this is something I have to go and see: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/byzantium/

Not quite sure how I'm going to manage it, seeing as it's in London and I'm not, but I would love to see it even so.

Here's the text of a letter I emailed to http://www.guardian.co.uk in response to this article.

I read with interest the article on Ritalin ("Doctors urged to stop use of Ritalin for under fives", The Guardian 24/9/2008, UK News P4).

My son is 8 and is diagnosed with ADHD (along with Aspergers Syndrome). He receives Ritalin on prescription.

Aware of the side effects, my wife and I resisted this prescription for a long time. In the end, under pressure from Alex's inability to handle lessons at school we accpeted it.

We have previously tried a number of different therapies to help Alex handle his condition - cranial massage, relaxation techniques, dietary intervention, enzyme supplements. We have attended a number of (superb) training courses organised by the National Autistic Society. None of these were provided by the NHS. All the therapies have been condemned as worthless by our paediatrician.

In my experience, the NHS does not provide any alternatives. Alex has never been offered psychological support. There is no NHS training for parents. Ritalin and it's alternatives are the only thing the NHS has ever offered us. Is it any wonder that prescription rates are soaring?

The new guidelines will simply make it harder for us to access the one therapy they do provide, without doing anything to fund the extra support parents likes us are so desperately in need of. The NHS has washed it's hands of these children. Shame on them.

There's a thoughtful analysis of Labour's current problems in this article by Madeleine Bunting from the Guardian.

I think it's particularly interesting to reflect on the thought that seismic shifts in working class voting behaviour can happen without being foreseen by the political left, and the reference to Thatcher's victory in 1979.

It strikes me that Labour - particularly under Brown - has become indistinguishable from Conservative policy.. Under such circumstances, why should the working class (or those on the left) support Labour? The only reasons left under New Labour are tribal ones, and even they are not strong when the government's agenda isn't interested in you.

I suppose the great unknown in all this however is how the financial crisis will pan out. That's a blog for another day, but it will interesting to see how it influences Brown's fortunes (conventional wisdom would dictate he's in more trouble than ever, as governments in office at times like this tend to lose the following election).

No update since before the summer holiday. Oops.

Summer passed over fine. Jessica is now in her final year before secondary school, and my evenings are filled with visiting schools to assess which ones we want to put down as her preference. The whole idea that we might not be able to get her into the school we want to terrifies me. And that's not even mentioning the eleven plus, which is still around here, and which we've decided Jessica won't be doing.

We've bought another game which has captivated the kids at the moment. Called Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. It's sort of like a computer based Star Wars wargame. Great fun. Even managed to get them running 2-player across the home network. That caused a few rows when one blew up the other's spaceships!

Very interesting blog article by Robert Peston. I normlly can't stand the man, but this article raises the possbility that the ongoing collapse of the west's financial institutions could end up with the Chinese owning much of what's left, as they are cash rich and not as exposed as western banks. I'm working on the Marxist analysis of what's happened as we speak, and how China could fit into it - something around the international division of labour, and how the proletariat has been 'out sourced' from the west to China.

Jessica's birthday - the big one oh - has now come and gone. We seem to have been celebrating it forever. She's had a friend to sleepover, a visit to the cinema with her friends, a trip to her favourite restaurant (Zeera Tandoori, which is another story), and Alton Towers.

Alton Towers was fun, but wet and tiring. Jessica didn't enjoy the really big rides (although Alex thrived on them) but had a good time on the slightly smaller ones. We managed to get disabled access passes and so didn't have to queue up at all, which was fab. We're just all worn out now.

Her first request for a present was for a Llama. A real one. Once we'd persuaded her that this wasn't really practicable she decided on a fluffy toy llama. This has proved no easier to get hold of. We're currently waiting on 2 different internet based companies sending one to us. In the end we created a letter pretending to be from the llama as he embarked on the boat in Peru on his way to Britain. Parenthood just keeps throwing up unexpected challenges!

Birthday tea with Deb's parents present on the day itself. Fun but low key, as we were all knackered.

Yesterday we climbed Moel Famau, hoping for a look at another superlambanana. No such luck. Although it's listed on all the maps, I'm told today that it won't be installed on Moel Famau until August. Oh well, we'll just have to go again another time. Fabulous view from the top though. All the way from Liverpool to Snowdon. Wirral very clearly visible between the Dee and the Mersey.

Hoping this summer to pick up the pace and do a little more walking, and the Clywdian range was originally one of my goals, so I'm pleased to have done Moel Famau. Found a leaflet with some longer walks in the same area. All we have to do now is persuade the kids to start - which is actually the toughest part of any walk. They've done 6 miles before now, but motivation is always the problem. Watch this space.

Been a short break from the blog again, mostly because of things going on at home. I've now got another free 5 minutes waiting for a train at Manchester Airport where I've been for a meeting (we have staff based there).

Looking forward to Jessica's birthday now. The plan is to take some friends to see Kung Fu Panda this weekend. Looks like fun, but I'll get the job of looking after Alex at home.

Alex wasn't well yesterday, throwiing up even water. However you could almost pinpoint the moment he began feeling better. He looked up at me and said "Daddy, I feel better, what can I eat?". I took the day off work to look after him, and took the opportunity to run software updates on 4 of my 5 computers (the other one is running FreeNAS but I haven't quite got it sorted out properly yet).

Deb is still feeling somewhat fragile - mostly because of the situation at school - but that's a story for another blog post.

Time to go and find my train.

Back to work today after a week off over half term. It's a bit miserable being back, particularly since I don't have a tremendous amount to do (hence I am blogging in work on my Palm again).

Great time off, made slightly more difficult by Jessica's teenage tendencies. Highlights were the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (plus a visit to the Wagamama); seeing Antony Gormley's "Another Place" at Crosby beach; and a 5 mile walk around Hockenhull Platts in Cheshire (we managed around 10 miles walking in total over the weekend).

"Another Place" was undoubtedly the highlight. It's an incredibly thought provoking piece of art, and well worth a visit. We spent over an hour sitting on the beach watching the tide slowly come in and cover the statues. I kept wondering what they were all waiting for. Deb commented that it reminded her of a scene from Doctor Who - they've all been hypnotized and are walking into the water together. There's something haunting about the fact that they are all facing the same direction. Truly stunning.

Jessica is still being a teenager. She would really rather spend time with her friends than with us, and this led to some rows in the later part of the holiday, but we managed OK.

Techniquest at Wrexham was also worth a visit, although I wouldn't spend more than a couple of hours there. Very robust science experiments for kids, although in a slightly odd campus location.

Still, back to work, without really having enough to do. Hey ho.

Errkkk, what a disastrous weekend. Jessica's slide into teenager-dom continues. She is becoming extremely difficult to live with. To cut to the end of the story, Deb and I agreed that Alex hasn't changed (except that he's bigger and faster than he used to be), and that we are no better or worse at handling things than we were. What has changed is Jessica - and specifically her ability to cope with Alex.

I think I've blanked out most of the rows and other such. The culmination however was losing Alex in Chester Zoo. This was the most dramatic one since IKEA a short while ago. He was about 5 metres in front of me when I turned back to see where Deb and Jessica were. When I turned back he'd gone. We were on our way out of the zoo at the time, and the reason we'd gone there was because we reckoned we had a reasonable chance of guessing where he'd go if he did disappear. The theory worked, but only just. After checking the shop and toilets, we did our usual routine in these circumstances. Deb grabbed a member of staff while I continued to search, checking the car park and car. We didn't think he'd go back into the zoo. By this time, Deb had mobilised the staff who were searching around.

Deb finally thought that the next most likely place for him to go was a land rover set up for the kids to play on by the Rhinos. A security guard was dispatched, and there he was playing as happy as anything.

It hit us both pretty hard, particularly coming so soon after the incident in IKEA. He's just to big and fast now. He was literally gone in the blink of an eye, and found a quarter of mile away on the other side of the zoo.

School finishes soon for half term, so I've taken some time off and we're hoping to recuperate a little. Let's see how we go.

The season's first cricket test between England and New Zealand is now underway. This leads me to reflect again on the decision couple of years ago by the ECB to sell the exclusive rights for live coverage to Sky. This effectively excludes me from being able to watch live cricket, and years on I'm still livid about it.

It just seems like such a short sighted decision by ECB. Lots of people who would otherwise watch cricket are now unable to. I won't pay for Sky (over my dead body), not even for cricket. What's more, on Sky it will only ever be a niche sport - whereas Channel 5 were actually doing quite a good job of providing modern coverage. And because it was pretty much the only sport they covered, it received pretty good treatment.

I read something a while ago which suggested that viewing figures since Sky took over the contract had plummeted. I can't help thinking it will be a disaster for cricket - as well as meaning I may never watch test cricket again :-(

Feeling rather chuffed today, having upgraded my laptop. It's a bottom of the range Dell Inspiron 1300. That said, it's an OK piece of kit - although perhaps a little bulky for really portable use.

Anyway, it came with 256MB of RAM. I turned down the salesman's insistence that I include more for about 30 quid because I knew I'd be running FreeBSD rather than Windows. Still, more memory always comes in handy.

After umming and ahhing about the memory on Ebuyer (would it be the right speed, would there be strange compatibility problems) I though of checking the Crucial website. I input my system details and it presented a number of compatible memory options. I chose the cheapest 512MB option, and got it with free delivery for half the price of the memory on Ebuyer. Installed and working without difficulty.

Encouraged, I then went looking for wireless cards. Again, I didn't include this when I ordered the machine from Dell because it was expensive, and probably Broadcom and therefore not supported by FreeBSD. Looking around, I found an Intel 2200bg chipset mini-pci card on Ebay for £15 which was stated as working on the Inspiron 1300. Installed that last night and was up and running in literally 5 minutes.

As an aside, it just goes to show that Unix isn't always as difficult for this stuff as it's cracked up to be. I had previously used a USB wireless device under the ural driver. My new mini-pci card is covered by the iwi driver. All I had to do to get it working was read the iwi man page and copy 6 lines into /boot/loader.conf (see the man page for details) and change the line in /etc/rc.conf which read "ifconfig_ural0" to read "ifconfig_iwi0". Everything just worked. I'm dreading having to install the drivers on the Windows XP partition, it'll be much harder. The moral of the story is, when looking for hardware to run on FreeBSD, make sure you buy something that's supported.

So all in all, an easy upgrade. In fact working inside the laptop was easier than working in many desktops (and particularly the small form factor ones I'm trying to turn into FreeNAS boxes - but that's another story)

Do I need to blog any more about my situation with Virgin Media? I switched ISP to them around November last, and I've had nothing but trouble since. They are dreadful.

My line speeds are dog slow - at peak times much slower than the 1MB line I used to have with Tiscali, although it's supposed to be an 8MB line. I've complained until I'm blue in the face. One of their engineers confirmed to me that the line is fine, the slow speed is caused by the contention ratios at Virgin. In short, they are cheapskates, meaning that all their customers are contending for too little bandwidth and the whole thing slows down.

I normally get less than 384K on a line tested as capable of functioning at 7660K.

The final straw now, they've throttled my access to dialup speed because they say I'm a heavy user.

I'm livid, as hopefully the letter I posted conveys. This is a modern broadband ISP folks, and to complain I have to write to them. Not call, email, or fax, but write. I'll post again when I hear back from them.

Had a hoot on Sunday at the Philharmonic seeing a live show called "Fanfare Ciocarlia, Gypsy Kings and Queens". Can't refer you to anywhere on the web about them as I haven't found a web address. But if you search Youtube there are a number of brief clips of their live shows.

To cut a long story short, it was a fascinating mix of eastern and southern European folk-ish style music, mostly claiming to have some sort of Gypsy background. It really managed to maintain a kind of carnival atmosphere, with different performers joining and leaving stage for different numbers throughout. This included spanish guitar; almost jazz style trumpet; gypsy-peasant brass; saxophone; and various singers from Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Macedonia. Oh, and belly-dancing style dancers.

It all made for a very lively and entertaining show. Bit odd though. If you'd told me beforehand that I was about to see a dozen pudgy balding middle-aged men mucking around on stage, well...

It was still great fun though.

Text of a letter I sent today to Virgin Media, my ISP:

This letter is a complaint about the recent decision to throttle my internet access.

I understand that I have been placed on an automatic list of the top 5% of users, and that with effect from Monday 28/4/2008 and for the ensuing week, my access will be throttled. This is completely unacceptable.

Why was I not told of the decision to throttle my access? An email notification would have avoided 3 expensive and unnecessary calls to technical support trying to diagnose a non-existent fault.

I made 3 premium rate calls to Technical Support today to query the slow speed I was experiencing. On the first 2 calls, the call handler simply fobbed me off from their script. Only on the third was it explained to me that my access was being throttled. I would like you to refund the costs of these calls which I estimate at 20 minutes x 25p = £5.00.

It was explained that I have been throttled as I fall within the top 5% of users. I simply do not believe that I fall within the top 5%. I am a light user of the internet, I do not for example download music or DVD's. Please tell me how much was downloaded and over what period of time to 'justify' this action.

It is not satisfactory that I am left waiting until Sunday for my broadband to be switched back on. I am a light user, and can only assume this is a mistake. Please restore unthrottled access immediately.

My experience with Virgin broadband has been one of consistently slow speeds and poor customer service - your "8 MB" service has turned out to be slower in use than the 1MB I used to receive from Tiscali. This incident is just the latest in a line of complaints and technical issues that I have had. I can no longer tolerate such a poor service. I wish to be released from my contract with Virgin WITHOUT PENALTY PAYMENT so that I can take a contract which actually supplies what is advertised. Please will you speak to whichever senior manager has the authority to waive the cancellation charge and release me.

I am thoroughly disgusted with the "service" received from Virgin Media. I expect a response well within the 10 days quoted by the call handler on your customer service line. My only alternative is to escalate this complaint to Ofcom as an unwarranted abuse by Virgin Media of the terms on which the service is supplied.

I look forward to your reply.

Strike day across the Civil Service today. I'm in work, but Deb is off. Always a source of tension.

The office is empty, but I am using my own form of subversion by not actually doing any work.

It's not that I don't agree with the point of the strike. In fact, as the pay deals have got worse and worse over the years, and the conditions have deteriorated - along with the attempt to remove some of our pension rights (let's face it, a lot of civil servants have always accepted poorer pay on the basis that the pension makes up for it to some extent - I've worked in areas where senior management have made this an explicit selling point for below inflation pay rises) I've become more in favour of industrial action. I'm increasingly of the opinion that what the government is doing effectively amounts to the destruction of the civil service. Large parts are now run privately, with the movement of further civil service roles into private hands (particularly most of JobcentrePlus) in the pipeline. Pay continues to deteriorate - and despite popular opinion, most civil servants are poorly paid. I'm a middle manager with 15 years experience, but I earn less than £25,000.

No, the main reason I'm in work now rather than on strike is that I can't abide the union, on a number of different levels. I have never believed that Mark Serwotka has the strategy or ability to do the best job of representing members interests. He has been militantly in favour of industrial action, even when it blatantly wasn't effective, ever since he was elected. In the dispute over the removal of screens for JobcentrePlus, PCS shamelessly abandoned staff who had gone without pay for 6 months during the strike and caved in to a deal they could have had months earlier. And lastly, I've never yet met a local PCS rep that I felt I could believe in. Most seem too full of their own importance and their ability to get one over local managers, and don't really have local members' best interests at heart.

So the long and short is that I find it hard to support PCS, even though I disagree strongly with the direction the civil service is being taken. So I'm in work, saving myself a day's pay, but being subversive by writing a blog entry rather than working.

I'm currently celebrating getting Microsoft Office 2000 to install on my FreeBSD desktop using Wine. I'd never tried this before for 2 main reasons - first, I don't do a lot of word processing, and the open source tools available (particularly Abiword) have always seemed adequate; second, installing under Wine has a reputation for being exceedingly difficult.

Anyway, the situation finally came up that Deb needed to do some work at home that needed her to access a Word document that Abiword was having trouble converting. So I took the plunge (with a small twinge of guilt about tainting my FreeBSD installation with MS software).

Wine installed from ports without any difficulty (cd /usr/ports/emulators/wine && make install clean). After 2 hours of fiddling around, I have learnt the following things:

• For this to work smoothly, the first thing to do is use Wine to install a basic version of Internet Explorer 6.
  
• The install routine for Office should then run smoothly. Make sure you add a name and organisation during installation.
  
• After installation follow the instructions listed in the Wine AppDB entry for Office 2000. Specifically, hack the Wine registry using Regedit to ensure that the specific keys mentioned exist and are modified too the specified values.
  

  And after that, it works. Or at least it seems to. I haven't tried out much of the functionality yet, but it runs and allows you to type a document using Office 2000 on FreeBSD 6.3.

First blog post for a while, mostly because I was on holiday over Easter, and have since changed jobs into one where I'm much busier than I was previously. I'll try to catch up from where I left off.

We took the week after Easter off and stayed in a cottage in Canon Pyon a few miles north of Hereford.

We approached it in a similar way to our summer holiday last year - lots of walking, some sightseeing, eating out, and generally spending time together as a family. It was really refreshing, and helped to get us all back together again.

I won't go over each day in detail. Here are some of the things we did - Severn Valley Railway; Ironbridge museums (kids favourite - Enginuity); Hereford Cider Museum; Dunkertons' Cider.

We also managed to fit in around 12 miles of walking, mostly in short 2 mile countryside strolls although we did manage one large walk covering 6 miles (!) at the Brockhampton estate - a National Trust property near Leominster. This was wonderful - a sculpture trail (which the kids enjoy) through mature woodland in glorious sunshine.

Since coming back, I've moved into a new job. Same manager as before, but I no longer have staff and I've given up all the finance responsibilities, which were never really me anyway. So my job is now more about gathering stats for the region and doing analysis, which is much more up my street to be honest. It helps that I've also been extremely busy, and that makes me feel much more comfortable. Having a quiet day once in a while is all very well, but if it happens every day I start to feel like I'm stagnating.

Kids are all OK, they are enjoying our new "play room" extension or "sugar cube" as it's been christened (it's all white). I should blog about this more fully, but it was finished in four weeks, and now contains our Wii and a television, although getting an aerial installed has turned into a bit of a saga.

That'll do for the moment, more to follow shortly.

Slightly fraught weekend. I think I'm still getting over the chest infection that kept me off work for most of last week, but I'm really tired and cranky most of the time. On Saturday, Jessica went to a friend's house while we went floor shopping for the new extension - and found out that the Karndean stuff we'd been drooling over is far too expensive for us. Back to the drawing board - and probably to vinyl floor tiles. At least I can lay them myself.

The extension itself is coming on apace now. We're into week three of the building work. I find it very disruptive having everything muddy and all over the place. But the walls are mostly up. Deb tells me today that the side porch - which they're replacing the roof on - has had the new tiles put on today, after they left it without a roof for a week through the worst storm of the winter. We survived though.

Sunday required the usual argument to get the kids to do anything other than slob around in their pyjamas. This one was a bit worse than usual, but we managed it in the end, for a 2.5 mile walk around Bickerton Hill. Short walk, but very pleasant. Fantastic views of the Welsh hills, Cheshire plain, and all the way over to the Liverpool cathedrals on the horizon.

Still concerned about where my job is going. I just don't have enough to do. And that's very difficult for me to cope with. It doesn't help that so much of the work I have done has clearly been nugatory. But I never get the feedback to say "this went well, but that's been overtaken, and the other wasn't quite what we were after..." It feels like fumbling around in the dark.

The school routine is very constraining too. Make lunches, iron shirts, generally keep the routines ticking over. It just seems to eat up so much time. Well, the Easter holidays beckon, and we've a week away planned near Hereford. Not quite sure what we'll do as yet, but the cottage is booked and paid for, so we'll just have to make it up as we go along. Haven't decided on the summer yet - have I told the story of how awkward my boss has been over summer leave? Hadrian's Wall is feeling attractive, but we might have left it a little late to book anything. The Peak District would be another possibility as we thoroughly enjoyed a long weekend spent there last year. I'll update when we've decided what to do. The downside, of course, is that if it rains it will be well and truly miserable...

It's the last day before retirement for one of my bosses in my old job today - Howard. He's been such an influence on my life and career that I couldn't let the moment pass without comment.

Strangely, I didn't actually work directly to him for very long - just 6 months on a project team. But I did other bits and pieces of work for him, and got to know him personally quite well in the 5 years before I left for my current job.

I must say that I don't think he was everyone's cup of tea in the organisation. But for me he seemed to show commitment and an interest in life at the coal face unusual in senior managers (at least in my experience so far). On a personal level, his interest in and commitment to my development was astounding. He gave me opportunities to excel, and then helped me make the most of them job hunting later on. He introduced me to EFQM which, although it doesn't seem very popular within the Civil Service at the moment, is an inspired way to think of management. To me, it felt like finally being given the instruction booklet for management.

In short, he was an inspirational leader, even if he could be a little cantakerous.

On a personal level, I like to think we became fairly close to friends. He certainly changed my interest in music, with an interest in Elvis I hadn't had before - mostly through a realisation of the breadth of his work, from country to jazz to gospel, and introduced through a 5 hour car journey to Cardiff.

That's it. so long Howard. Ere's hoping I meet another manager as good soon, 'cos they don't seem to be on the horizon at the moment!

I am now having some difficulty with my news in the morning. For a long time I was quite happy using Plucker to download news from a number of sites in the morning - but particularly from The Guardian's pda site. This was a superb, simple summary of The Guardian good for reading on a Palm. I'd transfer the Plucker file first thing and then read it on the bus on the way into work.

All of a sudden, The Guardian seem to have stopped updating this part of the site. I'm now struggling to find an easy way of downloading and reading their news. I've emailed them to complain about the site being removed but no reply so far.

Dreadful time in IKEA over the weekend. For the first time in a while, we genuinely lost Alex. He could have been anywhere in the shop, having wandered off, and we had half the staff out looking for him. He was eventually found - after what seemed like some hours, but was probably no more than 20 minutes - playing on one of the beds. As I said to the staff at the time, the danger is that because of his autism he will not react like a 'normal' 8 year old who's lost his parents - crying and such like. He'll be 'invisible' among all the other families, just running around having fun. As well as the shock of losing him, it put his disability in sharp contrast. I think I probably lost about 7 years off my life, and gained a few grey hairs. Deb has had to deal with this sort of situation more often than me, and was therefore much calmer. She managed the staff and got the hunt going, without which he'd never have been found. He said he'd been hiding in a wardrobe, then got bored and started playing on the beds. We must have gone past him while he was in the wardrobe, and then not realised that he was behind us, not in front. It all worked out OK in the end, but there was a moment when I really thought we wouldn't find him.

The visit to IKEA finished with us driving home with a new mattress for Jessica perched on top of all our heads. It would have been funny if it wasn't so darned uncomfortable.

I'm playing around with OpenTTD at the moment. It's a clone of an original Transport Tycoon game, where you have to build a transport company taking goods and passengers using trains, trucks, planes, and ships, making as much money as possible. It's quite addictive, and Alex thinks watching all the trains is marvellous.

The officially released 0.5.3 runs quite happily on my FreeBSD 6.3 desktop system, but the betas of the 0.6 release haven't been ported yet. I've loaded them onto the dual booted Ubuntu Linux side of the desktop, and it's a huge improvement. It allows the use of improved graphics with different locomotives, industries, bridges etc. (including trams!) and allows for a lot variety.

As you can tell, it's quite addictive really. You spend ages trying to get your rail junctions and signalling just right so that everything runs smoothly without you having to watch it all the time, whilst the towns grow around you. My most successful company reached a bank balance of £165 million by the year 2030 (having started in 1950), but I've a long way to go yet. I'm still just learning how to built effective main line railways with proper junctions and signalling - rather than single use lines that just go to one town or industry and back again.

Anyway, if you're a frustrated model railway fan without the space (like me!) you might find it interesting. There are even versions for Windows.

Went to see the new Sweeney Todd film recently (starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter). It wouldn't have been my choice necessarily, but Deb wanted to see it, and we don't get to the cinema together very often these days, and I do generally like Tim Burton/Johnny Depp films (Sleepy Hollow is one of my favourite films of all time).

It was certainly gruesome. Lots of throat-cutting in vivid technicolour. The special effects weren't too obvious (except in the opening credits). The plot zipped along at a reasonable pace, only flagging slightly before the slicing and dicing started before picking up fairly rapidly.

For the acting, Helena Bonham Carter was probably better than Johnny Depp - I don't think it was his best performance. The supporting cast was good, with Alan Rickman as the evil judge, and Timothy Spall as his henchman - both of whom meet predictably bloody ends. Sacha Baron Cohen not so good, but then he just gets sliced like all the others.

The singing was a little unexpected but not too intrusive. You wouldn't give Johnny Depp an Oscar for it, but he wasn't dreadful. In contrast to Alan Rickman, who was obviously following the Rex Harrison precedent. There was only one really great song though, and that was in the middle of the film, comparing notes on who will make the best pie (!).

I saw the plot twist coming at the end, but it was not worse for that, and Helena Bonham Carter does meet a particularly gruesome end. Overall, a good film worth the price of admission. Deb will undoubtedly want the DVD of it. It won't go on my favourites list, but it was an enjoyable watch.

And now for something completel different (sorry, I don't do smooth links).

It was Alex's birthday on Friday, which was followed by a visit by my parents. So it was a hectic weekend.

Alex's birthday went fine. He went to a local indoor adventure playground with 5 friends and the had a whale of a time. It's the first time he's really shown an interest in inviting friends and having a party. So things have really moved on. We bought him Star Wars Lego, which is one of his favourite things along with trains and Scooby Doo. He seemed to have a really good time. I wasn't at the party as I had to wait at home for Jessica to come back from a sleepover at a friends house. Her social life is just getting more and more intense as time goes by. In the evening we went out to a nearby Indian restaurant which is pretty much our favourite. It's a nice atmosphere, the food is good, and the kids like the Chicken Korma - so everyone wins.

The next day, my parents came for a visit, arriving around lunchtime. I (hopefully) fixed the printing on their laptop, which they had brought with them. Later we went for a meal to the local pub. This was nice enough, but something caught Alex offguard and he was violently sick that night (3 times!). We don't know whether it was the food, or just the over excitement. Anyway it rather put the dampers on things the following day. We drove around Wirral a bit, took look at the waterfront, and the Dee coastline (which is beautiful).

So overall it was quite a successful visit. The children in particular enjoyed seeing my parents again.

Update: we now know that it was a bug Alex had picked up, as Jessica has had it too, being off school on Wednesday after having thrown up at school on Tuesday and having Deb take her home.

The latest computer challenge is how to download video from Youtube and convert to a format that will play on a domestic DVD player. There are some old films of music hall performers that Dad is interested in, but can't pull off Youtube himself, so I said I'd see what I could do. I'll let you know how I get on.

Blog entry time again. This time I'm sitting in the Caffe Nero in central Liverpool. I've nipped out of work for half an hour to have a coffee and something to eat. Caffe Nero is definitely one of my vices now - particularly as there's one right next to the bus stop where I wait for the bus home. The temptation of a latte on the way is something I have to resist, if only because it's so darned expensive.

Anyway, back in the office today after my adventures finding wireless hotspots in Manchester Airport yesterday. I posted the last blog entry drinking tea in the waiting room of the railway station. Here in Liverpool we seemingly have BT Openzone but nothing I can connect to for free. Looks like I'll be setting up a BT Openzone account then. It'll have to be for the fun of it though as I can't afford to be on it all the time. Perhaps just to post the occasional blog entry or pick up email. As it is, this entry will have to wait to be posted until I get home.

Work is work. My boss assures me that there is an interesting job waiting for me in April when I move into the regional structure, but at the moment I just don't have enough to do - and that makes me rattle the bars of the cage a bit and fret. I've just applied or a project job on TP to SEO. Great experience if I can get it, but I doubt I stand a chance really. At the least, the application process provoked a (hopefully) honest conversation with my boss about where I'm at. We'll see.

Time to go back to work :-(

A trip to Manchester today to meet with someone in our office at the airport, so I'm typing this on the train. Another breakdown in the tunnel this morning meant that I only just managed to make the train I had planned for. The traffic was backed up half way around the M53 as one of the tunnel lanes was closed. That's the second time in 3 weeks, and a real nuisance when it happens.

The meeting is to discuss taking over a stats collation job from someone else, for the Regional Director. Now this is a job which is really up my street. It's the sort of stats analysis stuff I excelled at in my last job but haven't had the chance to do while I've been mired in all the finance work given me since I moved. The plan, as I understand it, is to take all the finance work off me to free me up for other things. This is a little worrying as it means I'll basically be without a job. But it also gives me the chance to define my own role again, and try to carve out a little niche for myself. The danger I suppose is that I won't succeed in carving out that niche. But we'll just have to see where it goes. I also have an application for a SEO project job to put in tomorrow so I still have some options open.

Jessica is very grumpy at the moment. She was at a sleep over with some friends on Saturday night and hasn't really recovered yet. She does struggle with her sleep pattern, and doesn't really have the knack of dropping off. Something like this sleepover (when apparently she was awake until 4am!) really knock her for six.

Alex seems fine - it's always a little hard to tell. His reading is really coming along and he's as heavily into Star Wars as he was once into Thomas the Tank Engine.

Off now to do some work on the long delayed website project while I wait for the train to arrive at Manchester Airport.

Update on the Nintendo Wii situation. We had promised Jessica and Alex that we would buy a Wii shortly after Christmas. My parents and sisters had sent us some money that could go towards it. Of course, at the time you couldn't get one for love nor money and the time since has been spent searching the web for anyone who had the basic £180 model which comes with just Wii Sports (rather than more expensive ones with loads of gubbins you don't actually want or need - and even they were hard to come by).

Well, after much searching I finally found one at Amazon and it was delivered this week!

First impressions? The Wii is an incredible piece of kit. We bought the version which has just the game Wii Sports with it, which is effectively the demonstration game for the console. The contrast with the traditional video game couldn't be more pronounced. The motion sensitivity makes the whole thing completely different. The tennis game is just like playing tennis, for instance. I expected the movement to be really 'blunt', ie it would not be very sensitive to small movements. In fact, it is amazingly subtle allowing for a really fine grained control. This allows you, for instance, to put spin on the ball in tennis or bowling. Or angle the direction of your shot in baseball.

I think the engineers at Nintendo have really shown a stroke of genius in the design. Instead of trying to outgun Microsoft and Sony, they've really invented something which has broken the mold of home gaming. What's more, it can really get you active. After ten minutes of tennis, your heart is really pumping. It's truly refreshing to see something which hasn't just pushed the boundaries of hardware construction to produce games which are boring to play, and actually concentrated on producing a good games console, something that's enjoyable to play.

This touches on a regular theme of mine, particularly since I bought an ipod last year. There's a real difference between something that's just been produced with a degree of contempt for the consumer (not thinking of any large companies based in Redmond!) and something that's been 'designed'. The ipod is a good example of something that feels designed. It feels natural and easy to use. And to some extent the Wii feels similar in use. It's been built with real regard to how people will use it, and to making the experience fun. I think the 'fun' aspect is something the other companies have lost sight of in the pursuit of ever more realistic gameplay. It doesn't matter how good the grass looks if the game is boring to play.

I think that's probably enough for the time being. I'll should post some more once we've another game to see how it stands up then.

In the meantime, I've been spending some time this evening on the Byzantine Studies pagewhich you might want to check out if you're interested in Byzantium, particularly for the online sources.

Well, this blog entry was supposed to be about how to get your Palm Tungsten E connected to your network, and therefore the internet, using a FreeBSD box and the USB cable supplied with the Palm. It's not actually that difficult, you just need an entry in your usbd.conf to call pppd and set up a ppp link between the Palm and the server.

However, all that is irrelevant now as I've splashed out and bought myself a brand new Palm TX. The beauty of this is that it has built in wireless, and so can connect to my router by itself without needing the cabled ppp connection through my server.

OK, so I may as well use the space instead to give you a few quick first impressions of the TX. Bear in mind that I'm a huge fan of Palms, and have been since my first one - an original Zire about 6 or 7 years ago.

In traditional fashion, I'll do the good points first:

• Connectivity: compared to previous Palms, this is a very connected device. The WiFi is excellent, it took no more than 5 minutes to get connected to my home router. Using LGet and LFtp I'm connected easily to my home server, and Versamail does an adequate job of picking up email. It also has Bluetooth, but I haven't tried this yet.
  
• Battery life, although criticised in other reviews, is significantly better than my Tungsten E. Maybe that's because it's battery had deteriorated over the years, but I'm getting much better time from the TX, even with occasional WiFi use.
  
• The screen doesn't seem quite as bright as the Tungsten E, but it's full screen. The pop up 'faked' silk screen is excellent - you get full screen when you want it and silk screen which shows your graffiti strokes when you don't. This makes data entry much less prone to mistakes. The only downside is that many of the older apps (such as Vagablog which I use for blogging) refuse to run full screen.
  
• As I mentioned above, the silk screen is 'faked' and this allows all graffiti strokes to be echoed to the screen. This has made data entry with graffite, although still slower than by keyboard, much easier than previously.
  
• The casing is plastic, and although this initially looks less impressive the the Tungsten E's metal, it looks less prone to scratching and scuffing, and will hopefully last longer in good looking condition.
  

Now for the not so good:

• The OS (5.4.9) seems quite unstable, with a few crashes already, and an ability to turn off when you press the wrong combination of buttons, or refuse to close a dialogue.
  
• The build quality is a little dodgy in parts. Maybe it's just because I'm used to the metal casing on the Tungsten, but the plastic case doesn't feel quite so 'satisfying'. I'm not at all convinced that the various buttons will last the course. None of them feel as robust as on the Tungsten E.
  
• I still use Plucker for offline web browsing more than I use the built in Blazer 'live' web browser. Although the battery feels good to me, it does run down quickly with WiFi use.
  
• As I mentioned above, not all the older apps support full screen mode. This is disappointing as I was looking forward to coding in SiED in full screen.
  
• My IR keyboard still works, but won't work in landscape mode as it rotates the 'wrong' way - ie. With the IR port pointed away from the keyboard's IR transmitter.
  

I think that's it for the moment. On the whole I'm please with it, but I'm not as blown away as I was when I moved from a Zire to a Tungsten E. Be careful if you're looking to buy one though. I bought my from Ebuyer for £158 and they're selling it now for £206 (same model) so the price does seem to fluctuate. Shop around.

Next up some thoughts about the Nintendo Wii which we finally manage to get hold of (was delivered from Amazon yesterday).

Talk soon and keep in touch.