Came back from our holiday in Northumbria on Saturday. Need to wrie more fully about this later. For the moment, we had a great time. The countryside and particularly the coastline were fabulous, and the beach at Embleton magnificent. The only fly really was that the car developed an engine management problem, but we managed to get home OK.

Still off work, but not looking like I'll get to do much.

Pictures to follow shortly.

Sitting at home recovering from having a wisdom tooth extracted. It was horrid (he broke it off while trying to pull it out), and is now very sore. My face is puffed out like a hamster, which the kids think is very funny.

Spent Sunday climbing a hill in the Clywdian range, fulfilling an ambition. Called Peny-Cloddiau it was an iron age hillfort, and the views across the Cheshire plain and the vale of Clwyd up to Snowdon (covered in cloud). 4 miles, not too much uphill. Really fabulous.

Saturday was a Roman reenactment day at Beeston castle. Great day, I'll post some pictures later.

The answer to the question "how do you interpolate a method call into a double quoted string in Perl" seems to be "not easily". This ones be exercising my googling for a short while now. I think I'll go for printing the method call outside the string for the time being.

Just had a look at a colleagues Huawei E160 mobile broadband dongle. Plugged it into my FreeBSD 7.2 s10e ideapad and it was seemingly recognised (at least I could see both a umass disk and crucially a ttyU0 usb-serial device, which I guess is the modem). I'm tempted. Didn't try to make it dial up though - I'd need to refresh on ppp first.

Watching the Outnumbered episode where they try to live without TV. It's like watching our life on television (oops...I don't think we're supposed to be watching TV).

Pictures from today's visit to the zoo. And yes, Alex really walk around the whole time dressed as a Star Wars clone trooper.

Highlights were the butterflies and the red ruffed lemurs. I didn't take a picture of either. I still like the leaf cutter ants, but the picture of them didn't really come out :-(