You may note from bkkeepr that I have started reading the PRINCE2 manual. It's heavy going, but not too unfamiliar. I go on the course in early October, hoping to walk away with the 'practitioner' badge.

Also reading 'the Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies' but I haven't put that on bkkeepr yet.

Currently sitting with Jessica on Hilbre Island watching seals through binoculars. Will need to leave in about an hour before the tide comes in. The seals are fantastic, lazing around on a sandbank and bobbing around in the water in front of us. Jessica is writing notes in her seal diary.

Pictures of us on today's walk in the Clywdian Range. Fabulous walking in early autumn sunshine. Note Alex pretending to be Indiana Jones in my new silly hat.

I can't note what I'm currently reading through bkkeepr. It's "The Imperial Administrative System in the Ninth Century" by J B Bury. Still the book on the middle Byzantine civil service, but not in print. I found a pdf for free download. I'll have to root out the URL and post it. Anyway, I've nearly finished and I'm then moving onto "The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies".

Will post on the kids school progress later (on the bus perhaps?).

Jessica is home, and it sounds like the first day has gone very well. She said everyone was friendly and helped her find her way around. I haven't found out much about her classes yet, but at least she's happy about the whole thing. Great relief all around!

Put Jessica on the bus to new school this morning. She was incredibly nervous. Fingers crossed it went OK.

Back at work now, haven't really posted over my leave period - been too busy! The holiday in Northumbria was magnificent. The weather just about held for us, and the coastline was wonderful. I'll post some pictures of it some other time.

Alex is now back at his new school, and Jessica begins secondary school (!) tomorrow. She's very nervous, but is holding it in well. We chose the school for it's pastoral care, so fingers crossed everything will be OK. I'll post an update after tomorrow with how it went.

Work is quite quiet, although my project rumbles on, having been off for a couple of weeks quite a bit has been picked up by others, so it will take a while to reintegrate myself.

And Deb has now begun her leave. She doesn't go back to work until December!

So it's all go here.

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.