The Rock is a disused limestone quarry which overlooks the village, now a nature reserve. A brilliant place for rambling walks. Loads more photos on my Flickr page.

Guy Kawasaki writes about  his 10/20/30 Rule of  Powerpoint: It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Just finished The Consolations of Philosophy, and while it took me a while to read a 250-odd page paperback, it was enjoyable stuff throughout. De Botton picks 6 philosophers and 6 predicaments, one for each philosopher to console us. It’s…

The WordPress blog has finally announced the release of version 2.0, or ‘Duke’. The post presents a nice list of new features for users: Completely Redesigned Backend — The first thing you’ll notice when you login to your blog is…

Am currently three-quarters of the way through Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. It’s good stuff so far. It dicusses a particular aspect of six philosophers’ work: Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Having looked up a couple…

Written by the man himself!

Librivox is an interesting project, a kind of audio Gutenberg, running on a mixture of WordPress and phpBB. Volunteers collaborate on recording mp3s of classic, out-of-copyright texts. As with all these things, the quality must be variable, but it is…

very hot and finely tapering pepper of special pungency [x] Well, I have upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and it was as seamless as always, no problems whatsoever. Will now get in touch with Rick and Chilli about getting theirs sorted…

Interesting story from the BBC: Businessman wins e-mail spam caseA businessman has won what is believed to be the first victory of its kind by claiming damages from a company which sent him e-mail spam. Nigel Roberts, who lives in…

Office Weblog: Meme of the day: Outlook 12 and RSS OH MY GOD…! – Trent End Talk on Boxing Day’s game: Forest 4 Donny 0! Festivus has been mentioned to me a few times over the last few days… Terminated…

God, I am a sad git doing this today. Still, here goes: Martin Rowson retells Tristam Shandy in the Guardian The Google blog post about the AOL deal …and the Guardian‘s view of the deal That’s it. Have a good…

A poem from today’s Guardian Review by Rowan Williams: Advent Calendar He will come like last leaf’s fall.One night when the November windhas flayed the trees to bone, and earthwakes choking on the mould,the soft shroud’s folding. He will come…

WordPress and the Performancing Extension is a great tutorial for setting up Performancing to work with a custom WordPress install. Currently my only real gripe is with the insertion of images, where to add an ‘alt’ tag one has to…

Have finally got round to installing the Performancing extension to FireFox, and it works a treat! Here’s a snapshot of me using it to write this post. It even drags in your categories and previous entries for you! I did…

Due to a total cock-up on the theme for this blog, I have had to revert it back to the original Beeblebrox one. Will have my changes back in place sometime tomorrow, hopefully!

Google Modules – add functionality to your personalised Google home page Steve Rubel writes about the Performancing FireFox extension – which from “any page in your browser, just right click and special blog publishing frame opens. Fill it out, add…

From BBC News: A Japanese man has died after being tackled by fellow train passengers who believed he had molested a woman during the morning rush hour. The man fled the train at a station in the city of Osaka…

Exciting (well, for the likes of me it is…) announcent on the WordPress development blog: The next release of WordPress is drawing near. Please help us shake out any last remaining bugs by downloading and testing the 2.0 Release Candidate.…

My Heritage is currently in beta – it’s going to be some sort of genealogy website or something – but it does have this face recognition thing on it, where you upload a photo of your face, and it tells…