The week went, more or less, thus:

1. Friday night: Drive from the Deep South to Inverness via Tebey and Stirling — the A9 is a fantastic road at 2am
2. Arrive at Inverness at about 0700 Saturday after a nap near Dalwhinney and catch a train to the Kyle of Lochalsh (because we can).
3. Conclude drive to cottage and unpack
4. Go for an extremely soggy walk around Inverewe Gardens (nearby National Trust for Scotland property with lovely trees etc).
5. Sarah and her Dad went to attempt a walk over the hills behind our cottage to Rubha Reidh lighthouse … but were forced to abandon this due to encountering a 4″ deep river which the buggy was thwarted by… so, instead, we drove Once there, we found the old supply jetty for the lighthouse complete with former railway for whinching the supplies up the steep incline (with kart and whinch in the gorge below).
6. A trip out to the other side of Loch Ewe to see a tiny distillery and while going there found a small NATO navy base… which initially dates from when the loch was using extensively during WW2 by the Navy with a lot of the old emplacements still evident.
7. We left after lunch on Friday having seen the surrounding hills covered in snow overnight to drive back during the day to see the landscape.

On the Sunday, we received a phone call to say that Mum had been taken into hospital suffering with what turned out to be a stroke hense leaving a bit earlier than we would otherwise have done.

She’s doing really well, having been transferred to Addenbrookes (Cambridge) a few days after it happend near Enfield. Having intially been unable to move her left side or talk at all, she’s now making reasonable sentences (while still struggling with remembering some words) and, although having issues with sensation, able to mostly move but is still quite weak and gets very tired easlily.

We’re taking Benji in to see her as much as possible

I’ve set up a webalbum for you to oggle

Famous Victorian engineer Robert Stephenson will be at the Museum of Canterbury this Saturday (10 May) to chat to visitors and enlist their help in a series of fun experiments.

Well, who’d have thought it… a man who died in 1859 will be receiving guests next weekend at a museum

See xkcd for more time wastings

I may be in a minority, but although my screen may be 1024×768, that
is not the resolution at which my applications run. I often (nee all
the time) have many applications open at once and the most efficient
way to know what’s going on in all of them is to have them layered and
*not* filling the whole screen.

The old 600 wide layout was perfect for this and was a design concept
I would reccomend to others too. The new design, however, doesn’t
actually provide any more space for actual content but, instead, makes
the navigation bars around the edge much “bigger” (that is wider and
fatter). This means I need to scroll off the side to see some of the
sidebar content (which annoys me greatly on any page — sideways
scrolling should never be required).

Furthermore, what were considered headings further down the page under
“AROUND THE UK NOW”, the section headings used to be bold and are no
longer. This makes it much harder to skim down for what you’re looking
for.

I am aware that people far cleverer than I have had a hand in creating
this new design, however it is, in my opinion, a step too far into the
“Web 2.0″ idiom. The site was, previously, clean, concise and easy to
navigate for all. That is no longer the case, I fear.

Thumpers are (up to) 48 Terabytes of storage in 4u… that’s pretty amazing really.

This has had the slightly annoying side-effect that the .snapshot directory has disappeared meaning user-driven restores aren’t possible on some of their servers (the functionality is there on Thumper, but called .zfs and appears to be hidden further up the tree, or maybe disabled at the moment).

Go Go Dreamhost!

Having recently moved into an area where the nearest supermarket is a
Morrisons, I have been using the store more frequently than before and
have noticed the following “niggles” with the way the store is
managed.

The store feels “cluttered”. At the ends of most of the aisles, there
are extra shelves which constrict the ends of each aisle by about 40%
making the apertures less than one trolley width. Also, in the same
area, the main central thoroughfare is considerably thinner than it
could be because of a vast array of extra product locations (products
that are, often, otherwise available in other parts of the store)
again, constricting the available space by 20-40%.

Secondly, the small (3′ square) metal containers strewn throughout the
store, as if by random, containing products often not in the slightest
related to the aisle in which they are found just get in the way.

Many thanks for your time in reading this. Please let me know if you
have any comments on the above.

This is the bounce:

MailMarshal has stopped the following message:

Message: B475052fc0000.000000000001.0001.mml
From: foo@mafoo.org.uk
To: postmaster@morrisonsplc.co.uk
Subject: My point of view

because the email address - postmaster@morrisonsplc.co.uk - does not exist.

What were they doing out and in a position to do something like that without parental guidance/observation?

The age of criminal responsibility should be at such an age as to when children are out and about apparently with enough nouse to know right from wrong. This may be different from child to child, but it should be up to the parents to decide if their child is ready to face the big wide world and is responsible enough a young-adult to do so. If they are not up to this yet, then maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to get in to such a situation.

I note how the BBC article makes absolutely no reference to the parents and the children’s upbringing — did they miss out on some vital moral lessons? Were they just being kids and playing around without realising that throwing stones at other people is wrong? If so, why did they think this?

It makes me quite sad, actually

If we do raise the age of criminal responsibility, on whom would fall the responsibility for the father who was killed by these boys? No one? The parents? I don’t know.

Four hours into the upgrade of the first of three updates I needed to apply, the following error is produced:

Installation error. com.webct.platform.installer.InstallerException: Unexpected error executing [webct_stat.sql]. ORA-04021: timeout occurred while waiting to lock object WEBCT.WEBCT_STAT

Great.

So I try and call it in, rather than log it on the web as a P1 as they recommend calling instead only to sit on hold for 5 minutes and then get dumped off to voicemail… ok, I’ll log it on the web. That was at 14:00. It’s now 15:30 and I’ve talked to an engineer who will phone me back soon with some advice. There are two more updates after this to apply…

Procedures involving rusty nails, hammers and kneecaps are springing to mind.

Below is the petition text, I encourage you to read and, if you so wish, sign your name here.

Digital Rights Managment (DRM) is a technology by which content distributors can dictate what consumers can do with their content to the extent that, for example, the PC that you own at home hides things from you, refuses to do something because it thinks you’re trying to “tamper” with it, and potentially notifies the content distributor of this action.

Currently, Microsoft Windows Vista is pushing this technology on users with various hardware manufacturers complicit in it including Intel, ATI, NVidia, S3 and Matrox.

This petition asks parliament to make it illegal for software to actively disallow and subvert the operators intention even if it “thinks” that it “might” be illegal — hardware is owned by the consumer and should remain such in the same way as cars do not disallow a driver to break the 70mph speed limit on UK roads.