I've migrated to Dreamwidth under the same username. Hope to see some of you there.

There was lots of snow in Banbury this morning, so my employer closed up the site at midday and sent us all home. I had a couple of unnerving skids on the way, but am unharmed and the garage up the road just checked over the car which is fine too. So now I can relax and enjoy a long snowy weekend :-)

I've been trying to keep our garden wildlife friendly and am pleased with how it's going. We had a hibernating hedgehog, which has now wandered off somewhere. We have lots of bees. There are birds (coal tits I think) in the nestbox. The pond is full of frogs and their spawn, and I also found frogspawn in a puddle, which I have relocated to the pond ( Read more... )

I've just had lunch with some of the nice people from mySociety and they asked me to publicise that they are currently recruiting for several IT roles. Most of these are mainly home-based with occasional days in a London office.

http://www.mysociety.org/jobs/

I've had a bad cold all of this year so far (it almost goes away, leaving me just tired and sniffly for a couple of days, then slowly builds back to the feverish/achy/can't-sleep phase, then back round the cycle) so not having much physical energy, I've been spending lots of time reading. Inspired by triskellian posting a list of everything she read last year ( Read more... )

I've just seen this awesome parody poster. I wish this muppet film really existed.

I spent Friday evening testing two new games from the Cambridge Games Factory. The first was Montana which uses poker hands to bid for control of areas on a map. We played with 3 and 4 players and the maps for different numbers of players seemed well-designed, and the scoring mechanism fairly simple and well-balanced. I didn't see the point of the ( Read more... )

I had good intentions for this morning, but it was raining and I felt lazy, so I spent it reading a Ben Elton book recently passed on to me by a friend. She did warn me it wasn't his best work - I must learn to listen to these warnings...

( Contains spoilers... )

I just left a book out in the rain and am feeling guilty, not least because it belongs to zandev (sorry!). Is there a special region of hell for people who drown books? Thankfully it's a hardback with a water-resistant cover and is still readable. It's a copy of Wireless, a collection of short stories by Charles Stross, which I started reading when mr_snips told ( Read more... )

Today has gone well so I thought it was worth recording. I supervised getting electrical issues fixed in two staircases at the flats (two more to go tomorrow), watered both my garden and that of our downhill neighbours (they are lovely and do the same for us when we are away), got some housework done, recycled a big pile of old paperwork, found a ( Read more... )