General

What can I say. I was scrolling through a random page, What's Special About This Number?, offered to me by StumbleUpon when under 197 I see the phrase "is a Keith Number".

Being called Keith I think that's pretty cool.

Better late than never, I'd like to wish everyone a very healthy and prosperous 2007.

The usual New Year's resolutions apply:

Eat and drink more healthily.

Stay off the cigarettes.

Get my flabby arse to the gym more often.

So far I'm doing okay. Certainly eating more fruit, haven't had a coffee or tea so far and have managed to get to the gym a few times.

We'll see how it's going in a few more weeks...

My dad's just called me to let me know that I'm now an uncle! My sister has given birth to two very cute girls called (it's now official) Casey and Kaitlyn.

All doing very well though one of the twins (Casey I think) has a touch of jaundice and is spending some time under a sun lamp and my sister's legs and feet have swelled up to amusing proportions!

Hopefully they should be clear to go home very soon.

I wrote a HTML version of Yahtzee many years ago as a small "I'm bored at work" project. It enjoyed a brief state of popularity when my mate Alan put it on his site as the 404 page. Even today, many years later and with no advertising by me, I still get around 1,600 hits a month.

Anyway, my girlfriend was recently playing it and mentioned that it didn't seem to work too well in Firefox. No surprise there really as I wrote it very much for Internet Explorer, seeing at that is the only browser we have at work.

Knowing I was in to my music a friend of mine at work recommended Last.fm to me. There's a lengthy description on Wikipedia so I won't try and explain it all except to say that you listen to music, the site logs it and then recommends other bands to you.

Mr good mate Alan and his good lady wife Clare brought, as Alan puts it, Popey 2.5 into the world on 6th September.

Congrats mate.

Popey blog entry.

For some bizarre reason I've got a irresistable hankering to have the Casio demo song as my ringtone. You remember the one, from the childhood keyboard with the red demo button.

I've recently found morgueFile, which is in their own blurb:

A place to keep post production materials for use of
reference, an inactive job file. This morgue file
contains free high resolution digital stock
photography for either corporate or public use.

The term "morgue file" is popular in the newspaper
business to describe the file that holds past issues
flats. Although the term has been used by
illustrators, comic book artist, designers and
teachers as well. The purpose of this site is to
provide free image reference material for use in all
creative pursuits. This is the world wide web's
morguefile.

Got this link from the B3ta newsletter, highly amusing...

eBay Revenge
"I bought a laptop on eBay but it didn't work.
sobs spikytom, "The bloke refused to refund my
money, so as a means of petty revenge, I made
a little website documenting the things I
found on the hard drive." Ha! Best being the
voyeuristic photos of women's legs the young
eBay fraudster has snapped on the Tube.
http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/

20 years ago today the word Chernobyl entered the English language.

The BBC have been running a number of articles with some haunting photos remembering the events of that awful time - a powerful reminder at a time when the goverments of Western Europe and the USA are looking for alternative souces of electricity generation in the face of volatile fuel supplies.

BBC - Chernobyl : 20 Years On
World Nuclear Association - Chernobly Accident
Wikipedia - Chernobyl Disaster

I was recently looking on the web for a site I had found some time ago where people can post their secrets, a kind of anonymous on-line confessional with some quite amusing entries. Someone at work had mentioned the site but couldn't remember the URL.

Anyway good ol' Google found me this site instead: PostSecret. It's a site where people send in postcards of a true secret they have never shared with anyone else. Some of the postcards border on art and their secret is all the more poignant for it. I think they change them every week. I recommend you go take a look.

The site I was originaly looking for was Group Hug.

Happy New Year to one and all!

Got into work this morning to find an email from a close friend of mine.

I've not spoken to him for a while as we now work in separate buildings and he's been hard to get hold of on the phone. I knew his girlfriend was pregnant after many years of trying but that there'd been some complications recently.

Well I've finally gone and done it, installed a blog and (shock, gasp) written an entry in it.

I've been reading lots of interesting blogs lately and even my girlfriend has got one (though I installed it for her). I'm not completely sure what to record in this electronic journal other than my random rantings about things that annoy me (and it seems that as my years progress that's more and more things).

I'm sure that as I get more comfortable with the idea of it that I'll start recording more and more and maybe even venture an informed opinion and the odd joke.

Signing off for now...