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Outside my window there is a Hebe in full flower being visited by many bees.
Just now, the bees were joined by a butterfly, Red Admiral, I think.

"I wonder what that was", I thought to myself as I heard a sort of rolling boom as I was sleeping/failing to sleep fitfully this morning. It was an explosion in a fuel depot near Hemel Hempstead. See BBC news article for details.
The current visible band satellite image available at the Met office clearly shows something which I take to be the ( Read more... )

I had a break last weekend by visiting my friend Carol in Wadebridge. I'd been having a difficult week and the time away was just what I needed. The weather had been predicted to be wet and windy all weekend, but it turned out to be much kinder to us than that. ( More details + images )

If you liked the soup Rog, maybe you'll also appreciate porridge - especially recommended for the colder days. I seem to rediscover porridge every couple of years or so. The weather in London has become quite frosty for the past few days and that's what triggered me this time. My current recipe, which is slowly mutating day by day is ( Read more... )

At http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html there is a simple questionnaire which indicates something about a tendency to autism.
In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed ( Read more... )

Thanks to Jane Sales for pointing this out to me. I have a colleague at Symbian called David Mery (some may remember him as an editor of .EXE magazine some years ago). David was arrested at Southwark tube station several weeks ago during the period of heightened tension following the tube bombings. Today's Guardian newspaper carries an article by ( Read more... )

Work on my bathroom has finally started. Two workers arrived this morning who seemed fairly competent, but slightly underprepared. They didn't have an up to date plan of the work required, didn't have enough dust sheets (happily, I had one to hand) and hadn't ordered a skip. To use a skip here, one needs a permit from the council which takes 7 ( Read more... )

The bastion server among my slightly weird collection of computers at home is an Alpha NT system which has served me well and reliably for years. But now its CPU fan is showing signs of wear and I'm going to have trouble finding and replacing the parts in a hurry, so it is time to rethink my configuration ( Read more... )