Personal: May 2006 Archives

Well, it's one way to get more people to speak Welsh, isn't it?

Still, given the teen pregnancy rates in Wales, isn't the advice a bit superfluous? This may sound like a joke, but this conversation really happened to my (Welsh) wife when she was back in Wales just before we got married:

Person: “Oh, you're getting married then? When's the baby due?”
My wife: “It's not”
Person: “Oh there's posh then!”

Just been reading the latest issue of Private Eye. Found a story about Barking's BNP situation. Turns out one of the councillors is called “Robert Buckley”. How much did I need that? Precisely not at all. And the thing is, now I've written about it, I'm going to get all the Google hits for him. Curses.

Guardian Unlimited's assistant editor Neil McIntosh says freelances should blog if they want to be noticed. I get the feeling he means freelances should blog well, because I'm not going much attention as a result of this blog... ;-)

A friend of mine, Martin, has managed to escape from journalism after nearly a decade at the grindstone. So a quick shout of congratulations to him as he makes his way over to the writing team of Emmerdale. Good luck, Martin!

I've finally released the beta of the next version of SCHWIF2004, my handy utility for creating complex HTML messages in Entourage. There's a few improvements:

• Added support for background images referenced using attributes in the body tag or in stylesheets
• Fixed a problem with Exchange server address books following previous Entourage update
• Improved the documentation slightly
• Added a warning for pre OS X 10.3 users

Grab it over at the SCHWIF2004 page.

I finally got my lazy arse into gear and uploaded week one of the Teach Yourself Instant Italian flashcards to the site. Grab them when you're ready.

I got summoned for jury service recently. It couldn't have come at a busier time so I asked for it to be postponed to January. I was expecting all sorts of bureaucratic resistance, autocratic refusal (“you'll come when we tell you to come!”) and so on.

Instead, I got a nice little letter yesterday, accepting my request for postponement and giving me a date in January to turn up. Now how good is that? So I'd like to thank those nice jury service people for being so helpful and obliging. God bless you all.