From the Orient

For now we’ll just called them footballers A, B, C, D and E, and Damaging Allegations 1, 2 and 3. A is implicated in both 2 and 3 but not 1; C, D and E have played for England; B plays for a Premiership team that boasts four players allegedly interviewed by police over Allegation 1, although he himself is only in the frame for 3. Ask around the office. Someone will know.

Makes sense? I know someone whose had an untrue allegation made against someone close to them by the News of the World (only read by people who can’t read very well) and know the damage it can do, the anger it generates and the pain it produces. But you still want to read it. It’s juicy, it’s scandalous, it’s oh so interesting isn’t it? No, not for me.

I want to know how Heskey still gets picked for England, and where the England defence went on Sunday. I don’t want to dwell on that much because for a change a friendly game was interesting and exciting (until the ubiquitous substitutions).

Oh yeah, gil? Bring on Saturday. Come on Jonny!

My three year old is being her normal cheeky self. “Father Christmas only gives presents to good little girls. Are you a good little girl?” I say.

“Yes.” A pause. “You are Father Christmas.”

I’m a little stunned. I wasn’t expecting this just yet. “No, I’m not” is all I can muster in reply.

“Yes, you are” Before this descends into panto, I remind my daughter of the facts. “You saw Father Christmas last year, and he gave you a present. He was in his grotto. Was that Daddy?”

“No.” I breathe a sigh of relief. “But the presents are in your bedroom.” Gaa, rumbled.

I think we need a plan. Why is Father Christmas storing his presents in our bedroom? Why has Daddy and Father Christmas never been seen together at the same time? Why are 3 year olds too clever for their own good? And will Rudolf shake off his drink problem by Christmas Eve?

I know this is sad, but I’ve named my computers after Manchester United footballers, all who begin with the letter R :-

==

Roy (Smoothwall server)

Nothing gets past it.

Rio (Linux server)

Currently online, but could be heading for some downtime in the near future.

Ruud (Win XP “Family” PC)

Powerful, strong, likely to fall over if petulent children go near it.

Ronaldo (Win2000 Laptop)

Always on the move, often requires “stepping over” if left on the floor.

Ryan (SL-5500 Zaurus)

Can be thrown through Arsenal defenders.

==

I’ve updated the blogroll taking the data from my list of feeds at the near excellent “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com and ditching “Sharpreader”:http://www.sharpreader.net.

Bloglines does 50% of “what I want my aggregator to do”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2003/01/28/blogroll_updated (i.e. the basic stuff). After a few months of using a desktop based aggregator, I decided I preferred using a web based solution. Also, Sharpreader had a big unaddressed bug (before you say anything; I emailed and commented on his weblog, but Luke never replied. It’s an issue I could only workaround for so long before it annoyed the pants off me and I found a different solution) with its proxy handling causing it to hang at least three times a day on my machine (later version only; earlier versions didn’t hang but didn’t handle the caching of entries properly so I missed updates).

Now I just need to work out how to include those people unable (or unwilling) to provide RSS feeds. Some hack involving extracting the info from my bookmarks.html file will probably do the trick.

And finally, Alan Smith does the “hokey cokey”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/tweenies/songtime/songs/t/thehokeycokey.shtml to the “England squad”:http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/sport/football/stories/Detail_LinkStory=73033.html. But why no James Beattie? “Ah, there he goes”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2003/11/14/ufnbea14.xml.

Reds’ hero a homeless alcoholic

Sad news this. McGrath was one of the best defenders ever, and part of “my United”, the United team I grew up with. It isn’t so much the arrest that is bad, but that he gives an address of “no fixed abode”.

Our hot water tank was leaking, so we called out British Gas (it is under cover because it is a new boiler; less than a year old).
After a couple of visits when they umm’ed and arr’ed a bit, they declared that they needed to install a new tank, the “old” one was broken.

Another all-day visit and the leak is fix. “You should get hot water even quicker now,” declared the British Gas engineer. Indeed, I had a lovely hot bath that very night.

The next morning, there was no hot water at all. Odd that. It wasn’t even cold. There was no water coming out. Turning the tap had no effect. For some reason, I tried again in the belief that I must have done it wrong the first time. This comes from working with computers all the time. Maybe in the future we’ll have plumbing-by-wire and this will be a common occurrence with MSPlumb.

British Gas and Jonathan Creek have been called back to investigate “The Mysterious Disappearance of the Hot Water of Reading Town”