I have to admire Jenny Tong for standing up and saying that blindly condemning the palestinians isn’t going to solve anything and if anything’s going to change, then understanding where both sides are coming from is a must. She took a lot of flak for saying stuff about understanding the thought processes of Palestinian suicide bombers and this week took up the Today program’s offer of going to the West Bank and to Israel to talk to people on both sides. It was very interesting to hear her reports and at the end of her inteview today back in Britian, she said that the worst thing was the negativity there. It’s really depressing that nothing is being done to sort this out. Not that I think there’s an easy answer, but I don’t see George and Tony putting in the effort that they promised they would before we occupied Iraq .

Always check in IE before shipping…

… stupid browser…

Interesting piece on the Today program this morning about Cambridge council buying one way tickets to other towns for their homeless people. The presenter introduced the piece as saying that the the other towns were unhappy and implying that Cambridge was just moving the problem onto other town. Then the guest came on. She was the executive of Cambridge council and corrected him! Basically, she was saying that Cambridge only pay for a ticket when they have verified that there is a bed at the other end and that the person is happy with going.

Seems quite reasonable to me and certainly took the wind out of the presenter’s sails!

I drove down to “The Allens’ long term storage facility” (aka, “The Mother-in-Law’s Attic”) with Jon. We returned with baby stuff: pushchair, car seat, rocking chair, baby bath, cloth books, etc… The good news is that that car seat fits in the Micra, so we didn’t have anything to worry about on that score. Georgina also checked that the Grako pushchair fits in the Micra and it does! (providing she doesn’t want to get anything else into the boot!)

So all in all, quite a positive day and I’m starting to feel that we are getting organised for Ben’s arrival.

We spent the afternoon getting a handle on what we needed for the new baby in terms of funiture, car seat and pushchair. We need to find a closer Mothercare World than Leamington too! We’ve decided that a changing table with drawers underneath it would be good, but at ?200, it seems a tad expensive… A lightweight buggy that lets baby lie flat and fits into the Micra would be nice, but we can’t find one cheap enough for the little amount of use it would get. As for a baby seat, the assistant advised us to double check the one we currently have as she thought it should fit (even though we were sure it didn’t!). What a nice lady – she saved us from buying anything that we were considering! Jon did get some new jumpers though!

We had a site go belly up today. For some reason the sessions stopped working properly. Was very frustrating trying to troubleshoot it at gone 5pm on a Friday evening! Suddenly I remember that I’d put in some 404 error handling into the apache server just after lunch and sure enough, that was the problem… The only trouble now is that I’ve no idea why!

Something for Monday I think…

Picked up some butter for Georgina at Tescos this lunchtime. In the St Peter’s Tesco, they have self-service checkouts and very nice they are too. As you would expect of new technolgy, there was no queue, so I just breezed up and started tapping the screen… it was dead easy: click start, then scan each item’s barcode past the little glass window. Note that you need to put the item onto the conveyor belt, otherwise it doesn’t accept that you’ve finished with it! This caught me out for a while as I just put the butter down on a handy surface after scanning it… Then it was just a case of swiping my clubcard & switch card through and I was done.

Definitely going to use that system again!

Topup fees for primary schools

Angel tonight was rubbish! I dunno, but to me the characters didn’t gel very well and the plot was paper thin! The scariest bit was the trailer for a new show with Alicia Silverstone in it! It sounded terrible and shows just how low actors/actresses will go for work…

The lightweight Mozilla browser has been renamed to Firefox and a new version has been released. Looks good too!