Now I seem to be on a spammer’s list , I’ve implemented some comment control stuff :)

Again, Chris Lightfoot sums up what I’m thinking about ID cards:

“At root, I don’t think that it’s the government’s business to tell me who I am. The government are our servants, not our masters, and we oughtn’t to let them forget that. Just as — see Saki stories passim — the Edwardian upper classes assigned names of convenience to their servants, David Blunkett intends to assign names of convenience to us. There’s no good reason to let him do that, and I don’t see why we should.

In more detail: the conceit of the ID cards scheme is that each person should have only one identity; that that identity is given them by the state and recorded authoritatively in the National Identity Register; that each person must notify the state of any changes to it, and such changes will be accepted at the discretion of the government; and that that failure to comply as prescribed by the law will result in various and novel penalties intended to result in compliance with these rules.”

Read the rest for more thoughts on why this whole ID card thing is bad.

We had our company Christmas lunch today as a couple of our team are taking leave from the 15th. We went to the Nightingale pub and it was great :)

Lord Butler states the obvious. I bet noone in the current government listens though.

The company moved today!

Unfortunately, the new office doesn’t have ADSl yet (next week or so…), so I set up our main “internal” servers over at the boss’s house as he has ADSL there and then got a networked dial up connection working in the new office. I have a feeling that working from home will be a reality next week!

Not a good week.. after Jon being ill over the weekend, now Georgina and I am suffering from the same thing :(

Georgina went out partying on Friday night and Jon was ill :( He was sick 4 or so times during the night and not very with it all day Saturday. Some sort of tummy bug presumably as he was back to normal by this afternoon.

I’ve also managed to get the text for Ben’s naming ceremony up on the site. Georgina’s been a real star scanning in all the good photos from the disposable cameras that we had on the day. It has really brought home the usefulness of digital!

From The Register:

“Computer problems have left police forces in England and Wales unable to run national fingerprint checks for more than a week.”

Won’t it be fun when this sort of thing happens to the national ID database…

Scot’s Newsletter reviews Firefox:

“Firefox is the anti-Opera. Although it borrows many user-interface design principles from Mozilla’s older browser line, the developers have also clearly spent a *lot* of time studying Internet Explorer. This is precisely the approach that Microsoft used when it won over word processing and spreadsheet users back in the ’90s. You don’t win a marketplace by baffling them with amazing new features. You win them over by giving them what they want with a user experience that closely approximates what they already know.”

via Scoble

Took Jon swimming in at the swimming pool at Malvern today. He had a great time. It’s a “walk in” type pool which is very easy for Jon to deal with as he was able to choose his depth. It also has a wave machine which he enjoyed, except when he was splashed in the face!

On the whole, today has been a very busy day where we have achieved quite a lot of little chores. All in all, not a bad day.