Spent all day with Jon today. We spent most of the day playing with his new “Toby” engine. He got it for doing so well at potty training yesterday (no accidents!). He’s now trying to persuade us to get the rest of the “set” by dropping hints like “buy Gordon tomorrow?”
Very subtle, my son!
Seems, that I have haven’t shaken the this cold thingy yet :( Today’s been really horrible as I’ve been feeling very under the weather. It was so bad, that the fry-up I cooked for lunch was virtually inedible!
So, Michael Portillo is tired of Westminster. Maybe that documentary he did where he stepped into the shoes of a single mum for a week did have an effect? Maybe he’s worked out that to most of us, what happens in the House of Commons is immaterial to our daily lives until the Government decides to hit us in our pockets or break public services? If so, then all MPs should have to spend a week or two being with a normal family…
The Bank of England raised interest rates today to 3.75%. The move was hardly unexpected as last month, only the governer’s casting vote prevented a rise. 0.25% doesn’t sound like much does it? Apparently it means ?9 per month extra on a ?60,000 mortgage. Not too bad. However, the smart money is on the trend continuing until we’re at 5% by the end of 2004. 5%… that’s getting on for a ?50 per month rise in the mortgage payment… that’s gonna hurt some people.
Fortunately we’re on a fixed rate for the next 2 years and we have negligible debt as a result of paying nearly everything off with the house move money. Unfortunately, we have no savings either :)
I had a light bulb moment this morning! For the last 3 or 4 days at work, I’ve been struggling with a Flash problem that I couldn’t work out how to solve without making the moving an 8MB download. Yesterday, I stopped thinking about it at lunchtime and went on to think about another problem to do with databases. Driving into work this morning, I was thinking about how Dame Shirley Porter may hopefully soon have to pay for her diabolical behavior 10 years ago and out of nowhere I had an idea on how to solve my Flash problem! Now, I don’t know if it will work, but it’s a different approach to any that I’ve tried so far and I have reasonably high hopes.
What a nice start to the day.
Radio 1’s lead story today has been about how P2P networks are used for distribution of pornographic images and especially paedophilic images. Well duh!
In just about every case of the introduction of new technology, porn has been one of the early adopters. It’s been true for printing, home cine cameras, the video recorder, the video camera, websites, etc and so it has been for P2P networks. In fact, I would guess that a porn image was downloaded across a P2P network within the first month of the first system being available.
It’s hardly news.
Michael Howard was on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning and sounded very much like a leader. I was quite impressed though very aware that he was just talking very broad strokes. We’ll have to see what happens as the months go by, but certainly from what he was saying, I want to look a lot more closely at the Tory proposals than I did.
I can’t help thinking that when he was Home Secretary crime reduced by getting on for 20%… and that sounds like an OK record to me. I’m not sure I care that he was an unpopular Home Secretary as he got results. Maybe that’s why he was unpopular?
Much more research to do I think, but so far, I’m thinking that vote is definitely “up for grabs” this time around.
Yesterday, I took Jon down to London to see Mum & Dad. Georgina stayed at home to get going on her NaNoWriMo thingy.
Jen & Tim were down with Leah and Jack too, so Jon was assured a good time :) He really enjoyed seeing the trains again and for the first time was allowed to turn the controller to make the trains start and stop. It won’t be long before he starts to understand how it works. We also went to the park to play on the swings and slides. Jon managed to stay reasonably clean whereas Jack managed to sit down in at least one puddle!
The funniest thing at the moment is all the talk about Michael Howard on Tom Watson’s blog. If I was a cynic, I’d say that Labour are worried that they might actually have some serious competition for the first time since they came to power.
I’ve no real view on Michael Howard except that I am aware that crime reduced whilst he was Home Secretary, but I am sure that over the next year, we will hear enough about him to actually form a view. Certainly he won’t have the IDS problem of everyone saying “who?” whenever his name is mentioned.
seems to have gripped the Tory party. Of course it could all come to nothing but if they do manage to only have one candidate, that’d be good. Of course I really pity the poor sod who has to try and persuade us that the Conservatives aren’t a lot of back-stabbing children, but at least he’ll have more time to do it.