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It's two weeks since my last entry, and two weekends since Leela's birthday. Things have been busy! On the 26th I took Friday to Monday off, sent Leela to a spa on Friday, and over the rest of the weekend we traveled round the countryside visiting exciting places and doing exciting things, including trips to museums, galleries, theatres and a zoo. It was awesome, and there was cake. I have many photos, some of which will find their way onto this website at some point.

In other news, last week I moved my mail servers, so if you're sending me mail and it's not getting through, that's weird, everyone else is fine. But let me know.

As many of you will know, I have a habit of managing to turn what should be a relatively simple project into a monster of complexity. My latest project is no exception - I caught myself yesterday in a weak moment, thinking about a scripting language for the config file. Time to step back, or call it a framework.

I tried out MTA recently, and managed to get myself banned from one of the better servers, which I'm quite sad about. I think it was entirely unfair, as it didn't actually say anywhere that you weren't allowed to spawn loads of vehicles from high in the sky in an attempt to create a giant fireball. Although in retrospect, doing it in front of an admin might not have been the smartest move.

The observant among you will have noticed that it's my 25th birthday in about 19 days, 14 hours and 25 minutes. By my calculations, that leaves you just 7 working days to order me something off Play. If you're stuck for ideas, I quite fancy one of these, or maybe this. Happy shopping!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, I shall contact you in due course.

Am I the only person who gets freaked out when I'm wearing headphones and someone comes into the room behind me and taps me on the shoulder without me hearing them?

More to the point, am I the only person who tries to prevent it by pointing all of my webcams behind me so I have a full 360 view of the room without moving my head?

As all regular readers know, I've had a long and happy history with Play, so I'm extremely pleased to see that they're the first UK company to bring us DRM-free MP3s. At last, I can stop buying my music from the Ruskies!

I went straight in to buy something, and must admit I'm a little disappointed; it's just EMI at the moment, so a lot of the artists are a bit rubbish, and - as always with Play - it's a bit of a pain to browse for what you want, or for what you might want.

But most of all, it's a shame that the albums are so expensive. Indeed, the only album I can find that I want is a mere 4p cheaper as MP3 than as a CD - for that much, I might as well wait a couple of days and have something that'll survive a crashed hard drive.

But still - definitely a step in the right direction.

I'd forgotten it was half term this week. Needless to say, by the time my train had reached Kemble this morning, I had remembered.

I was surrounded by children, who were all shrieking or crying, while their parents stared on in admiration, oblivious to the fact that they're in a quiet carriage and that people around them were trying to work. Yes, I dare say that if it had been my child I would have also taken great pride in its ability to make enough noise to piss off the entire train, but as the lucky passenger who found himself sitting next to it, I did not share in her joy.

And of course, I was subjected to it again on the way home. Let me be clear: I don't mind the children themselves - they don't know better. It's the parents who are staring at them, full of pride that their children have developed a rudimentary grasp of speech, actively encouraging them to gurgle and scream while completely oblivious to everyone else on the train who really couldn't care less about the child's bloody toy horsey, and would prefer a bit of peace. If it had been the family carriage then fair enough, but the quiet carriage? For 2 hours?

Old and grumpy before my time? Perhaps. But I will remember to check for school holidays before using public transport again in the future.