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Mr. Butshesagirl and I are off to my folk’s place for Christmas tomorrow, first doing mightly battle with the jams on the M25. Since we’ll be deep in ancient dial-up territory (and no doubt, busy stuffing our faces with mince pies) I’ll be off the air for a few days.

Have a good holiday yourselves, and remember - it’s rude to eat all the green triangles from the box of Quality Street.

I was reflecting today that I would rather give up watching TV than listening to the radio. There’s The Archers of course, but Radio 4 and now Radio 7 have some excellent programs. This afternoon, we listened to “The Northern Irish Man in C S Lewis”, a play about C S Lewis’ early childhood in Northern Ireland, and the events that influenced his writing. It had great acting, evocative sounds, and set the scene beautifully. The Christmas before last, Mr. Butshesagirl and I spent all Boxing Day listening to Stephen Fry reading “Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone” on Radio 4. It was so gripping and vivid that we were severely disappointed by the film. This time last year, I was terrified that the film of The Fellowship of the Ring wouldn’t live up to the fantastic radio adaptation that I listened to as a kid. Luckily, I needn’t have worried - the film just enhanced the picture in my mind from the radio play and the book.

The play also fitted well into a current theme in our lives. We’re going to see The Two Towers tomorrow (yay!), and spent a very pleasant Saturday lunchtime last weekend in the snug of the Eagle and Child pub, where C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien spent a lot of time with the other “Inklings”, drinking, smoking pipes and discussing elves, amongst other things.

It was my last day at work before Christmas today. When I got off the bus, the nice bus driver (the nicest driver on the route) wished me Happy Christmas. It reminded me of the driver (aka Mr. Nice) we used to have on our school bus. I went to school just outside Croydon, a good 15 miles from my home. A lot of girls (I went to an all girls school) were in the same boat, and there were no public bus services on the route, so the parents clubbed together to hire a coach.

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I was convinced that this [via BoingBoing] was a wind up. Can you see yourself wearing the Heartcam? Sure, it might prevent you being the victim of crime, but that would be because potential attackers are paralysed with laughter. Still, it might be amusing for those “Hello, I’m up here” moments (women - you know what I’m talking about).

This afternoon was The Great Work Christmas Do. There was a slightly different format this year - gone were the tiny sandwiches, sausage rolls and cheese and pineapple on a stick. This year we had a proper sit down Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and (more importantly) lots of free booze. Me and my co-workers are a cynical old bunch, so our expectations of a 3 quid dinner weren’t what you might call high, but it was really quite impressive.

Then there was the disco. At 3pm. This was just plain wrong on so many levels. Even the provision of copious quantities of more free booze and ABBA on the sound system couldn’t pack the dancefloor out. As far as I know, no one tried to photocopy unusual parts of their anatomy, have any ill-advised sexual liasons, or go on an expedition through the ventilation ducts. But it was still a good party.

I made a big decision today. I came out as an Archers listener. Note that I said “listener”, not “fan”. This is very important. I don’t, for instance, feel the need to write to the BBC and complain that cows take about 300 days to be cured of mastitis, and NOT two weeks as the so-called writers believe¹. Nor do I believe that Ambridge is a real place. I know this because:

1. Everyone knows each other, and, more importantly, speaks to one another.
2. Ambridge has a village shop, and people buy things in it every day.
3. No one goes to a big supermarket.
4. Everyone who lives in the village works in it. It is not full of people who visit at the weekends and find it “terribly convenient for the City - just a quick hop down the motorway in the Beemer on a Friday night”.

Despite all that, it’s blummin’ exciting at the moment. Mr. Smarmy-Love-Rat-Git-Face-Bastard (aka Brian Aldridge) has finally been found out, and now has to choose between sultry Irish temptress Siobhan, and long-suffering wife and cake-baker extraordinaire, Jennifer. It’ll all end in tears, you mark my words.

¹When surfing briefly to check the correct recovery rate (I know - I’m a sad sad person, but I aim for accuracy), I discovered that there is a journal called Udder Topics. I must subscribe immediately.

I wasn’t able to check my email all day today, so I was expecting to have quite an overflowing inbox when I got back. However, I hadn’t bargained for the flood of mailing list posts I was going to receive. I hadn’t bargained for it, because I hadn’t signed up for it. It seems that someone called Jason T. Slack has bought a text editor, Pepper, from its original creator Maarten Hekkelman. This is good news: Pepper was a very good shareware text editor, with many nice features, but Maarten had stopped developing it. I bought it some time ago, and used it frequently until development slowed and I switched to BBEdit. The bad news was that Jason had signed all the purchasers of Pepper up to a new mailing list, without their permission. Now this wasn’t really going to win him friends and influence people, let alone persuade people to buy his new version of Pepper. All day, my inbox has been filling up with emails from angry geeks berating Jason for signing them up. Worse still, when he provided instructions for unsubscribing, all the unsubscribe emails got sent to the list as well, increasing the numbers of unwelcome emails even more. Oh dear. To be fair, some people have welcomed the return of Pepper, but many will never want to have anything to do with it again after this debacle.

I’ll be forever grateful to Peter Gabriel’s RealWorld Studios for producing this album. Without it, I might never have come across the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Nusrat was a Sufi singer - a mystical sect of Islam, in which ecstatic music, singing and dancing is an important part of the devotions. In this collaboration, Nusrat’s remarkable voice is paired with the subtle trance-like music of Michael Brook.

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I’ve been doing a bit of housekeeping on this site today. I’ve added a few links to the Browsing section in the sidebar to update it with some weblogs I’ve started reading recently. I’ve also fixed the “More..” link in the About box so that it actually goes to the about page as promised. Sorry about that - the link broke when I moved hosts, and I’ve only just noticed.

I’ve also been doing some more work on my long-promised photoblog/gallery. It’s still not done (I’m being a bit of a perfectionist with it), but it should be coming soon. I’m hoping that when I finish work for Christmas I’ll get a bit more time to sort it out. Watch this space…

My geeky task for the day was to install a BBC News ticker on my SliMP3 player. Mission accomplished! It works really well, and beats the hell out of using Ceefax or Teletext to check news headlines or the weather.

It also shows the power and flexibility of the SliMP3 server, which is open source and written in Perl. You can think of all sorts of other useful information which could be sucked off the web and displayed on the unit: TV schedules, more detailed weather forecasts, stock prices and so on. Kudos to both Gordon Johnston and the guys at Slim Devices Inc.

If you want to relax and chill out this weekend, have a look at Danish Soundscapes [via BoingBoing]. I particularly reccomend “Koeer/Gallop” (Galloping cows) or “Naaleskov” (pine forest).

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There’s a house in the street opposite which is laden with Christmas lights. It has snowmen, reindeer, Christmas trees, stars and bells, all twinkling and flashing in technicolour. Yes, it’s tacky. But when I came past it on the bus this evening, the lights were like a defiant shout against the cold and dark, and they made me smile. Christmas (as the pre-Christian winter celebration), should be all about light and warmth, sticking your tongue out to the dark and saying that you aren’t afraid of it - that you aren’t afraid that Spring will never come. Even now, with electricity, central heating and satellite weather forecasts, I think we still need that.

My ADSL connection went down this morning. This is a fairly rare occurrence, as my ISP is Mailbox, a tiny but fabulous company, which has an excellent reliability record and tremendous support. But, they (like other ADSL providers in the UK) are ultimately dependent upon BT for the service, and BT manages to screw things up with monotonous regularity.

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This is heart-breaking and uplifting at the same time: Ethnologue, Languages of the World [via BoingBoing] lists thousands of languages, where they are spoken, and how many people still speak it. The diversity is staggering, as are some of the names: anyone here from Mali who speaks Xaasongaxango? But a depressing number of the entries are labelled “extinct” or “nearly extinct”. It’s really sad that all these local languages are being lost. When you lose a language, you lose a culture and a history, as language colours so much of how a community sees the world and interacts with it. If I could find a “Xaasongaxango for Dummies” book (and I wasn’t so utterly rubbish at learning languages), I’d learn it just to try to stop it disappearing entirely.

I’ve just spent half an hour tinkering with my XML summaries, thinking that I’d broken something when I moved hosts. I’d got round to testing it with NetNewsWire, but found that I got an error when I tried to subscribe. Minor panic ensued. I couldn’t find anything wrong with the file, and after tearing my hair out in a techno-rage, I finally decided to try quitting and re-starting NetNewsWire. My XML file now loaded beautifully. Why, in the name of the God of Geeks, why?