View from the Potting Shed

There is a new version of OpenOffice.org in beta at the moment. The improvements made to the Writer application are noticable already. I favour Writer to MS Word (which I have a pathological hatred towards). And there is a new application: Base, which handles MS Access relational databases — excellent.
I’ve just downloaded […]

I’m getting sick of blog comment spam for online casinos and poker. This evening I spent at least three minutes deleted pages and pages of it. I have a couple of anti-spam traps installed, but they are not good enough. Obviously.
I’m trying not to feel angry about it, but it is a […]

Tomorrow evening St Salvador’s church is playing host to a choir from St Petersburg, Russia called Blagovest. This will be their third visit to us, although only their second concert at St Salvador’s.
The concert is at St Salvador’s Episcopal Church, 61 Saughton Mains Street, Edinburgh EH11 3QX at 7:30pm. Entry by donation. […]

Jane and I have spent an hour puzzling over our Scottish Hydro Electric electricity bill.
Last month (24 March) I received a letter from Scottish Hydro Electric informing us that our monthly direct debit amount must be increased, from £29.00 per month to £67.00 per month. I couldn’t believe it! That’s an enormous […]

The latest edtion of my browser of choice, Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3 has just been released.

While it is still much, much more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, this latest edition includes a number of security updates and a fix to improve the update process.
I’ve just downloaded it, and updated it on-top-of my current […]

Surprising news in this morning’s PCPro newsletter: Adobe buys up Macromedia.
Adobe is to buy Macromedia, in a deal that will create a single, dominant player in graphics and Web software.
Adobe will pay $3.4bn in stock, for which it will acquire products such as FreeHand, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash which are the main competitors to […]

I’ve been cracking on with rewriting the website for the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain this last week, which is why there has been a dearth of posts on my blog.
(I did also take some time out to install a new anti-spam trap for comments, that appears to be working — although it did, […]