We bought and dressed

We bought and dressed our Christmas tree last weekend. I’ve never had a real Christmas tree before (in fact, I’ve never owned a tree before as this is the first year that I’ll be spending Christmas at my house rather than at my folks’) and so it’s all quite exciting (okay, not really exciting but different anyways).

Our Christmas Tree

It’s not all that easy to tell from this picture, but the tree is only about 1.5 feet tall. We bought one in a pot in the hope that we can convince it to live.

Scary old stuff

Google have made the last 20 years of Usenet news available of searching.

Searching on your own name brings back some interesting things. In my case, things I’d forgotten about. It seems that in 1989 I was posting in comp.ai.neural-nets. In the first half of the 1990s I was spending a lot of time writing LaTeX macros, by 1995 I was worried about Pro*C and Oracle, but by 1996 everything was web related.

The first result from google for me is a posting to rec.pets. I had no idea what it was about, but a bit of digging revealed that some one in San Diego was offering to digitize pictures of a cat for me. In the days when scanners were not commonplace.

There’s a nice write up about what google have dug up from the archive.

Hmmm our server is

Hmmm, our server is currently experiencing some technical issues, like seeing the internet… so, if you’ve tried to view our site over the last couple of days, sorry… Normal service will be resumed shortly – I hope!

It took me ages

It took me ages to get the blog below to publish. It was complaining of an ftp error, saying that the connection didn’t exist (which it did). Big thanks go to Onno Zweers of the Netherlands for coming up with a solution to the problem.

We bought new recipe

We bought a new recipe book a couple of weeks ago, and it’s full or really tasty recipes, and they’re healthy too. The recipes are designed to be low fat and low sugar, and best of all tasty. We’ve tried 5 or 6 recipes so far, and only one of them was slightly dissapointing, the others have been great.

World Cup Draw

BBC2 have been showing the draw for the Japan and Korea World Cup in 2002. They really padded the show out, with musicians, and singers, and the like all doing their turns but eventually, they got around to doing the draw. Here is England’s group:

Group F

  1. Argentina
  2. Nigeria
  3. England
  4. Sweden

And England’s matches are going to be:

2 June 7.30am England v Sweden at Saitama
7 June 12.30pm Argentina v England at Sapporo
12 June 7.30am Nigeria v England at Osaka