Yak & Natter

One of the programmes that Tivo started to record for us as one of its suggestions is Stargate SG1. We ignored them for a while, generally we don’t like the whole film spin off thing, but then decided to give it a go one day when there wasn’t much else worth watching around. And now we’re hooked. Fortunately for us Tivo finds us lots of them, both from Channel 4 and from Sky One (although this does mean that we watch them in a strange order). I’ve just been taking a look through the episode guide and know I’ve never seen any of Season One. Must look out for that some point. And if you’ve never seen any Stargate SG1 it’s kind of a cross between the X-files and Star Trek, and very watchable.

I tried another recipe from the Low fat, Low Sugar cook book today, and made some oatcakes. They taste okay, but I had a real problem rolling them out as almost everytime I put the rolling pin on the mixture, it broke up into pieces. Anyone got any ideas how to prevent this happening? Or happen to have an email address for Rose Elliot (the author)?

I accepted a job offer today. I’m going to be working for a small company in Portslade doing internet/intranet stuff and I start on the 7th of January. Hurrah!

Unfortunately, the news isn’t as good for most of the other guys that I was made redundant with. There don’t seem to be many jobs around at the moment, and there seem to be agencies listing jobs that don’t exist, or agencies that won’t give you more details about a job before you send them your cv – all a bit suspicious.

For the record, here is a list of the job sites I’ve been using, ranked with the best at the top:

• jobserve – always has a lot on offer (not all of them exist though)
• gojobsite – again has a lot on offer, and there isn’t much cross over with jobserve
• wired sussex – doesn’t have much on offer, but it is all local (to me anyways)
• monster – allows you to create an online cv so potential employers can find out more about you
• planetrecruit – not a bad site, but seems to have many of the same jobs as gojobsite, and I prefer the gojobsite layout

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).

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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.

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 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!

The world cup (football, soccer) is still six months away, but I’ve started to prepare for it. I’ve keyed in the fixtures and you can download them for your Palm PDA. Sad, isn’t it?

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 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.

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