B3ta is down.

How will we cope?


I've spent the evening techily occupied finding a new web host that will run WordPress for me. I've outgrown blogger. I'll be moving a spare domain to a new host for experimental purposes and will be migrating www.niles.org.uk in the fullness of time. The ageing content of the site is a little bit embarrassing now.

It's been a techy few days. I spent Sunday evening upgrading a computer in the office. It now has a network card and an extra ISA parellel port and has been transformed into a print server. It's been ages since I've had to do anything ISA and I'd forgotten what life was like pre-PnP.

This is Libby, our neighbour's cat who came in through our open back door earlier today. I shot a 'reel' of film of her before we escorted her off the premises in accordance with the terms of our lease. She's looks very much like my parents' cat Ellie except that where Ellie is grey-only, Libby has warmer colours in her fur.

I've just started watching tapes of 24 Season 4, even though we've not finished Season 3. Paul has Kiefer Fatigue and has decided three seasons of high tension cliffhangers is quite enough for him. Me, I'm a glutton for punishment. "Looks like someone's trying to corrupt the internet!" Techy bloggers the world over are up in arms.

Ten years of history etching themselves into my face. It's time to renew my passport, and if I do it now, I won't get stiffed for the fee to have unnecessary biometrics incorporated. I wasn't planning on going to the United States any time soon anyway.

How could I forget my idea about planting a walnut tree? And grow apples?

Today in Nottingham, there's been a

• peace rally in Market Square
• Gay Pride festival in the Arboretum
• and a Mela on the Forest Field

All connected by the tram, so a peacenik gay Asian with a bus pass can hop between all three.

Unfortch, I didn't go to any of them. We had a delivery day in the diary from months back so I went leafletting with a bunch of Lib Dems.

I'm starting to work on the fantasies about the new house and garden. If we're moving in at the end of the summer what can we plant? Help is at hand on the HDRA website that gives a month-by-month account of what needs doing in the garden -- and what you could be enjoying if you'd followed their instructions earlier in the year. The Organic Catalogue has been constant bathroom reading for the last six months.

Will we keep chickens? There's plenty of room. But to be honest, we don't actually eat all that many eggs. I'm sure we can always eat more omelette, cake, quiche, egg sandwiches... We can Go To Work on an Egg, provide Oeufs Durs a la Mayonnaise to every bring'n'share... (Blimey, the Eglu has changed so that now it can hold rabbits. Are the rabbits for food or looking at? I don't think that we'd need an Eglu when a couple of feet of chicken wire and some wood will do...)

There's a quite a bit of garden out of sight of the house, so we could have a polytunnel and grow chillis and melons. And have a full sized compost heap instead of a garden compost dalek. But with all that garden, we'll need a way of disposing of dead leaves and grass cuttings.

Maybe I'm jumping ahead of myself. First we'll need to rewire, redecorate and furnish the place. That's assuming we can sort mortgage, surveys and the conveyancing. Dammit! I want to move now!

But of course the main reason for moving? Away from restrictive leases and evil, inspection-mad letting agents? KITTENS!

We've had an offer accepted on a house.

There's a long, long way to go yet, and it doesn't look like I'll be a home-owner by my birthday, but it's an important step down the road.

3-bed 1930s semi with large established garden in Sherwood, Nottingham. Kitchen, Lounge/diner, lean-to. Shed. In need of redecoration, and a bit of basic maintenance, which is the only reason we can afford it.

I'm finding it harder than usual to concentrate on working!

B3ta Newsletter gives a link to this guy, who was on one of the tube trains that were blown up. Not yesterday, but a fortnight ago.

Google Moon. Like Google Earth only moonier. And the occasional hint that they're not taking it quite so seriously.

During elections, we print target letters, mailmerging letters to thousands of people. By-election stalwarts of many years' standing will tell you horrendous stories of feeding arrays of 4ppm primitive laser printers with paper long into the night.

Now we have fast, modern laser printers like this HP Laserjet 4200 with its three-ream paper hopper that can print at 30 or more pages per minute, and speeds up the job no end.

But they get hot, all the more so when you're facing the electorate in July and your office is cooled only by the odd fan here and there. When the printer gets too hot, the paper coming through starts to curl, which means it won't go through the folding machine, and in really bad cases has to be folded by hand by the army of clerical helpers.

So when the need to print is not too pressing, someone thought they'd open all the printer doors and let it cool down a bit.

Pretty much all the rest of my photos from Cheadle are of the fantastic views you get from the holiday cottage we were staying at, which was The Hayloft, c/o Three Chimneys, Cobden Edge, Mellor, SK6 5NL, tel no available here. Stockport may not be an obvious place for a holiday, but this really was a gorgeous place.

One of the things I did during my holiday was get some serious recreational reading done. Before I went off I hadn't had much time, so it was great to relax and fall back into the easy arms of detective fiction.

Weeks before my departure I spent a small fortune in Amazon Z-shops, buying up paperbacks at a penny each so that I had a small crate of books to take with me. I realised halfway through that I was going to get through my supply of English language books before my holiday came to an end, so had a whole bunch more sent to Nottingham for me to pick up when I got back.

The first supply was almost entirely Reginald Hill novels. The entire Dalziel and Pascoe series and some of the Joe Sixsmith books. I finally got round to reading the outing of Wieldy and the story of how Edgar and Edwin met, both of which have been referenced in more recent books, and left me intrigued. I even read so far back in the series that it was before Ellie and Peter got married and before Rosie was born. But I still don't think I've read the first, A Clubbable Woman. The Hill books were ordered a long time before I went off, so I had time to lend them to my mother before my holiday. Since I got through them while I was over there, I've lent them to a friend in France.

For the second lot, I ordered up some authors that I'd read before of (eg Morse omnibuses, endlessly depressing Ruth Rendell novels from the 80s) and some I'd heard of and never actually read before. Minette Walters was one, as was Peter Robinson, so too Sue Grafton.

I easily took to Grafton's alphabet murder books. Slim, well crafted detective fiction you can polish off in a few hours. I bought A-E and read them very quickly. F-I are waiting in my now huge to-read pile.

Peter Robinson was also good. I read a book from his Det. Insp. Banks series and it was great. I didn't find it quite such the same page-turner as some of the other books I've had in the crate, but it was still enjoyable, and I will be looking up the rest.

But the real star discovery was Minette Walters. I only had one book with me, her first, The Ice House. And boy was it great. A wicked sense of humour, intriguingly written and rather more substantial than the Grafton books. It took me 9 hours to get through, and was the main reason I didn't actually leave my hotel room in Saintes. I've already acquired five more, and have nearly finished Acid Row. I can't unfortunately spare too many slots of 9 hours straight, so I'll be reading a bit more slowly than usual.

Also in the pile are a series of Maigret books in French. This will take a little more psyching up for me to actually read them. I'm a quarter of the way through the first one (La Pipe de Maigret, which means Maigret's Pipe, I suspect, and not Maigret's Blowjob...)

It occurs to me I've been reading detective fiction my entire life. I think it was a sort of detective fiction that taught me to read in the first place. I have a vague memory, either from actually remembering it, or from being told the story, that it was a Famous Five book I took off my mother because she couldn't read it to me without snickering, and read it for myself. I did with the Enid Blyton books what I've done with every author since that I've enjoyed, and spent days of my life reading book after book by the same person. Eventually I exhausted the children's library and was allowed to go through the adult library under the watchful eyes of friendly local librarians who never let me borrow anything too racy or inappropriate. Agatha Christie was next, Ian Rankin fairly recently. Before that, and before Jurassic Park really brought him to everyone's attention was Michael Chrichton. Nicci French is someone I've been reading in the last five years since one was serialised on Radio 4.

It's all so desperately low-brow. But I'm not ashamed! (Well, maybe I am a little bit since I obviously feel the need to deny it.)

Do please feel free to leave recommendations below.