Always, always read a post aloud to yourself before you hit the publish button.

On Monday, we watched part of No Direction Home, Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan. The part that struck me most strongly was an anecdote about the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis. One interviewee walked into the Gaslight Coffee Shop and found Dylan playing. They ended up singing You’re Going to Miss Me When I’m Gone together. About half way through the song, he realised that there was a good chance that there’d be nobody around to miss him.

Unless you’re interested in the internals of the Typo blogging engine and a possible rejigging of it, don’t bother reading the rest of this.

I’ve been unemployed (apart from the aborted teacher training course and the Perl 6 Summaries) for far too long now.

I just got word from O’Reilly, I’ve got press accreditation for European Open Source Conference in Amsterdam next month. So I’ll be interviewing various Perl 6 luminaries and hopefully summarizing any Perl 6 hackathon activities, doing photojournalistic stuff and generally enjoying the ‘hallway track’.

I’m 38. How did that happen?

It looks like the iPod Shuffle I bought in a fit of exuberance and silliness not long after it was launched is finally proving its mettle. Because it’s so tiny, it happily fits in my waistcoat pocket and supplies me with interesting listening on a boring trip to the place where I’m temping at the moment.

The trouble with version control systems is that, if you’re not careful, it’s almost as bad as having no version control at all. I’m currently juggling about 4 active branches of typo: the local development branch, the production branch and a couple of branches that isolate some of the local changes so I can make clean patches for the typo developers.

So, I’m temping now, just another admin worker bee for the council. I can’t say that I’ve found my vocation, but it’s certainly an eye opener.

Tags’re great aren’t they? Yet another way of slicing through the thicket of information. The only problem with adding tagging support to your blog is deciding if you can be bothered to go back through the archives adding tags to everything.

There’s a print hanging above the reception desk at the place where I’m temping. It depicts a line of silhouettes of poplars. It bears the title Southern Trees

Shakespeare describes the Globe Theatre in one of Chorus’s speeches from Henry V, so it’s no great surprise that, when the newly rebuilt Globe opened its doors for the first time, Jane Lapotaire strode out between the two great columns and declaimed

One of the great things that the internet allows us all to do with music is to share it. I don’t mean ‘sharing’ copyrighted material that we have ’liberated’ from the media we purchased it on - I know enough struggling folk musicians to realise how important royalties are to those people.

A definition before we start:

If you’ve eaten with me, you might be aware that I’m not a big one for chili heat. I don’t mind it, but you won’t find me chopping up the Scotch Bonnets for a mole or ladling out the chili oil in a Chinese restaurant.