David and Katherine Goodwin

This morning while on my normal morning run, Bob (who was on his elasticated lead) ran out into the road. Unfortunately a car hit him and his back legs were paralysed. Thanks to the kind builders working nearby, I was able to get him to the vets, and after an emergency call out, X-rays and so forth it was determined that his spine was broken. At around 8:30am he was put to sleep, and we took him to my mother's farm to be buried alongside Cassie.

Rest In Peace Mr Jangles, you'll be missed by us all. We had some excellent memories together.

It seems Linux User and Developer will have another issue out soon; which, if things go to plan will have a column written by me on whether being free (as in beer) is a good thing or not for open source adoption. I suspect after the magazine has been published, I'll publish the article on here too.

Here's a great (relatively short) podcast on the power of marketing and branding.

"How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps" - Steve Yegge, Google.

http://mc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3375.html

Today was day 1 of LugRadio Live 2008 (UK edition).

Headline news - There will be more LugRadio Live conferences, and the implication of more LugRadio episodes.

As per normal, we met all the usual suspects, and had a good time. I only attended two talks - one on Women in Open Source, and the other was about bzr. Perhaps the schedule wasn't worded too well, but it was hard to get excited by any of the descriptions given - I needed more info goddamit!.

The following is effectively an online version of a talk I gave to phpwm in July 2008.

Disclaimer!

I'm no great expert on the inner workings of these protocols....there are probably secret manuals on SOAP/XmlRpc etc I/we failed to read somewhere

This is just a documentation of what I/we as “newbies” found ...

A week or so ago, there was some thunder and lightening (just to make our generally wet summer a bit more interesting). In the course of this "storm" lightening struck somewhere nearby, and killed our home ADSL router. (Perhaps my religious alter-ego should blame God?).

I've finally uploaded a few pictures to our website.

See :

• Rowan on his tummy
• Our new office
• Rachel's birthday cake (cake-pod anyone?)
• Emily's photos of us camping near Bromyard

Today, we moved to a nicer/bigger/better office within The Business Centre. This was prompted by a "Which would you prefer - a better office or a pay rise?" question to the minions, who all responded with "Better office". It's probably an understatement to say we were cramped in our previous one, but it was relatively cheap.

So - the good news (?) is that the employees now have a window to look out of - although the view is not really something to write home about - it is far better than no view.

Hopefully nothing else is going to die on me this week, but yesterday my bicycle suffered a fatal injury. I knew the frame was cracked in one place, and was about to take it to A&E (bike shop) but it beat me to it.

See : here for the gory pictures

When I did take it to the bike shop this morning, I discovered it had another crack in the seat stem... so in total - 3 defects on one frame. Nice.

Yesterday (17th of May 2008), Cassie (the dog) died. She signed off peacefully on a campsite near Bromyard (Herefordshire) after a sudden unknown illness that started in the morning. She was subsequently buried under a blooming damsen tree on my mother's farm.

She'll be best remembered for her ability to :

• bite unsuspecting individuals (Alex) and family members (Emily),
• producing some horrible smells,
• obediance,
• loyalty
• and a night time trouble making streak (bin emptying and weeing on the fridge/freezer!)