David and Katherine Goodwin

Some time ago, I bought a Neuros OSD which we're really happy with.

What surprised me today, is that due to Neuros migrating the user interface over to QT, they're providing a free CF flash card to all owners of the device.

Most other companies would tell you to go out and buy your own, or release a Neuros OSD v2 with the CF card built in and expect users to buy a new device. It seems as if Neuros truely do care about customer satisfaction and loyalty. Thank you!

I keep seeing adverts for Mountain Biking breaks/trips/holidays in Facebook, so in an effort to see fewer/different/no adverts, I've decided to adopt leet-speak and change 'mountain biking' to 'm0untain b1king'.

Will others follow?

Feckenham's Scarecrow Festival

On Sunday, I decided to cycle to Stratford-upon-avon and back (route here). As only I would do. The ride itself was quite nice, although it seemed easier on the way back. There were stupid roadworks on the A46, so I had to take a detour uphill, hence the indirect route. On the way back, I managed to get a little lost, hence the extra dual carriageway.

As normal I sweated loads.

This article on the BBC news website comes as no great surprise to me.

Given the hysteria fueled by the press, it's of little surprise that many men avoid contact with other people's children.

I wonder just how many paedophiles are there? What proportion are male?

I was just using Google maps to get directions to a wedding we're off to over the weekend, and noticed it no longer had it's beta tag on it.

I'm probably well behind in noticing this, but I did also notice that I can right click on the map and draw silly shapes and lines (and associate random text with them).

I got the impression the random shapes and lines could be somehow made public for searching by others, but I couldn't quite see how/where....

Phone spam.....

I'm no great fan of spam, in any variety (tinned, email, phone etc); so the other day I reconfigured our Asterisk server to require that inbound callers press '*' to speak to us, or get through to the answer phone. So far it seems to have cut out about 5 pointless calls - so that's good.

When I was much younger, I was quite interested in politics - mostly the theoretical aspects of it rather than the day to day activities of politicians. At university, I indulged this interest by taking several politics modules during the first year I spent doing a history degree. (Almost half of my modules were politics or modern history modules from the International Politics department)

I've never been involved in actual politics (I don't belong to any organisations, have never campaigned about anything), mostly because I haven't felt strongly enough about anything to really get my hands dirty. I doubt that will change in the near future.

Open Source Beer

At LugRadio Live 2006 leaflets were scattered around for Open Source Beer which will be available at Birmingham Beer Festival (September 14th - 16th, 2006). The festival is at Aston Students Guild, Gosta Green, Birmingham.... Kat and I will probably be there.

The Birmingham Camra website may contain more information.

My favourite podcasts....

Here's a list of podcasts I currently listen to (or would recommend to others) often while running the mongrels in the morning, or driving to work :

They're in no particular order...

• 7th Son - sci fi podcast, first episode was a little hard to follow due to a large number of characters
• PHP Arch - PHP Architect / PHP Pro podcast, has interviews and interesting discussions (for php programmers at least).

We're still horribly busy on all fronts, but I've decided to try to keep up the work momentum - as I've felt terribly productive while we've been rushing around - without the silly (for us) late nights.

Today I've been doing something I'm not too good at - graphics stuff - as I got offered a free full-page advert (instead of the normal half) in our favourite linux magazine (we have to say that now we're writing for them ;-) )
I'm reasonably satisfied with what I came up with (after the best part of 6 hours work), but wish I could have had time, and the money to have it done properly. Hopefully though, the adverts that have been in for the last few months will be starting to be recognised, and with the extra detail in this one, we might actually get some calls.