Apparently today is “Atheist Pride Day.” You are supposed to “change your Facebook profile picture to the [Out Campaign Logo] And change your status to something like ‘I am an atheist’ (or whatever).” I’m not on FaceBook so you’ll have to make do with this little post.

It turns out that the timing is quite good, too. Last night I went to a British Humanist Association talk by Daniel Dennett called “A Darwinian Perspective on Religions: Past, Present and Future.” It was chaired by Richard Dawkins. Here’s a fuzzy iPhone picture of the Q&A session at the end. (If only I’d brought my 50D!)

Did you see today’s press release from the Home Office about how great ID cards are? Despite any evidence that this actually happens, they keep asserting that people can’t wait to get their hands on them. Everyone is so keen that they’re going to start issuing them to volunteers before the 2012 official start.

It seems that they’re backing off a little on the anti-terrorist claims, but here is the new list of benefits.

I’ve started to get “into” Twitter, the micro-blogging site, in the last month or so. One trend that I picked up on is that of “hashtags” where you put a hash (pound) symbol followed by a word somewhere in your message. This makes is searchable. The most recent that I’ve participated in is #firstmac, for which my contribution was:

A white iBook G3, paid extra to get the 600Mhz version with the faster bus speed and an impossible-to-use-it -all 384Mb of memory

I recently went to a BCS talk entitled “Eight Significant Events in Computing.” In the question and answers session at the end, one attendee noted that most innovations were Western in general, from the USA in particular. There are a good number of exceptions but, okay. He continued: the result of a Capitalist system and not Communist or Fascist. Again, I’m not sure that this is entirely true.

But it was his final point that floored me: IT innovations were mostly Christian. A few confused looks made him clarify with the line, “There are no Buddhist Computer Systems.”

It’s that time of year where every magazine and website does a retrospective, regurgitating old material with no shame. I didn’t want to miss out this year. Digging into my Google Analytics logs I found the following…

Ten most read pages this year:

1. Installing Oracle 10g XE on CentOS 4. This page was actually 35% more popular this year than last despite the ageing versions of both Linux and Oracle
2. Sri Lanka. This has been one of my most popular pages for years, although it took a 50% dive in page impressions this year due to the loss of a single referrer
3. Oracle on Linux Installation Howto
4. Minolta Dual Scan II film scanner review. Another surprise given the age of the scanner and the rise of digital cameras
5. Belkin WiFi (Skype) Phone review
6. Photobook Group Test (Part 1)
7. Printing-1 Photobook Review (Part 1)
8. Photobook Group Test (Part 3)
9. Sophia Smith
10. Photobook Group Test (Part 4)

Somehow part two of my photobook group test slipped out of the top ten.

Wishing you and your family happiness and peace, turkey¹ and chocolate this festive season, whatever your faith or lack thereof.

The above image, by the way, was taken in Reykjavik, Iceland a couple of days before Christmas 2006.

It all started ten thirteen years ago. In November 1998 I went with a friend to Amsterdam, and now every November since I have spent at least a few days out of the country.

For the record, those trips were:

• Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1998)
• Abu Dhabi, UAE (1999)
• Thailand (2000)
• Oslo, Norway (2001)
• Malta (2002)
• Charlotte, NC, USA (2003)
• Cuba (2004)
• Brussels, Belgium (2005)
• Lille, France (2006)
• Jordan and Egypt (2007)
• Lisbon, Portugal (2008)
• Vienna, Austria (2009)
• Amsterdam and Den Haag, The Netherlands (2010)

It never started as a challenge and you can’t deliberately start a tradition, but I’m keen to keep this one going for as long as I can. Even if it is a little silly.

George W. Bush stars in the latest (and little publicised) in the gory Saw movie franchise. In it he discovers some interesting new “enhanced interrogation” techniques and finds that getting out, with no recourse to legal representation or trial, is, quite literally, torture.

Full news on her own website, but today B said her “Affirmation of allegiance” and gained British Nationality. She was a little unhappy about having to pledge allegiance to the Queen so I’ve made a minor edit to the original picture.

I commented that a lot of our government clearly have not had to make such a pledge themselves. If they too had to respect democracy and freedom I think we’d be hearing rather less about 42 days in gaol without trial and ID cards. (End of rant.)

Somehow the idea of replacing the head of Hellboy with that of the last Deputy Prime Minister and MP for Kingston upon Hull, John Prescott, amused me. Even the slogan kind of works.