It turns out that 2006 is a big year for weddings. I got married in April, a friend of my wife got married in May and my friends P and I had a Civil Partnership Ceremony yesterday.
Despite the poor weather, it was a great day for everyone. They tied the knot in Wandsworth Registry Office with nearly twenty people present. It was a short but touching ceremony. They said their vows and exchanged rings.
I was introduced to the strange world of Geocaching over Christmas last year.
For the uninitiated, geocaching is, basically, a high-tech scavenger hunt. People hide things all over the world, typically Tupperware boxes containing various goodies, and post the co-ordinates on a website. Other people then enter the details into their GPS systems and try to find them. It sounds simple, silly even, but it can give you a good excuse to look around an old and familiar area with a new perspective.
Bruce Schneider again talks some sense about the recent unsuccessful terror attacks.
Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic.
If the security services did most of their work in the back-ground, without people knowing about it, then the public wouldn’t be in a state of terror. And — from the point of view of the police — working behind the scenes never did James Bond’s reputation any harm…
Introducing two new additions to the Darlington household…
Bob:
And Cornelius Maximus Wilmington the 4th:
Friends, leaning against a car chatting. This was in Trinidad, Cuba in 2004. Taken on my Canon EOS300D with 18-55mm lens. Come back next week and vote for me, I’m entry 432.
Please vote for my entry in last weeks “Four” competition! I’m entry 494 (–> Stephen <–).
What right-wingers see when they read The New York Times.
If you’re in the UK, you can just buy a copy of the Daily Mail.
I found this interesting article that “demolishe[s] the myth that faith strengthens society.”
While we’re frequently told that religion provides a moral basis for a civillised society, the study found “that secular societies have lower rates of violence and teenage pregnancy than societies where many people profess belief in God.”
How can that be?
“Consciously or subconsciously, those who are “born again” or “chosen” have diminished respect for others who do not share their sect or their faith. Convinced that only the Bible offers “truth”, they lose their intellectual curiosity and their ability to reason. Their priority becomes not the world they live in but themselves.”
If you’ve been to ZX81 before you can’t fail to notice that we’ve had the second major redesign in our history. This time we’ve moved over to using WordPress, the unfortunate consequence of which is that some of the old links might have stopped working. I’ve tried hard to maintain things, but there may be some problems. Let me know if you find them!
[ Edit: Some people are using my pictures on their web pages, in most cases this is both uncredited and without permission. This is an infringement of my copyright. As you might imagine, I have made no attempt to maintain links for these people. For a short time this may also inconvenience people coming from Google Images. ]
Most people that know me are aware that I tend to favour the Macintosh over Microsoft Windows. One of the problems with maintaining such a position is that people are always saying how much more expensive Apple products are. While I realise that a single example is not likely to change that, maybe people should look at this Windows XP Media Center PC before throwing stones. A snip at £5,980,000.00.
The company where I (currently) work is always trying to get people to transfer over to the New York office. There are a number of personal reasons why I didn’t want to do that, however the main reason was always that it — basically — just didn’t appeal. It really didn’t seem to be very much different from London, where I currently live, but, well, more. So when I visited New York in April I was not expecting to like it very much.