Putting on some mellow bird-calming music, such as Zero-7, really does mellow little Humph’s head. She doesn’t care that Zero-7 are merely a cheap pastiche of Air..she likes Air! To her it’s all nice.
So as I type she’s drifting off to sleep on the arm of the sofa after successfully removing and playing with a particularly fluffy bit of feather. She takes such good care of her feathers.

Michele is away and we’re both sulking as a result. I think Humph blames me.

The amount of work I’ve been doing has started making me feel like I’m in prison recently. Apart from work all I’ve done is go to a pub within five minutes walk of the sofa and drink too much, which in the long run makes me feel worse.

I had loads of stuff I wanted to blog about, but of course I didn’t do it at the time so I’ve forgotten. Instead here are some things I knew already but have been forced to re-learn recently:

• When doing anything in the kitchen or bathroom that is time consuming, don’t go and “check your email” while it’s going on. Email checking leads to web clicking, which leads to wikipedia/bloglines/boing-boing/space_ghetto, which leads to anything from no tea, to a house fire or flood. The flood one happened quite a few years ago and the house fire one has been only narrowly avoided 3 times in the last year.
• Doing two part-time jobs actually means doing two full time jobs.
• Working with Windows is an utterly miserable way to spend your life.
• In the words of Sean Lock, “don’t give anybody your address ever, ever, ever”. The same goes for your phone number. Phones are so wrong – when you call someone it’s like shouting “Oi! It’s convenient for me to talk to you now, so pay attention, stop whatever your doing, no matter how engrossing or intellectually demanding it is, and talk to me for bloody ages whilst I talk at you.
• Birds are amazing.
• Oracle is a huge monster that is best avoided.
• PostgreSQL should only be used by computer scientists who don’t have the need for something fast, reliable and that actually works in the field for massive amounts of real data. Use MySQL.
• Margaret Thatcher really was as evil as you remember. Anyone who doesn’t agree should be entitled to the best psychiatric care available.
• If you arrange to meet someone in the pub, on their birthday, at 8pm, don’t get there at mid-day. You won’t be much of a positive asset to the social function when the friend arrives.