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Anyone with an academic background who also knows Tolkien will appreciate Dave Pritchard's The Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?.

Have you ever noticed how often characters in films say things twice? It's generally used to end a scene, along the lines of:

It's the modern equivalent of Shakespeare's rhyming couplets, and it happens all the time. No matter how realistic the movie dialogue in general, people still repeat themselves like this. Try it in real life to make yourself sound more like a movie star.

Actually, of course, you'll just sound silly. It only works at the end of a scene before the lights go out, so it's a little trick, perhaps, best saved for your deathbed, to make your last words stick in people's minds.

Just make sure you don't misjudge the length of that thoughtful pause.

Splendid! Nottingham City Council has started 'fining' its staff for incorrect use of the apostrophe. A marvellous idea.

If only they would do the same thing in schools...

One of the things I love about the Mac is the way that applications are usually self-contained on your disk. They don't dump miscellaneous files into system folders, for example, like Windows apps do, thus requiring an uninstall procedure. For most Mac apps, the uninstall procedure is 'drag to the Trash'. Similarly, backing up and restoring your programs is easy.

Of course, this tidiness also makes this sort of thing easy!

From "Import This: the Tenth International Python Conference":

"Tim [Berners-Lee] became a Python enthusiast when he tried to learn Python on a plane trip. He had already downloaded Python and its documentation on his laptop, and between takeoff and landing he was able to install Python and learn enough to do something with it, "all on one battery." "

(Python is a programming language. Just in case anyone thinks this is an unhealthy obsession with reptiles.)

Andrew Sullivan's very interesting Blogger Manifesto:

I'm a bit behind the times, posting a link to this. He wrote it about four days ago. Which illustrates something or other about the world we live in.

Last summer Rose and I took up a new hobby: horse-riding. I'd sat on a horse many times in the past, but always as a passenger rather than a driver! We got hooked, and we've been going once a week ever since. I wish we could ride more often.

I was trying to work out quite why I enjoy it so much, and I think it's largely that it's so different from anything else I do. Much of my time I spend working with machines, which generally behave in a fairly predictable and repeatable way. My car isn't sluggish about changing into third gear just because it didn't get a good night's sleep. But on the other hand, it doesn't rub affectionately against me either.

Another factor is that I spend so much time trying to predict, invent and plan for the future that it's fun to pursue an activity which is shamelessly wallowing in the past. Good for preserving one's sense of balance (in more ways than one).

Recommended for geeks everywhere.

A bit more hacking, and this page now displays the number of comments to each message (for those that have any). It also emails me when a new comment is posted. Don't get me wrong, I don't actually expect many people will want to write anything here; I'm doing this because integrating the client-based Radio and the server-based PHP is quite a fun experiment.

I'm quite pleased with a photo I took of my wife Rose today:

You might very reasonably ask, "How did a guy like you get a girl like her?"

I got lucky.