At the company Christmas meeting/lunch/disco in 2006, I had the pleasure of sitting at the same table as one of our directors. During the meal he checked his email on his Blackberry (nicknamed “Crackberry” due to the addictive nature of anywhere, any time email) several times. I seem to remember telling him, in jest, to “put it away”. Fast forward to 2007. Three has the best-value data packages of the UK mobile operators: £2. Read more...

[Abigail Emily Beadle](http://www.flickr.com/photos/t1mmyb/2154524254/) Originally uploaded by [t1mmyb](http://www.flickr.com/people/t1mmyb/) Slightly late posting this (I twittered, Flickrd and emailed on the day), but Abigail Emily Beadle was born at 9.25pm on December 30th, 2007, weighing 7lbs. Mother & baby are mighty fine :) Phoebe is delighted to have a little sister, and Kathy is delighted not to have had another Caesarean section and the -attendant- +associated+ six weeks’ recovery.

Sorry - I haven’t posted since Friday, and that was only to tell you the blog had moved house. In short: Bill Gates, KBE.stm. Killing British Enterprise, presumably. Southampton earned a well-fought point against Arsenal, though David Prutton has been given a ten-match ban for pushing the ref. Eek! Saints also beat Brentford in the FA Cup 5th-round replay, setting up a quarter-final against Man. Utd. That’s about it, really. See you again soon! Read more...

The blog now lives at www.timandkathy.co.uk/journal/ as I was fed up of performing redirects from the PlusNet homepages server to the CGI one. The RSS feed still lives at feeds.feedburner.com/ItCouldBeWorse

Another quick rant. I’m working at home today, which means I’ve had to field two telemarketing calls already, and it’s only lunchtime. Both calls were from companies that I am already a customer of, but they both used a technique that I’d encountered in the past but only recently got wise to: the “Is That OK?” Rather than asking a question that’s unambiguous, like “would you like to take advantage of this offer? Read more...

Snow towards Roundhill Originally uploaded by t1mmyb.

Grrr. I thought we’d seen the last of these, but I had noticed the odd popup lately, in both Firefox and Safari. It seems that those dirty advertisers have found ways to get around the popup-blockers present in most modern browsers by default (and IE with XPSP2 or a third-party add-on). Veerle Pieters has a great quote from a web advertiser on her blog: By using a popup blocker, you are essentially stealing their work. Read more...