grahambinns.com

Tom Reynolds has posted some excerpts from the London Ambulance Service's unofficial messageboard today.

Once again I think that this is proof positive of how proud we should be of such a professional, dedicated bunch of people, and how glad we should be that they are as good as they are.

And whilst I'm on the subject of linking to things found in blogs not my own, I thought I'd let you know that Neil Gaiman's excellent short story We Can Get Them For You Wholesale is going to be online for the next month or so at Shadow Writer.

Just in case you're short of something to be getting on with, of course.

Well that was an interesting morning!

For reasons best known to someone else the www.grahambinns.com webserver stopped serving PHP pages at about 9am today. I have no idea why this happened whatsoever, but I'm glad to say that it's now fixed (or so it seems) after a reinstall of Debian and all things therewith.

Unfortunately, in my haste to get the system up and running again I forgot to back up the gallery, so all the photos have vanished. I've remove the posts containing gallery photos for the time being and I'll make them live again once I've got Gallery installed, but since that takes a while (it's the most long-winded web-app installation process that I've ever come across) it might be some time before that happens.

Suffice it to say I haven't got much writing done thust far today.

As Simon Willison has pointed out in his blog, the new version of Ubuntu - "Linux for human beings" - has been released today (version 5.04, also known as "The Hoary Hedgehog").

Ubuntu is one of those distributions that geeks like me either love or hate. Personally I like the look of it. It's a desktop usability focussed distribution as opposed to a more server-oriented distro like, say, Debian. It comes with only one Desktop Manager (Gnome) and only the neccessary applications for the neccessary tasks (Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice etc.), but also provides a powerful package manager akin to that of Debian, which I happen think is the Cat's Pyjamas.

As a result I've got a download of the Live version running now. The Live version is another funky idea that so far as I know is limited to Linux distros. It allows you to run the OS from a CD rather than having to install it, giving you a rather neat way of trying it out before actually having to commit to it. Very nifty. Perhaps my laptop will be receiving an OS upgrade over the weekend.

In other news I've finally got Wysi-Wordpress's rich text editor, TinyMCE, working properly, so I can now put <abbr> tags in and not have them stripped out. I might even get some blogging done at the weekend, in between all the writing, housework and vigorous visiting of relatives that I'm doing besides.

No, wait, forget that. It's still broken. Rats.

It disturbs me more than a little that according to Webalizer the top search string used to find my blog has been "Hobbits sex."

Triffic, that.

Mind you, at least I'm not top of the Google rankings for that search term (nor, so far as I can tell, anywhere near the top), as Tom Reynolds has the misfortune to be for "Womble Porn."

Still, there's time yet...