Barrier [Photos]
11:07pm GMT, 22 Jan 2009

Taken on a cold, clear day at the start of what will probably prove to be a long journey along the Thames Path.

2008 in review [General]
03:35am GMT, 3 Jan 2009

A bumper blog post to make up for a year of indolence.

January

An early highlight: visiting Iain in California. We didn't manage to surprise him — he'd heard we were coming a day or two beforehand — and a 12 hour flight, 8 hour time difference and a 6 hour drive aren't the best preparation for a few days skiing. It was well worth it, though. Some great snow and great company in Mammoth, a trip through Death Valley and a few days in LA made a memorable week.

February

At work, it was the biggest launch of the R2 rollout project. The vast majority of the news content on the site was migrated onto our new platform, a significant increase in both content size and traffic. The weekend wasn't without its excitement; we had some significant database stability issues which were not directly related to the launch, but the team took them all in their stride.

That was also the weekend when Sally and I unfortunately split up. I found myself living in Tooting with Tom "for a few weeks, until I find a place of my own."

FOSDEM was its customary mix of both engaging and disastrous lectures, excellent ideas, chance meetings with interesting people and catching up with friends over some serious Belgian beer. For some reason we found ourselves in the curry house again. It's becoming a very odd tradition.

March

Still living in Tooting with Tom and showing no signs of going anywhere else. Being gently re-introduced into the joys of listening to trance in darkened clubs until sun-up. A few weeks of commuting on the Northern Line had allowed me to turn off my sense of smell at will.

April

By April I was settled in Tooting. While Tom was away in Sri Lanka, I finally found my own place: a one bedroom house, only 50 metres around the corner, in a street so quiet it's hard to believe you're in London. My week of property hunting coincided with the arrival of my niece, Chloe.

Met up with some old friends at the UKUUG Spring Conference and the Ubuntu Hardy release party.

May

A reasonably uneventful month. I helped Andy rack his new server and we heard the first death rattles from the car on the way around the M25 to Telehouse. The novelty of having a washing machine with a timer and a dishwasher kept me entertained for most of the month. When I wasn't chuckling to myself about this.

June

Started brightly with a chance to catch up with old friends at the Wychwood Festival. Continued well, with 8 days windsurfing in El Tur with 13 other assorted non-gybers, cruelly, but accurately dubbed the Pathetic Sharks (after the Viz comic strip). Gybing, for those who don't windsurf, is one method of turning the board around and is surprisingly difficult to learn. My previous attempts were something between a slow motion fit and arthritic break-dancing. Jim Collis was able to coax much improvement out of all of us.

The shock of spending days in the sun and the local food, gut fauna and (probably most significantly) beer mounted a combined attack on my body, all in a town which has a strain of Cholera named after it. Nevertheless, I came home much healthier than when I departed and discovered that I do have abdominal muscles after all. Haven't seen them since.

July

Nothing too exciting. OpenTech was a great one day event; I'd definitely go again. I discovered the joys of the Tooting Bec Lido and ran the Chase Corporate Challenge in my slowest time ever.

August

The weather was the filthiest I've seen it for a long time, we spent days gale-bound in a harbour too small and crowded to windsurf; it was still a great sailing holiday around Brittany with Mum, Dad, Gail, Ella and Chloe.

Kilos of bread fed to the seagulls	>10
Number of times caught in a 40 knot squall with full sail up	1
Occasions on which wind instantly died from near-gale to gentle breeze once I'd rigged my windsurfing kit	3
Visits to top of mast to replace main halyard	2
Days on which wind was forecast to ease the following day	14
Days on which wind really was significantly less than on previous day	3

September

The howling winds again coincided with the Fat Face Night Windsurf, making it a tremendous spectator event, especially if you enjoyed watching a lesson being meted out by the vicious shorebreak. But whose idea was it to get Jaegermeister to sponsor it and why did I decide to hoover up the surplus free samples?

This was also the month when Alan and I started taking maximum advantage of the BBC's free tickets, beginning with the recording of Armando Ianucci's Charm Offensive. About an hour of material to make a 28 minute show. I'd imagine the lawyers took most of it out.

October

Turned 0x20. Considered looking after myself a bit more, behaving a bit more responsibly. Don't remember much of the rest of the month.

November

A big celebration at work to mark the end of our two and a half year project, with roughly the right combination of drama, tears and gossip. And then came Hack Day, which was the most fun couple of days at work I've ever had. A lot of after work socialising and family and friends made it a great month, but I was getting a bit stretched by now. Smeared the car along the side of a skip, which settled the question of whether to get it through the MOT this year. Life will be infinitely duller without its unpredictable electrical surprises.

December

We moved into our new offices. I managed to sneak Mum in for a look around and she was very impressed; it is surprisingly appealing for a large open plan office and by and large everything was working, even for those of us in the vanguard. I miss Clerkenwell and creative mess. However, the commute is easier, we've finally got all the technical people in one place and I'm starting to get quite attached to some parts of the neighbourhood.

Marie and Richard's wedding was great fun; many old faces and some new ones. Christmas was the same relaxed family event, it always is. New Year's Eve was spent with good friends up for the night in London. For the rest of the month I struggled with minor illness of one kind or another.

My first Guardianwhack [General]
12:49pm GMT, 16 Nov 2008

It transpires that we currently only have one article about Wales and fashion. It's about Burberry.

Paul Carvill explained what the guardianwhack is on our Inside guardian.co.uk blog. I'm tagging my finds with guardianwhack in delicious. If you find any, please do the same.

Your robot manuel of fale has arrived [General]
10:26pm BST, 22 Oct 2008

Someone really needs an editor.

Sansa Clip: cheap and cheerful Ogg Vorbis and FLAC support [General]
08:39pm BST, 19 Oct 2008

Earlier this year I moved to Tooting and started using the Northern Line to commute. At times this line is so busy that it can be difficult to read a book without elbowing a couple of people in the ribs, so I decided to buy a new MP3 player and listen to podcasts on the train to pass the time.

Having pored over the spec of the lovely Cowon iAudios, I eventually opted for the cheap and very cheerful Sansa Clip 2GB, largely on the back of a glowing review from anythingbutipod. I also ordered a pair of Sennheiser PX100 folding headphones.

The PX100s are great headphones for the price, but sadly aren't up to the job of keeping out the extremely loud tube noise. I did some thorough investigation of noise cancelling headphones and concluded that they were too bulky and expensive. In the end I went for the more sensible noise isolating headphones and bought some Sennheiser CX55s. The sound is nowhere near as good as the PX100s and they lack bass, but the rubber flanges sit tight in my ear canal and are very effective at keeping out noise. I have forced myself to overcome my hatred of in-ear phones so I can actually hear what I am listening to.

The Sansa Clip is very small and easy to stuff into a pocket. The sound quality is fantastic for the price, but a few things have frustrated me ever since I bought it. Firstly, it didn't support Ogg Vorbis. Roughly half of my audio files are encoded as Oggs and I had never really got around to re-encoding them, so about half my music and comedy could never make it onto the Clip. Secondly, the interface has always been a bit fiddly. For instance, you couldn't add a track to your GoList (the adhoc playlist) without actually playing that track.

Unbeknown to me, Sansa's engineers have been quietly working on improving the firmware. In May, they added Ogg Vorbis support and just a couple of weeks ago they added FLAC support and in some previous release, they've added the ability to add tracks to the GoList without playing them. Better still, the firmware update is extremely easy from a Linux box. With the two things that were annoying me most both having been fixed, it's like having a new player.

Sansa (who are actually Sandisk in disguise) deserve credit for investing engineering time into supporting their customers. At under £30, the 2GB Clip must be one of the cheapest audio players to support Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. There's now a 4 GB version and they have other products, such as the Fuze with higher storage capacities. The interface on the Clip still can be a bit awkward to use, but they seem to be fixing that.