I would write this post in German, except that I feel a little bit rusty at the moment. I have admittedly been getting a bit of practice in this week, but I still find it shocking how much of a language it is possible to forget once you don’t use it for a period of months. I know that all my German knowledge has not seeped out of my brain, that it is in fact just resting in a dark recess somewhere, but it is requiring conscious effort to pull it back out to the front again. So many words are getting stuck on the tip of my tongue

Munich is probably the most expensive city in Germany but also the most beautiful and exciting, and I am determined to drag Babel there one day soon, although preferably in the summer. I am going there with my family tomorrow for a mad Christmas market visit, and am very excited A full blog report on exactly how much delicious German food I managed to cram into one weekend will follow at some point next week, but not Monday because I’m seeing Babel for his birthday. (more…)

I have just logged into my blog and been instructed that I need to upgrade my WordPress to version 2.7. I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but it feels to me that for the past few weeks, every time I’ve logged into WordPress to make a post, I’ve been asked to upgrade. I’ve literally only just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.5, which as far as I could see had no discernible (or discernable??) advantages over WordPress 2.6. Sometimes I wonder whether I ought to go to the trouble of upgrading at all, but then Babel has installed a nifty little plugin which does most of the work for me, and people who know about computers have given me the impression that these upgrades are more important than I will ever understand. Having had all those issues with 3ix, I don’t want to slack off on upgrades and leave myself open to some other sort of security problems down the line. (more…)

I apologise for the distinct lack of blogging over the course of the past week, and resolve to do better going forward After my rather wonderful birthday, I proceeded to have a rather miserable week in which I succumbed to a slight cold and had to get up at the godforsaken hour of five in the morning to commute to London. I was booked to a small audit in London, of a computer software business my firm had never dealt with before, and so there was some uncertainty over how long the job was going to take. For this reason the manager decided it was going to be too risky for me to book hotel accommodation, which I then might have to cancel at a later date and incur charges for, and thus I merrily agreed to commute. Commuting to London is something which sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on paper, but when it gets to 5am, it’s cold and dark outside and your breathing resembles that of Darth Vader, it’s the sort of thing you wish you hadn’t volunteered for (more…)