apennyformythoughts

I know things are supposed to disappear after parties, but this is a bizarre one. Someone nicked all of my biros on Saturday. It's not like 1 or 2 disappeared - I had lots in a jar on my desk, and now there are only highlighters and big marker pens left.

I went to a pub last night hoping to hear a friend DJing. Turns out he was actually due on next week, but he was there anyway, and this week's DJ was a friend of his, who also used to play on local radio and now has a show on internet radio. I have only recently discovered that internet radio is a far better source of interesting music than actual FM radio (during the day at least - in the evenings we do get the great John Peel on Radio 1). What this DJ told me about was the show he's now doing, which is on totallyradio. Very nice discovery, as the one half-decent radio station in Brighton (Surf FM) was taken over recently, becoming Juice FM (it's even a terrible name) and losing all its good DJs. Now I know where they went, and I can listen in decent quality whenever I want to, and skip any shows I don't like or go back and listen to tracks again.

Brilliant. The new commenting system was easy to install, works on all the browsers I could be bothered to test it in, and looks like it should be easy to customise it as and when I get around to making it look nicer (mainly making it look like the rest of the site).

Credit where it's due: I discovered this on Adnan's site while trying to work out how he does his commenting. I don't think it's quite the system he uses (Adnan if you're reading this please could you tell me how I can have the comment script email me when people leave comments?), but the page with the code and some explanation is here. I think the version I'm using was originally written by Sascha Beaumont, who I know nothing about.

To use it you will need to have PHP installed on your web server, but the instructions are fairly clear and it has the advantage that all the comments are also stored on your server, so you don't depend on anyone else's service (which was why my old commenting system stopped working - it was maintained by a student who quite rightly put their own work before maintaining reblogger).

Now that it seems to be working, show me love. If you are not here for the first time (or for that matter if you are but intend to return) please drop a comment in, because my readership has grown (from 2) over the past month or two, and I'd love to know who you are. If you can't use the comments for some reason (you don't need to leave a URL or email address if you don't want to, but I'd appreciate you leaving at least one) email me, and if you have any problems using the site in general please tell me what software you're using and what goes wrong. If you have never met me, it would also be cool if you could tell me how you stumbled across this site.

this time I actually am testing a new comment system, but if it isn't easy to make it work, it might have to wait for a few days till I sort it out properly.

ignore the number of comments to this post - 7 of them are me testing the system out, and 2 of them are someone else telling me it works

Very clever once again Mr. Bush. Because the companies involved are suspected of having links to Osama Bin Laden, the US has effectively shut down Somalia's entire information infrastructure. Now excuse me for twisting a metaphor beyond its sensible reach, but what happens when you use a mallet to hit a drawing pin?

well as you may have noticed the promised new commenting system hasn't materialised. The Sunday demon swallowed up any attempt I made at doing anything more productive than cleaning my house yesterday. I'll try to sort one out soon, but I have some real work to do as well....

Oh dear. The Euro coins that will become currency here in a month are poisonous to a proportion of people. It's not too much to expect that our great and good could have thought this through beforehand, or is it?