Feedroll proves disappointing

I’m disappointed to see that the new RSS feed on my website doesn’t seem to update very quickly. This post is really just to see whether I can provoke it into doing something...

Updated personal website

Now it’s the turn of my own website. I’ve done the redesign and finished the work-releated pages. Some of the other stuff – local politics and so on – is not done yet but I’ve decided to go ahead and upload the new site because the old version was horribly out of date, and even in its unfinished state I think the new one is better.

Comments on the doodle that decorates the page headings would be welcome. I can’t decide whether it’s a good idea or not.

Updated boat website

Finally got round to redesigning the website for our boat. About time too.

Renoir landscapes at the National Gallery

Monet is better! Really Renoir should have done figures all along. (They show two early works of theirs side by side and it's obvious.) But some of Renoir's work is very good -- especially later ones with less distracting stuff in them, just lots of vegetation.

Sometimes it looks as though he has turned up the Shadows/Highlights filter in Photoshop too high -- shadow areas aren't deep enough and they're too blue.

[ We actually went to this exhibition a week ago last Saturday, but I haven't fully got into the blogging habit yet so it only just occurred to me that it's the kind of thing I could post. This is transcribed from my notebook entry at the time. ]

The personal and the public: 10 years on

Ten years ago we brought down the Government, and then we got married. It was a very happy time, all in all. Lots of things are conspiring just now to bring it all back, and to remind us how long it's been.

There's Tony Blair's resignation, of course (I could write a long essay on all the emotions that produces. Maybe another time. I guess there are enough of those essays about at the moment -- you don't need me to add to them).

And this morning I got an email from a friend who did one of the readings at our wedding (a few lines about marriage taken from Four Quartets), asking for a pointer to the text so that he could read it again at someone else's. So I dug the wedding script out again and spent a happy half-hour wallowing in nostalgia.

Andrew has just installed MediaWiki here so that we can have our own household wiki, for shopping lists and so on -- mundane stuff, mostly. (Much cursing during the installation process, which seemed to require a complete OS upgrade on our fileserver. Why are these things always so hard?). So this morning I put the wedding script in as the first page. Seemed a good starting point.

Doesn't time fly?