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The Register reported today that Google Blog Search has overtaken Technorati for blog searches. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I didn't know Google Blog Search existed… but I can certainly agree with The Register's unscientific testing of the Technorati site, i.e. it takes an eternity to load and the search results are poor to say the least.
I was pleased to see that Refluxology turns up in the Google search results already, but Wordpress users like myself can ping Google automatically when you make a new post. The address to add to the update services box, as I discovered at BlogCarta, is http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
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I travelled to Durham for the Christmas holidays today. Having watched the news over the past couple of days I was expecting the journey to be grim or worse. How wrong I was!
My train was just before 3pm and the journey to the station is normally about 20 minutes… so I booked the taxi with Mercury for 1:30 to be on the safe side :) Typically, the taxi turned up bang on time and there was hardly any traffic so I had nearly an hour to wait in the train station. At least the weather was nice - blue skies, no wind, warm in the sun - nothing like the grim greyness elsewhere in the country.
Being the last Thursday afternoon before Christmas, I thought the train station would be very busy and the train even more so. As it turned out, the station was like something out of 28 Days Later - as good as deserted! The train was also relatively quiet, more so than a normal Friday afternoon.
The fog around York was very bad so I was surprised that the train was apparently able to maintain full speed along the East Coast Main Line. Because of a delay getting into Doncaster station I arrived at Durham about 10 minutes late, but, compared to the horrors I was expecting, the journey was as smooth as silk! 
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Today I took part in the NEUAL Novice Championships, hosted by Leeds University Archery Club. As the name suggests, this is for archers from universities in the north of England who have only started shooting this academic year. The rules were the same as for our other NEUAL matches, i.e. a "Portsmouth" - 5 dozen arrows shot in ends of 3 arrows, giving a maximum score of 600.
I started quite badly with a first dozen of 70, but once I stopped being a total muppet (and Steve kindly helped me reset my sight) my scores improved dramatically, with the other dozens being 97, 98, 91 and 95, giving a final score of 451. This was a personal best for me and earned me a lovely orange badge for scoring 450-474 (old cripple jokes to the usual address…)
Sheffield came 4th out of eight overall and I came 7th in the mens recurve, out of a field of probably between 30 and 40. All in all I'm happy with my day's work and hopefully I can get my score up to 470+ if I can find that bit of early consistency!
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The Peterlee Today website is reporting today that, following the publication of the Local Government White Paper, Durham County Council are going to pursue their desire to become a unitary authority in control of all local government matters in the area, with the district councils being abolished as a result. The rights and wrongs of their policy aren't really what annoys me here, though.
A mere two years ago the government held a referendum in the north east of England on the creation of another layer of local government in the form of a North East Assembly. A subtext to that was another question on whether Durham County Council would become a unitary authority or whether it would be abolished, with a few amalgamated district councils becoming unitary authorities themselves. John Prescott and friends made it very clear at the time that the answer to that referendum question would only be followed through upon if the referendum also came out in favour of the creation of the assembly.
As it turns out, the creation of the assembly was massively opposed by the electorate. Prescott was embarrassed, everyone forgot about it. Now it transpires that they probably intended to go ahead with the council abolishments/amalgamations anyway and just used it as a carrot to try and get their pet project (the assembly) approved.
I guess they thought that after two years, no-one would remember their promises…
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The developers at facebook have released a toolbar for Firefox 2.0 that gives you instant notification if, amongst other things, you receive pokes or messages and if your friends update their status or write a note.
One of the criticisms that could be levelled at facebook is the lack of notification of activity, so you have to keep logging in to check what is going on in your groups and with your friends. Well you don't have to, but you see what I mean
Hopefully this new toolbar will go some way towards fixing that problem.
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I have become an affiliate for ebuyer - as many of you will already know, they are fine purveyors of all things electronic at bargain basement prices. Whenever I need to buy an electronic item, I always use ebuyer to get a benchmark for the price and it's very rare their prices are bettered elsewhere.
For example, I was looking for a 1Gb SD card today… Argos are charging £40 online for their cheapest one, whilst ebuyer sell one for £8.99. No contest really!
Look out for offers in the future on the left of the page :)
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