45 Minutes Old, originally uploaded by Martin Burns.

Born this morning at 11:10, weighing 3740g (8lb 4oz in Old Money).

Everyone's doing just fine - Morgan's very, very excited. Ruaridh's a bit more nonchalant so far. Lucy's relaxing, and I'm on paternity leave!

If you're in a present-buying mood (well, a bloke's got to try, eh?), see Lucy's Gift List.

Listening to the recent debates about party funding, there seem to be two camps emerging:

1. Let's leave all the funding limits in place, and just make it more transparent
2. Let's further limit the amounts individuals and/or corporate bodies can give/lend to political parties, and make up the gap with state funding that won't come with the taint of political favour for sale.

Now let's be clear - I think that people should be allowed to give money to promote their political beliefs. Parties are at their heart voluntary associations, and should be allowed to rely on their membership to fund them.

However, both of the above camps make the same assumption — that parties should be allowed (no, sorry, encouraged) to maintain their current spending levels, particularly in election season. But I have two very good reasons why this is a false assumption:

1. Campaigns should be fought on the basis of who has the best ideas and policies, not who spent the most on advertising. Does anyone really actually believe that the national poster campaigns make a valid contribution to that debate? The Devil Eyes poster? The Fagin poster? Are you thinking what we're thinking? At least we don't have paid-for political TV ads here...
2. If a party can't muster a mass membership that can fund its activities, doesn't that suggest that they're not connecting with the electorate? If one or two large donations can outweigh the entire membership fees and donations of the party membership, then of course it's going to bring undue influence with it, whether that's for good old fashioned pork barrel, or fittings for ermine.

HMG have been swearing blind for ages now that a main reason why we absolutely must have ID Cards and the National Identity Register is to ensure that we comply with the new International Civil Aviation Organisation passport standards, and remain in the US Visa Waiver Scheme.

The work involved in this would therefore increase the cost of passports to £93 (HMG figures, disputed by the LSE amongst others).

Well paint me pink and call me Nancy, the Home Office has managed to do it sooner, cheaper, and without all the ID Cards/NIR nonsense. On Monday it announced it would issue its first Biometric, ICAO-compliant passports this week. Home Office minister Andy Burnham was quick to point out that the passports would confirm the identity of the individual.

So, all the benefits of ID Cards and the NIR, for the cost of .... (wait for it...) £53, or a supplement of just £11 on current prices.

As HMG is an entirely logical beast, with the interests of the country at heart, we can expect an announcement from the Safety Elephant in the next few days declaring that the ID Cards/NIR objectives met, and the rest of the scheme being abandoned.

Oh, wait...

Like our previous two, this baby will (hopefully) be born at home, in water.

This time, though, we've bought a pool rather than renting one. But either way, you still want to do a test run a few weeks in advance of the date, so this was ours.

I don't expect this to be the final location - that's planned to be the dining room. However, if Lucy changes her mind...

The Oscar ceremony begins in 24 hours — excellent, just time for me to make some wild and incomplete predictions about films of which I've only seen some. So, without further ado, I'm going to open the envelope...

A mad, half awake conversation with Morgan, showing the wonderful logic of a 4 1/2 year old.

Because I'm working away from home at client site much of the time, and un-snooped access to my home email is A Good Thing™ to have, setting up secure webmail was a priority for me when I moved to hosting my own email setup.

I've been using SquirrelMail for pretty much all that time - having a system that I can keep up to date using Debian's apt-get management tools is a strong incentive.

But I never really liked it - the interface is extremely clunky, and uses frames, which is a particular hate of mine. Recently though, improved Open Source webmail interfaces have been coming along like buses, no doubt inspired by the success of Gmail.

One's so good, I installed it for a test, and liked it so much, I repointed my webmail domain at it within 5 minutes.