We're on the move next month - having finally sold the current house, we'll be renting a rather nice 4 bedroom house in Cockburnspath, (pronounced Co'path incidentally) which is a few miles along the coast from Dunbar.

While we're there, we'll be looking for a plot to build a house, of which presumably much more later.

Move-in date is set for 21st29th September and we'll be in a caravan for 2 weeks between houses, so I guess we'll be having a joint housewarming/birthday party.

Seen in #evolt:

If, like me, you've gone out and bought an AMD64-based machine to run Ubuntu (or any other 64-bit distro) on, you'll have discovered that there's no Flash player available. Which is an awful pain when the point of the machine is to be a safe one for the kids to use on the Interwebs, specifically the CBeebies site.

Fortunately, Adobe's John Dowdell pointed out a rather useful wrapper that lets 64-bit Firefox use 32-bit plugins.

Two minutes on Google later, and I'd found a one-click install script for Ubuntu that sorts out nspluginwrapper and installs the Flash9 plugin.

NB it needs to be run for each user, but other than that, is bluddy grate.

JD, my kids thank you.

Hey - great news! One of my favourite albums of my teenage years is to be re-released after many years in deletia. The Travelling Wilburys Vol 1 is out on June 11, and is available for pre-order on iTMS now!

Here's a sample: their debut single Handle with Care.

Our MP, Anne PickingMoffat has historically been a thought-free, nodding dog for whatever hare-brained, knee jerk, reactionary guff the current government has dreamt up.

However, lately she's excelled herself in lack of thought, research, tact and insight when she conflated problems with the recent Scottish Ballot Paper with the principle of PR, and in doing so, compared the new First Minister to Hitler:

Did not proportional representation give Germany Adolf Hitler? To a lesser degree, we have been given the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond). Can that be a good example?
Source

To pick off the obvious problems:

1. There's the obvious kneejerk against Labour's current bête noir — sour grapes for losing power in Scotland, mixed with the fear resulting from her own constituency being part of that shift.
2. Then there's the simple fact that proportionality delivers an overall result that is closer to the will of the people. That it tends to upset entrenched parties that benefit from the current system obviously leads to even the more reasonable of her Hon Friends decrying it.
3. Next, we can note that previous AMS elections had very few spoiled papers. And even this time round, the new STV system had a remarkably low spoilage rate. So bitchy comments about this particular election's validity are either supremely premature and ill-informed, or are directed at another target.
4. Finally, Ms Moffat has shown herself prone to making logical fallacies. In this case, the Reductio ad Hitlerum, generically expressed as Adolf Hitler (or the Nazi party) supported X; therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad, etc. As X can include building motorways, painting watercolors, owning dogs and vegetarianism, this is clearly a fallacy. In the online world, this is known as the Corollary to Godwin's Law: the citing of Hitler in an argument ends the argument, with the citer being deemed to have automatically lost.

We're booked with Canvas Holidays, to spend two weeks in Sunny South Brittany.

The interesting thing is that I think this is the same campsite that I went to with Mum and Dad when I was about 13. Although much has changed since then — huge swimming pools with waterslides are now de rigeur.

Now I have to hit the Michel Thomas on the iPod, to refresh my rusty French.

Woohoo! Ruaridh, in Big Boy Pants, woke up in a dry bed this morning! I am so proud!

I waked up in a dry bed mommy come see
I waked in a dry bed daddy I did
I woke up in a dry bed w/ dry feet & a dry head
I am a big boy now