Nominet Lunch (by alaric)

Today, I attended a Nominet Members Lunch.

Nominet are the organisation in charge of the .uk domain name hierarchy. My company is a member of Nominet, giving us voting rights, and a "tag holder", meaning we can create .uk domain names and are charged "cost price" by Nominet for running the root .uk name servers and administrative procedures.

It was brilliant - my company are a very small member, yet I sat and chatted with the Chief Executive about issues facing Nominet. There are not many systems about where a "little guy" who wants to discuss how something is run can have lunch with the Chief Executive and other staff (in this case, Nominet's IT and Marketing/Communications directors) and chat about it.

Yet I worry that, in theory, the 3,000 odd Nominet members could all sign up for the Lunches, drink free wine, eat free food, and discuss football. It's one of those wonderful things that works beautifully because nobody's thought to try and spam it yet...

I went, not because I have a particular political axe to grind, but because one of the points that came up at the EGM is that a lot of the members aren't getting involved in Nominet governance; and so I felt I, as somebody who will never make much money from .uk domain name registrations so whose views on it are purely from a making-the-Internet-cool perspective, should set a good example to others by making my voice heard. Plus, I like getting into a good debate. We discussed EPP, IPv6, Nominet's voting rights, expanding the scope of Nominet to bid for ENUM and .eu, and other issues.

Baby geekery (by alaric)

Ah, I couldn't resist. I bought some NetBSD "devotionalia".

Including:

and

Jazz in Cranham – Saturday 1st July 2006 (by alaric)

We're now selling tickets for Jazz on the Old School Field, from 7pm onwards on the 1st of July 2006, in our home village of Cranham, Gloucestershire.

Tickets are £12.50 (under 12s £2.50), and proceeds go to local worthy causes via the Cranham Feast Committee

Drop us a line if you'd like a ticket!

(And for the technically inclined, note that I've marked up the Feast web site with hCalendar, so one can use the Technorati Events Feed service to subscribe to a Cranham Feast Committee calendar, if your calendaring software supports it)

First day at nursery (by alaric)

Today, Jean had her first day at day nursery. We dropped her off at 8:30am, and picked her up at 5:30pm, and in between she was in the care of a group of nurses, meeting other babies and playing with new toys and generally being mentally stimulated in ways we can't provide ourselves, while we (in theory) were free to get on with work and relax a bit all day.

Well, Jean had a lovely time - the nursery seems good; such establishments are quite tightly regulated in the UK in terms of adherence to standards, but - more tellingly than the wordy OFSTED report - when we were dropping Jean off all the other children arriving seemed to be looking forward to their day.

While we came home, having woken up at 7am to get her ready after getting to sleep past 1am the night before, so fell asleep again until about 1pm, then headed off to collect a parcel from the post office (my order from the NetBSD Online Store arrived! I now have, amongst other things, an "Of course it runs NetBSD" bumper sticker which I'll attach to the van - once it's running NetBSD) and to do some emergency shopping since we're out of toilet paper.

On the way home, we realised we'd forgotten to actually get any toilet paper, so had to stop off at another shop anyway. We arrived home and I tried to do an hour's work on an empty stomach, with relatively little success, before lunch was ready, which we had to hurriedly eat before heading out to pick Jean up again.

So now we get home, and I take a twenty minutes to write this blog post up while I run down from driving mode to programming mode, and my work day is starting at 7pm. Grrr!

Garden (by alaric)

Sarah was away today, and I was working hard, so for a treat Jean spent some time in the garden with my aunt (her great-aunt) Barbara, watching Barbara gardening.

Alas I was working inside, so have no cute pictures to post, but apparently a good time was had by all, with Jean learning to play peek-a-boo with her blanket (pulling it up over her eyes and down again) 🙂