[Lib] 'Kin 'ell. I've only just thought about that. It's 20%!!!

Yay! Well done! However, your namesake hasn't layed an egg yet.

I'll admit I'm chuffed to bits. What's more, I may just be able to flog my tent (sleeps four, dark green tunnel tent, used once) to my soon-to-be-ex colleague who has snatched not only a hot-air balloon ride in the Northampton Balloon Festival on Friday, but also a last-minute ticket to the Stafford V Festival this weekend. Jammy sandwiches, virtual beers, Pimms and shandies all round. Unfortunately, unless BobTD starts squeezing chickens' heads, there's no egg-nog.

[pen] Congrats!

Yes, what Penelope said. I can't believe she actually ate the thing though. [BtD] Nettles are great. They're terribly healthy. The Victorians would sell them at market as a vegetable. I used to pick and eat them frequently, partly for my obsessive healthy eating drive and partly because I was incredibly poor. You have to pick them as they are growing, not when they're old and raggedy late in the season, and you pick just the top four leaves. This means that you have to pick an awful lot to get a decent quantity. Then the best thing to do with them is steam them. They cook extremely quickly. You might think you would have to cook them for ages to kill the sting, but in fact the sting goes almost instantly, so you can treat them essentially as spinach. They taste similar but with a pleasant velvety sort of texture.

Superb skills penelope. Sounds as though the promotion is well deserved. Hope the new responsibilities won't gobble up your 'online chief crescentess' time, though.

Forgot to add my congratulations. Well done, pen. [Chalky] I thought one of the management skills is "delegation" which, as I understand it, could be used to free up plenty of time for the same.

[rab] Better that than delegating someone else to play, certainly.

Cross-posting of course, but a note for Orange MC players - the server which hosts Orange will be down for repairs at some time between 4:30pm and 7:30pm ET today (that's 21:30-00:30 BST). The outage should be for 20-60 minutes, and is to replace a broken CPU. Hopefully Orange will be a bit less sluggish afterwards, too.

It's back. Not that it went away for long in the end.

[rab] Good point about delegating - and delegating someone to make moves on my behalf (especially in MC where you know my skills don't shine) has given me an idea. I'm going to be involved in the interviewing for the underling position(s) [tbc], so maybe I could ask the applicants to make a move in one of the games here, then you can all judge whether they deserve the job or not!! Whaddya think guys???!!! Do I have the skills to be a manager or not, eh? :o)

Have a care before introducing professional colleagues to MC before you know them well. For one thing it gets harder to post cross rants about the bastards in the office in the Advice game.

[pen] I suggest a game of 'Straight face'.

[rab] Straight face? I guess it means anything but, but would you explain? :o)

[pen] Get BtD to stick a tube map in the hen-house. When pen-the-hen pecks at a station, that's your move!
[BtD] Did you get my email(s)? Hen pics are online!

[pen] On the contrary. The aim of the game is to maintain a straight face while your opponent says things to bring this state of affairs to en end.

Meanwhile I'm trying to cancel my contract with the Carphone Warehouse. If I have to listen to Connected being played down a tinny old phone one more time...

[Bb] url?

It's amazing how long it takes for a salesperson to realise that the reason you want to buy something from elsewhere is that their opponents give a better deal and nothing they can offer matches up...

BtD is somewhat busy - so using some left over bits of HTML and sticky backed plastic, may I present . . . Big Clucker!

Ignore those pesky errors that pop-up. Geocities is the only upload place I can access at work - and they bung their own code on top.

[Boolbar] No pesky errors when I looked. Just three surprisingly pretty hens in a very clean place. Penelope's obviously a heart breaker, Flerdle looks mischievous and Lib rather enigmatic. So now we've had the individual mugshots, how about panning back so we can view the whole Big Clucker House and its environs?

[Boolbar] Sorry, I realised after I posted that you are the technical chief who enables the picture viewing. My camera positioning instructions should have been directed at Bob the Dog, the producer of the show.

Chalky] Acknowledged. As Boolbar says, I'm not at home at the moment, but I will try to upload a floor plan and more photos. Saskia is looking after the chickens while I'm away, she says they are being very good girls. No eggs yet. I'm not worried about the lack of eggs because the chooks are still very young and need to settle in a bit more. However, Penelope is looking particularly perky and her wattle appears to be turning red. Whatever that means.

I know *exactly* what it means but I'm darned if I'm telling you.

[pen] Many congrats, both on your chicken namesaking and the promotion. I suggest you ask prospective employees one of two questions. 1) Would they straddle or strile in a half closed farkle situation if blue tokens were wild?, and 2) What's a good rhyme for "chihuahua"?

[blamelewis] Ah, the old trick question! [Hidden Text]You can't have a half closed farkle situation when blue tokens are wild, unless the blue tokens became wild after the half closed farkle situation arose. In this second case both straddles and striles are impossible until the farkle is fully closed. See Ackerman's thesis on half-closed farkles, a good bed-time read.[/Hidden Text]

F*ck. I would have fallen for that one.

Day 9: Flerdle has grown in my absence and is now bigger than Penelope. Lib and Pen are probably about the same size now. Chickens were freaked out by a glider that went over our house, Pen making a dash for cover whilst Lib and flerdle tilted their heads this way and that in an endearingly quizzical fashion. All chicken eating well, they seem to like carrot - fed them the dried head of a sunflower yesterday - but they didn't really get the hang of it and the seeds had to be pulled out for them. At about nine o'clock, they tramped up their little ramp and waited for me to lock the pop-hole. They are such good girls!
Day 10: Still no eggs. Estimated (with help of a calendar) that first egg may appear on 26th August (Day 21), although a friend of mine suggests that they won’t really get going until mid Sept. I am very busy at the moment, but I will try and draw up a plan of living quarters and maybe upload it to a Big Clucker website (which for me is a big step, never having done anything more adventurous with HTML than this!) Looking for reasonably priced no-ad site host. Any suggestions?

There are several sites like this one which try to recommend free site hosts. As they say, free sites usually come with little or no help and most have annoying adverts/pop-ups. I've used Vispa for 2 years now and have had no problems (except in the first week when they were down for a day). Their on-line help was adequate for my needs. There must be many other free ad-free site hosts out there, some of which may allow you to have your own webby addy (like www.bigclucker.com instead of www.bigclucker.isphostname.com).

BTW, is it generally half-slow on the internet today - I can't get into MCiOS or eBay (due to timeouts) but this site is speedy.

. . . and no sooner do I type that, when MCiOS springs back into view. eBay is still way too slow though.

Ebay is now OK. Hmmm, it seems the moment I post something here, it ceases to be true.
Gosh, I am lacking in money.

Glad flerdle is doing so well. Have been at home sick for last two days, able to do a little work remotely, but generally bleurgh. *totters back to bed for a while*

It seems to me that after all this chicken related discussion, this should be renamed the Bantam Page!

[Thos] Much as I hate to break it to you...

[Rab] How complimentary to have one's ideas confirmed as good ones prior to having them!

[BtD] I think I could probably be persuaded quite easily.

Although image-heavy pages (like the one blob presented) would probably kill my connection quite quickly, so somewhere with more bandwidth might be better.

[Thos, rab] "Sorry, old man, we don't understand your bantam!"

For the second time, Dujon has hit the high point of Celbdaq - don't worry, fans, at 0600 BST this will change. Disappears back into left field chanting "percentages, money, percentages ..."

Have made a surprising discovery. Chickens love grapes. And porridge. Not mixed.

[pen] Thanks, much appreciated. Am still not well, and not particularly enheartened by a visitor yesterday saying "Oh, I had that for six weeks" :-o

But that didn't stop me from going to the football today (my second AFL match, and why complain when someone shouts you? Just rug up warm); hopefully some really nice photos... telephoto gooooooood.

Sorry folks. Mini Cheddars. Bit confused. Two words? Really, penelope. Wrong game!

I've been kneecapped!

[rab] You and several others by the looks of it. Bravo all. I'm finding it tough to make any headway this time round, but I'm not bitter . . .

Ooooh, strawberries have started to come into season here! Yay!!!
[penelope] I don't see the problem there. Oh, and your hot chocolate remedy works a treat.

...and looking forward to regular posting!

I've just ordered new disks, one of which is for the web server. At the same time as moving to a new disk, I'll be taking the opportunity to upgrade to newer versions of the OS and web server.

This is the first of 3 or 4 planned outages during the remainder of this year, and will incur the largest downtime - I hope to keep it under 24 hours but promise nothing. If anyone has a problem with the machine being down on a particular day this week, let me know, either here, or by email to an address that should be fairly obvious. If I don't forget entirely, I'll point out the cause for outage at MCiOS and/or Orange at the time.

As an aside, the other planned upgrades are: a UPS, more RAM, and yet another disk.

On another note entirely; Rab - it's really quite annoying that the HTML checker insists on apostrophe pairs inside title="". Still, I guess that's what ' is for; I'm giving up my contractions for nothing or no-one. Nothing or no-one!