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!

[Nik] Point taken - I'll have a look at the HTML checker and see if I can get it doing something more sensible viz the quotes. Will you be upgrading MySQL too? Not that - I think - I need any of the features of the newer version when I finally upgrade, but just curious.

[Nik] Obviously if you drop me a line indicating when it'll go down, I'll arrange for a backup to be made of the game data at that point. I'm away for the bank holiday weekend, but with sufficient warning can set up a cron job to do the business, so it's irrelevant really.

What are you saying, like? Don't trust me to not destroy all the data, like? Eh? Eh? A benefit of switching disks and installing fresh is that the current disk won't be modified at all during the process, so data should be safe, although I'll be dumping /etc, /home, /var and /usr to CD anyway (a slightly neater variation of which will become a weekly backup to CDRW). I might go to Apache 2 and Mysql 4; I'll have a look at their feature lists and see if it's worth the risk.