How could you be so heartless to accept it, Lib? That's probably the poor bloke's drinking-money-for-a-week now suspended from your neck. Soppy blokes - honestly!

(Dujon) Maybe your drinking money for a week. I wouldn't presume to know. :-)

[Lib] I am not so chauvenistic. Congratulations, your first girl's best friend.

Can't get anything to go in though Preview works. Anybody know what's happened?

It's down now. I'm not sure what the problem is. Disk error, perhaps. This may be serious. I'm connected but there's not much I can do. I'll let you know.

That was really odd. The disk was in a peculiar state and very few commands functioned. Notably, I couldn't reboot it using any of the usual commands. (It's in a locked machine room at a colocation facility three miles from here and it's after 11:00 at night so pushing the button was not an option.) I did manage to force it into a reboot state somewhat more directly, and it came back promptly with everything seemingly fine. I'm doing an unscheduled backup now since today's didn't have a chance to occur at its normal time.

(Dan) Working OK now. Thanks, as ever.

Cold snap this morning with ice on the car, cross my fingers that this will remind the grass to stop growing.

I'm glad there was a frost today too. I'm hoping it'll make the slugs that terrorise my rabbit and eat her food go away. I've tried beertraps but the rabbit knocks them over and drinks the beer!

It's distinctly cold here in sunny Bath too - but then, this is why November is my favourite month!

(nights) Dec, Jan, Feb and March are all colder than Nov, the last two sunnier as well.

ah but ... those particular months aren't adorned with spectacular autumnal colours. I'm with nights on this one.

Early November is my M's birthday... and since my father died, she and I have celebrated it by taking a city holiday to do the galleries and museums - Venice, Florence, Rome - and this year, Paris. On Wednesday for five days. I like November too :oD

Ooh, Paris in November. Sounds amazing. Have a magnificent time. After my exam I'm going to a health spa with my Mum, and she's paying! Hurrah! Send a postcard to the crescent if you can!

(Chalky) Yeah, OK, but it's still pretty well all green here ATM. Most leaves have hardly changed colour let alone fallen off the trees, probably due to the very warm and rather wet Sept/Oct. Climatological analysis shows that we should start trying to get used to this sort of thing.

I'm really going to miss Autumn.

Don't worry, nights, you'll get over her. Change your working hours to something a little more sociable and you'll find someone else in no time.

Chortle, chortle.

Talking of darkness, there was apparently a major power blackout across Europe last night, centred on Cologne in Germany. Given that's precisely where I was at the time, and furthermore, that I returned on a 10am flight with only 30mins delay, and only found out about it once I'd got back to the UK suggests either that I am, truly, the least observant person the world has ever seen, that the Germans know how to handle a crisis, or that I'm actually going mad. I shudder to think what effect such an event would have had on British transportation.