With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost went unnoticed last week. Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Kokey," died peacefully at age 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin. They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started.

(Thanks, Robin!)

The young lady and I spend the better part of today searching high and low for a suitable engagement ring, and, ironically, ended up buying one from the first shop we went in to. It's rather lovely, though I say so myself, but since we commissioned the jeweller it won't be ready for at least two weeks.

We toyed with the idea of a stone other than a diamond, but in the end bought into the whole 'diamonds are a girl's best friend' corporate line and did plump for a hunk of compressed, superheated carbon.

Someone told me that the tradition now is to spend two month's wages on an engagement ring, but we both agreed that if this was the case it was a damn silly tradition.

In other, much less exciting news, my computer is finally back up and running. I am childishly delighted by this.

For those who don't already know, the young lady has promised to make an honest man of me. Yes, in a move which removed any shred of masculinity I had left, she proposed to me on my birthday. It was utterly adorable, and though we're both trying valiantly to keep everything low-key, even the choice of picture for this post demonstrates that at least my standards of taste and decency are beginning to slip.

The proposal was two nights ago, and in a move which may anticipate our future married life, Jenny tonight was pestering me to post about it. I will not be owned! x

Yahoo recently celebrated its 10th birthday, and to celebrate made a page available showing what their site looked like 10 years ago. To complete the effect, you should be looking at it on a computer from a similar vintage:



Yuk.

I'm also seriously considering bidding on this ancient piece of computing. I was trying to justify to someone the other day why I spend so much on computer equipment which is effectively obsolete, and it's actually a very simple answer. As a kid, I yearned to own so many gadgets, but they cost thousands of pounds. Now, the ridiculous rate of change in the world of computing means that I can at last own them all, and all for pennies. It's a mildly ludicrous justification but then it's a fairly harmless hobby.

That particular computer is the fancy version of the first laptop I owned, the Amstrad NC100. Both computers were marketed with the slogan "If you can't use this computer in five minutes, you'll get your money back". The NC100 was a fantastic piece of equipment, and I remember writing a manual for connecting it to my desktop computer using a system called, I think, ProLink Plus; I wrote to PCW Plus (edited by the redoubtable Alex Summersby, who I believe is still working in the industry) about it and got a ridiculous number of orders for it from the letter they published. Is there anything more adorable than a tale of a young geek?

Incidentally, it was in this same journal that another letter I submitted was given the 'Best Presented Letter of the Month' award, printed as it was on paper I was selling at school for a project under the brand 'Skoosh'. This all sounds a bit trippy, doesn't it?

Anyway, I worked pretty solidly over the weekend on magazine stuff so was very kindly given today off. I'm currently sitting in Patisserie Valerie in Soho sipping loose-leaf Earl Grey and stuffing myself with toasted fruit scones with jam and clotted cream.

Can't wait for my meal this evening; this pic shows two plates of lovingly-crafted meatballs poised for cooking this evening. Mmmmm!

"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare." Blair Houghton

Gah, what a nasty bloody day. I'm in the middle of something at work that is just taking for ever to finish. Partly it just takes a lot of man-hours just to complete, and partly the whole project keeps being hit by setbacks of various kinds. I've been stuck in our labs for most of the weekend, and I'm just settling down to write the final thousand or so words of the piece proper. Then up tomorrow morning with the young lady to write what's effectively a stand-alone piece, 1200 words long, which sits somewhere in the middle. Ah well.

Jenny has been incredibly supportive, bless her heart. I returned home today to find the flat spring-cleaned, meatballs made for my birthday meal tomorrow, and pancake batter with blueberries mixed for breakfast. What a sweetheart.

This, apparently, is the world's oldest woman. She's 125, and still surprisingly spry. Now, "a hundred and twenty-five" doesn't, to my ears, sound so fantastical, but that does means that she was born in 1880. That's when it really hit me. 1880. Astonishing.

Read more about this admirable lady here.

As you may know, I recently took the decision to begin the process of covering my iBook with stickers. Well, it's white, and seems to cry out for it. Besides, it was getting a little tatty, and I thought some colourful stickers would brighten it up a treat. So, thanks largely to Aston and Jason, I began assembling a small collection of stickers to start from, and last night I placed the first few on. I'm being fairly conservative, at the moment, and here's what the lid of it currently looks like:



The Apple sticker in the centre is an official one (albeit very old), and it coincidentally perfectly fits over the glowing Apple on the lid. There are more stickers on the bottom.

I'm doing the whole thing very neatly; the red sticker at the left wraps round over the join between the screen and the main body, but has been carefully sliced so that the lid does still open.

I spent far too long last night browsing eBay for other funky stickers to add, and came up with a very long list. Hence, I'm now waiting for some ironic, possibly hazardous, baldness-related, cheery and assorted stickers to arrive in the next few days. I'm also very very much hoping to win this auction for Royal Military Police insignia.

If anyone who reads this has other stickers – the more retro or odd the better - please do drop me a line. I'll be posting proper photographs of the project in the coming weeks.

The iBook itself remains hors de combat, unfortunately, since my spanky new hard disk is yet to materialise. Bah.