It’s been a long time since I posted anything to my Silly Ideas blog. Poking through the source files, it appears that I haven’t had a silly idea for a long time, which is a pity. I’ve decided, however, to create a new category on this blog and move stuff here; the wiki technology is just a little too long in the tooth now.

The last holiday that I went on produced a long stream of blog posts; this one, I suspect will result in only one or two, which reflects the different character of places. India is a place of conflicts, confusion and excitement; Elba, on the other hand, is a holiday resort, universal beautiful, relaxed; in short, wonderful for swimming, sitting on the beach and general relaxation, but not so wonderful for writing about on a blog.

Some advance on the knowledge blog front this week. Firstly, myself and Simon Cockell spent a short while setting up a development and testing environment and wrote our first wordpress plugin — “Peaches” based around the Hello Dolly plugin, but with the lyrics from the Stranglers song instead. We finished this yesterday just before automattic released Wordpress 3.0. Hopefully, it will be easy to upgrade. Rather more usefully, I got the very first version of a reference list plugin working. At the moment, it just transforms DOIs into hyperlinks.

For the third year in a row, I managed to the Northern Rock cyclone this weekend. It was a lovely occasion as before; the weather was cool in the morning with a brisk wind, but it warmed up a little and the wind dropped by the end of the day. The numbers have gone up slightly and it was good to see so many cyclists around.

It’s been relatively quiet from me for the last few weeks. One of the reasons for this is that I have been submitting a JISC bid. I’ve not submitted a JISC bid before, so it was quite a lot of work; it’s exactly the same as a research council proposal, except for all the bits that differ.