Zak had an unfortunate accident yesterday; he fell over while playing and managed to break off the top of one of his front teeth, and bite straight through his lower lip.

We ended up having to take him to Taunton, where they have a specialist Childrens Ward, and under a general anaesthetic they removed the base of the tooth that was remaining and stitched his lower lip up.

The only part of the entire procedure that he really didn't like was having the IV Cannula inserted into the back of his hand - even though the back of his hand had already been numbed with a local anaesthetic cream, he really screamed at that point.

The whole operation took about half an hour (although it felt like hours to us), and within about fourty minutes of waking up in the Recovery Room he was up and running around again! We were able to take him home a couple of hours later.

I've just came across this article on Slashdot about a demo FPS from a bunch of coders calling themselves .the.produkkt

The game itself is standard fare, but what's absolutely extraordinary is the entire executable is 96k. That's it!

Go get it here, and marvel at the ingenuity of the developers.

India and Zak got to meet their new sister this afternoon, so I've uploaded some more photographs to the online gallery.

The gallery can be located here:
http://gallery.edcourtenay.co.uk/albums/6.aspx

Chloë Megan Courtenay arrived this evening at 20:44, weighing in at 6lbs 12oz.

Both mother and baby are doing fine, and hope to come home on Saturday morning.

More pictures will follow at http://gallery.edcourtenay.co.uk/albums/6.aspx very soon.

Some tosspot has decided to send out a ton of spam emails advertising Viagra to the world, faking my domain as the return address.

This means my mailserver is currently having to fend off masses of bounce messages from other mailservers around the world that have rejected mail due to invalid email addresses, or messages telling me my email has been rejected by their spam filter because I've sent unsolicited commercial email.

I haven't!

Why can't sysadmins learn to disable bounce back messages for UCE? It should be perfectly obvious by now that the return addresses in UCE messages are never valid, and all that happens is some poor sod (me at the moment) gets flooded with erroneous messages.

Luckily, I control my own mail system at home using a combination of fetchmail, qmail, qmail-scanner, courier-imap, spamassassin and maildrop. So, for the time being all these bounce back messages are being directed to /dev/null - but I pity the poor computer illiterate sods who get hit with this crap and don't know what the hell to do about it.

But more to the point, why on earth should I have to jump through hoops just simply because some arsehole on another continent wants to flog some blue pills to idiots I've never met?