For those insane souls who want to listen to something a little less festive over the, erm, festive period the Shirley Temple Pilots will be playing a couple of gigs to stretch your yuletide eardrums.

Thu 22nd December
Brunswick Hotel, Bournemouth

Fri 30th December
Scallys, Weston-Super-Mare

Last night, Bec and I went to watch the recording of an episode of "Never Mind The Buzzcocks" at BBC Television Center; I've not laughed so much in ages - Phil's team consisted of Tony Livsey (editor of the Daily Sport) and Blak Twang (can't say I've ever heard of him before).

On the other hand, Bill's team consisted of Jo Caulfield and the truly fruit-loop X-Factor finalist and ex-Happy Mondays backing singer Rowetta. Naturally she stole the show, but unfortuately for her it was definately not intentional - she seemed to forget almost from the first second that she was filming a comedy quiz, and was convinced that Mark Lamarr was picking on her - but you can hardly blame him when she's coming out with (unprompted) anecdotes about how she once sat in Kim Basinger's urine. I kid you not.

Seeing as a lot of the content last night was not merely close to the knuckle but way past the elbow, it'll be interesting to see exactly how much they let in to the transmitted show. I'll never be able to look at a canteen of cutlery in exactly the same way again....

We've just come back from dropping India off at her new school. Naturally, she had absolutely no fear and unlike some of the other children there she could not wait to get into the classroom to start drawing.

Somehow, I think she'll do fine....

We don't take memory as seriously as we used to - most computers nowadays have more memory than was dreamed possible twenty-odd years ago, and applications have expanded to fill the abundance available.

So while there are those that are still producing impressive code in 4k for example - I was geniunely impressed to run across this listing for 1K Chess on a ZX81. In the end, while Parsec is impressively small it still has access to massively more RAM and resources while it's running - the ZX81 only had 1k to play with full stop (unless of course you were filthy rich and had the 16k RAM pack).