We went to see Mark Thomas yesterday at the Drill Hall.
He was talking about his “new book“, well he didn’t really, just did his routine which may have contained stuff from his book, but it wasn’t made clear if any bits were from it.
However he was still clever and still funny.
The only thing I’m left wondering is why whenever Mark goes on tour does he always visit The Old Town Hall in Hemel?

On Monday I went to the Lincoln Book Festival.
I saw Mark Billingham and John Harvey talk about crime writing. Heather not too keen on the subject stayed at home, but I still had a good time.
Managed to spend £23 on books which I probably won’t read for another 6 months, as I now have a shelf full of books to read.

If you look to the right (on the main page) you’ll see my upcoming events.
This is my first attempt at playing with the Google Calendar API. It wasn’t as easy as some of the others I’ve used, and a lack of any real PHP code made it harder.
For some reason the XML files return different date formats depending on the type of event. For short one day meetings I get a start and end time inside a <gd:when /> tag down to the nearest millisecond. For all day events I just get the Year-Month-Day. For reoccurring events, a completely different set of data is returned inside <gd:recurrence /> tags, one day events have start and end times, whilst hourly events have a start time and a duration.
It also only shows the last 25 modified events (although you can search by date ranges), so if I enter an event a year in advance it may not show up.
Maybe if a GData library is available for PHP it’ll be easier, but at the moment my nasty hacky code seems to work.

After Blogger ate my template, I’ve finally rebuilt it.
There are some tweaks, but I’ve learnt that you should regularly back up EVERYTHING.
I’ll probably knock up some code soon to automatically backup the template each day. It shouldn’t be hard to make, as I’ve already used the Atom API before.

For now (as it’s 3am) my template is a little screwed. It seems that when I moved a pipe | from the left to the right the bottom half of my template just disappeared.
When I went to check what happened, even more got stolen.
I’ve rebuilt bits so the HTML is valid, but stuff like latest news, archives and the LibDemBlog box will need to be added again.

Well the bidding has begun and Sky have half the packages, but this stupid rule from the EU is going to be the worst outcome for the fans.
Domestic channels won’t be able to afford more than one match, and if NTL gets the final package then those with Sky won’t be able to see these games.
Instead of Sky pumping millions into the sport for exclusive rights, they’ll now offer less.
The only possible winners in this will be Sentana Sports who might get a few more viewers if they win the final package.