So it's the end of the banking world as we know it, and the western world is collapsing, yada yada. One of the things I'm noticing, is that all these banks and financial institutions like Fannie May, Freddie Mac, AIG, Northen Rock etc, keep getting saved by the their respective governments (the US and UK) because they're "too big" to let fall, and too many people - and other institutions - are dependant on them.

It's just so damned shiny.

I have a real gadget crush on the Iphone, I really like the design, the UI is great, and this time around with the 3G, I really thought this might be my Iphone. While last year's Iphone was pretty but vacant, with the features list of a phone from 2002, this year's had all the right headlines - broadband speed data! Exchange email! GPS! Affordable price!

Coming from my current Windows Mobile phone, the Iphone is like a Ferrari next to my Windows Mobile people carrier - it's slicker, faster, better looking, and just sexier all round.

This is a blog really, but I'm just posting it on the front page because there's been no news for a while...

Sometimes, technology can overrun. Certain points are reached at which, essentially, the technology is perfect – it does exactly what us unchanging, un-evolving, ham-fisted bipeds need it to do to the most perfect degree, at which point anyone sensible would simply say "there, that's done" and just sit back and enjoy it. A spade is still a spade, no matter how many different shapes and materials you make it in.

Of course industry, in its wisdom, is never ready to pack up and go home – it has to keep working – so it pushes ever forward, tweaking this, "improving" that, until that moment of perfection is long since forgotten and we all merrily march into the shops and buy new products that are just that little bit worse than before. That's the "progress" that old people like to mutter to each other about, and the older I get, the more I see their point. I suppose that’s the way it goes.

This last Saturday, Lisa and I had the happy duty of attending the wedding of two of our best friends, Martin & Kristen - Lisa as bridesmaid and myself as (gulp) best man.

I killed my Facebook self on Friday. I've finally had enough with the thoroughly hyprocritical way in which I couldn't stand Facebook, but wanted to be on it regardless.

Here's an assorted list of reasons why Facebook irritates the hell out of me:

1. It's a successful community website, which this isn't.
2. The applications drive me mad.
3. I don't have a funwall, so how can anyone have posted anything on it?
4. Why the hell would I want to bite chumps?

Well now that some of the hype has died down, I actually went to an Apple shop and had a good poke around at the Iphone the other day.

Now, I'm a bit of a phone geek. I've had a succession of "giant" smartphones with touchscreens, real web browsing, email, video, music etc since 2003, and maybe that explains it a bit. But at the end of the day, I was massively underwhelmed by the Iphone.

So anyway, the google ads have gone again. I don't know why they keep coming back. Every now and then I get possessed by the spirit of Sergey Brin and start thinking about "monetisation" and "maximising assets", and then I plaster the place with really tacky looking ads, and then a month or two later I realise I've only made about three pence that Google are probably never going to pay me anyway, and in the meantime the whole site's died a death. And in any case, both the people that visit this site probably have Adblock installed anyway.
I know I do.

So anyway, on Friday morning I decided to upgrade the site to the latest (stable) release of Drupal, going from 4.7.7 to 5.2 and taking all of the various modules we use with me. 5.x has actually been around for quite a while, but the thought of updating everything had me veering towards the dark side of sticking with what I knew worked already... the problem with that, is what happened to the old Postnuke-based site.

It was a sad day for me yesterday, when we arrived at the pub in Catherington where the music quiz is held every week, only to find that the best beer in the world was no longer on the pumps. HSB (Horndean Special Bitter) was gone.

Lisa and I are just back from a week in the Lake District, which is just about the farthest North I've ever been... lots of very lovely mountains-which-are-probably-just-hills and, well, lakes as you might expect. I bolstered my tenuous and downright fictional claim on Captain Cook's genetic inheritance by spending a certain amount of time on boats, on Windermere. In fact we spent a whole day getting ferried around on a ferry just for the hell of it, and another day piloting a little speedboat around (unfortunately that voyage was cut short by the sudden appearance of some Weather).