White car in Germany.

• Down the rabbit hole of stupid again: scalar waves.

• W.H. Smith in major publishing coup!

arkady bounced over the bonnet of a car on Tuesday, thankfully having the trained reflex to jump and ending up with nothing more than scrapes and bruises. On the way to fetch Freda, thankfully, not on the way back with her. The incident was captured on traffic camera, the numberplate annoyingly obscured; they're looking for another camera to see if they can nail the dangerous idiot.

Earlier that day, A had secured the Ikea part of doom from Ikea Edmonton, courtesy michaelnolan knowing the part number. Result! Now to wait for the arm to get better ...

At work last week, I successfully moved our internal MySQL from 5.0 on Solaris to 5.1 on Ubuntu without more than thirty seconds' break in service. Just following the manual worked worryingly well and I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Our idiot neighbour didn't burn two streets down last night, despite lighting a bonfire under trees and taunting Father Darwin by giving his kids fireworks to launch from the back yard. Said back yards are completely enclosed by two rows of two-storey terrace houses; it would be extremely difficult for a fire engine to get access for serious quantities of water. "No way! Do you dare me to kick this one?" — one of said little dears. Freda greatly enjoyed watching the official Waltham Forest council office fireworks from her bedroom window.

Xubuntu on the laptop is going quite well. I like this. The key point appears to be to do a fresh install and do not even copy your home folder across except piecemeal — evil appears to lurk in the dot-directories. Unity, the first virus for GNOME.