This morning a member of the Darlington household passed away quietly in his sleep. Cornelius Maximus Willmington IV was less than a year old. He is survived by our other goldfish, Bob.

Cornelius was never the brightest fish in the bowl, and it’s not like he was up against stiff competition. He often did “Jaws” impressions, his fin breaching the surface of the bowl but terrorising few, and had a tendency to try to eat bubbles rather than the food we fed them every day.

Microsoft have been getting lots of press recently because of their new Zune music player. One of its major features is its wireless interface that lets you share music; even most of the advertising talks about the social implications¹. But let’s have a quick look at that functionality in more detail.

If I decide that I want to expend an hour of battery life in order to see other Zunes in the area, what can I do? Most famously you can transfer songs. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are limits. When I receive a song, I can play it three times or hang onto it for three days² but after that all I get is an electronic post-it note reminding me about it. Clearly a lot of thought and a lot of engineering effort has gone into these limitations.

Last night we went to see the recording of a new BBC Radio 4 comedy programme called “His Master’s Voice.” It’s the first time that I’ve ever been to the Drill Hall (on Chennies Street in London) although I’ve heard many broadcasts of “Just A Minute” that were recorded there.

The programme itself is a political satire set in the offices of “The Blue Touch Paper,” the weekly magazine for the thinking Tory. I don’t want to give too much of the story away because I want you to tune in when it airs in July!

I enjoyed writing my CRAP Alert post yesterday. Very cathartic. But there are some serious points in it and while I might be overstating the case when I spell them out here, I think it’s worth doing just to be clear.

The truth is I genuinely do support the right of people to publish this kind of information. I am against pretty much all forms of censorship and am very much in favour of giving people good information so that they can make an informed decision themselves.

Sometime when bad things happen all you can do it show your support. That’s what I’m doing here. The first cause is “One Day Blog Silence”:

This is to honour the victims from Virginia Tech and all those other innocents throughout the world. Given that the “blogosphere” is where many students poured their grief and vented their anger it seems appropriate.

I knew it was a bad sign. I mean that literally. As I got on a busy northern line train this evening I saw a dark, bearded man in a long, brown coat with yellow sign hung around his neck. It was too packed to actually read his message but I suspected that I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

“Where is the love?”

As the train doors closed, with all us commuters trapped, he started. He was here to tell us about his god. He did well to raise his voice above the level of the tube train; holding a conversation with the person next to you can be a challenge but he made himself heard by half of the carriage.

For those that got here via Google and those other people that don’t know me, I’ll start with a confession: I am not a wedding photographer. I am keen amateur photographer, mainly concentrating on travel and occasionally branching out into portraits. However having a reputation among friends as “the photographer” has resulted in a number of people asking me to take pictures at their wedding.

It’s something I have generally resisted. It struck me as just too high risk. Wedding pictures will, hopefully, last a life-time and I didn’t want the pressure of needing to get everything right on the day. Even if you discount all the variables around the camera, computers and memory cards, there are so many other things that could go wrong. The weather; missing shots¹; people blinking or looking on the wrong way; people inadvertently missing²; annoying things in the back-ground³. And then, since neither of these were commercial ventures, I would have to take all this into account as well as actually trying to enjoy the event as a guest, and, in one case, as a best man.

I was rather surprised last year when people started asking what songs I’d been playing at my birthday party.

I’m pleased to say that I’m prepared this year and have already uploaded my playlist to iTunes. Enjoy.

I don’t think my birthday last Thursday could have had more of a Monty Python theme if I’d tried. A few weeks ago B booked up tickets to see Spamalot, the West End musical based on the Monty Python film “Holy Grail.” She also hid away a copy of “The Very Best of Monty Python,” a small book with pictures and scripts from the Python series.