So what have we had this week? I’m still working on my new plugin, so I won’t be ready to release that just yet unless I really get a crack on. But as we all know 90% of IT projects come in late and overbuget so this is no exception.

In baby news, we Brits apparently feel pressured to buy expensive baby-related equipment in order to show off to our peers. We also prefer to dress our babies in clothes that match our own. HMM. I don’t really get that one. I certainly won’t be doing that. I’ll be dressing our baby up like a baby. Who knows why you would go and create a “minimi” as that just seems odd to me. Where’s the fun in that? Clothes-wise you should be putting baby into onesies and then as soon as baby has grown out of onesies you should be experimenting with every possible odd clothes combination possible. Oh yes.

In Google news, some folk have asked for images to be removed from the Google Street View service, citing an invasion of privacy. I honestly do not understand this mentality. Personally I’d think it was great if I appeared on a Street View scene. Unlikely at the moment as my area is just outside street view’s circle, but, still, surely it’s a piece of history, why not be recorded in it? It almost seems like some paranoia to me.

Oh, there was an about-turn on new F1 rules giving the championship to the driver with the most wins. Turns out there was some objection from the teams, and their existing rules mean that everyone already entered for a season has to agree on any rule changes. So it’s old style this year but all change for next time. So we can expect. Apparently.

Finally, ridiculous holiday complaints lists 20 complaints that were apparently lodged by actual, living, supposedly sane people. Including such gems as “The beach was too sandy”.

Gmail disappeared for a number of hours today with an as-yet-undefined issue that affected the free gmail service as well as the paid for hosted mail apps functionality. Unfortunately for Google, the popularity of the service means then when they do go down, it pretty much gets noticed. I wonder if we will hear the cause of this one.

In other news, I was pretty disappointed to see this story pop up. New childrens’ TV presenter Cerrie Burnell has become the target of criticism. Why? because she has only one hand. Amazingly, people have expressed that they think it is too “disturbing” for their kids to watch. Seriously? I don’t even know where to start with that one. Maybe if you educated your own kids instead of being too scared or bigoted to talk to them, then they wouldn’t have an issue. At least the comments on the BBC magazine article are mostly reasonable, showing that the majority of people are (possibly) still sane.

A new browser has been released, by Google. You can download it here. It seems ok. I am, in fact, writing this article in it right now.

I am experimenting with google mail for some of my (lesser-used) domains. It is quite funky, you set up a few things and then you can have the google front-end for your domains’ email. (Which of course you can then download with pop or imap if you want, rather than using the web front end.). This could come in quite handy for moving stuff away from other providers, because it would mean that I only need to deal with web stuff for domains rather than web + email.

In other news, well, there’s not that much other news at the moment. Our side gate still has not been fitted. I am expecting them to do it next week, or I shall be unimpressed. I have some cheesecake in the fridge. I wonder if 9:23 is too early for cheesecake? mmm.

that this guy was a bit insane [news.bbc.co.uk]

Also, the Google 2003 year end statistics have been produced, so you can look see what the popular searches were [news.bbc.co.uk] (no big surprises really…)