Tonight a chat friend asked if we could talk on Skype, which I hardly use anymore. I started it up, but it told me I ‘must’ upgrade and then shut itself down. I tried again and the same thing happened.

What if I happened to be on dial-up right now and needed to have a quick chat with someone? Who wants to be forced to download a 10Mb file over a dial-up connection and install it before they can make a call?

I really don’t like control-freak companies. This is my PC and I will decide what ‘must’ be upgraded and when.

Furthermore new versions of software aren’t always better. They can be bloated, less stable and even have fewer features in some cases. In fact there are websites that provide old versions precisely for that reason.

I’ll think I’ll be sticking to voice chat on MSN from now on.

I had an eventful five hour walk this afternoon. This is a short extract from a much longer video that I’ll be making about it.

I’m laughing about this but, with a calf on the track ahead of me, I wasn’t sure whether angry mum and dad and all their friends might be able to get out the field if they reached the corner before me.

There have been a few cases of walkers being trampled to death by cattle. Especially when there are calves: BBC report.

(Peter says: ‘get back to the city centre!’)

The BBC reports the story of man in Cornwall who has been threatened with arrest due to having an ‘annoying’ garden gnome:

“Now police have served Mr MacKillop with a notice for “placing a garden gnome with intent to cause harassment”.

Mr MacKillop, 46, was woken in the night by two officers who warned him that the gnome was offensive to his neighbours.”

Interesting to see that the neighbour who has complained about it is a ‘former policeman’. And, reading this, you may suspect that the gnome is naked or obscene in some way. But no, it is dressed in a police uniform.

There does seem to be a certain theme running through this story.