I have nothing to say.

Nothing. None of the news looks interesting enough to comment on. Charles and Camilla? Yeah, that's big news: a man and a woman who have been in love for longer than I've been alive are going to tie the knot. Shocking. A riot at Ikea? A bit odd that they were trying to get in, admittedly, but, as The Guardian is always telling us, desperate people will turn to violence when they are the victims of oppression, and, well... Ikea has victims instead of customers. I'd rather like to see Ikea added to Bush's hitlist, come to think of it. I mean, yeah, Iran is probably a higher priority right now, but Egypt? Does Egypt really cause more suffering than Ikea? It seems unlikely. And what else has happened? Sod all, as far as I can see, "sod all" being, if I do say so myself, the best summing-up of the nascent general election campaign you're going to see until Peter Snow unveils his graphics. What will he have this time, I wonder? Giant bears throwing red, blue, and yellow frisbees at each other, I hope. Or wombats would be good. I like wombats.

Tonight is Valentine's Night, so I shall be heading home with my lovely wife to indulge in a bit of stripping. And, by that, I mean I'll be up a ladder with a scraper and a steamer, removing the blight on our new living room that is wood-chip. Ah, I kill myself, I really do. Got rid of about half of it last night. The walls aren't too bad, but it appears to have been superglued to the ceiling by bastards. The previous owner (or possibly the owner before that — how would I know?) was rather enamoured of wood-chip: some of the original doors actually have wood-chip laid into their panels. Weird. Not as weird as the pictures in the house we nearly bought but didn't, though. Some people are devout Christians. Fair enough. Some devout Christians like to put framed verses from the Bible on their walls. Fair enough. The woman who nearly sold us her house (but was persuaded not to by her bastard lawyers, who we suspect were merely exercising a grudge against my wife, who used to work for them) appeared to have decorated her home by plugging a random number generator into a database that contained the Bible and Arena's complete archives. "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son." Well, maybe he did, but what has that got to do with puppies in a basket? Or with a black Porsche 911 Turbo? Amazingly enough, these pictures were less weird than the rest of the decor. A lucky escape that the sale fell through, then, you might think, but only if you hadn't seen the place we did get. Half the walls in our front room were painted a sort of washed-out mushy-pea-green; the other half were pale mauvy lavender. My very spirit still cringes at the memory of it.

Anyway, we've had extraordinarily efficient builders in, so our front room is now our front room and back room at the same time, and is huge. And we've got a new ceiling on the top floor and an insulated attic, and sundry other things done that needed done. And all we have to do is clear up the fucking mess and remove the fucking wood-chip. Oh, joy.

Speaking of building, I've been hard at the virtual webby type in recent days, getting rid of Haloscan's trackback system (which, I felt, was a bit crap) and replacing it with Movable Type's standalone trackback tool and then spending ages buggering around with it, trying to figure out how to add automatic email notification. Yeah, yeah, this is probably blogging about blogging, but I blogged about other things first, see? To soften the blow. Anyway, it's kind of blogging about programming, if you think about it. And that is fine. Still extraordinarily dull, yes, but ethically defensible. Anyway, send me a trackback ping. I went to a lot of trouble to get this just as I like it (programming in Perl is particularly difficult for me, as I have no idea what Perl is), and I wouldn't want to think it was all ultimately futile.

So, yes, like I said: I have nothing to say.