Unfortunately this website was unavailable for part of yesterday due to a power failure affecting the Coventry area. Whilst I believe that the power failure was only for a very short period of time unfortunately whilst my server reboots itself and is able to run as a webserver my NTL modem doesn’t reconnect unless rebooted […]

Is calling your coffee black or white really being racist? Should we be calling blackboards, chalkboards or whiteboards, penboards? Is it wrong to have a brain storming session at the start of a meeting? People have referred to the above words as inappropriate. Words that have existed for many years without offending anyone suddenly become […]

This is a book written for people that need to deal with death of a friend or relative. The book would be of some use regardless of the age of the dying person, but is particularly relevant to the parents of a child with a terminal illness. The first thing about this book is that […]

I’ve added two new Crosswords to www.firstaidquiz.com. I have also added a new wordsearch. I’ve also updated the home page for www.watkissonline.co.uk so that it shows the latest blog entry.

This book has become one of my favourites since I first read it a couple of years ago. Since then I’ve read most of Minette Walters’ books and she now ranks as one of my favourite authors. I have just finished reading the book a second time and it is still as captivating as the […]

www.watkissonline.co.uk and www.firstaidquiz.com have been offline for just over a day. The reason is that my ISP (NTL) has now upgraded my connection (yippeeee), although at the same time added further download restrictions (booo). During the upgrade my IP address changed and it took a while for the DNS records to be updated. It’s now […]

Although I do run Windows on a couple of machines I use Cygwin to add some of the Linux Functionality / Commands. In particular openssh provides an ssh server that allows you to remotely login to a computer, or to transfer files to/from that computer. I had added this before, but couldn’t remember the steps […]

I’m writing this entry from Linux which makes a nice change. Even though I’ve just reinstalled Windows and only installed the commercial applications it’s still not particularly stable. Linux on the other hand just keeps going no matter what you throw at it. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a while which is a non-commercial community […]

Well after a few hours reinstalling, reconfiguring and reregistering my software my Windows machine is back up and running. Well almost, it’s got most of the applications installed, but there are still a few more to go. At least I’m back to using Firefox to browse the web with. To install the applications required no […]

My home computer running Windows XP has been getting less and less stable recently. Generally it’s been fairly stable (for Windows), requiring a reboot about once a week to keep it working. However in the last couple of weeks it really went badly down hill, categorised by windows explorer crashing, and the computer rebooting itself. […]