Well, it's been almost six weeks since I first took back posession of my house in Leicester. With the help of my friends and family, I've managed to make a remarkable amount of progress. I doubt the house has ever been as good as it is now.

I've started a set for photos of the progress on Flickr, some of them are pretty gross, but some fun too! Check it out here.

Sold! So, my parents have finally agreed the sale on our house in Kingswinford. I lived here between the ages of 12 and 18, and just down the road before that. For those that don't know, my parents have now finally moved to Wales after three years of to-ing and fro-ing and we are all leaving Kingswinford behind for good. Having been squeezing into a tiny cottage during the working week, they're hoping to have moved into a much larger house by October...

It appears to have been confirmed today that Randy Lerner, an American billionaire will be taking over as the major shareholder and chairman of Aston Villa from Doug Ellis.

Like the rest of my family, I've been a Villa fan my entire life and I agree that it's time that Ellis was shot of. It can't be denied that since Ellis's takeover as chairman in 1982 - the year that Villa won the European Cup - the club has seen a slow but certain downhill slide. Yes, there have been high points, like winning the League Cup in 1996, but if current form contines it seems highly likely that Villa may be relegated this upcoming season.

Time then, for a new manager, new Chairman and new money. All have come this summer and with this probably the greatest hope that the Villa will avoid the drop and start to push back up the table to a place befitting of one of the original Football League teams.

As my Dad pointed out recently though, with this takeover comes uncertainty. We've seen what has happened to Chelsea and Manchester United in the last couple of years, and while I would of course like Villa to once again have that kind of success, it can't come at that sort of a price.

Think ahead 5 years... Villa have used their American money to buy up a whole host of players from AC Milan, Real Madrid and a range of struggling Premiership teams that could really do with holding on to their home-grown talent, and are finishing in the top three reliably. They've had plenty of European success too. The new chairman has brought with him a more American style marketing approach and Villa is now becoming popular across certain parts of the less developed world. Ticket prices start to soar, pricing out most of the local Villa faithful who, it has to be said, will not earn enough to spend Chelsea prices week after week to support their local team. But, there's still plenty of interest in seeing these fantastic players and corporate ticket numbers go up. New stadium needed and hey, well that land in Aston is worth quite a bit. Let's build a brand new "American Airlines Arena" out near Sutton Coldfield somewhere with loads of corporate boxes, parking and good motorway access. Fantastic business opportunity.

So in summary, I hope Mr Lerner takes proper note of the tremendous support that Aston Villa has and acknowledges that it is the support of the fans - not his predecessors - that has brought Villa to success and through tough times over the past 132 years.

Isn't that an interesting term: "Intellectual Property".

If I didn't know the established meaning of the term, I'd think it referred to the lump of grey stuff which sits just behind your eyes. Even that is a slightly odd concept though, because it implies that you own your own body. I know that it might be a weird thing not to assume this in today's society, but I for one don't believe that the idea of ownership is as old as life itself. Do cats own the territory they spray? Do birds own their nests or are they just renting them from the tree? I'm sure that bees rent pollen - otherwise they'd have a legitimate claim over the plant that grew up from the crosspollination. Just think what an empire of lavender bushes the Queen bee would legally own! Maybe they're acting as freelancers operating under a lavender franchise.

Anyway, in the modern human world there appears to be a largely accepted though contravertial concept of "intellectual property", and one of my friends, a lawyer and "intellectual property" specialist is part of the team behind a new IP related blog. Many of the posts on there relate to IT and technical stuff, but there's other stuff too. Take a look.

So many posts on the blogosphere appear to reference other blogs. I have in fact done it already, after only having posted a few times. I don't think that it's particularly interesting to do this, although it does perhaps serve to promote the medium of blogging and draw links between otherwise fairly independent websites.

Well, it appears that my blogging debut has (give or take a few weeks) coincided with the decision by the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to begin blogging too. It appears in several languages including English and can be found here. We don't receive a great amount of information in the media about the Iranian government other than to bash it as being "hardline", "dangerous" or "wanting to wipe Israel off the map" (none of which I deny), but it will be interesting to see if the President's latest attempt to communicate with the western world fares any better than his previous attempt.

These things are constantly flying around outside my window... almost every day it seems. Well I hadn't realised until I captured this photo that they are indeed police helicopters. Should I be worried or feeling more secure?

This blogging fad that everyone seems caught in these days is really easy to do. I signed up with WordPress and two minutes later I have a free, advertising free, fully functional blog to which I can post from my web browser, via email, from a third party piece of software, from my mobile phone via either WAP or email or some other service which isn't available on my network yet. I can post directly from Flickr, by clicking "blog this" in my web browser, or via some sort of XML feed which I don't really understand. I can even post voice messages rather than the usual textual ones from a piece of recording software on my phone. Presumably I can post more than just my voice using this.

Wow. I mean really, how many more ways do I need to be able to send my contribution to the publisher with no editors that is the world wide web? Whoever decided that we wanted to blog, obviously didn't trust that it would really catch on unless people could do it however they wanted.

I feel like I'm behind with my gas bill.

"We're sorry to see that you have yet to pay your most recent gas bill. Please call us on our freephone number to arrange an alternative method of payment, or to discuss a payment plan appropriate to your circumstances."

They want their money. Psychologically speaking, if they treat you nicely then you'll probably cough up quicker. Many people do have serious problems making large payments of this kind - not least because the bloody gas bills keep going up - and do need to talk it over with someone. And to be honest, it's a real shame that they're not blogging. But while there is a legitimate need for pre-payment cards, direct debit, quarterly or monthly bills and the like for people's utilities, surely blogging isn't in need of the same softly softly tactics to ensure people keep posting their thoughts.

So I suppose the question is why do we have so many choices when it comes to blogging, when clearly one or two well-understood and convenient ones would do? One explanation is fragmentation. Since it is so easy to post to a blog, it's also easy to write a little bit of software to do the job for you. If no-one else uses your software, so what? Just like the blog itself (or mine at least), its purpose is not to gain a large readership and make me a famous writer; it is there because I want to write it. So someone somewhere in the world decides he'd quite like to be able to post to his blog from his fridge (so he can write about what he's having for dinner) and if he's got the time and inclination, the fridge-blog software is there for all to use. This really is one of the joys of free software, and it's heartening to see just how many of the popular blogging tools are released under the GPL. But fragmentation has long been the bane of many otherwise excellent software projects in the free software world. Those who contribute do so by and large because they want to, not because they hope their work will get noticed and they'll get offered a job with Microsoft. So they do it how they think it should be done.

So, in a world where it's easy to make things yourself, things get made. And when people share their home-made things, there are lots of things available - especially when they're virtually free to distribute. What a wonderfully nice world we live in. It's a shame we can't apply the same theory to gas really. Now I'm an advocate of localism and microgeneration of electricity, but I think I'd draw the line at the local village having its own bore-hole staffed by the old guy who's retired and likes to keep occupied. Better instead to reduce usage, methinks. It seems that gas users everywhere will have to content themselves to making do with those options provided to them by the relevant authority - in this case the gas company.

So, choose quarterly electronic billing and have them plant a tree for you, choose direct debit with £2 per month discount, choose a pre-payment card. Better still, buy a large gas company. If you can't do that though, just be glad that from all the payment options you never knew you might want, there's one to suit you.

Happy Birthday Tom. Today you're officially a quarter of a century old.

This last weekend saw the party and much alcohol was consumed. A gathering of this type of course requires the camera to be brought out and so it's needless to say that there are a few shots of the weekend on Flickr.

Okay, this is one of the wonderful things about sharing photos, writings and music over the net... every now and again you come across something completely unexpected.

Browsing on Flickr, I have just come across an entire set of photos on an otherwise nice and friendly photostream devoted to pizza. More specifically, pepperoni pizza. There are two pages of photos of this.

What is going on? I think I'm going to write to this person and find out.

Wow, today on Pluto (which is incidentally quite a long time) any life which may or may not exist will have to start getting used to no longer living on the 9th planet in the Solar System. Thanks to the discovery of "2003 UB313" (catchy title, that - see the picture below for an even snazzier look), it has now been relegated to a mere "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

So all that stuff I learnt is wrong. The BBC seems to think that textbooks will all be changed to miss off Pluto from the list of planets taught in schools.

I think this is interesting though. Has Pluto been a planet for the 76 years during which we have known of its existence? Or does the decision by these in-the-know astronomers mean that we were wrong about it all along? Who are we to judge? Who are they to judge?

Pluto is used in astrology too - will this reference be removed or its significance on our predicted moods be downgraded? Interestingly, the dictionary definition of planet talks of "a celestial body, in orbit around the Sun or another star, which has too small a mass to become a star itself, and shines by reflecting light from the star around which it revolves". I suppose that the IAU's definition was a little more stringent. It does raise an interesting question though: is this a scietific question, or a language one?

What is nice, is that the word planet actually comes from the Greek word planetes, which means "wanderer".

I think I largely missed out on the news that was the establishment of YouTube, but it's hard to escape hearing about it now. Even a quick search on Google now leads me to much more than text; thanks to the tagging system employed by these video/photo/blog type systems, it's all searchable too.

I was just looking around on the web, reading a few things in advance of Sunday's game and came across a little video compilation of Luke Moore set to Salt'N'Pepper's 'Whatta Man'. Qualitaay...

This is a fascinating article: Apparently AOL recently dumped a load of poorly anonymised information on the internet detailing what people were searching for on its Google powered search engine. I'm not going to pass any comment on it beyond agreeing especially with the latter musings on the usefulness of information like this, but just take a look.

Well, Sunday's was a fantastic game. A 2-0 win over Newcastle, and the new majority shareholder, Randy Lerner there to see it too. It also seems that he's willing to start spending straight away, as this article seems to suggest.

Today was the day on which my fellow course mates and I presented the posters for our MSc projects. There were quite a few anxious people in our small group of students this morning, but it all seemed to go pretty well and to be honest I think it gave everyone a bit of a lift. It was actually quite interesting hearing so many other people's views and perspectives on a piece of work which, bar my weekly meetings with my supervisor, has been largely confined to my head and computer. This milestone also means that there are only seven days left to go until the full project reports it due in too - something which means that I'll be working all day every day until then. Afterwards, I shall no longer be a student (again).

However, before I cast myself as totally conscientious and hard working, I feel the need to also point out the significant amount of procrastination which this silly falling sand game has helped me with this evening. The thing is fantastic... but be warned, it can get quite addictive.