We went up to Darlington last weekend to visit friends - a brave thing considering all the ridiculous amount of snow that there was on that day. For some reason Birmingham doesn't cope well with snow and the whole city grinds to a halt. In the event, it took us three hours to get three miles! And then another three hours to get about 200 miles...

But, it was a great weekend, and I was introduced to a new game - Carcassonne - a German game modelled after the French town of the same name. I was hooked, and have bought my own copy already! Watch out people who know me... I'll be asking for a game if you come round. :-)

I've just uploaded the first half-decent version of a fun little tool that I've been working on - GenetiQ.

As I'm studying evolutionary computation as a major part of my PhD, I thought that it might be helpful to be able to visualise some of the stuff I read about so much. And well, pretty graphics are always nicer than lines and lines of numbers... Feel free to download it here and take a look.

Yesterday saw the inaugural meeting of the new Black Country Flickrmeet group. We went to Walsall for the afternoon, and had a rather TTV-tastic day. Some of my photos are up on Flickr, so take a look and leave a comment!

I may well be organising a future (the next?) meet and am thinking about some of the canals and old glassworks around Stourbridge.

The more established Birmingham Flickrmeets will be resuming their summer timetable next month!

This weekend I finally accepted an offer on my house in Leicester. Yay! It's not been on the market for too long, when you consider that we've had the Christmas period, when moving house is the furthest thing from most people's minds. Still, it's gone to the solicitors to sort out now, and I'm hopeful that it will all go through smoothly, unlike a false start that I got into right at the end of last year.

This means that I can now start looking seriously at where I want to move to, and I've decided that the part of Stirchley which borders on Bournville is the way to go. Apart from having a few nice victorian streets with some relatively inexpensive houses still, it's also right on the train line, meaning with a four minute trip to University and only slightly longer to the City Centre. The trains are still cheaper than the buses round here too.

I know a few people who live round there already too, which is helpful, and they've all recommended it. I'm now off to look at quite a few houses this week!

There seems to be a lot going on in the world of DRM this week.

Firstly, the government has responded to a petition calling for DRM to be banned in the UK. Bizarrely, their response cites the protection of consumers' rights as a reason to plough ahead with allowing DRM in all sorts of legally bought media.

The BBC has also been thinking about whether and how to use DRM in its material, and is holding an on-line public consultation. There's a particularly good blog post about some of the implications of what they're asking here, so please do let them know what you think. The Financial Times is also running a poll on what people think of DRM here, which to date records a massive 98% of people against it.

The BBC one astounds me the most really. It seems to me that they're actually asking us (the British people) how much we think that they should restrict our rights to view and listen to stuff that we've already paid for (through the TV licence). To me, this is just cheeky. If TV and radio had not been invented with the idea of timed broadcasts, where things are just shown once, I wonder if any of this would have ever been an issue. Get real folks at the BBC, you're a public broadcaster. Just because the nature of broadcasting is changing, why should you artificially recreate the restrictions of previous broadcast technology?