I've been quiet on this site lately, mainly because I've been busy with other things.

I don't want to bore you with fluffy family stuff - let's just say things are fine at the moment. Susanne and Philipp are living just around the corner from me and things seem to be going well.

Mainly I'm concentrating on my business, trying to generate some more work for me to do to get money to stay alive next year. I've got a designer who has been working on a leaflet for me. It's looking good from what I can see so far. I now have to organise the process of getting it printed, posting out 500 copies, and then following them up with phone calls.

It's a gradual process, but it's certainly worth doing. Fortunately I have a very narrow customer base so I can concentrate on a fairly small number of people and try to get them to pay me for a video.

So things are likely to be busy here for some time. Unless I don't get any work, of course, in which case I will be able to spend lots of time on Life As It Happens. I'm not sure that even with my lovely readers I want to do that ...

My campaign to turn Life As It Happens into a Superbrand continues apace.

(Yes, I know it would help if I actually wrote more often)

If you have not already bookmarked this site in Internet Explorer, do so now. When you do so, you will find that the bookmark has a special LAIH icon that matches the fish images used on the site.

I happen to think that's really cool. But that might just be me, of course ...

(update: has anybody actually tried this? did it work?)

urgent message, passed on by Tom of plasticbag - if you use Blogger, you need to know this...

BLOGGER HAS BEEN HACKED
MANY MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AFFECTED
CHANGE YOUR SERVER PASSWORD IMMEDIATELY - IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED.
YOUR PASSWORDS HAVE BEEN CHANGED SO YOU CAN'T ACCESS YOUR ACCOUNT
YOUR URL HAS BEEN CHANGED SO YOU CAN'T PUBLISH
IF YOU GAIN ACCESS THERE'S NO WAY TO CHANGE YOUR SETTINGS BACK BECAUSE THE DATABASE HAS COLLAPSED.

THERE'S NO AWAY TO POST THIS TO METAFILTER BECAUSE IT APPEARS TO BE DOWN

SPREAD THE WORD TO EVERYONE YOU CAN, AND WILL SOMEONE WAKE UP EV?!

This was the fastest way I could think of to get the message out... PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD ASAP...

In among the spew of spam I normally get in my inbox, I found a secret message.

Because it was sent direct to my account rather than my blog or journal alias, and because it was not offering either a penis extension, bigger breasts, or enormous wealth, I decided to have a look.

It was from an organisation which calls itself the Bavarian Illuminati.

The Illuminati are a bunch of very clever people who are going to rule the world. None of this nonsense about democracy, just clever people who know better than we do.

one of the primary duties of all Illuminati, is to help secure the reduction of the global population to approximately 3 billion people so we can start over with a smaller but educated people.. We feel, we can achieve this within 200-500 years at most, but we hope sooner.

Unfortunately, in order to become illuminated - or sufficiently so to discover their special secrets and become one of the enlightened ones who will rule - you have to join the order. And this costs a measly $95.

Which might sound a lot of money, but then you get the benefit over a long time. 200-500 years at most.

I don't expect to be around then, of course. Which may be a good thing, because by then we will be ruled by a group of people who have a very poor grasp of grammar.

There was something I was going to say.

I can't remember what it was. It was very interesting, though.

Or funny. Possibly it was very funny. Or both interesting and funny. That's possible too.

But I can't remember what it is. You'll just have to make something up yourselves.

Well, I've been really busy lately. That's my excuse.

But this morning I was faced with a major decision: I had croissants, I had butter, I had jam, and I had marmalade.

The butter was not a problem. Nor was the jam. But I have a deep and abiding feeling that marmalade on a croissant - well, it's just not right, is it? There's something profoundly wrong about it.

I don't know why, though.

What do you think?