'Do we need to have sex?'

'Oooh yes, I think we definitely need to have sex'.

'Okay, let's have sex, then'.

One of the problems in working in an open-plan office is that you get to hear fragment's of other people's questions. And when you hear two middle-aged men having a conversation in a serious, deadpan tone about whether to have sex or not, it's a bit distracting.

And it's still distracting even when you realise that they're discussing which fields to include in the database.

I've had a major problem over the last month, with comment spam. Lots of my older entries mysteriously started developing comments by unknown people which bore no noticeable relation to the contents of the entry.

Plus, they seemed very eager to recommend my readers to play poker, and various other unsavoury activities.

I kept deleting them, and banning their IP numbers from commenting again, but they kept coming back, desperate to share their views with you.

I tried various things (including making readers preview their comments before posting - sorry about that, readers). None of them worked.

Finally, I managed to resolve the problem, for the time being, by fiddling with file names (can't provide more details, just in case they come by again, although I'm pretty sure they were robots).

Now I'm happy not to have to spend ages deleting comments. Just a bit disappointed, now, that my hit count has gone back down to normal.

But if they do happen by again, I shall invite the people responsible round to my place for an evening of poker.

What exactly I will do with the poker, and to what portion of their anatomies - well, I'll leave that up to your imagination...

Not that having the World's Cutest Baby™ is not an honour in itself - we brought Caitriona into my workplace on Monday and everyone immediately fell over themselves to hold her. Two staff members announced that they now wanted to have babies. Now.

But the downside of this is that The World's Cutest Baby™ is also a HMB - High Maintenance Baby.

One of us has to be with her at all times, in case she decides to, say, rewire the TV set (her knowledge of electronics is somewhat limited, and far less than her ability to pull cables). Susanne and I have to organise our time carefully in the morning - I can only have a shower while Caitriona is having her morning bottle of milk, while Susanne can have her shower while I have my breakfast and do cable alert duty at the same time.

She has now learned to move, crabwise, the length of the sofa, and pull down anything not substantially taller than she is - which is most things in the room.

That doesn't give the rest of the family much time for themselves, which can lead to frayed tempers all round.

She's lucky she's so damned cute.

Maybe I should tell you a little bit about this place. It's got an atrium. It's got glass lifts (they're not all glass, so I get a bit disappointed every time a non-glass lift comes and I have to get in that one).

The security level today is: BLACK.

The security level every day so far has been: BLACK.

I'm guessing BLACK is a good level to have, but nobody's actually told me. This being a government department, I'm guessing this building has politically correct security level codes, so the highest and most dangerous one is probably something neutral.

If I come in and find it's BEIGE I'm hiding under my desk.

I'm sitting here at my desk, taking a break from work, and trying to think of something useful to write.

Nothing so far.

Nope, nothing.

Sort of Blogger's block.

Hmmmm.

Nope.

Maybe later, eh?

Gondolas in the Grand Canal, Venice, August 2004.

I've been taking pictures with my Ixus digital camera (It's a digital Elph, by the way, if you're in the US) since I bought it in September 2001.

A few months ago I found to my annoyance that it had started the numbering system for the pictures at the beginning again, from number 1. This was really annoying as one of the things I found most useful about the camera was the way it numbers each picture, and stores information about the day and time it was taken.

In fact, I have discovered, when downloading the pictures on to my laptop, which uses Windows XP, that you can view lots more detail from the camera, including the shutter speed and aperture setting (though they're set automatically).

That's really useful. I used to be a fan of photography in the days when everything was done on film and printed on paper (I used to print my own, and there's still nothing quite like the feeling of watching a black and white print come up in the developing tray; I even learnt how to choose the right mix of developer and paper to get a warm or cold toned print).

The thing that always annoyed me about photography was how you didn't get to see the results for ages - several hours at the very least - and I found that made it difficult to learn how to take better pictures.

There were other things as well, of course - among them the fact that I didn't have to change films if I wanted to change from black to white, that I could take a hundred or more pictures without having to load a new film, and that I could check whether I liked the picture I had just taken and delete it and take another if I wanted to.

And when downloading them onto a computer in Windows XP, you can add lots of simple information like where the picture was taken and about the people and/or places in the picture (very useful long afterwards when you've forgotten most of it).

So it was while doing a mass download the other day that I realised why my camera had started the numbering again.

It had reached the limit of available filenames. This was because it had gone up to IMG-9999.jpg and started again. This meant that in three years I had taken more than ten thousand photographs.

I was astounded. That's like 300 rolls of film. I doubt if I used as many as 100 rolls of film in my entire life before that.

Of course, whether the pictures are any good ... well, that's another question.