[The second attempt at writing this as blogger.com threw a whoopsie and lost the first. You get bitten by bugs, so you get into the habit of copying your text into Textpad for a while before clicking upload, then all goes smoothly for ages, and you get out of the habit again, when bang, 40 mins of painful blogcrafting all up in smoke.]

I wanted to post something — anything — just so I could push the selfpitying gastric health post off the top of my blog. The scheme of not eating or drinking for two hours before bedtime seems to be working for now, although my Gaviscon consumption is still up, and I’m much less forgetful about my daily Zoton. And if anything, the new rule means going to bed later, rather than stopping eating earlier.

Work is heating up, as you’d expect, what with getting ready for a general election any time now. Although strictly speaking no-one knows when the election will be, it’s interesting to note that www.bloggers4labour.org have a count-down timer on their front page. Clearly, these people are better connected than those of us at www.libdemblogs.co.uk.

It was widely expected that Tony would go to the Palace tomorrow to ask the Queen for the dissolution of Parliament and a General Election. Now, we hear, because of the death of the Pope, that definitely won’t happen: Tony’s going to church instead. In order for the GE to be on May 5th, he has to go and speak to her sometime this week. Desperately hoping he goes Tuesday, because if he doesn’t I’m going to have to spend a lot of time talking to Special Branch in advance of an event we’re running on Wednesday that I can tell you more about tomorrow, but not before.

Bah.

Oh, yes, I just remembered, I’m supposed to be being heavy-handed with links to the Lib Dems as the Real Alternative to Labour. We’re trying to get it so that if you search google with the phrase from our slogan, you end up at our website. Seems to be working: try it out. I didn’t think it would be possible to knock the real RealAlternative software (an alternative to RealPlayer) off the top spot, but it seems like we’re getting there. The flexed might of the Lib Dem Bloggers pays off.

In other news, you may have noticed from the random badge on the right hand side of the screen that I’ve signed up with flickr, an exciting photo storing/sharing website. I now have unlimited storage space on their servers, but I am limited to 1GB uploads a month. I managed about half a gig last weekend uploading my entire back-catalogue of electronically stored photos, so I wouldn’t have thought I’ll be getting too close to the limit too often.

The basic website for all my pictures is www.flickr.com/photos/niles. There are some sets of photos there too, and soon, I hope to have a ‘favourites’ set, because I have to admit, I’ve uploaded a lot of dross, and casual visitors will need help to find the pearls.

The site also does interesting things with ‘tags’ — you can set an unlimited number of tags on each photo, and then search through them using them. So, for example, you can see all my Nottingham photos at www.flickr.com/photos/niles/tags/nottingham. Because it’s a photo-sharing website, you can also see everyone‘s photos of Nottingham — that would be at www.flickr.com/photos/tags/nottingham.

You can see a full list of all the tags I’ve used to categorise my pictures at www.flickr.com/photos/niles/tags. But some interesting ones to look at for now might include

• vacation
• prague
• normandy
• wedding
• camping
• cooking
• brussels
• magdeburg
• and autoportrait, for a look at Niles through the ages.

BTW, if you sign up to flickr too (and there are free accounts), you can leave comments on my photos.

I’m looking forward to seeing how I can use this when I bugger off to France later this year!