I rode my bike into work yesterday. This is only worth remarking on because of the extraordinary incidence of my having a puncture when I first ride a bike into a new place of work.

I didn't get a puncture yesterday, although my cube neighbour did.

It was a nice ride for me yesterday - there was a slight sprinkling of rain on the way home, but otherwise dry. And I feel great today.

I will be doing this as long as I can, although the knee surgery is now booked so that will only be for about five weeks before I will be off the bike for a month.

I have been using OpenOffice.org and its derivatives as my primary office suite for years. Latterly this has been NeoOffice since that is a native OS X app - OOo required running under X, which looked weird and was slow to startup.

So I was quite excited to read that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is available. One of the things they have been working on is a native OS X UI, and I was keen to play with that. I kicked off the download, opened up the disc image, and...

It was then that I noticed that the image was for Intel Macs. Since my iBook is a G4 PPC Mac this did not get me anywhere.

I went back to the OOo site and found a PPC image. Apparently my glass of wine with dinner confused me though - I downloaded the latest stable build, which is 2.4, rather than the 3.0 beta I wanted.

Truly, I can understand the OOo folks only supporting Intel Macs. The binary download is big enough to make a universal binary prohibitive, and all the excitement in Mac Land is around the Intel machines - it has been the best part of two years now, I believe, since they were introduced. But I am still disappointed that I won't get to try this out, at least not for a while.

News today that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is offering free access to bloggers, but apparently you have to qualify by not being a personal diary kind of blog.

Never mind then.

Maybe I should aspire to be like Andy Updegrove or Pamela Jones, but I don't know that I want to.

Apologies to all for my lack of drive on this matter.

Another big day today - I talked to son #1 for the first time on the phone.

Actually, that's not quite true - I have spoken to him on the phone before, but he has never talked back. It was quite the outpouring, talking about his Bob the Builder toys and how excited he was to have Scoop.

He's talked to other relatives on the phone before, but it's quite special hearing a new voice on the other end of the phone.

As I frequently lament, I don't get to play Scrabble much at the moment. So it is with some delight that I can relate that I have won my last two games, in each case by a substantial margin.

I had a game with my mother in the UK. Neither of us played especially well and the board was difficult, so it was a low scoring game - I got 288 and Mum got about fifty points less than that - but it was a win against a stronger player so I am happy.

Today I had a lunchtime game with a colleague who is also a Scrabble player. We both played well, but the tenor of the match was set when I put down all my letters on the first word. Final score was 353 to me, 273 to my colleague.

Yay me.

Big day yesterday - son #2 pulled himself back up to a sitting position!

Now the fear starts.

He has been boot scooting around for a few weeks, slowly moving around while sitting. He began pushing himself around backwards on his belly recently too, and yesterday he managed to get stuck underneath the train table a couple of times.

We got the corral out of the attic the other day. I think it is getting on time to set it up.

I've had some increasing problems over the last few months with waking up congested. It has left me feeling very tired in the mornings, like I just was not sleeping right.

Just before we went away I began to wonder if it was the cats since I have a slight allergy there (my father and sister are much worse off then I). I've never been made congested by the very slight reaction I have, but allergies can change over time.

My suspicion was fuelled when I stopped being congested in the UK - aye aye, I thought. This isn't so good. Then we came back and my congestion started up again almost immediately.

Jen made a suggestion, though - how old was my pillow?

Wow, I thought - it's an eight year old pillow that, now I came to think about it, had been in storage for fifteen months. Not ideal conditions for a nice savoury sleeping experience.

So I went and bought a new pillow, and now my congestion has gone away again.

I am still trying to keep the cats from sleeping on my pillow, though.