Well, it’s the 2nd of April, and the clocks just went forward at the weekend. This has the immediate effect of losing an hour’s sleep in the changeover. It has the slightly less immediate effect of making the sun set an hour later in the evening.

While you can argue for hours as to the point of British Summer Time, it has the bonus of heralding the start of the run up to the summer. The trouble is that the British summer doesn’t seem to appear like it used to. I remember the summers of my youth – the blue skies seemed to last for ever, the sun was always baking hot, weeks would pass with not a cloud in the sky. It also used to snow in the winter (even on Christmas day) and, basically, there were four seasons (you know, spring, summer, autumn and winter).

Nowadays, thanks no doubt to global warming and not being 12 any more, we seem to be stuck in a state of perpetual autumn. Frequent cold spells, lots of rain, occasional blue skies. Maybe I’m just depressed because I’m back to work after a lovely, relaxing, long weekend… Yeah, that sounds about right.

I’ve been playing around a bit with PHP and mySQL to do some more interesting things on John’s Adventures including revamping the mailing list (you subscribe, it sends you an e-mail that gives you a link to confirm the subscription and everything lives in a mySQL database table – no more Perl required). I’m also working on a discussion list, although more for fun as I can’t see anyone using it for anything other than slagging me off (you know who you are). Anyway, it’s pretty straightforward, which was a nice surprise.

Had a nice few days off, by the way. It’s not often that sunny in Scotland so you’ve got to make the most of it!

And why is internet access in the UK so overpriced?