I'd been saddended earlier by the closure of my local hippie-veggie shop, "OutOfThisWorld".

I was rather surprised therefore to walk into one in Beeston, Nottigham at the weekend. It turns out that the both this branch and the one in Leeds were bought by their managers from the parent company.

Good stuff! Hope that they do well. With any luck, they might expand. Newcastke might be a good place to go, as they are in need of a new hippie-veggie shop I hear.

I've been getting some needling recently for my grammar, spelling and composition, at least on these pages. There is clearly some justification for it. I normally have a relatively high standard for these things and, yet, these blog pages do fall below these standards.

Ultimately, the means of communication do affect how we behave; the blog feels more conversational, less formal. I tend to write this stuff out once, and rarely even proof-read it.

I shall think on this; my worry is that if I spend time improving the presentation, I might just not write anything at all. But then, if a jobs worth doing...

Next week, I start teaching again. I've had to rewrite a practical for my microarray course, because genespring has totally changed (we used it in the past) and because I wanted to use something freely available which the students can use after our freebie license runs out.

It's been a lot of work. This has conspired with the early spring deadline for conference season; I am now in the review period for three conferences at once, including ISMB and haven't yet done a lot of work for Bio-Ontologies. Next week appears to be an "incredibly busy" week; I've just blocked out my entire diary with events.

Maybe there will be a miracle next week, and I shall be magically freed of work. Alternatively, maybe, google calendar will undergo a terrorist attack or, worse, a power cut which would have much the same impact.

I've had about 10 different sets of birthday greetings over the last day or two, which is very gratifying. Unfortunately, it's not actually my birthday. When I first created a facebook account, I put in a random date for my birthday, so I could get through the stupid forms as quick as possible. According, my birthday was yesterday and I am 29. To think that I missed out on the Golden Jubilee, the '76 drought and the Sex Pistols by so few years.

The funny thing is that I think I have had more birthday greetings than I have ever had in my entire life. Whether anyone will speak to me again, now that I have so cruely decieved them is open to question.