Well as you can see, thankfully the banner ads have disappeared from my site again after I contacted my web hosting provider, http://free.prohosting.com/.

Argh! Ugly banner ads have suddenly appeared all over my website, despite the fact that I paid my hosting company (free.prohosting.com) what was supposed to be a one-time fee for banner ad removal way back in January 2003.

Fortunately I’m a digital pack rat and still have the original email invoice, so hopefully the banner ads will be removed soon — or else I’ll need to find a new hosting solution.

I just got back last night from a couple of days in Washington DC, where I was part of an editorial committee working on the third revision to the NISO Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.

While there, I was also able to visit my friends Gordon, Jamie and Darby, and was introduced to an employee of the World Bank who told me that they were all hoping that Wolfowitz would go. She also told me a funny story that when Wolfowitz first took over as President of the bank, he was given a facsimile of an 18th Century map of Iraq with the locations of WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction) marked on it!

I asked her if she thought the World Bank was a force for good, or a force for evil. She said she thought that, although many mistakes have been made, overall she thought it was a force for good (although obviously as an employee she’s not going to have a completely unbiased opinion!).

I’m extremely happy the Wolfowitz has been forced to resign. Apart from the fact that he had no credibility whatsoever in my book, I’m delighted to see that, one by one, the neocon architects of the current disastrous U.S. imperialism are beginning to discover that eventually their misdeeds catch up with them, and they can’t do whatever the hell they feel like after all.

Against all the odds, Sheffield United were relegated from the English Premier League last week on the last day of the football season — which coincidentally was also my birthday.

Despite being safely above the relegation zone at 15th in the table just a few weeks ago, and despite the fact that they only needed to draw against Wigan, a team already in the relegation zone and that had been in considerably worse form recently, I got up early and went to a bar in SoHo to watch the Blades play awful, desperate (and at one point horrific, when Jon Steade and the Wigan keeper smashed their heads together) football, and yet again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The other highly unlikely factor that conspired in their relegation to the Championship was that West Ham beat Manchester United, the league champions, 1-0 at home, thanks to a goal by the gifted and controversial Argentinean Carlos Tevez, who is already at the centre of a legal challenge and FIFA enquiry over transfer irregularities.

Perhaps the saddest part of the whole affair is that the Blades’ outspoken and hardworking manager Neil Warnock decided to quit. It’s a shame, because I thought he was a good manager who brought the Blades to the Premiership and obviously cared deeply for the team and the fans.

I just treated myself to a new Samsung LN-S3251D 32″ widescreen LCD HDTV, which seems huge compared to the standard 20″ telly I’ve had for the last 6 years or so.


But now I have to figure out how to get rid of my old Panasonic CT-20G5 20″ stereo color TV, which I’ve had for the last 6 years, and which still works perfectly. I don’t have any need (or space, for that matter) for a second TV, and a quick search of eBay suggests that there is absolutely no market for second-hand CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TV’s anymore.

If I can’t sell it on Craig’s List etc., I’ll need to figure out how to dispose of it responsibly. It would be a huge shame to send a perfectly good TV to a landfill!

This is a great idea — Modbury, a small town in Devon, has completely banned plastic bags. Now shoppers either bring their own reusable bags, or they buy biodegradable bags made of corn starch.

Apparently San Francisco will introduce a similar ban later this year.