The Book Tower

Another random selection of bullet points, which I’ll be adding to as the weekend progresses.

• I was in Birmingham this week for a workshop for webbie people who work in the public sector. Coincidentally, two of the organisers were fellow bloggers Jack Pickard and Dan Champion who took part in the Christmas Blogswap (I failed to realise that the gentleman showing people in at the beginning was actually Dan until the event started). I didn’t get to speak to either of them as much as I would have liked; it was similar to going to a wedding reception and not seeing much of the bride or groom because everybody wants to talk to them. I hope they forgive me for that analogy. Anyway, I really enjoyed the presentations.
• Talking of blogging, the number of blogs I subscribe to through Bloglines has now crept up to 53. It’s far too many. I can’t keep up. There’s my favourites, which I tend to read regularly, and you can tell which ones they are from my Blogroll. But there’s also a number of blogs I’m trying out to see if I like them or not. I’ve a feeling that some of them are just going to get left behind. Is there a sensible number of feeds that I should be aiming for?
• Playing Scrabble at work yesterday lunchtime, I was allowed the word qi. I felt slightly guilty as it won me the game, but I’ve later found it’s a genuine word. Meaning:

an individual person’s life-force; the free flow of which within the body is believed to ensure physical and spiritual health.

• Wherever I go these days, I’m finding that my name isn’t on lists or that information about me has been removed. It’s a good job I’m not a paranoid sort of person. It happened in Birmingham and it happened today in the library, where the assistant got quite shirty with me and accused me of still living at the house we moved away from nearly five years ago. I was forced to fill in two forms and produce identification. She apologised in the end, perhaps after detecting my qi.