Jack won the man of the match award at football practice last week - we were very proud parents as you can imagine. He obviously does not take after his dad for his skills on the football field.

Some photos from the holiday near the lovely (and smallest) city of St David's have been added here for family and freiends. Worthy attractions if you ever go to that area are St David's itself, an amazing beach at Whitesands, The Shed for great food at Porthgain - the coasta; walks are spectacular if rather dangerous with a 5 year old :)

Saturday was the long awaited day to build our chicken coop (more photos). The chickens don't arrive for another week or so but Jack, Jess and Emma had lots of fun being chickens after the build to test out the robustness of the coop and I have to say it stood up to the rigour of three rather large chickens very well.

We used a coop from flytesofancy based in Dorset and I have to say that the assembly was straight forward (although Helena did most of the technical stuff with the electric srewdriver) supported by Geoff and I on panel holding duty. The quality of the build is superb, it is a very sturdy structure that I am sure will last us a good long time.

Next week we are planning to dig in the sleeper base and give the coop a permanent home in the garden, with hard wood chippings for the hens to scratch about on - we are hoping this will make cleaning a little easier too.

Check back soon for when the coop cam is installed :)

Did you know email was invented more that 40 years ago? That is before the web came into existence. It was created, obviously, without the knowledge of communication that we have today.

What if we were able to start from scratch and design email from the ground up knowing what we now know? Just think, being able to take the best concepts from blogs, wikis, instant messaging, social networks, twitter, flickr, youtube. What might that just look like?

Well a Wave is the concept that Google have come up with to potentially redefine how we interact on the web. I took a closer look and have outlined some of the key features below.

I'd like to start a discussion with IBMers, Geeks, Technologists anyone interested on this, what can we learn from this? is the protocol something we can use in our environments? - it fits with an open source ethos, that has to be good right? This is me starting a conversation. Welcome and please join in.

Some new videos and photos have been added of Jack up to various bits and bobs. I have finally replaced my little video recorder after it was stolen (along with my travel bag) a few weeks ago so hopefully I'll be updating here a bit more often.

I know it is a strange subject for a technology blog but what the hell, I hope you enjoy and I hope you learn something too.

The next time you are running a bath and for anyone who knows me I love HOT baths and you curse because the water heater hasn't been on long enough or worse it has broken down, just think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Jack : Snow Angel 2000 from Paul Athey on Vimeo.

To me the real beauty of this video is people love it for so many reasons.

For me it just makes me smile and gives a boost to my day.