5 inches of snow fell overnight, and it was a slow drive to Church in the morning. The cats didn't venture out when they saw the depth of the white stuff. At least I got to use my new snow boots which had been sitting impatiently in the cupboard under the stairs.

A blackbird decided to build a nest in the narrow gap between our cat enclosure and the neighbour's sun lounge. As it built it on a window ledge the nest kept collapsing. Despite that the blackbird and its mate have persisted. Our cats have expressed great interest in the proceedings.

Too much time last week spent sorting out my personal website. Even before last week I was considering moving my own website to a different host as for some reason the images on my website weren't always showing up properly in browsers. Sporadically only the first part of an image would appear, and one would have to refresh to get the whole image. Got no joy from the hosting company who said it had to be my connection even though other people also got the problem looking at my website. At the start of last week however my website vanished totally. Which meant we also lost email as our emails are based on the website. Much later the hosting company (named "Downtownhost" which perhaps they lived up to in this case) claimed someone had unplugged the servers in the Data Centre. So I decided there and then to move my website to a UK-based hosting company "VirtualNames" which other people recommended. The emails were fairly easy if tedious to set up, and then I changed the nameservers for the domain to get emails working again. That at least was straightforward. However uploading my website onto the new hosting provider wasn't. I use 'ssh' and 'sftp' for security to manipulate files on my website, and run them inside scripts which work out which files need to be uploaded from my local system. However as I had it 'ssh' and 'sftp' relied on public keys to establish connection and the new hosts didn't support that. So I had a hair-raising time playing around with a Unix utility called 'expect' to be able to get the scripts working again. Frightening. But that got my files back again. What I didn't get back first off was MySQL access. Some of my pages use a MySQL database for data, and I couldn't get the PHP to connect to the database. What I didn't know until after an exchange of emails with a helpful guy on support was that passwords are limited to 16 characters and I was using 20 character ones. Why does life have to be so complicated!

"Avernum: Escape from the Pit" is a remake of the remake of "Blades of Exiles" also from "Spiderweb Games". As such the game has been updated with new fresh graphics, easier navigation, a different skills system, and rewritten scenes and characters. The bad Emperor Hawthorne (hiss boo) has cast your party into Avernum, which is a subterranean world where you will never see the light of day again. You can choose a number of paths leading to revenge, or escape, or just surviving in your new home. The gameworld of "Avernum" is huge, and there are a lot of NPCs with their own agendas. Choose your friends and enemies well. The game is played in an over the shoulder 3rd person isometric view. The graphics are more than adequate for the kind of game - the strength of the game is in the hours of strategic gameplay one will have not the eye candy. More than other Spiderweb games a less skilled RPG gamer like myself can get through the game on the Casual setting to one of the endings. A skilfully crafted indie RPG.

"Atlantis 3: The New World" is the third game in the Atlantis series from the now defunct French game developer Cryo. The story is again written by Jehan K. Robson so (for me) is imaginative and outside the box. There's these interstellar dolphins with a mysterious gift for humankind which will take us to the next level of evolution. Three dream-like game chapters set in the paleolithic, Egyptian, and Arabian nights enable your character of a French archaeologist to reach Shambala and the promised gift. The framing story is set at an ancient Egyptian site in the Hoggar desert where you must outwit the baddie who has found the crystal skull. The writing and scenes are often beautiful and transcendental. Particularly memorable is when you find yourself inside the skull, and frustrated trying to navigate around inside it. Some of the gameplay is quite fair and acceptable, but some of the puzzles need a walkthrough to get through. There aren't timed puzzles as such, while you can get killed by a tiger for instance the game restores you to before the sad event. I loved the story, many scenes were mind-blowing, but I wished some of the puzzles weren't so off the wall.

A cruise to the Azores on the P&O ship Oriana. We get seasick trying to see whales, on land saw a pineapple farm on Ponta Delgada and a banana plantation on Gran Canaria.

Virginia and I returned from a cruise to the Azores on the 9th of June to find my mother very poorly. On Sunday we went to the care home she was in, and heartbreakingly watched her pass away. Rationally she's gone. The room at the care home is now empty. There's a death certificate with her name on it. She had a good innings you can say. We got back in time you can say. Emotionally she's still part of me, and I'm part of her. Emotionally it hurts a lot. Grief grieves me. It should hurt, otherwise I'm just a biochemical robot.

An open-air performance of "Twelfth Night" at Robinson College in Cambridge. Seeing this play on TV made me realise Shakespeare was OK really.

I now have an iPad, I've joined the ranks of tablet owners. My problem now is to justify having it! One justification is that it's a good thing to take on holiday. I've already loaded nearly 200 books onto it which will last me several holidays even at the rate I read. And I can keep in touch using email and the web through it. Even at home it eases pressure on who's using the computer. For just checking email / Facebook the iPad is very usable. And when we're playing games and get stuck no need to fell forests printing off walkthroughs, one can look at them on the iPad!

A long weekend in Bath admiring Roman bath technology and the Jane Austen tourist trail.

I help my and Virginia's soft toys to do things they couldn't otherwise do, like speak. Move around. And make games. I felt the game they wanted to make was about the end of the world, and how to make sure it's enjoyable. Hence Armageddon was written using Adobe Flex and Flash, and released at the end of 2011. The game has you answering a set of questions. Depending on the answers you get a different disaster. There is a set of answers which does not result in a global apocalypse.

You can book at The Bridge now, before you just turned up and hoped. Virginia and I eat early so we beat the rush. Another building with character which I like, I want to believe the wooden beams are genuine and indeed they may be. There's an open fire, and soft armchairs for those waiting. The staff are pleasant and friendly. The menu includes pheasant and partridge, and a bubble and squeak starter. So not run of the mill, but not haute cuisine either. They now come to your table to take your order, before you had to go to the bar.

A long weekend in Derbyshire, taking in Denby pottery on the way. We stayed at Willersley Castle despite the Satnav's efforts.

A second trip to see the Thursford Christmas Show in Thursford Norfolk.

The home computer is now one of the new iMacs. A rather expensive Christmas present to myself! The Mountain Lion has certainly pounced, some noticeable differences to Snow Leopard! It's rather like moving house. The applications like rooms are not a one-to-one mapping. I need to adjust to the way the new OS (to me) is best suited to. An example - Calendar no longer offers the chance to say repeat this reminder in a day or a week. Instead you can either dismiss it, or be reminded again in fifteen minutes. So I'm looking at Reminders as an alternative way of managing tasks to be done.

The film "Super 8" is both a derivative of earlier films like "ET" and "The Goonies" but also self-referential about starting in filmmaking itself.

"The Kingdom Beyond the Waves" (2008) is the second book in Stephen Hunt 's Jackelian series, which is set in a steampunk world with magic with countries loosely based on England and France and Arabia. As with the other books in the series "The Kingdom Beyond the Waves" is a non-stop roller coaster of ideas, like several adventures from other authors rolled into one. Characters from the farthest shores of the sea of imagination stalk its pages, twists and turns and revelations keep the poor reader bemused. (For me when you've read one book in the "Jackelian" series you've read them all, but each book is well written. As another aside I think the author has written himself into the series as Commodore Black so as this character dies at the end of "Deep of the Dark" then the series has died too.) To say "The Kingdom Beyond the Waves" has a plot is an understatement. It has several. The book is related from multiple character's viewpoints to entrance the reader even more. In brief it's about archaeologist Amelia Harsh's quest for ancient "Camlantis", a place of long-lost wonders, and why when we find our dream it's not always what we expect. Even in the name "Camlantis" you can see how Hunt is inventively reforging millions of influences and ideas and names from history and fiction. Everyone should read one book by Stephen Hunt as he is the best exponent of this kind of writing I've yet come across. I like "The Kingdom Beyond the Waves" the most out of his books. The parts of Hunt's books are brilliant - but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.