The Guardian devotes half a column each day to corrections. I will limit mine to once a fortnight. As the World Cup is in Germany this year Florian & Vasco can kick off with my first apology of the year because my upgraded deal from http://blog.co.uk gives me a hundred blogs so my Friday calculations are null and void.

Yahoo! were sadly maligned on Monday for their failure to respond to my 'Get Code!' text message. When I tried again yesterday it worked like a dream. So I am now hot-wired and get bleeped at by my mobile phone every time an e-mail comes in from Rye, Stockholm, Tucson, Morlaix, Purton or Llangolman.

I mentioned on Monday that I had e-mailed Private Post to find out if the software advertised in Private Eye was only available for PC users. Gareth replied by return with these glad tidings: ‘Hi, we are planning to develop Private Post for Mac OS X by Summer 2006. At the moment Private Post is only available to PC users with Outlook/Outlook Express. To help our development further, what email client are you using? (Entourage, Tiger Mail, Eudora etc...). Regards, Gareth Hall, Technical Support Engineer, Private Post.’

This was real friendly so I e-mailed back: ‘Hi Gareth, Thanks for your prompt response...but I expected no less since you're in Bristol just an hour's drive away from me here in Pembrokeshire on the other side of the Severn Estuary. If you had been in New Zealand it would have been different...more satellites to bounce off...’ I went on to give him chapter and verse about me and my cyber-alter-egos (CAEs).

‘...My main window onto the cyberworld is my Yahoo! e-mail account. I increasingly run my business out of my Yahoo! inbox and find that more and more of my colleagues operate this way too. My principal telcom decision last year was to shift platforms away from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs heading for Linux and Open Source. I spent quite a bit of time with eBay last year where I have a couple of accounts...Holobolo Canterbury and Holobolo Uppsala...and by the end of 2006 expect to be running an online bookshop with them...and Google is an extension of my right arm.

My main holding company is William Franklin & Sons Limited - a UK private limited company. I do all my domain name dealing through Easily where I have several websites and quite a few e-mail accounts. Easily run on Linux servers with Apache software. I sell the Good Yacht Guide online and payments come via Visa credit cards...I never see anything else...via my William Franklin & Sons PayPal Business Account.

I have business dealings with Sweden where I have an e-mail account with Spray...owned by Lycos. I also run a William Shepherd website on Passagen owned by the Swedish post office. You can find out more from my daily weblog...looked after from Berlin. You are mentioned in dispatches. Hope this helps. Anecdotes are often more useful than statistics.

The storage heater problem was all my fault. It trips out when it gets too hot...and it gets too hot when people use it to quick-dry jeans and sweaters. Mea Very Culpa. The plumber-cum-electrician was here fixing a pump today and sorted it. The trip switch is hidden inside the outer casing...and several screws must be removed to access it which seems pretty silly. But at least now I can fix it myself. ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for ever.’ Tell that one to the Scottish fishermen. Nonetheless Gandhi, Fritz Schumacher, Lao Tzu and anybody with two brain cells who has given any thought to real development...as opposed to rip-off and pillage...can’t all be wrong. Anyone want their storage heater fixed?

My day got off to a slow start when I got up late. The rain had stopped. The sky was blue. And I thought about a run. You can do these things when you work for yourself. I had picked a book off my daughter’s bookshelf last night...The War Against Chaos by Anita Mason...and couldn’t put it down. Anita turns out to be a local lass from just across the water in Bristol. My daughter is reading a lot of futuristic stuff at the moment.

Otherwise my day consisted of e-mails about Good Yacht Guide orders and access details to the Franklin PayPal account, a message to my daughter about her new Chip ‘n Pin and an e-mail to let Alan know that I had not abandoned Cultura and would be on his case at crack of dawn.

In the middle of the afternoon I sloped off to my nearest cafe...Caffi Beca up on the Cardigan to Tenby road... and used the time to write a journal entry. In the evening it was Sirens with Sam Neill and Hugh Grant.

I had my Coleridge moment in mid-morning. While in full flow at the keyboard there was a knock at the door. ‘Go Away!’ I yelled. Emerging from my hermit mode half an hour later I discovered that the phantom rapper had been my landlady, anxious to let me know that my water was about to be turned off. She had visions of a washing machine melt-down. All I lost was a couple of weblog sentences. Coleridge lost most of Kubla Khan.

The Welsh gods retaliated with a vengence and it bucketed down on Monday night. It had eased off by first light but continued to drizzle until well into the afternoon. I don’t understand my storage heater. But I do understand when it no longer gives off any heat. Something is wrong with it...and it is more than a duff fuse. Fortunately it has been quite warm since it went on the blink...and there is a wood-burning stove and an electric oil heater so I won’t freeze in the dark. But it reminds me that this good life of mine is really quite fragile.

I can stay home for a whole day but have acquired this niggling urge to jump into my little green and red car if I stay put much longer. Walking or running to the local Spar shop ought to be another option but I am addicted to car driving...something I put down to living car-free for twenty years...although I rent one on average a dozen or more times a year. I could discipline myself to staying put for two days. But one way or another, my peace of mind and soul seems to demand at least three trips a week to Cardigan. With In Her Shoes playing at Theatr Mwldn at six today a call was made on my weekly Cardigan quota. I left for town mid-afternoon. My other excuse was to print out the Papworth Papers on budgets & contracts and to acquire print-outs of my weblogs.

My digital world shifted from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs last year. My Apple Mac Mini came with Microsoft Windows Xp installed but it ran out after thirty days. Instead of paying up like normal people I took it as a challenge to go Microsoft-free. But I am also printer-free. So my first step to hard copy is to convert manuscripts from the Apple Works cwk format to Adobe pdf. Next the data gets whisked off my hard drive onto a USB flash memory stick and driven to an Internet Café. As a result my printing comes with a £1.50p fixed overhead. Today it was spread over 30 copies. At 10p each that works out at 15p. I can live with that.

Over breakfast I listed a dozen things I wanted done by the weekend. I won’t list them here as they will appear in the weblogs. None of them got done. Sloth was not the reason. Hubris perhaps. I figured that since I was spending £1.50p anyway I might as well get my money’s worth and post some files to a website. Big mistake.

There is a lot of website work pending. Websites are like the Severn Bridge. No sooner do you come to one end than you must start again at the other end. My William Franklin & Sons Limited PayPal business account allows me to accept payment online by credit card. So far only the Good Yacht Guide website has benefited from this facility. I look forward to the day that the Academic Inn Books website gets similar treatment. Then I can think about running a proper online bookshop.

But next on the priority list is cescweb. Toni Pinschof and I set up the Cliff’s Edge Signalling Company (cesc) in 1993. A website was added at the end of 2000 which was then extended to accommodate the needs of the 2001 Radical Consultation. Since then the cescweb has grown like topsy. A complete make-over is called for.

Waiting patiently in the wings for the cescweb makeover are rather a lot of jobs. Last night I was working on one of them...Dispatches From The Iraq War. This morning I was working on another...Oil Wars and The Politics of Killing People...derived from some work by Richard Moore in Wexford last year based on William Engdahl’s ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and The New World Order’.

In a rush of blood yesterday evening I had deemed these dispatches to be a natural extension of the Radical Hansard...the name given to the Proceedings of the Radical Consultation. So I renamed the Dispatches file as ‘radicalhansard.cwk’. By morning I had completely forgotten this so well over an hour was wasted trying to find the file on my computer to take to town and post on the cesc website. In frustration I was guilty of another piece of poor judgement by then turning to the Oil Wars Paper.

I ran out of time of course. So in the end nothing got posted to the website. But at least it inspired a few minutes googling up a photo and a resume of Richard Moore...and also prompted me to send him an email enquiring whether the final part of his essay ever got written. I also ordered a copy of William Engdahl’s book.

In Her Shoes turned out to be quite a classy script and the film was very well directed. Shirley Maclean and Cameron Diaz were excellent and the supporting roles worked extremely well. There is a genre coming out of Hollywood now that was absent a few years ago. The films in this new genre explore the issues of marriage, families and the meaning of life. Richard Gere has done several of these...Shall We Dance and Unfaithful being two that spring to mind. This is a very healthy trend. And the top players are picking good scripts.

I came across a receipt from the local Spar shop as I was tidying up so let me teach you some Welsh. Siopa has to do with shopping, Spar is Spar and diolch must mean thank you, because the till receipt translates ‘Diolch am siopa yn Spar’ as ‘Thank you for Shopping at Spar’. You’re welcome! Have a Nice Day!