little bits of everything

3/2/2000 Things are moving! Our buyer wants us out in 4 - 6 weeks! We've got friends who have agreed to put us up until accommodation is available at Wycliffe.\\r\\n\\r\\nWycliffe have changed the arrangement, they aren't going to pay a salary, they are topping up our support. At this point I was working part-time in another job and part-time for Wycliffe. We were moving house so that we could be nearer the Wycliffe offices, and I was going full-time, but not with a salary as I first thought.

I don't know how many people who knew us were reading this, but I was a proper blogger now.

A year or so ago I did my 2018 awards. As 2019 is over it's time for this year's awards, though you'll find all the categories are different.

Best Orchestral Album of 80s tunes When I heard a track from Trevor Horn's Reimagines the Eighties on Radio 2 I thought it was worth seeing if the other tracks were as good, and many of them were.
The first track, Everyone wants to rule the world, sung by Robbie Williams, was released as a single, and doesn't depart too much from the original.
The second track, Dancing in the dark, sung by Gabrielle Apin, is a slowed down version of the original. The leisurely tempo and string arrangement really enhances Bruce's words.
Seal sings Ashes to Ashes and his powerful range manages to competently handle the melody that David Bowie wrote.
Matt Cardle sings The Power of love. Yes, he's still around.
There are other slowed down tracks: Slave to the Rhythm and Take on me, and they manage to not be a cheap trick too often repeate…

Not really worth waiting for:
5/1/2000 A New start
A new chance to put a message in. Doesn't make sense to me either. Come back in February for the next exciting instalment.

Back in 1999 it mostly cost money to run a blog (from what I can remember). You had to sort out your own hosting. Then Dave Winer made on offer on his blogging platform editthispage.com for a 60 day free trial, so I was away. So what was my very first post? What words did I choose to post for all on the internet to see?
 23 December 1999 I'm stil trying to decide what to do with this. Click on the skull to add your suggestion. Oh, that's not very good is it. A typo in the second word too. The URL was morrissfamily.editthispage.com. (I think. Everything I say could be unreliable, because it was a while ago.) I also created an FAQ page that day:

Who are the Morriss family? We are just a normal family with a dad who likes exploring the internet.Why don't you have more information? Because I'm not sure want I want to do with this site. I think there are no typos there. The idea was that I would share family news. Come back in January to see what my next post was.

As of 23/12/1999 I will have been blogging for 20 years. I plan to do a retrospective on my first few blog posts starting on 23/12/2019, but before I was writing them I was reading blogs.

Here are the notable ones from those early days.
scripting.com I used to read this at work while I was dialing up to download our work email because as it was about scripting, which is work, isn't it? I stopped reading it a few years ago, but Dave Winer is still going.
Through Dave I found... Tim Bray - Ongoing And I have been reading him ever since. He writes engagingly about technology, boats, his electric car and toast. When I see that red diamond in my feedreader I will often read that first. Magdelena Donea As her Twitter bio says, "Once famous on the internet". I first came across her website (probably called a webzine in those days) from a link on the Microsoft homepage( or maybe it was the Internet Explorer homepage). Even the internet archive doesn't have that site (kia.net/~m…

I have a post brewing in my head called "I don't love your thing, but I love that you love your thing", about SF/F and media fandom and how I stand on the edges watching what people do, which would end with an "except". This is the except.

I was reading a review of Sherwood by Meagan Spooner and I thought I'd get on and tell you about Robin Hood. In particular I loved Robin of Sherwood on ITV in the 1980s. Thirteen years ago I posted about how I was looking forward to the BBC's (then) new series of Robin Hood. Whilst that programme was really good, and something we all enjoyed as a family, Robin of Sherwood was better in my mind.

It had an atmospheric soundtrack by Clannad (so I bought the album). As well as the usual story of a good outlaw it also had elements of pagan spirituality as the character of Herne the Hunter helps out somehow (my memory of actual plotlines is pretty faint). On those olden days (the 1980s, not the middle ages) there was no way…