Yesterday Pauline and I spent a lovely evening with Peter (PC) and Jill Brown and their daughter Kerry and son-in-law Ross. Peter, Jill, Kerry, and Ross are a major part of our (small) combined family and time spent with them is always special.

Jill is the consummate hostess. PC is the consummate host. Ross and Kerry and just like Pauline and me. The supper Jill and PC prepared for us was superb. As was the conversation and banter. I guess that's why we had such a lovely time ;-)

As an ex-captain of the Scotland rugby team and, by popular acclaim, the best captain of the past 30 years, PC is a larger than life character with such a rich seam of personal life stories, that he is now an established part of the professional after-dinner-speaker circuit. For his last birthday, it seemed appropriate to register pcbrown.org, and help to set up his website, as a novel birthday present. Expect to hear more about PC's websiet once it's up and running.

The Register | Windows on a database - sliced and diced by BeOS vets

After we wrote about Microsoft's plans to put a database into each copy of Windows as the native file store back in January, we were delighted to hear from two system architects for whom this news was really old hat.

You see, it's been done before. Benoit Schillings was one of Be Inc's first employees, and authored the original user space database server. This was later superseded by a more conventional approach: BFS, a fast, 64bit journaled file system written by Dominic Giampaolo, which had many database-like properties.

Between them they have more practical experience in making such an ambitious scheme work on a PC than anyone else. So last month we reunited Benoit and Dominic at Menlo Park's Applewood Pizza for reminiscences about Be, and some low-down on file systems and databases...

The Register | Xbox: 'Microsoft has its teeth kicked in'

Leave it to EA's ever-controversial president John Riccitiello to put the boot. According to El Ricco, by way of Blooomberg, "Microsoft has had its teeth kicked in, in both Europe and Japan". Ouch. This may help explain why EA has been quietly shuffling all of their European Xbox releases further back into the summer for the last few weeks...

I have used several quotations in the past on my (dormant) Radio website from the motivational quotes of the day site but AFAIK have complied with their conditions of use by citing them as the original source.

I was therefore somewhat surprised today to get an e-mail from one of the 'authors' of a one line quote asking that I take it off the Radio weblog page. I have no problem with someone asking me to do that and I have 'deleted' it from that day's page. The reason for the request was that they expected to get paid for every use of the quote.

I guess I can't argue with that but it's a strange old world when one-line quotations become commodities. It got me think about quotations. Are they only of interest if they have originated from a 'celebrity' of some sort? Can you only be motivated by someone famous? Hmmm!