I'm going over to Washington tomorrow for a few weeks to visit my mother, who has had another operation; probably going up to New York for a few days the second week of February. Might have another brunch somewhere in DC if anyone would like to come.

Meanwhile, a minor annoyance: spilled a drink on my MacBook a couple of weeks ago, had to replace. The good news: the new MacBook had Snow Leopard; it was possible to install Creative Studio ME, which I had previously only been able to install on the older Powerbook which was running on Tiger. The bad news: now that I have transferred all my Sites files over to the new machine, I am unable to connect to the server, and none of the sites turn up in the Files panel when I try to Manage Sites - even though there is no problem opening the files. (Somewhat unfortunately, the last time I did anything much with Dreamweaver was back in 2006.)

I wondered whether there might be a reader in either the DC area or in NYC who is au fait with Dreamweaver and would be willing to sit down with me and these luckless machines; it would be nice, obviously, if I could do everything on one.

Facebook makes good

A town has emptied its library in a bid to fight plans to close it down.

People in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, have spent the week withdrawing their maximum allowance of books in protest against council plans to close it as part of budget cuts.

And today they said the plan had been a success, with all 16,000 books withdrawn from the library.

Today, as they celebrated the empty shelves, Emily Malleson from Friends of Stony Stratford Library (FOSSL) said they were amazed at how everyone in the town had pulled together.

She said it was calculated that books were being checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour - smashing the usual rates. (the rest here)

[ achieved partly through an enterprising Facebook campaign]