I heard about this via LifeHacker and immediately knew I had to add it to my Mac system: a system-wide ad blocker. I’ve long been frustrated that there’s no obviously good Ad Blocker for Safari, as there is for Firefox (Adblock Plus). But now you can install GlimmerBlocker, which works for all browsers, for all apps that use Safari under the hood (eg, my favoured news reader NetNewsWire), and any mobile devices using the internet connection from the Mac. Result!

Following an idea passed on by Seth Godin, I decided to give a donation to Wikipedia. After all who has broadband and doesn’t use it most days to look up and learn all sorts of things? So much so that they get 50,000 requests every second! Serving that takes about 300 servers around the world: those by themselves aren’t that cheap, but I imagine paying for their bandwidth is much more expensive. (If you want more details on the architecture see James Hamilton’s blog posting.)

We have also made a donation to Christian Aid this Christmas in lieu of sending Christmas Cards to local friends.

We’ve had Maggie for 10 weeks now, and yesterday we measured her weight again as we do most weeks. (Thanks, MacDonalds Vets!) She’s now only 24kg, down from 31kg when we first knew her. That’s almost a quarter of her weight in just 10 weeks. Don’t try this at home, folks — or at least not without a vet on the case!

When we first got her (in footstool pose):

10 weeks later (in watchdog pose):

OK, not that dramatic from these pics, but she can now jog a bit, and also jump up to greet you, neither of which she could for the first month.

For Martha’s birthday we went to the Town Hall to hear the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

The high point was Boris Giltburg tackling Rachmaninov’s glittering 2nd Piano Concerto – Martha’s favourite piece of music. But we liked Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony too, particularly the second half. The evening started with an Overture from Hansel and Gretel by Humperdinck. We’d not heard that either before.

The evening finished with a warning form the conductor about walking home on the ice and suggesting the best way to travel in mid-winter was to take a … Sleigh Ride. I’d forgotten what a entertaining piece it was, complete with whip sounds, and it was a lovely gift to leave on.

There was a decent-sized audience: probably 2/3 of the 900 seats were filled. But from my vantage point in the gallery I could see the tops of most people’s heads, and there was a definite grey-white colour scheme. Cheltenham has a lot of retired people with spare cash, so that isn’t a surprise. But I think there were only a handful of people under 40. (Indeed, there were more under 40s on the stage, but only just.) This should be making the orchestras nervous, particularly with a popular programme like Rach and Tchaik. Whilst they might be younger on average, if a quarter of their Cheltenham audience isn’t going to be around in 10 years, and another quarter in 20 years, can their kinds of concerts be sustained?

The other surprise was looking to see just how many of the men were showing more or less “male-pattern baldness”. Rather too many for comfort. Next time perhaps we should sit on the ground floor, so I won’t get distracted by all this audience watching!

First night we ate at Pad Thai, which was without frills, and had good soup and a hot green curry. A few steps beyond it is the Ram’s Head Tavern, a micro-brewery, with a restaurant as well. Our meals there were good to excellent, and their Copperhead Ale went down nicely, too.

The next day we landed up visiting Annapolis Mall, and tried Chipotle. Turns out to be like Subway, except creating Mexican burritos etc. to eat in or take away. Thumbs up from all of us.

Back in Annapolis near the harbour we had an evening meal at McGarveys. There I tried a “Panko encrusted mahi” – whatever that means – with excellent results. (You can tell the iPhone is getting popular: at the next table were 3 people each with their iPhones in different coloured protective skins …)

Trying to avoid Starbucks and give some trade to the independents, we had post-meal had hot drinks at the City Dock Coffee house. This was a great find – friendly (but not in the cheesy way we Brits tend to find), artily untidy and with good drinks. The only room for improvement would be to serve the drink-in customers with real cups or mugs, not plastic ones.

Continuing the theme, on Saturday I had lunch in 49 West Coffee house, where I had a fantastic Crab Nicoise salad, listening to a jazz band practising in the back. Then over a just-right Mocha, I started reading 360 degree preaching. I felt all this was deserved after going for one of my longest jogs yet.

Over the bridge we tried Rockfish, an up-market Surf and Turf place. Good decor, reasonable service, and more very good food. The only downside was getting asked for ID before they’d serve us any wine. As usual I’d not wanted to carry it and deliberately left it locked up in the hotel safe. I managed to blag my way around this, leaning heavily on my British accent in the process.

[Why don't I want to carry ID? I don't in the UK, so it feels very strange having to in the US. But that's not a good reason by itself. Certainly having to show ID when using credit cards should cut down on some kinds of fraud by. This happens in many stores, but not in restaurants or supermarkets. Makes no sense. But what irks me most is that often I'm told that it's for my safety or security -- when it's not. It might be for the stores' protection (reducing fraudulent use of credit cards) or avoiding a restaurant losing its license for serving alcohol to under-agers. But it's not directly helping me. Explanation over.]