What is it about yellow? Are people afraid of it? Is it (and this has just occurred to me) the association of it with cowardice? Last weekend Wexford played Cork and Tipperary played Kilkenny in the hurling and I heard Wexford's colours referred to as purple and gold and Tipp's as being blue and gold. It's yellow folks. Yellow. (oh and Kilkenny? It's orange, not amber). I know in heraldry silver is argent and red is claret or what have you, but these are county colours for All-Ireland teams. No fancy talk now. It's yellow.

It also annoys me when people say the Irish flag is green white and gold. It's not. It's green white and orange. Apart from a) the affectation and b) the fact that gold is used to make yellow fancy, not orange, it also shows an ignorance of the history of the flag. The flag was modeled on the French tri-colour and the idea was that the two traditions in Ireland could co-exist. This has, sadly, proved a bit optimistic, but to deny the orange in the Irish flag, is to deny some Irish their traditions.

Admittedly the traditions defined today by the colour orange are not necessarily ones you'd want to embrace, but the sentiment of co-existence is one that deserves to be fostered.

Or firewall machine died on Friday. This meant no internet, but it also had other ramifications. For years we had a semi-autonomous existence; we had our own email system, local LAN and so on. Gradually over the years the corporate policies were introduced and various IT systems were centralised and rationalised and circumcised.

The last vestige of independence we had was our local connection to the internet. With the death of the firewall the last reason to keep the local access has been lost and all our systems now come in under the larger corporate umbrella. This means losing access to my personal email for one thing, and (I think) access to AIM and things of that ilk. It also means crappy slow networks and a dependency on the IT team in Manchester of somewhere like that when Things Go Wrong (IT Problems from Hell -- Tonight on ITV). As they do (see Friday). It also means the loss of most of the remaining Unix boxen we have and sic transit gloria mundi.

Things just ain't what they used to be.

I use Fog Creek's City Desk to maintain this site. Due to the fact that I update every blue moon or so (which occur more often than you think) I had been making do with the free version and doing a redesign whenever I reached the file limit. I had decided to upgrade to the home version which supported more files but I hadn't got around to it. I then learned that bone fide owners of the home version would get a free upgrade to the full version (unlimited files) when version two came out.

I took the hint, (even though it makes me feel like a cheapskate) and since the image no longer takes up a precious file slot, I can show you this: