We don’t – by a long chalk – go to all the events run by our clients; but somehow it has fallen out that in the past two weeks we have been at the three launch events run by Smokestack to celebrate their two latest books.

We started at the Lit & Phil for the launch of Tom Kelly’s The Wrong Jarrow, poems about the people who built the ships and mined the coal and were left behind when the industry went, echoing around the sedate shelves of the private library.

Next came the Teesside launch, in the Teesside branch of Borders bookshop, a busy store with a constant flow of customers peering curiously down from the staircase to listen to a little poetry without having to commit themselves. Tom Kelly found himself explaining that his poem, The Wrong Jarrow, had as its starting point Andy Willoughby’s The Wrong California in the presence of Andy Willoughby himself, and Ellen Phethean read from her novel-in-poems, Wall, impersonating in turn a teenage girl, a family of refugees, dad in his pigeon cree and a gaggle of lads getting high in the park.

Charlie Hardwick (left) and Ellen Phethean at Seven Stories

Finally came Ellen’s own launch, in the attic of Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books, a magical space (especially for people of below average height) webbed with the beams of the old warehouse in which the Centre is built. Wall grew in part from Ellen’s residency at the Centre, and she had assembled a team of the people she had worked with there to read teenage Kylie and her family.

Three entirely different events, two good books, and it all counts as work!

We do what we can to protect ourselves and our clients from spam; all the sites we host have SpamAssassin software, and we take care not to publish e-mail addresses in a form in which they are easily recognised by spammers. But spammers are ingenious people – fortunately they sometimes use their ingenuity in unproductive ways. Roger recently produced this list of false names used by the senders of e-mails which had been trapped by one client’s spam filter:

Reconciling V. Mariachi
Courtrooms F. Perspire
Leukemia F. Stumpier
Wardroom V. Neat
Mooting S. Perry
Trustiest L. Narrower
Muscatel J. Brontosaurus
Childbearing V. Svengali
Celtic H. Marxisms
Signed Q. Shadows
Hop H. Woodpeckers
Intemperate O. Easterly
Rifling E. Bethe
Intimated R. Tilled
Blemished U. Bethought
Arena A. Agglutinating
Awl R. Sequoya
Electromagnet M. Vats
Sucker D. Sorrel
Radioisotope H. Mowgli
Disparates G. Mousey
Unwariest C. Assad
Remainder V. Violent
Speckle T. Sprite
Modicum B. Powder
Kaleidoscope S. Disconnections
Kerry R. Reappointment
Bobwhites H. Doorbells
Extenuation K. Flushing
Garrisons U. Haphazard
Bombshell O. Norberto
Nonobjective L. Enumerable

As long ago as 2002, we started inviting clients to consider blogging, keeping an on-line diary, as one of the features they might want on their web site (we even wrote a Spotlight article on the subject). And I’ve been keeping a personal blog at Livejournal for very nearly two years.

So what made us decide now that we need a company blog?

Ten days ago, over breakfast, Roger read me from the Guardian about the discovery of a coin showing the profile of Cleopatra. “You realise,” he said, “that the coin belonged to a client of ours – ‘an unknown member of the Society of Antiquaries‘, it says here.”

“If we had a blog, I’d blog that,” I said.

The more I thought about that, the more sense it made. Our clients do all sorts of interesting things, and often have pieces of news we’d like to share. And Roger frequently e-mails me technical advice, or we send each other funny things we’ve come across while looking for something else.

That’s what we’ll be posting here.

A client called: she was totally unable to browse the Internet though emails were still getting through. At first it seemed as if her browser had been hijacked or a virus had infected her PC. Now, we design websites not do remote support for PCs, but I offered some basic advice over the telephone (she lives about 250 miles from Durham). This proved fruitless so I said I was sorry but she would have to seek help locally.

This she did, at some expense, and it turns out that Norton firewall was blocking Internet Explorer. I infer that Internet Explorer 7 had been automatically downloaded by Microsoft, and Norton had not authorised this new program. She asked me to post this information here so the next person to hit this “feature” would be better informed.

For our part, we use Panda antivirus software.

Durham Castle and Cathedral in the mist

Originally uploaded by Roger Cornwell.
We are based in Durham City. I have been living here for thirty-five years now, but views like this, less than half a mile from our home, still take my breath away.