Mother Russia

My dad is back from Russia now, reinforcing Whitney's belief that he is an international spy, but in reality (or at least his cover story) he was visiting a university there. Various journalists were fascinated that a professor named Newton was coming to the Chernsomething Institute of Technology, so he was interviewed for a number of television channels and fed on the Russian diet, which is in his words "Stodgy pancakes and stodgy doughballs. They're very good at eating stodge".

He's brought me back a glaringly red T-shirt with the word "Russia" on it, which will ensure that I'm taken for an evil communist when I live in America. The back of the packet said "As every stitch has been done cautiosly. You can get more brilliant looking when you put on this garment", as if I needed that anyway.

I was organising more testing appointments this week at work, and will probably be doing the same for the next week as well. I've met most of the testers now - there's a clear difference between their methods. Some of them are very tentative and want to be prompted through the process, while some - most notably one of the technical people from the Aberdeen Business School - leap right in and give a huge list of minor HTML errors that need to be corrected as well as sweeping suggestions for changing the whole operation of the site. He also insists on uploading Liberal Democrat manifestos for all his test files. You can read into that what you will.