Wishes and thoughts go out to the staff and players of the Togo international football team, and their families/friends after their bus was hit by gunfire whilst travelling from the DR Congo to Angola for the African Nations Cup (link to the BBC story here).

Having said that why did the organisers schedule games for a part of the country where there is a “war of independence” ongoing (according to BBC News – I know nothing about Angola!)?  That seems like utter madness to me.

I hope that no players or staff have been seriously injured or worse.

It’s fair to say, I think, that they do not get along.  And it’s not just the difference in political outlook either…

Tory Bear has started a “Get Kerry Out” campaign, the website for which has just gone live in the last few minutes and can be found here.  It seems that plenty of people are supporting the campaign, including the man that politicians love to hate…Guido Fawkes.

Personally I know enough from what I’ve read, from both sides of the coin, to know that there is likely good reason for this campaign, though I want to find out more before I display a “Get Kerry Out” logo on my site!!  But if the campaign achieves it’s aims, then there will be one less “Labour Twitter Tzar” and £400-per-month food expense claimer in Parliament come June…

OK, so as is tradition, what do I intend to do differently in 2010 as compared to 2009?

Well, I have 3!

1.  To get my PhD back on track and  be ready to write the Thesis by Christmas 2010

2.  To take charge!

3.  To have (even more) fun.

Title says it all I guess.  2009 is gone and 2010 is here…I wonder if anyone has slipped from calling the year “two-thousand-and-nine” into “twenty-ten” rather than “two-thousand-and-ten”…?

Anyway, all the best to you all for the New Year.  May it be safe, prosperous and joyous for you all.

For the first time, this website and blog actually has a Blog Roll all of it’s own.  I’ve sat back, envious for too long at the blog rolls that have appeared on other blogs.  Like most of my site it will be improved, probably quite dramatically, in a short amount of time.

But for now some of the blogs that I read on a daily basis have been added.  They are the blogs written by Charlotte Gore, Tory Bear, Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes and Mike Smithson.  So, whilst it is certainly no honour to be on the blog roll of a PhD student like me, congratulations to them for catching my interest I guess.  More are to follow.

I’ve decided, after thinking about it for a while, to migrate the whole of my website to WordPress.  Basically I think it offers far more options in terms of site configuration while at the same time it removes the need for me to spend a lot of time thinking about the website.

The main reason for this is that I’ve got so much work to do at the moment – having taken a fair chunk of time off after a family bereavement recently, and the PhD having stalled for a long while before that.  So this removes me having to think seriously about re-writing the website to make it look better!  It should take me a few hours over the weekend to get all the content back from the previous version of the website (which you can probably still access).  Most of the content will be easy to replace and update, and there will be some improvements in terms of available content.

In terms of content the one difficulty however will be the previous blogposts.  The blog was written in b2evolution, and I’m looking in to ways of migration but as I’m going to be really busy over the next year or so I won’t wait to make these changes just in case I never get round to doing the total post migration from b2evolution to WordPress.

Last but not least, I hope you enjoy the new layout of the site, and the content that might well appear over the next year or so.