Crums

Up My Street is in administration. This is a terrible awful thing to happen for so many reasons. Primarily it affects some of my best friends, and that's more important than anything, the job market being as it is.

Secondly, however it must not be underestimated what a huge blow this must be to Stef whose personal crusade is the distribution of information that matters to the masses. Faxyourmp would never have happened without Upmystreet. Faxyourmp could not have happened without Upmystreet.

And beyond even the personalisation of the bitter disappointment is the mere fact of it's existence. It's a beautiful concept. One of the purest web concepts I've ever seen: taking a small input box, just your postcode, and giving you at least the beginning of your own, personal portal of information. The idea could have been expanded on so far and so clearly.

I remember three years ago trying to show my employers and for them to "get" the whole local information revolution; that a single input box on the front page could lead the user to personalised info that is uniquely UK oriented. "Personalisation" - or to put it more bluntly, the clunky and frankly hilarious "Push" concept is misused and misunderstood by just about everyone who ever touches it. Upystreet is surely one of the few concepts that actively utilised the personal interests of its users in a way that made sense. Particularly since the launch of Conversations, which is a wonderful concept which has only just started to take off.

It's so sad, it's desperate.

Meanwhile children die in Iraq, I suppose.

Paranoia of the day. Well. There isn't one, actually. I had a funny pain sitting in a car last night around my left ovary but these days I can never tell if it's front action or back action. I'm trying my hardest to feel less conscious of going to the loo. And generally speaking, things are just kind of... ok!

I had to give up eating some mango chutney last night, the raw onions and chutney tasted so strong I couldn't stomach them at all. We'd ordered Indian so I had tarka saag dhall and mushroom rice, beginning to suss that extreme flavours aren't really going down too well at the moment. Having said that though, my stir fry the other day had plenty o'chilli in it and it seemed delicious at the time. Ach, it seems to change hourly.

Meanwhile, bedtime has now clearly moved to 10.30 or even 10, and I'm still waking up tired at 7, sometimes (like this morning) waking up in a flurry again twenty minutes later. I'm feeling generally a bit zonko'd today. I'm going to take a picture of my arm, from which I had the test the other day. It's bruised as *hell* I'm telling you! I look like a drug addict, I realised in a meeting today!

As I type, I am being told by the receptionist at the Doc's surgery that my Progesterone levels are "normal" whatever that means! So I'll discuss it with ye doktor on Tuesday. Meanwhile it gives me a green light to phone up my friend the Herbalist.

Enough, already!