Wed 2009-04-29 
This is how my daughter Zoe is wearing her school tie this spring. She has probably been doing this all winter but I only noticed when the warmer weather came and she stopped wearing her pullover.
Tue 2009-04-28 
A daisy (Bellis perennis). Photo taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading, UK, on 2009-04-26.
Sun 2009-04-26 This morning I came across some small irridescent green beetles on some dock leaves in Reading University grounds. 'Complete British Insects' by Michael Chinery (Collins, 2005) showed them to be green dock beetles (Gastrophysa viridula). First a lateral view of a male (or unmated female):
A dorsal view of a male (or unmated female):
Next a lateral view of a mated female. Note the bulging black abdomen which is now far too big to be covered by the green elytra (wing cases).
And finally a dorsal view of a mated female.
Sat 2009-04-25 This morning I upgraded my laptop operating system from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. All went smoothly and took under 2 hours (less than I feared). I don't know exactly how long it took because I went out shopping while it was under way (there's confidence for you!) and it was waiting at the "Remove unneeded packages?" screen when I got back.
I have only noticed one problem following the upgrade and that was the graphics in Blender no longer work. However, as I no longer use Blender on the laptop, I just uninstalled it. (Blender is listed as a packge from the "Universe" and so is not officially supported by Canonical Ltd.)
Wed 2009-04-22 
This morning I noticed two of these little flying insects in the woods beside the large lake in Reading University grounds. They were tiny: their wing-span was about 7mm. The black and yellow banding and their hairy bodies suggested to me that they may be bee-mimics, but surely they are too small to fool birds into thinking they might be bees?
At first I assumed these little insects must be moths because of their hairy wings, but I couldn't find anything like them on the UK Moths website. It was only after quite a bit of Googling that I came across a reference to moth flies, a group of primitive dipteran flies. Their classification is, as far as I can take it:
A few years ago we had similar little black flies living in the overflow of our bathroom hand-basin. I didn't take any photos of them but they must have been drain flies which are very similar. However, they all disappeared when I squirted some bleach down the overflow, and have never reappeared.
