I have reason to believe that some people don't like this new sponsorship era of sponsoring people to do anything before they've actually done it (as opposed to just pledging). If you people are out there waiting to give me money for Dry July, I will observe that is is now August.

Quick recap: Dry July, do not drink alcohol in the month of July. Fundraiser for the Prince of Wales hospital. Sponsor me here, it's a sure thing now that July is actually over.

I sadly can't regale you with tales of the new perspective on life that doing this gave me, except that opportunities to drink are offered to me more frequently than I realised prior to Dry July. I probably had about eight active offers of a drink during the month (including the Tuesday night drinks I go to every week). Andrew and I almost never drink at home: I don't think we have had a drink without guests over since New Year, so I hadn't thought it was so many. In a normal month I would probably have turned down only four or five of those opportunities rather than every one of them. It is an annoying feeling, I remember feeling much the same during linux.conf.au, when I couldn't drink because of a medication interaction.

I drank more on the weekend than I usually would: one glass of wine Friday, and then 600 mL of beer (it was a Bavarian beer tasting thing, three 200 mL samples) followed by a cocktail on Saturday. My tolerance for alcohol does not appear especially affected by the month of abstinence, which makes sense considering my low exposure anyway.

I intend to change my drinking habits not at all long term as a result of Dry July. But hopefully the hospital is a tiny bit richer.

Public service announcement: I'm on holidays and effectively unreachable until August 29, unless you're in the select group of people who I've already given emergency personal/technical contact details to. (Yes! The cool kids!)

If there was something I was meant to do for you before I left... to be honest it's probably already too late to remind me.

There seems to have been a run of blog recommendations while I was away (Catie, Kirrily, Nicholas, Penny). And Blog Day is tomorrow. The time is ripe, and here are some newer things from my feed reader. If for some reason you want the complete, insane, truth, I can help with that too.

I'll start out as I intend to continue, by flat-out cheating: The Dancing Sausage Web Journal and Gumbaby. Everything old is new again (even things called 'web journals') and so Gus cleaned out the spam from the DSWJ and is oiling the joints. People at uni were super impressed that I actually knew the person rescuing end-of-lifed dead trees and I didn't even have to tell them that I once bought the t-shirt.

You'll need to have a passing level of serious interest in MediaWiki-enabled Free Culture to enjoy Brianna Laugher's All The Modern Things, but I have, and so, I do.

It might just be a passing fancy because I've found Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) such a... interesting experience, but I've been not-so-secretly enjoying the Linux Hater's Blog.

I really do not care very much about Bill O'Reilly, but I started reading Marc Andreessen recently and except for the Bill O'Reilly it's been pretty interesting. He's probably the only blogger I read who has ever gone and asked attorneys for help with an article and it was well worth it.

Matthew Paul Thomas writes only very occasionally about software usability but when he does tech bloggers throw him parties.

I used to read Megan at From the Archives, where she begged and pleaded for a new commenting culture of loving kindness, and wrote about exercise, sunshine, dating and engineering. Now I read her with her friend Sherry at Rhubarb Pie, where they've given up on comments, and on the idea of addressing their readers directly, and instead are writing letters to each other. Sometimes they're about exercise, sunshine, dating and engineering. I wish I'd had this idea first. And that I knew either of these women.

A White Bear at Is there no sin in it? thinks and feels subtly differently from me about just about everything: I'm not really used to subtle challenges to my thoughts about research and teaching and relationships.

Julia at Here Be Hippogriffs (and Mom Moment) has three children, two of whom are twins. She was pregnant in total thirteen times. Yeah. Eleven miscarriages. The first thing people ask me when I try and persuade them to read this is whether she's totally mad. I don't know her, I have no idea, but they did, for the record, know the cause of the miscarriages and the odds were better than that. Anyway, she had eleven miscarriages and has infant twins and a nerdy six year old, and she still has time to be gently, amusingly dry.

There are basically two feminism things I talk about with the AussieChix these days. One of them is Dorothea Salo's Grunchy stuff (The sickening grunch: There it was—the sickening grunch as I landed involuntarily back in my body—and not my entire body, either, but specific parts of it.) and the other is Shapely Prose.

See also previous versions of these from me: Australian blog awards (2005) and Blog Day (2006). And PS, Martin, I still miss sourcefrog...

A link that I've passed on to other people enough to warrant putting it here: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site by the Yahoo Exceptional Performance Team. They have a Firefox extension YSlow to identify likely problem areas for you.