For a while Tony had been putting new things he learned up onto his blog. Well I learned something new at the weekend. Scombrotoxin poisoning occurs between 1 and 3 hours of eating scombroid fish, for example mackerel. The microbes that contaminate the fish produce histamine from tryptophan and it is the histimine that causes symptoms such as hot flushing, headache and diarrhoea in the foolish people who eat the fish.

Next time I’d like learn about food poisoning from a book rather than by eating mackerel that had been sitting in the car for too long.

On Wednesday night I went to the technical meeting at Birmingham.pm. The first talk was given by John Pinner. He talked about payTHYME – an open source pay-roll system that Clockwork Software Systems have developed. The thing that interested me most about this system is that it is GPLed and they are planning on making money by selling support. As far as I can remember John said that it has taken them two years to develop. The system is being used by a customer at the minute but there is still more development work to be done as they want it to be certified by the Inland Revenue. I’m not really sure what I think about this business model and would love to know how much money has been put into development to date and how many hours of support they will need to provide to recoup these costs.

The second talk was given by Shevek on protection systems. The talk was well presented but not really my thing. Then Brian gave a presentation on the Fluxx project he is currently working on. This was the first time I had been to a meeting in Birmingham and I really enjoyed myself. After the meeting I was taken to a bar somewhere in Birmingham and then Barbie very kindly left me back to the hotel I was staying in.

I’m tired. I have spent about 12 hours today revising for the law exam I have to sit tomorrow. The course is vast. And because there is so much information I appear to have forgotten the parts of the course that I revised only two weeks ago. I am also having difficulty working out which parts of the course are the relevant parts. How can I tell which of the 40 or so Judicial Review cases are the ones that I am expected to know? I can’t possibly remember them all – and even if I could Judicial Review is only 10% of the course.

The only thing I have in my favour is that there is no way the rest of the people sitting the exam can remember all this either.