Although he's been playing well and his work rate cannot be faulted, the one area you expect a £20m striker to perform is in front of the goal. Whilst not taking the amount of time that Peter Crouch did to notch up his first goal for the club, I've been surprised at the lack of comment made in the press about his lack of goals.

That said, he looked every bit the part as he took advantage of West Brom's defence for his 2 goals on Saturday. Hopefully this will spur him on and he'll be able to take some of the goal scoring duties from Torres.

Once again, Rafa Benitez showed little concern for bringing off a player on a hat-trick, despite the team looking comfortable (how often has he done this?) The roar that went up around the ground has Torres came on shows the level to which the crowd missed 'El Nino', but the rest of the team can be proud that despite his absence we're still going toe-to-toe with Chelsea at the top of the league!

As a result of moving some of the time over to develop using Ubuntu, and using gEdit a lot as a result, I have attempted to port the Intype snippets across to gEdit. Though not identical to the ones for Intype, they're pretty close and hopefully people will find them useful!

The original bundle available for Textmate / E-TextEditor is available from Start Up Web 2.0

Tab triggers

With the release of Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10), I've decided that now is the time to finally give linux another go.

Having spent the last 2 years avoiding Linux as much as possible since a rogue installation auto mounted and subsequently destroyed one of my Windows partitions I decided to tread carefully with the latest release. Finding out that the install CD didn't like booting on my HP laptop (not a great impression!), I installed it first using VMware using direct access to my external disk.

Once installed, I booted directly off the external HDD and (apart from having to keep a key pressed until loaded, again not confidence inspiring!) Ubuntu found all of my hardware nicely once I'd compiled the NVidia X driver. I've managed to install the essentials (LAMP, Amarok, etc.) and was pleasantly surprised it didn't take too much effort to get the Wireless going with madwifi! I took a (much overdue) backup of my data before allowing Linux to see my Windows partitions, but I'm happy to say that after a little tweaking Ubuntu didn't manage to damage anything!

The installation has been upgraded a few times, and since Intype won't work properly under Wine, and gEdit doesn't really give me what I want, now all I have to do is figure out what I'm going to use Ubuntu for.

I'll have to admit it, we've had some great results over the last few months. Some deserved, others not. Optimistic about our chances after the beating of Chelsea, I think a little complacency set in against Spurs. That said, the defeat to Spurs wasn't altogether unexpected. They're bound to have been buoyed by the arrival of Redknapp, and I don't believe will finish the season at the wrong end of the table.

The players have the chance to put that right over the next few weeks as the number of matches pile up - and though we're still short of Manchester United's depth, at least Rafa has got a team together that seems to be heading in the right direction, and closer to that elusive 19th Premiership title!

Another year, another month ahead of frantic noveling for thousands of people! And this is a very special year. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, and singularly responsible for the world's coffee and RedBull shortages, National Novel Writing Month is a great event.

After failing to complete NaNoWriMo 2006 and 2007, I'm not even going to attempt to do it this time. Having said that, the approach of NaNoWriMo this year has given me inspiration for the novel I'd like to write 'one day'. Whether that day will ever come, I don't know yet! So for this year I will simply offer support and encouragement from afar (and on the forums) until the fantastic efforts of those taking part this year come to a close.

For more information, check out the National Novel Writing Month website. You'd probably be more successful than me!