The UK 1901 census has finally come online. After months of waiting, we now have access to records we wanted. Inevitably, the information will probably generate more questions than it answers.

I've been thinking about this line of Gorners on my mother's side. The earliest ancestor we have traced is a John Gorner in Wigan who was born in 1796. There's quite an extensive tree that all stems from this one man. There are those that emmigrated, those that were imprisoned, those that had children out of wedlock (gasp) and presumably numerous lost stories.

I do know some stories about my great-great grandfather. From a distant relative, whose father knew my great-great grandfather, I know that he worked on his farm until very late at night and then was down the mine by dawn. He owned quite a lot of land and made quite a bit of money. He started businesses for his children that let them all make a living. However, when he died, the money disappeared from half of the kids (including my great-grandfather) and there is much speculation about why this happened. At one point, those that had been forgotten or conned were virtually destitute (to the point where my grandfather could remember being physically in pain due to hunger) and the fortunate ones did nothing to help. A rift developed and half the family wouldn't even acknowledge the other half's existence.

In addition to the scandal of the Gorner money, there was bad blood due to religious divisions as can be evidenced from half of the family being buried in C of E churchyards and the rest in Catholic ones. There were also divisions due to marriage (my grandfather married an Austrian just after the second world war).

The Gorners appear to have come from around the Preston area and then spread to Wigan and on to Yorkshire. To this day, they are still primarily in Wigan and around York and Leeds, with a few in Lincoln and Somerset. The current generation have just about as varied circumstances as their predecessors.

Knowing what I know about the recent generations, and speculating about some of the previous generations, I think I could create quite the novel, complete with every ingredient imaginable. I don't anticipate that my ancestors have any more of a colorful history than any other family, but the fact that I know all these people's names and what they did, where they did it and when they died means there's an element of reality for me.

The same person whose father knew my great-grandfather found a court judgement from the 1700s that cites a Gorner having impregnated a servant. The child was put into care and the Gorner in question ordered to pay some amount towards the upkeep of the child. Incredibly, the mother was ordered to pay more than the father.

That is where I would start...a raucous pub (maybe the Bull) in Newton-le-Willows on a summer night in the early 1700s. A grizzled young coal miner falls out of the pub with a giggling servant girl and they stagger home over Lowton moss. In the heat, passions run high and nine months later arrives the son. The genesis of many hundreds of fascinating lives has just happened. Ironic that nearly three hundred years later, I was born in that very town and knew none of my ancestors until I emmigrated.

The following generations build and lose fortunes, the divisions grow and finally, we could stop at my mother's generation and take a snap-shot of what that night in Newton started...the miners, the cannon fodder, the rocket scientists, the teachers, the musicians, the criminals and the enduring name that has become an obsession to me.

It would be easy to let today's blog be consumed by the events of this time last year (given the media) but there's nothing I can say that hasn't been said. So I won't be tempted down that path with all its contradictions, provocations and unfathomable implications for the future.

That said, it's difficult to keep your mind off it given its enormity. I didn't expect to be so preoccupied. I spent the drive into work looking at the beautifully clear blue sky and noting the absence of planes flying in and out of Minneapolis airport. I didn't expect any repeat performance by the perpetrators but I had a feeling that hoaxes would abound - the jury is still out on that.

An email went around the whole company requesting a moment's silence to remember the victims which seemed a reasonable proposal. The statistics state that the circulation list was large enough that there would be one dissenting pedant who would start to point out the 'policies' that have cost other nations many more lives than last year's attack, and the statistics were right. These same statistics also point to the fact that there will be numerous valiant gladiators who will object strongly, and again they were right. After several rounds of exchange, common sense came from the HR department citing the company policy on email usage and a carefully veiled message to shut up.

The point of this little anecdote is that whether the original pedant is correct in his assertions or not, today is not the day to open that can of worms. A whole nation, who weren't brought up listening to IRA attacks day after day, suddenly had to grow up and realise that the world is not your friend no matter how many times you give them an apple. I mean that in the nicest sense; the country is young and not very well traveled. The idealistic teenager came of age. It was inevitable. That kid, now with the proverbial key to the door, is still reeling. Leave them alone and let them be introspective for a while. When they're old enough, they will start to analyze themselves. It is no job for a third-party to adjudicate on; on the other hand, the bully that forced the loss of innocence can be judged on purely moral grounds and will be sentenced accordingly.

Let America weep and grieve. Don't judge, just empathise. There will be time enough for analysis of foreign policy and the American way.

From a Brit in America's perspective, the American way has many benefits. The American way is not what you encounter on TV, at Disneyland or in corporations. At the grass roots of all of this politically correct society, are a bunch of very decent, hard-working people who are sometimes ill-informed when it comes to world affairs. They have the same values as the rest of the world and the same vices. America doesn't hold a monopoly on making mistakes, neither does it hold a monopoly on culpability.

With all that said, I failed in my attempt to avoid the subject. America, let's roll!

Right now, it's like how I imagine New Orleans to be right here in the Tundra. If it were an hour later so a little more dark, I'd expect to smell French food and hear jazz refrains floating along, visibly pulsating in the humidity. The luxury of living in a foreign country allows you to believe you are living anywhere in it, no matter how enormous it is. It's been over 90 degrees here today and the heat, although oppressive, has been welcomed by me, even if the rest of Minnesota has had enough of summer and longs for some discomfort and snow-digging.

A few nights ago, we had the mother of all thunderstorms. Around 02:00, I was awoken by the house literally shaking as lightning bolts grounded themselves within a few hundred yards of the house. I love that cyclical excess of heat and humidity followed by torrential rain, thunder and lightning. There really is nothing like a good storm.

So here I am, sat in my head at least, in Louisiana. And I'm loving every second of being boiled.

For some reason, I found myself thinking of Harrogate earlier this evening. I spent about six months there after my separation from my ex-wife and prior to my move to the US. It was a tough, but enjoyable time. I was working for a start-up company in Skipton and putting in some long hours and Natzoid was a good few thousand miles away. Food was scarce because I don't cook, money was even more scarce as I was paying a mortgage, rent and numerous other bills, but that six months was strangely happy. I must confess that everything but my worklife was completely out of control. I spent what little cash I had on Stella Artois and international phone cards. I have some fantastic memories of Crabtrees next to the church while Natzoid was visiting, Sundays watching the football in various establishments and always returning home to a musky flat on the top floor of a building on a one-way street that had stairs that were too steep for my innebriated self and that required a permit to park outside (that I never got - hence my outstanding parking ticket in the UK). I left a lot of things outstanding in the UK when I left, in many respects. While I remember those days fondly, I suspect that the reason that I see them as being so happy, is purely out of self-defence. The only thing that I had ever prided myself on was the ability to do my job well, and there were a few months during that time, where my job (and the prospect of moving to be with Natzoid) were the only things that stopped me from having a complete breakdown. Strange to look back at that time nearly four years ago and recognise that I was so close to the edge of throwing away many years of education and (not exactly hard) work. And it's weird to think I really gambled with my future because that is something I'd never done before. I lost that particular battle in Harrogate to a lot of beer and wine, but I won the war.

I've just won another personal battle that I don't really want to elaborate on and it feels fantastic. I'm going to sit back in my Mississippi heat and soak it up. After all, within a few weeks, I could be out there with a snow-blower. You know, I might be happier if I didn't need to have a snow-blower and every evening was fans running at full blast and sweat pouring down me. Maybe at the side of a rail-track. With neon lights invading the room. Just like "A Streetcar Named Desire". No particular work hassles, just atmosphere to live on. Like summer evenings in Montmatre, all you would be able to do is sit outside and watch as the world turns, and all you are is an observer. Bliss.

Back to work today after a five day weekend and it was hard going.  I've been in code-writing mode all weekend so going back to communication wasn't that easy. I also probably didn't eat enough over the weekend so my energy levels were a bit low and I felt a little below par.

I can hear the final episode of American Idol from upstairs (I haven't found a decent Linux HTML editor yet but I'm sure I will, so I'm in the basement).  I'm pretty embarrassed that the idiot who devised this kind of mass-appeal drivel is one of my fellow countryman.  What's more, he gets paid an obscene amount of money for producing such tripe.  This is not his only crime either; he is responsible (in varying degrees) for Kylie Minogue, The Spice Girls and numerous other anathema to quality entertainment.

On the same subject of US TV, I used to be proud of BBC America where that bastion of all things respectable broadcasted thoughtful and well-produced programming aimed at those with an IQ that was higher than your average plant.  Sadly, this is not so at present.  Endless re-runs of Changing Rooms and Ground Force are the whole schedule, with an odd So Graham Norton thrown in.  At first, I was slightly amused by the camp old git, but week after week of the same old banal nonsense started to wear me down and now I find myself shaking my head and thinking 'Auntie, you've lost it'.

In my teens and early twenties in the UK, most evenings I could find something interesting on the old box, even with the restriction of 4 channels being broadcast over (gasp) the airwaves rather than being fed down cable.  As the nineties progressed, I found it more and more difficult; the quality degraded and the mindless, lowest common denominator emerged.  In support of this wicked allegation I offer you...Big Brother, Survivor, Fear Factor, London's Burning (and so it bloody well should), endless 'gritty' Northern dramas based in Newcastle where hard working lives were contrasted with the gliterrati.  Complete twaddle the lot of it.

I can identify the exact moment that this house of cards started to fall down...the moment that The Bill went from being an hour-long carefully crafted plot and re-appeared as a thirty minute pseudo-soap.  The reasoning?  The hour was too long for people to concentrate.  I despair for the demise of UK TV and for the emergence of Murdoch's monopoly.

But more so, I despair for a nation who have never been fed what used to be the contents of the British airwaves and can only regard all they see as normal.  As the slide continues into the future, I wonder what my kids will be watching once they've been weaned off the brutality of Rugrats.  It really doesn't bare thinking about...

PS - Kelly won...

OK I am so pleased with myself that I have to share it with the world.  The PHP code that I have been working on has gratified me immensely. For the first time since graduating, I actually feel like I am proficient in the art of coding.  After coding in C on HP UNIX machines for a while, I convinced myself that I wasn't very good at it.  And then when the whole object oriented thing happened, I resigned myself to the fact that I would never be employed as a programmer again (and I really wasn't that bothered).  However, PHP is so clever that it hurts.  Thanks to Webmonkey, a few boring days at Tellabs in 2001 and some inspiration as to how this whole object thing works, I feel like I could do anything with PHP.  For example, take a look at this...

Now, that, my dear old thing, was written to classify my blog hits.  And before we have any comments about reading my own page too much (the .net hits), I was debugging stuff.  And anyone who adds up the percentages and tells me that it doesn't equal 100% will be redirected to /dev/null within milliseconds since I have neither the time or the patience to correct the rounding errors.  To be honest, it annoys me about as much as you don't care in the slightest so I will fix it.

For those that are of a non-techie nature, the above chart was generated using information I store in a database about who visits from where.  I dynamically generate this PNG graphic every time I run the report.

Slap on the back Kenny Lad - you could have made it as a programmer and now you will never need to prove it.  What would I have done had computers not become mainstream during my life?  Probably the same as my grandfather, a coal miner.  Except Margaret Thatcher would have made me unemployed so I'd be on the dole.  So I'd be in England.  Yack.

A recent survey showed that 54% of British people want to emigrate - I wonder why.  It seems my honorable friend Dr Conners is thinking the same thing.  My advice is do it.  I couldn't ever move back.  Be it France, Italy or the US, the world is a hell of a sight better when you leave the shores of Blighty! 

I survived what could have been a bad day yesterday.  Debug awaits.

Ode to my dogs; they're 18 months old now and are probably about as loyal as you could wish.  That doesn't mean that they are not stupid; lordy they are stupid.  Case in point; both Sasha and Stella have red marks on their usually black noses.  "What could have caused this?" Natzoid and I wondered.  The answer became obvious when I noticed that they have a sadly predictable curiosity about the barbeque.  They are dogs; hmm - that smells good so I'll go sniff it - ouch, you burned me you A-hole.

That whole paragraph above would make Kurt Vonnegut cry.  Kurt, I'm sorry.