Photos of the quail chicks taken a few minutes ago (8pm). The oldest hatched last night, making it less than 24 hours old.

We have some quail eggs in an incubator and they weren't due to hatch til tomorrow (friday). Two of them hatched yesterday evening and a third hatched overnight.

I'd forgotten how small they are when they hatch, but when you check the size of the quail eggs this shouldn't be a surprise.

Our original three hatchlings from before Christmas are all doing ok and are almost as large as their parents.

Whenever we have a loaf of bread which has started to go dry, we usually take it to work to feed to the ducks and geese by the lake. We had the dry crusts from the ends of the loaf and took them with us today.

Alongside the usual ducks, there were a couple of grey geese which didn't seem to be interested in the bread. They clustered around us while we fed the ducks but they didn't eat. One of them kept looking up into the sky, as if it could see something.

I turned round to see what it was looking at, but I couldn't see anything in the air behind me.

I was searching for some information about the Cray Y-MP computer. The article I found was a PDF scan of an old paper. The OCR seems to have got slightly confused. I didn't realise there was a Crap 2 computer or a Gay Y-MP.

We have to be careful what we feed the Degus. They aren't allowed anything with much sugar in it, so we limit them to the bought food (Degu food isn't available in our local pet shops so we buy chinchilla food - they have similar dietary requirements) with the occasional bit of vegetable.

This morning we gave them some of the fenugreek biscuits which the hamsters seem to like. They seemed to like them. Emile had a nibble on one when he found them. When we got the Degus out tonight, Remy smelt of curry, much like the Roborovski hamsters do when they eat them.

TGI-Fridays Mac and Cheese Bites: Take one unhealthy meal, form into cubes, cover in breadcrumbs and deep fry to make it even more unhealthy. Serve with a tasty tomato relish.

TGI Fridays food might not be terribly classy but it does manage to be tasty, especially their ice-cream based cocktails. This time we finally managed to have one of their 'Strawberry Shortcake' cocktails. On previous visits they had always been missing one of the key ingredients, usually the strawberries.

It was good to see our friend Ben on Channel 5 tonight, in a programme about the World Memory Championships. He's written extensively about it on his blog so I won't bore you with the details here.

It was good to see him wearing the t-shirt which Emma bought for him a couple of years ago. He referred to it as his lucky t-shirt and he tries to wear it sometime during the competitions.

We've been watching the Hugh's Chicken Run programme on Channel 4 (final part tonight) where Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall highlights the plight of intensively farmed chicken.

The aim of the programme and campaign is to encourage people to buy free range chicken. In the programme he created a chicken barn according to industry standards, to illustrate the conditions the birds have to endure.

I just wish the website wasn't so annoying, with 'sign up' banners making beeping and honking noises all the time. The banner below (which you can click on to sign the petition) is one of the less annoying ones. It only beeps when someone new signs up.

1. Don't fry mackerel. It will make both the kitchen and the pan smell for hours.
2. It is very dusty in our attic.
3. The Mail on Sunday has recently gone up to £1.50.

Just in case any of our parents are reading, earlier today we didn't go to the RSPCA. We didn't get 2 degus and bring them home. We didn't put them in an enormous cage which Emma didn't buy and which doesn't take up most of the living room.

We haven't called them Remy and Emile, after the rats in the film Ratatouille.

Remy (with Emile in the background)

Emile

The Degus had originally been confiscated from a pet shop in the Birmingham area. They had been kept in overcrowded conditions and there had been some fighting. This is probably how Emile lost the tip of his tail.

Remy sometimes sits very still and acts as if he can't see you. The staff at the RSPCA thought he might be blind but most of the time he seems ok. It's as if he has occasional absence seizures which stop if you pick him up.

I have never had a positive experience with DRM (Digital Rights Management). I can appreciate why content producers use it, to restrict unlimited copying of their copyrighted materials, but in my experience it just doesn't work.

Part of the problem is that it relies on proprietary (and possibly untrustworthy) software which often demands a specific computer setup. The original version of the BBC iPlayer insisted on Windows XP and the latest version of Media Player. Pretty much the same configuration was specified for Channel 4's 4OD system. Despite my computer complying with all of the requirements, neither system would work on it. I never managed to work out why. I eventually managed to get iPlayer to work on my new laptop.

At least the BBC now let you watch episodes on-line, using Flash and streaming, but XP/Media Player are still required if you want to download episodes. Downloading or streaming is usually only available for a week after broadcast, but downloading has the edge because you then get 28 days to watch the episode, which is handy if you don't have time to watch an episode straight away.

My main gripe with DRM is the complete lack of control I get. I cannot copy episodes to a portable media player, so I can only watch them on my laptop pc (which I can't connect to my TV) rather than on my Creative Zen (which I can).

I have had TV episodes 'expire' and refuse to play, despite the download library claiming I had several days left on the 'licence'. The worst experience was with music I downloaded from the '3 Music Store'. All of the music files were infested with DRM and somehow the licence files managed to get corrupted. All the files I had downloaded during the last year or so suddenly refused to play. The backup licence also failed to work. One good thing about the 3 Music Store is that it allows you to re-download the files at a later date. This only worked if I downloaded the files on my other computer, but at least I managed to get the files working again.

I will never consider buying any music or video which contains DRM (the '3' files were downloaded as part of the monthly allowance with my phone contract). There is no way I'll pay for music where somebody has the ability to deny me access to it. I'd rather buy a CD or DVD which should work on different machines, won't force me to upgrade my computer before playing and would be less likely to suddenly stop working.

We had a quiet night in for the new year. We watched TV, had a few drinks, opened a bottle of Cava to celebrate midnight. We were going to get some champagne but our nearest supermarket (the ever so classy Asda) didn't have any on offer.

They did have several cheese hampers half price. The one we bought had a posh bottle of cider, two cheeses (one mature and one smoked cheddar) and a jar of chutney. The cheeses and chutney will be added to the ones we bought before Christmas and haven't eaten yet. We didn't think we had bought too much food but we've got lots of potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, cheese, chutney, party snacks, cake and mince pies left over.

We bought a lot of different drinks as well, because we knew we'd be having a lot of visitors. Thankfully it's all stuff we'll drink ourselves, although there is also a bottle of sherry (dry, not the awful sweet stuff). I had a few glasses of it in the run up to midnight and mentioned that I was getting a taste for it and might consider buying a better bottle to try next time. Emma muttered some comment about being gay... I'm sure you don't have to be gay to drink sherry. It's perfectly acceptable for men to drink other fortified wines such as port, but maybe that's because that's made from red wine and sherry is from white. It's well known that men drink red wine and women drink white...

After midnight we went outside to watch some fireworks which looked like they were coming from a neighbouring street. I had bought a skateboard for Emma for Christmas, so we also had a go on that in the street (while it was quiet and there were no cars around). I think more practice is needed. While neither of us fell off, we both looked fairly incompetent at it.