It’s great to see someone speak so passionately about maths and statistics in particular. When I was at school, maths was streamed – the brighter ones did the mechanics options and the weaker students were put into the statistics stream.

On the whole, I think having a better understanding of statistics would have been a much better life skill for me.

• Careful Everyone Using Facebook: Your Data is About to Become Public – Thoughts on social media, the web and technology – jungleG
  I really do wish Facebook would stop doing stuff like this. If you have a Facebook profile, you must read this article and check your privacy settings when the new Publisher on your home page kicks in.
  (tags: facebook privacy socialnetworking)
• Tim Dowling: A mobile for your four-year-old? What a bad call … | Technology | The Guardian
  An amusing list of reasons your four-year-old doesn't need a mobile. My favourite: "If you don't know where your four-year-old is, there's no point in ringing him. He doesn't know where he is either."
  (tags: guardian humour news mobile firefly)

Autobiographies written by people aged less than about 80 years old have never really appealed. Anyone much younger than that just doesn’t have the live experience to make for compelling reading, surely?

I was to be proved wrong in that assumption when I was sent Jo Whiley’s autobiography “My World in Motion” to review.

Jo Whiley is a successful Radio 1 DJ who has built her reputation on discovering and promoting the ‘next big thing’ in music. She is a regular co-presenter for the Glastonbury Festival coverage and has a morning show from 10am every weekday.

The first impression of the book is one of overwhelming enthusiasm, spirit and personality. It’s packed full of interesting and often hilarious anecdotes about the music industry and life in the BBC, combined with the balancing act of being part of the Whiley-Morton ‘tribe’. It’s a non-stop ride and as a result the narrative can feel a little disjointed in places, but Jo comes across as someone who is honest, loving and living life with every last ounce of energy that she has.

I greatly enjoyed reading about her family, her childhood with her sister Frances who suffers from cri du chat, and how she juggles her life as a DJ with bringing up four children. Motherhood, work and life balance is hard for many women and while Jo doesn’t claim to have found that balance, she meets the challenge head-on with the passion and vivacity that she throws into every aspect of her life. It makes a refreshing change from the current trend of angst-ridden genre of momoirs.

The absolute best feature of the book, though, is the playlists that are scattered throughout the pages, each themed to a different stage of her life. It was a great trip through memory lane for me as well as I re-discovered tracks I haven’t listened to in years and I strongly suspect I’m going to be spending a lot more on iTunes over the next few weeks as I go back through the book!

Anyway, I can thoroughly recommend this book to any music fan or if you just love to read about other people’s interesting lives. Jo Whiley’s “My World in Motion” is published today by Virgin Books and you can find out more by visiting the My World in Motion website.

If you’re a Twitter user, then you’ll probably be aware that you have a fairly limited area to fill in a personal profile on the site. It can be a bit of a pain, especially if you’re active on lots of different places on the web, or just want to be able to provide more information about yourself.

A new third-party Twitter service was launched today that aims to get around this very problem: profiles.im. The idea is simple – it provides you with an extended public profile to go with your Twitter account. You can fill out as much or as little info as you want, display your recent twitpics, include an rss feed of your blog and show your latest tweets all on one convenient page.

It’s very simple to use, and if at any time you change your mind, you can delete your profile in just three clicks. The developer is Dom Ramsey (of Fotonomy fame) and while the service is quite basic at the moment, he promises me that there are lots of new features on their way. He also welcomes feedback and suggestions – just send him a tweet to @domr or @profilesim.

Oh, and if you’re interested, my profiles.im page can be found here!

I am having so much fun with The Sims 3 at the moment – the AI is so much better than the previous incarnations and the game play is far less linear.

I am often surprised by what my characters get up to and it’s fascinating to watch their lives develop with only a nudge here and there (although, I confess I find it terribly hard to sit back and not constantly interfere… yes, I know… so unlike me!).

Then @akasylvia sent me this wonderful link: Alice and Kev – A Story of Being Homeless in The Sims 3. The idea was to take two Sims, give them lots of negative personality traits and stick them in a lot with nothing more than a bench and a teddy bear and see what happens. It really makes the most of the game’s AI and randomness.

It’s brilliantly funny, awesomely addictive and also a little sad in places. If you have Sims 3 (or any of the previous games or merely considering getting it) then the Alice and Kev blog comes highly recommended.

Akra Jr decided to surprise us all on Saturday by having half of his face expand.

He’d been complaining of a sore gum for a couple of days before, but (as I couldn’t see any sign of inflammation or problems) we’d adopted a wait and see approach with the help of a little bonjela and reminding him to be thorough while cleaning his teeth.

Friday night, he came home from school and asked me if I thought his cheek looked a little swollen. I looked and it did look a little puffy, especially compared to the other side of his face. However, he wasn’t in any pain and again, another inspection of his mouth didn’t show anything unusual. We sent him to bed with a spoonful of children’s nurofen and the resolve to buy some children’s mouthwash in the morning, just in case.

Saturday morning, the swelling was much more pronounced and by lunchtime it looked very scary – the skin was taut as if it was the surface of an oddly shaped balloon inflated to its maximum size. The swelling was along his cheekbone, up by the side of his nose and the underneath of his eye was so inflated that it was pressing on his glasses – it looked like he’d been punched.

I have to say that the out of hours GP service in our area is awesome. We got a swift response and an appointment time (so all our queuing was done in the comfort of our own home, not in a waiting room). The GP was wonderful with Akra Jr, addressing him almost all of the time rather than just speaking over his head to me. We left with a prescription for an appropriate antibiotic and the instructions to see a dentist as soon as possible.

Dentist today was also wonderful – we were seen very quickly with little waiting around. Poor Akra Jr has a teeny cavity at the back of one of his baby molars – I feel gutted, he’s always had excellent teeth up until now. We’ve got the option to try and save the tooth or have it extracted with pros and cons to both. So we just have to decide by the end of the week once the course of antibiotics has finished.

• The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun
  Awesome little video to help you re-evaluate what's important in life.
  (tags: animation creativity life fun philosophy motivation inspiration video)

Somehow, I’ve managed to go a whole week without writing here. It’s mostly been a fairly lethargic week without much interest in anything much, let alone putting words and sentences in order on a computer screen.

It’s not just the blog that’s been neglected of late, but also the garden. I’m starting to wonder whether keeping track of crops, even small potted crops, isn’t a bit beyond me. I haven’t remembered to feed any of them (although the sky has done a good job of watering them!) and it looks like a fairly low success rate again this year.

One of my potato plants has gone yellow and has black spots all over the leaves, as does the other plants (they just haven’t gone yellow yet) which I’m sure isn’t a good sign. I’m not even quite sure when I’m supposed to start digging them up, weren’t they supposed to flower or something? They are of the Charlotte variety.

The salad leaves planter (which I’d stopped bothering to cut for salads as the leaves were fairly bitter and the kids hated it… can’t say I was overly keen either) has gone completely wild and is a riot of flowers and not an awful lot of leaves. At least they were only a free packet of seeds from Lakeland, so not a great loss – and at least the bees seem to love it. I can pretend I’m doing my bit for wildlife conservation.

The tomatoes still seem rather stubby and haven’t grown an awful lot. I can’t remember at what point they shot up last year, but I’m sure it was earlier than this. They don’t look dead yet though, so there’s still hope with those.

The only crop that seems to be growing fairly well is my strawberry planter. We’ve had one ripe strawberry off it (carefully cut into four so we all got a teeny sliver each to avoid arguments!) and it was really tasty – not too sweet and full of flavour. There’s more ripening and on their way – I doubt we’ll manage a whole bowl of strawberries off it, but a strawberry to taste here and there is always appreciated.

Perhaps at some point I’m just going to have to admit to myself that the pleasure of growing your own food is in the anticipation rather than the harvest. Either that, or I’m going to have to be a lot better at remembering to take care of them.

It’s no good. I can’t do push-ups. I struggle to even do those girlie push-ups where you get to keep your knees on the ground.

This wouldn’t normally be an issue, I’d just avoid doing them – problem solved. However, my martial arts class last week included push-ups as part of the warm-up, plus some weird sit up thing where you have to lift your legs at the same time then slap your ankles (on a hard floor – I still have the blister on my back from that!). Needless to say, I was beyond pathetic.

Anyway, @tinyblob pointed me at the one hundred push-ups training program, so I’ve started on that in the last couple of days along with the two hundred sit-ups companion program for good measure.

I will not be defeated. I will rise above patheticness.

Current status: I still suck.

I have been practising mindfulness meditation for just over a month now. Only a little practice – just 10 minutes a day (after all, 10 minutes that I do is better than 30 minutes that I don’t) – but I feel like I’m getting a lot out of that short time span.

At first, I was using the timer function on the iPhone clock to know when each session was over, but it wasn’t ideal – mainly because of the nagging voice in my head which would repetitively tell me that I’d forgotten to set the timer, that I’d been sitting there ages, that I really should take a peek and see how much time I had left. It was becoming a major sabotaging issue.

Then I came across Meditator through the Zencast site. It’s a simple little iPhone/iPod Touch timer designed specifically for use during meditation. I was a bit put off by the price (£2.39) but the price was dropped to 59p during a sale so I thought I would give it a try.

I’m very glad I did – it’s a lovely and very useful little app. You start off by setting a start delay (useful to give yourself a few seconds fidget time before you start), when the session will end and any interval alerts you might like. There is a good selection of different sounds you can use to mark each of these, each of which is soothing and nowhere near as jarring as the alarm on a normal timer – it’s also a great reminder to your nagging psyche that yes, the timer is still working, you did remember to press the button. You can even set an ambient sound to play in the background, although my preference is to leave this silent.

Meditator will let you set up to three different meditation presets – perfect if you don’t like an interval alert during shorter sessions but like one to sound every five minutes in a longer session (for example).

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. Do I think £2.39 is worth it? Yes, I think I would have still paid that as it’s the one application I use every day and it has been a huge help. However, my gut feeling is that it is a little overpriced, and that a £1.19 price tag would be fairer for an application of this type and would encourage more people to try it.