I took this (and five others which didn’t come out as pretty as this one) on December 16, leaning dangerously out of Rebecca’s bedroom window. It was a full double rainbow at that point, but the old Canon doesn’t have a wide-angle lens and the rainbow was changing too fast to risk the panorama function, which I’ve never tried properly.

Note the slightly lighter sky outside the outer rainbow and the much lighter sky inside the inner rainbow. If it hadn’t shown in the picture I’d probably have thought that it was an optical illusion, and if the sky on the inside hadn’t been much lighter (the effect in reality was even stronger than in the photograph) I’d have seen it as a band of darker sky between the two rainbows.

Having been without a computer for two weeks, I had to catch up on mailing-list management. Four mailing lists; two messages on one list from someone who forgot to subscribe with his other address before posting; all the rest, about two hundred held messages in all, were spam. Ninety-nine percent of the spam in my personal mailbox is spirited away by my various anti-spam tools, so I don’t see the really interesting subject lines, such as these:

We’ve students from all works of life. Apparently, they’re not very advanced students yet, or English isn’t what they’re studying.

Your academic qualification expired. Even if I had one, how can it expire? And even if it can, how would they know?

The UPS van stopping in front of our house made me gleefully abandon my ironing this morning. More like the UPS lorry, really: it was on the huge side of substantial and, like all UPS vans, gothically black with gold lettering. I hope the neighbours were watching. It brought not one but two Dells, which Boudewijn has already blogged about extensively (also in other articles in that vicinity; just keep reading).

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