Graze is a new company that sends selection boxes of fresh fruit, dried fruit, mixed nuts and seeds, crackers, Japanese snacks like wasabi peas and crackers, honey roast cashew nuts (oh my goodness) and TONS of stuff like that.

I just got my first box. It had olives, fresh pineapple slices, raisins and dried banana slices.

You can choose from their wide range what kind of things you like, and they store your choices, and send you selections based on that. You can get them every day, every week, or every fortnight. Or twice a week. Or three times. Or whatever.

Seriously, their selections are amazing. There’s honey roast cashews, salsa tossed almonds, chocolate coated pumpkin seeds, puffed rice crackers, white chocolate coated blueberries, dark chocolate coated cocoa beans … it’s just stunning. And healthy!

Check them out at graze.com. If you use my code (JZZTQMD), you get the first one free, then the second half price! Normally they’re £2.99 You also get a code that you can give to people, and when they sign up, you get £1 off! (I’ve already gotten £2, thanks people!!)

Anyway. It’s worth signing up, even if it’s just for the free one — and you can cancel whenever you like. Visit http://www.graze.com/p/JZZTQMD (discount code is prefilled for you).

It is my ambition, as a writer, to use the semi-colon perfectly. Perfectly, not merely “correctly” as in, ticks all the boxes, follows all the rules, well-done-good-and-average-servant.

It’s relatively easy to use it correctly. The rules are fairly simple, once you understand them. But to use it perfectly gives a sentence wings. It’s quite possibly the only thing you can add to a piece of bloated prose to make it lighter. When it’s used perfectly, the semi-colon is like a letterless super-word. It’s like an invisible hand that lifts your sentence into ethereal realms.

The corollary, of course, is that there is nothing more offensive in the English language (other than the word naivety — which, unhappily, is a word without an efficient synonym, otherwise I would never use it at all) than a misused semi-colon. Nothing sticks out more glaringly. When it’s used properly, it’s like a tiny, hair-thin component in some well-oiled machine. But when it’s used in the wrong place it sticks out like pube in a restaurant napkin — that you only discover after it’s too late, after it’s already started making its way across your palate to the back of your mouth.

The better something is, the more foully and more completely can it be corrupted. A frog, for example, can’t really be good or bad. Nor can a cow, in any meaningful sense, be thought of as wicked. You can have a bad dog, of course, and a reprehensible man, but it takes an evil genius to really wreak havoc.

Likewise, you can scatter your text with superfluous apostrophes, and you merely look like a jabbering, toothless, cross-eyed idiot who smells of cow manure. You can slash all of your sentences into pieces with dashes until nobody knows where they are any more, or overuse an ellipsis to give the impression that you struggle to draw breath — or worse, write them with too many or too few dots, as if hoping to alter the volume of your dramatic pause. You can even leave your sentences strewn with commas that are like spent underwear on a bedroom floor, tripping your readers up and disgusting them with your slovenly habits at the same time.

All these errors are ridiculous but, let’s be generous, forgiveable (at a stretch at least). It’s only with a semi-colon that you can truly pervert perfectly good orthography into something heinous, something that stings the eyes in the same way as cigarette smoke. Nothing kills copy quicker than a semi-colon dropped haphazardly into a sentence. Bam. Suddenly it ceases to be meaningful communication, and collapses immediately into a collection of strange curved lines that once had something to do with the alphabet.

Be warned, then, aspiring writers: the semi-colon is not to be trifled with. Use it with too much caution. Use it as a surgeon uses his scalpel (having undertaken meticulous study and training). If you get it right, you will delight your readers. Get it wrong and, well, thanks for coming.

Spot the deliberate mistake! There is no such thing as “properly”. OK, so I wrote this in brainstorm format, but I think it works better that way. It’s about prayer and spirituality and how these things look in ordinary life. Hope it helps.

Prayer should be raw. True. Honest. Say what you really think, otherwise you’ll go no-where. It should be instinctive. Intuitive. Pray for what you want, not for what you think you should want. And never feel guilty for praying for yourself.

Don’t do all the talking, however. Don’t pray and then hang up the phone. Keep listening. When God speaks it’s nothing flashy, most of the time. It sounds just the same as your own thoughts, only there’s a peace and a sense of life and cleanness about them. People either take spirituality too seriously, or they make it spooky. It’s neither, even though it is serious and it is “mystical”.

The word “spirit” is from the Latin word “spiritus” meaning breath. Spirituality is as ordinary, everyday and easy as breathing.

Stay alert for “promptings”. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right to be so “honest” (i.e. moan about something), but to be grateful, or to pray for someone else instead.

I use a Macbook, a PC, and then also Windows when it’s running on my mac (through remote desktop). I also use keyboard shortcuts like my life depends on it. These are not standardised across the various platforms, and it’s been driving me crazy when I press certain keys expecting the cursor to move to the end of the line, or whatever, and suddenly it disappears to the end of the file. So I’ve worked out what keys do what in each OS, and made a table.

Yes, this makes me an awful geek, but it will save much of my sanity. I hope that this helps you as much as it will help me!

So I’m thinking of starting some new blogs. I keep posting stuff about personal development that I’d like to move to another blog. I’d also like to start a blog about teaching yourself a language. I have a real ambition to learn German, who knows why, and I think it would make a good blog! There’s also another blogging project that I had a while ago that I think would be good to resurrect, but I might seek guidance on that one.

Anyway, my question to you, my readers, is what should I do about the address? I have already bought some domain names for them, but can’t afford the hosting just yet. In the interim, which is better:

• joy.beingmrkenny.co.uk
• beingmrkenny.co.uk/joy

It’ll only be for about a year, but which do people find easier as a web address?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying out the Bing search engine instead of my usual Google. Bing is Microsoft’s revamp of Live Search, which was its revamp of MSN search.

I’ve never really liked Microsoft’s offering to the search engine industry, mainly because I don’t like its online presence. I hate MSN, I hated hotmail, I don’t like Live mail. I think they are all inferior products, and I really can’t understand why people don’t make the switch to Google’s online products. Up until now I would never have given Microsoft’s search engine another look, but I don’t like things staying the same for too long so I thought I’d give it a spin.

Firstly, I think Bing is much prettier than Google. They have a new background image every day, and the whole design is obviously more deliberate than Google’s 1990s colour scheme. I appreciate that. I never liked Google’s boring logo, nor its ugly results page.

Also, the images search function is light years ahead of Google’s. With Google you get 20 pages of about 100 image thumbnails that you have to laboriously scroll through. With Bing you get a sidebar of thumbnails which is refreshed with Ajax. You never have to leave the page, and you can still view all of the thumbnails it finds. I like the efficiency, convenience and cleverness of it.

They’ve copied Google’s novelty logo idea. Google puts up a special image for Christmas, New Years’ and special occasions, like famous scientists’ birthdays. There the focus is on learning more about, e.g., the famous scientist. With Bing, it’s more about you using their search engine, which I don’t like. It’s a sneaky way of promoting yourself by promoting someone else. It’s funny to see how deep that runs in Microsoft. They’ve resisted web standards, preferring instead to release their own proprietary codes, right up until IE7. I really hate this tendency in Microsoft.

As for what was going through their heads when they called it Bing, I can only hazard a guess. It’s a dreadful, awful name. Interesting to see that they’re stepping away from all their other branding (Microsoft, MSN, Windows, Live, etc).

I hate, and will always hate, multimap. This is probably irrational, much like my hatred of Yahoo. And there’s video adverts on the main page. I hate video adverts.

As for the quality of its search results — obviously the most important thing — I haven’t really looked into it all that much. I guess my expectations in that area are mostly unconscious ones, so I’ll continue to do side-by-side comparisons for a while till I find out what I prefer.

So far, Bing doesn’t feel like proper searching yet. I must confess I don’t really care. (It’s not exactly the most hugely important question in life, is it.) What wins is whatever works easiest. Bing is pretty and excellent with images and media, but has a dreadful name. Google has a boring design, but it’s familiar.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out in the long run. My personal prediction is that in a year or so they’ll have another rebrand (they’re on their fourth as it is). We’ll be introduced to “Swish”, or some other equally silly name, but unless they do something fundamental to searching online muchbetter than Google it will fail to raise much interest.

Maybe pay people every time they use Bing. And change that wretched name!

Today I had my first dental appointment in … well, you read the title, don’t need to type it again.

It was really good fun! I booked it about a fortnight ago, and it made me feel grown-up and responsible. I encourage you all to take your diary right now and book in a check up! (I also registered with a doctor a few months ago, and I have just filled out an electoral roll form — I am all about the taking responsibility at the moment).

The appointment went much as I expected it. I used to want to be a dentist when I was about 14 (ha ha!). This came about because we learned about teeth in biology, and I found the whole thing blindingly fascinating.

Isn’t that weird?

Interesting enough that, when I had 4 pre-molars taken out to make space for my crooked teeth to move about it, I kept them. I still have them today in a film cannister (remember them, before the days of digital cameras?). They’re about an inch long, with the root, and I think they’re pretty cool. I’ll show you them if you ask nicely.

Anyway, I listened to the dentist reporting the status of my teeth to her assistant, and I mostly knew what she was talking about. I actually quizzed her at the end of the appointment. I’m like some kind of dental geek. I asked her about my wisdom tooth, because she’d said, “8 … watch” so I thought “Uh-oh dental caries!” and it turns out I have a small one forming that may need filling, but maybe not. (Teeth are numbered 1-8, 1 being the incisors at the front, 8 being the wisdom teeth right at the back).

I’m a little sad about that, actually. My wisdom teeth are only about 6 years old, and they’ve still got that new feeling to them. Kinda like when you buy a new pair of shoes, except they’re smaller and in my mouth. And sharper, on average, than my other molars. It’s a shame that one of them already has signs of decay.

Anyhoo, turns out I need two small fillings in tooth 6 or 7, I forget which, so I’ve got another visit coming up in October.

Hooray for NHS dental treatment, by the way! I walked past the practise the day after it opened. How lucky! I bloody love the NHS. Goodness me, thanks to Obama and all the American opposition to health care reform — and all those snide comments from across the pond about the quality of our teeth — I suddenly feel very proud of my country and its fraught-with-problems health service (a friend and I recently spent 7 hours in A&E). It may be inefficient, but it beats the horrors of health insurance. Just ask any American family on low income.

P.S. Isn’t it great? This is the first silly post on this blog in a long time.