Smoke on the Water

Last Monday we went to Weston-super-Mare to see the sand sculptures. We also walked out along the Grand Pier and had a look at the Pavilion (which I was intrigued to find, housed a climbing wall somewhere amongst all the other amusements).

Today, a week later, the pier was seriously damaged by fire and the pavilion was destroyed, which is a bit sad, because - despite what John Cleese says - I rather enjoyed my visit to Weston last week.

This photo was taken when I cycled to Weston on a bike ride in February. It seems odd that I would end up with two trips there (so far) in one year, when I've been in Bristol to 20 years and never been there before.

I hope the pier - which was only recently refurbished by it's new owners - will be restored to it's former glory.

On The Road Again

The other day I was driving along what I always thought was Filton Road - but looking on Streetmap I find that it is actually called Station Road - by the railway bridge just before Abbey Wood Station, at the lights by the oddly named Emma-Chris Way (which I always thought must have been named as a consequence of a disagreement between Emma and Chris, but is apparently named in commemoration of two children killed on the busy road). Anyway, I pulled up alongside a beaten up old Escort (or Cortina or something - I'm not exactly a petrolhead), which was stopped with it's rear wheels positioned on the stop line.

"Hmmm...", I thought, "I'd better keep an eye on him. He'll be haring off as soon as the lights change". But when they did change it pootled along to the next set of lights, which were on red, over the line and came to a halt, once again, with the rear wheels positioned on the stop line.

"The problem with that bloke", I said, "is he just doesn't know when to stop". Unfortunately I was alone in the car at the time, so there was no-one to share my insightful aphorism, so I thought I would make it available for the Internet as a whole to appreciate.

Do The Jukebox Jive

I spent this morning finding out how to put an embedded MP3 player on your website. I wanted to do this for the Macaroni Penguins Demo Page.

The bad news is you have to use Flash, but the good news is someone has already done all the nasty bits for you, so I was able to pick up a configurable solution by downloading the JW FLV Player, cobble together a few playlists, a bit of HTML and get it working nicely.

You can try the results by going to the demo page and clicking on one of the "Click Here To Listen..." links. Enjoy.

All we need to do now is record some new demo tracks. Now that Tim has got his super posh electronic kit and I don't have to spend all hours of the day working for The Man the time could be ripe...

Consecutive Chronological Numerals

I realised today, while looking at a shop receipt, that the date today is:

06/07/08

Which means, if I'd been up early enough (or late enough) I could have witnessed the time:

03:04:05 06/07/08

(Although I never know with these things whether I should be observing UTC or local time, and, yes, I am aware that people in the US write their dates as mm/dd/yy, so they can miss opportunities like this almost a month earlier than me. I also tend to use four digit years after all the millennium buggery that went on nearly a decade ago, but none of this works if you do that).

I'm still trying to think of something appropriate to do on:

08:08:08 08/08/08

which will be in the middle of the 30th Anniversary Bristol Balloon Fiesta, so maybe I will be able to get a photo of 8 balloons or something.

I totally forgot about 07:07:07 07/07/07 last year (I was asleep at the time (local time)), and also 06:06:06 06/06/06 (when I was in Scotland polishing off some Munros, but I didn't get up until 6:30am), but at least such patterns are occurring later and later in the day, so I stand more chance of actually being up when they happen.