Phew – made it home after a holiday in the Dales. Stayed in the lovely cottage in Horton-in-Ribblesdale, which was marred only by Ben’s continuing illness. Still, he appears to be on the mend about now, which is great, and hopefully he’ll back at full speed when we’re both back at work next week.
Anyway, point of this entry is that autumn seems to have happened while I wasn’t looking. We came back after only a few days away, and suddenly all the trees are red/golden, and there’s leaves everywhere! Of course, the scientist within knows that the hues are due to programmed cell-death as the trees try and reclaim as many nuturients as possible from the leaves, but it’s still very beautiful. Still, I just love kicking through big piles of leaves (unless there’s something unsavoury lurking in the middle, of course)
Oh yes, there was one other thought – are people no longer taught to put headlights on when it’s raining? Several times now I’ve noticed it’s been chucking it down, and probably most cars driving along without lights. I concede that they have been quite bright days, but the purpose is not so that you can see, but so that others can see your vechicle, and see that’s probably active. When visibility and road grip are reduced, it’s important to be able to tell at a glance where the other road users are and what they’re doing. I’ll get off my high house now.
Closing thought – just been handed the baby, and sadly my typing is only a little slower using one hand than two!
Well, the end of another week. Been quite an eventful week – little Ben got a tummy upset that kept him off nursery, so I had to stay at home for a day and look after him, and just this afternoon a couple of friends asked me to be an usher at their wedding next year, which was dead nice of them!
On a rather different note, almost exactly this time last year, Arriva trains started a loco service to Leeds in the morning (I wrote about it extensively) – I got it the first ever time it was run back then (with a brass band and everything), and today I got it for the last time it’s going to be run. Yup – after a year of running an extremely comfortable, successful, and popular service, they’ve decided the whole thing was only a trial after all, pulled it, and are replacing it with a two carriage set. I would estimate that the loco has between 4 and 6 times the capacity of a 2 carriage set, and the loco was always chocka by the time it left Horsforth, so exactly what’s going to happen I don’t know. Oh yes, and I’m sure the fact that Arrive have lost the franchise for this area is nothing to do with them withdrawing the service. Come to that, I’m sure the fact they started it at all was nothing to do with bidding to keep the franchise – course not.
For completeness sake – I do still have the mock-leather card holder (which I use for my season ticket.. seems appropriate somehow), and I have usually seen the young lady I chatted to that first time on the rare occasion when I’ve got the loco, but we have never talked again.
Random entry – here’s a procmail script that will automatically squirrel away any e-mails with [ ] in the subject into a mail folder with the name of the contents of the [ ] (after stripping out any nasty characters):
The observent among you will have noticed a stuff up in the last entry.. of course $670 is nearer 380 pounds on it’s own, putting the total cost up to 510 pounds. The reason for this error? Well, when I first checked the website, said camera was listed at $485, which was the figure I used throughout my previous calculations. At some point they must have realised the 485 figure was a mistake, and changed it (but I didn’t double-check my calculations!). With that price difference it’s not worth the time/effort of ordering from the states – mainland Europe is probably a safer bet! … it also puts it firmly out of my reach (as opposed to merely being out of my reach) 🙁
Very sad day – had to wear my coat on the journey into work because of coldness for the first time in ages. Obviously there’s been rain, but this morning was distinctly too nippy to just be in shirt sleeves. Won’t be long before the central heating goes back on after its summer break!
A recent bit of research has also stated that “people who keep diaries are more likely to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems, and even social dysfunction.” (New Scientist, 11/9/04). These ramblings, while not really worthy of the title ‘diary’, do probably evidence social dysfunction, and certainly would give any reader a headache and probably an upset stomach (although not, presumably, sleeplessness), but I don’t think that’s quite what the researchers are saying. 🙂
On a different note, got my eye on a digital SLR camera, particularly the Canon EOS 300D (aka Digital Rebel). The usually dependable Ebuyer can only do 600 squid – too rich for my blood – but A&M Photo World, in the states, do the same deal for 670 bucks (with 75 bucks delivery). The current exchange rate of about 1.8 means that comes in at about 311 pounds. Course you need to add duty and VAT, which bumps it up to about 380 pounds, which is still steep, but a bit more manageable. By the time I’ve saved up that much it’ll probably be cheaper anyway!! Course Canon have only gone and brought out the 20D (8.2 megapixels, compared to the 300D’s 6.3) AND the 1DS (a whopping 11.1 megapixels, with a full 35mm sensor to boot), but at $1,579 and $5,499 respectively it aint going to happen! Still, these new cameras may well drive down the price of the 300D, which would suit me!
I read The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, many moons ago, and yet in the
last few months it seems to have made a comeback, regularly appearing
in the “Top 10” shelves in Smiths, or being read by people on the train.
Let’s be frank – this is not a nice book, deeply disturbing with no
holds barred about the rape and subsequent murder of the book’s subject,
one Susie Salmon. Let’s just say I was glad I read it before our little boy
was born! I should probably also mention that, being so long ago, some of
the details are a little hazy, so this is more recollection/reflection.
The concept is fascinating – a little girl killed before her
time, looking down from heaven as she and her family come to terms with what’s
happened, as we (and they) piece together the precise sequence of events
and who is responsible. It’s very sympathetically written, with very
believable characters and I really was upset by the girl’s murder (the book
proceeds on parallel tracks at first, with Susie simultaneously relating
her life and last days, and also what is happening since her death) and
came to care a lot about her family over the years (decades?) that follow.
The book is essentially upbeat though, with plenty of resolution at the end,
and as happy an ending you could expect – the subject matter is brutal though,
and dealt with in that way!
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Buy this book on Amazon
Middle age has set in. It’s Friday evening, and what am I doing? Eating an M&S Cantonese takeaway and watching Gardener’s World with the missus. But it’s ok – tommorow’s excitement is going out food shopping! 🙂
So much to say, so little time. Spent yesterday in London at my Dad’s funeral (which was actually a lovely service, and huge numbers of people turned up to pay their respects, which was nice). I do find travelling by train very civilised, even if they have stuffed up Kings Cross tube station while they do whatever their doing. That said, the plans for the new tubey bit do look quite nice, and it will be ace to be able to get a train to Kings Cross, and then change over to get a train to Paris! Yorkshire to France in 4 hours or something.
I’m never sure if it’s better to have long rambling entries, or to split up entries into sub-sections by topic. I guess back when I first started this diary thing (January 2001) I decided against having a title for each entry, mainly because it started life as a side-bar to my webpage, with one or two line entries. In those days I did it entirely manually, by hand-editing the HTML each time I put in a new entry! Wasn’t very long before it went semi-automatic, with various source files being ‘compiled’ together whenever I changed anything. Now, of course, it is fully automatic, and each page is generated on the fly from my database of diary entries, reviews, etc. I do sometimes wonder about introducing topics or titles, but I figure bandwidth is so cheap these days I may as well just serve a whole year’s worth of entries in one go. One day I might get around to writing a web interface to my database, but it’s not too hard to just ssh into my machine and enter stuff into the database directly (and probably also more secure). I guess it wouldn’t be too taxing to put a search feature in here, that brought up any entries that matched said search string. Nervous about allowing too much access to the database though…
On a related note, I’ve switched back to using CSS for the layout of this site. It’s a much nicer solution, and I decided I would rather hack a solution for naughty browsers than bodge the entire site. The result is not entirely satisfactory for browsers like Netscape 4 or IE 5, but it is all legible now, and approximates the layout I designed. Early versions of IE 6 aren’t quite right, neither is Netscape 6, but c’est la vie. It’s perfect in Firefox and Opera (as long as you don’t mess with the user-agent setting!)
OO – just found out there is a second season of Tru Calling! The website what I looked at only had about 5 episodes listed, so I guess it’s only just started airing in the states… Sky have got nothing to say about it yet, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
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