Graffiti spotting

This has to be the most insightful piece of graffiti I've ever seen:

The importance of ringing Idle

This year's peal tour was based around Derbyshire; we were centred in the village of Youlgrave (or Youlgreave). We stayed in the Farmyard pub (our room was called the Sheep Pen - the other two were the Pig Sty and the Cow Shed) which had one handpump serving Hardys & Hansons Olde Trip. We ate in the Bulls Head on the first night which did good food (if expensive) but the only beer they had was Bass or Pedigree, neither of which I'm all that fussed on. We spent the rest of the week in the George which had an excellent range of both food and beer.

Sunday's peal was at St Mary and All Saints church in Chesterfield, Derbyshire Surprise Royal. The bells were nice but hard work, and the method left a lot to be desired.



On Monday morning I went for a walk and found a geocache - really could have done with a map as it took me ages to find the correct path. A peal of minor was scored in the afternoon.

Tuesday started with a peal of Bristol followed by a lazy afternoon doing not much.

Wednesday morning included a trip along the Peak Rail followed by a peal attempt of Stedman Triples which was lost with about 20 minutes to go.



Thursday's peal of Double Norwich was scored in the morning followed by another afternoon doing little else but sleeping. Friday morning's peal of spliced was lost early on, but the successes resumed on Saturday morning with a peal of Idle S Major.

I visited the North Downs for some walking on the weekend of 18th August with David and Richard.

Richard and I stayed the Friday night in Leatherhead, sinking a few pints in the Edmund Tylney.

On Saturday morning we met up with David after breakfast and walked up Box Hill, finding a geocache on the way. We could see what appeared to be a church spire in the distance:




During our walk we encountered a water tower, which I neglected to take a photo of. I did, however, take a photo of the inscription we couldn't read from the path:



In the afternoon we got the train to Gomshall, and walked back along the North Downs Way to Box Hill again, before returning to Leatherhead for Showers, Beers and Currys. On our walk back we encountered the church we could see in the distance from Box Hill:




On Sunday we took the train down to Dorking, and walked to Leith Hill, the highest point in the South East of England. This is the tower at the top, which we also climbed:

Squirrel watch

Each morning on my way to work I pass a cemetery which contains many trees. It's very rare that I do this and don't see a squirrel or two running around. However, that didn't stop me being surprised to wake up this morning to the sight of a rather overgrown squirrel waiting for the Oxfam shop opposite my flat to open.


Update

Today, however, I could see no squirells as I walked past the cemetery. Maybe they've all joined together and formed one giant super-squirrel?

We apologise for the convenience

What do these sites all have in common?
http://www.hud.ac.uk/hhs/error404.htm

http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/graduate_students/training/training-amendments.html
http://www.lancashire.gov.uk/corporate/news/press_releases/2005/02/23/0001.asp
http://www.yesterdaysworld.co.uk/outdoorattractions.asp
http://www.ludlowcastle.com/events.htm


There seems to be quite a few more examples of this.

Made it!

Forty posts in forty days! This period of lent accounts for almost a third of all the entries I've ever posted onto this site. It's been tricky thinking of something to post each day, and often I sit at home (not at work, of course....) trying to think of something to post for the last few days....

Of course, you can expect this website to return to its dormant state for the next few weeks while I take up again my practice of not blogging.....

Almost there

I'm off to Becky's for a couple of days, so this, and especially tomorrow's entry may not get posted until Sunday. Am back in St Albanscestershire for Sunday lunch and Monday. Maybe I'll do something on Monday worth blogging about? Maybe we'll never know....

PS... As it happens the room I'm staying in has a PC with a network connection :)

An interesting case is Brian Peppers. Not because he looks hideous, or because of the internet's obsession with him, or even because being a 'paedophile' makes him the modern day equivalent of a witch, in that even debating his rights as a human being is a taboo, but because of the debate over whether he should have a Wikipedia entry could be, imho, a landmark case.

I cooked a lasagne tonight for the first time, mainly using inspiration to make the bolognese sauce, plus hints from this site and a quick phone call to my mum to ask about the cheese sauce. It was supposed to be two portions, but the dish I used is fairly large, so it's quite a monster. Will probably eat it tomorrow night, and for the next few nights if it's remotely edible.

As soon as I returned home from the tour I shot straight out again to head down to Bromley to help Dickon celebrate his birthday. Far too many pints in the Red Lion were followed by more in the Crown and Anchor, followed by just as many in the Red Lion today. Today I was almost happy to head back to work for a rest....

Hopefully I can get some photos up soon of the tour, and the report which will be appearing: here. Meanwhile Iain has already posted some photos.

Thursday night I travelled to Aston Clinton for the Welsh Colleges Easter Tour. Most of yesterday was spent suffering from last night's excesses, and ringing at various towers around Buckinghamshire. By mid afternoon I was feeling a little better after a pint and a pickled egg.
Today saw more of the same, finishing with me doing not a great deal to help Sue cook everyone a fine meal, and chairing the meeting in Becky's absence.

Apparently they've had a quote for Gene Pitney's Funeral - it will take them two months to make the coffin out of oak, but only 24 hours from balsa.
Apparently I'm far from the first blog to make that joke.

Bird Flu

So, we've got bird flu in the UK at last. I don't really understand how it travels between countries - if I were a bird with the flu, that last thing I'd be thinking of doing is migrating; A few days in the nest would be called for I'd have thought....

As I'll be away this weekend, for the Welsh Colleges Easter Tour, and then Dickon Love's birthday celebrations in Bromley, I was trying to find a way of blogging from my phone. The first thing I thought of was an interface a friend of mine used called wapblogger, but it seems to have demised. As it says, blogger offer a similar service but only for some US users.

Another way of doing it would be to use the phone to send photos to a flickr account which can then be uploaded to the webpage, but my phone doesn't seem to be supported.

So this might be something of a (long) silent weekend from me, unless I can find some other method of mobile blogging.

I rarely allow myself as much time as I'd like for reading - my metaphorical pile of books would be rapidly taking over my lat if it wasn't for it's metaphoricalness. This year I resolved to read a total of twelve books, approximately twice what I managed last year. Only it's April now and all I've managed is two - "UK on a G-string: Adventures of the World's First and Worst Door-to-door Busker" back in January, and "The curious incident of the dog in the night time" this week.

An email came round at work today saying there was an online "Health & Safety" training programme that we all had to complete by the end of April. Most of the modules had any relevance to my job whatsoever, such as 'Driving Safety' and 'Working at Heights'. I wasted twenty minutes completing the section on Food Preparation (for which I got 86% in the test at the end, and a nice PDF certificate to say I'd completed it), after which I received another email saying that there was a glitch in the system, and there were only a couple of sections we need do. Funnily enough, 'Food Preparation' wasn't one of them.

A fairly relaxing day today - I rang for a wedding at lunchtime, followed by a few pints in the Farmer's Boy. I wonder if the rumours (which I've been unable to provide a link to) about it being up for sale were just a ploy to make people (like me) frequent the place more often before it changes hands. I could see no sign that it was up for sale, and the beer was as good as ever.

A rare opportunity for a weekend at home saw me watching Layer Cake this evening. It's definitely a lot more Holywood that a lot of other British movies made in the last ten years such as Lock Stock, but it still has its charm. Plot twists and Tarantino-esque jumps in sequence makes it a film that needs thinking about, but not as much as, say, Donnie Darko, another great film I saw relatively recently.

My love of useless gadgets and "Technology for the sake of it" (which I've always thought would be a great name for a company) has been renewed with the discovery of this. It's a wifi bunny. I'm not really sure what use it would be, and I certainly have little or no need for it, but I want one....

It's becoming harder and harder keeping this constant blogging up, not least because I never seem to do anything worth blogging about - going to work, having tea, shopping, picking up dry cleaning etc....

Blogs invariably get written the following day when I realise I'd not written anything - a delve into the previous day's emails and news for anything interesting to write about is just followed by finding an interesting link to post.

Still, I'm well over half way now and keen not to let the momentum slip any more than it has. Perhaps I should do more interesting things just so I have something to blog about. That would be an interesting pursuit in itself - making my life interesting so I can write about it, rather than writing about it because my life is interesting....

I've been spending too much time play isketch. My username is (rather unsurprisingly) ucalegon if you want to find me on there.

Here's a rather poor quality photo of a pony near where Martin and Poppy live:


Aaah.

Today the eliminators of the National Twelve Bell Striking Contest were held, results for those that are interested are on campanophile. Other than the fact that they're an excuse to get pissed with large numbers of ringers, I don't really have much interest in striking competitions.

Meanwhile, Becky and I visited Martin, Poppy and Daniel. We found a geocache in the afternoon despite the rain and mud.

A friend pointed me in the direction of a rather useful guide called getting things done with GNU/Linux. The guy also has some nice photos of St Albans.

Rang a quarter peal tonight of Harpole S Royal. Not the most inspiring of methods. The Bombardier was on good form in the Jolly Sailor afterwards now, which is more important.

I suppose I could cheat and post a funny / amusing / stupid / rude new link every day, but instead I'll just post a link to this site which seems to have them all: http://www.franksemails.com/

One link I will point out though is blackpeopleloveus.com - The irony is piled on and it's hard to see exactly who they're taking the piss out of, but I think it seems to satirise modern attitides towards racism with uncanny accuracy.

I was sent this today. Apparently it's a Belgium TV show and an interview with people who had the wrong operations done on them by mistake. The guy has had his testicles accidentally removed and the interviewer can't stop laughing after hearing his voice.

http://www.ucalegon.com/84_holdi.wmv

CSBS Tour

Saturday was spent touring round some of North Hertfordshire with the CSBS. Photos are here, but all of them seem to be from the pub at lunchtime....

Last night Becky and I headed up to London village for a meetup with those nice fence folk. Photos are here.

I should probably also add a note to say that this is the 100th blog on this site....

Amazon has a history of being too bloody clever for its own good, but the recent addition of the wedding list feature has added some gems. We first noticed this at work when amazon gave us the option "Add to Wedding List" when we were buying the SQL Server 2005 Administrator's Pocket Consultant, but they seem to have surpassed themselves with allowing the same option for Divorce for dummies.
Presumably some sort of error led to them helpfully listing the things this gps unit can't do....

More random Links

I'm also rather fond of mashup, especially if done well. The Grey Album has its moments and scores top marks for the concept. I really like the Green Day / Oasis (plus others) combo: Boulevard of broken songs. Recent discoveries sent to me by Zack include this and this.

Random links

There seems to be a world drought on good new jokes at the moment, but there's plenty of other funny stuff going around. My two favourites from these week are Knitting for Psychos and what is undoubtedly an urban myth: The Crocodile.

Wedding touches

We usually ring for about 20 minutes on the back eight for weddings, which means ringing touches that are roughly 500 changes in length. For Stedman we usually ring two "omits" (S,SHQ,H), and for Grandsire there's a fairly handy touch in the diary produced by calling 6 and 7 in and out of the hunt a few times.

For other standard methods fewer touches of this length seem to exist. For Plain Bob Major I usually call something like this:

496 Plain Bob Major W B 3 4 M 7 2345678 ------------------- - - - 4238765 - - S 4325678 - 2435678 - 3 S 2345678 -------------------

The touches and quarter peals of Erin Triples in the diary can easily be arranged to produce:

504 Erin Triples 3 4 5 6 123456 -------------- - - 365214 - - 256314 - - - - 345126 -------------- - - 562431 - - - - 416352 - - - - 321546 -------------- 2 Part

504 Erin Triples 3 4 5 1234567 ---------------- - - 5324167 -* - 4213567 ---------------- 6 Part, s for -* in parts 3 & 6.

Sunday was quite a lazy day really - ringing in the morning and then watching a film before dinner. In the afternoon we went and found a geocache before the quarter peal at Knowle in the evening.

Last night I went out for a meal with Becky's family to celebrate her birthday. This evening we went to a concert in Shirley Methodist Church, at which Becky performed. It was an enjoyable evening - quite an eclectic selection of music, which unfortunately over-ran, so they had to cut some pieces out. It was put on to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care.

After the funeral last night I spent the best part of the evening sitting on motorways on my way to Cardiff. I stopped off at Membury services for some tea and to change out of my suit, at which point I realised I'd managed to pick the wrong pair of Jeans off my floor, so have only the pair with holes in to last all weekend.
Fortunately by the time I arrived in Cardiff Becky had drunk enough not to care too much. I meant to get up early and buy some more from town, but decided oversleeping would be far more worthwhile....

I'm off to Cardiff tonight to celebrate Becky's birthday, which is on Saturday, so there will be limited blogging chances over the next few days. I shall see what I can do, though.
Before that though, I've got a funeral to go to at Harwood Park Crematorium. They were obviously one of the UK's first creamatoriums to jump on the website bandwaggon, securing as they did crematorium.co.uk

If you want to see the some porno clips, have a look at this:
pornoclips.jpg

Updates

Recent updates to this site include the Peal Statistics page which now helpfully tells you how much time I've spent ringing peals (just the successful ones!), and how many people I've rung peals with.
Also added is the Photos page which is an index to the galleries I have on this site. Hopefully I'll add some more at some point.
I'm currently updating each peal with details of the composition that was rung (only a year or so after I'd said I'd do it!). I need to get the index sorted out too.

Cat photos

To equal the hilarity of the infinite cat project there's the (slightly more disturbing!) Stuff on my cat. (Thanks to Martin and Poppy).

Make your own zoo

Some people have too much time on their hands:

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Geocaching and GPS

After my recent purchase of a GPS, I'm keen to find some geocaches. This page describes some of the ways of downloading and managing lots of waypoints. It also talks about how you can import waypoint files into Google Earth, but what it doesn't mention is that you can download a KML file so that Google Earth will download and display all the geocaches in the area you're looking at.

Forty days and forty blogs

I always like to find something strange to give up for lent - one year it was Oasis, last year it was posting to Ringing Chat.
This year, considering how neglected my website has become of late (except the peals page), I've decided to give up not blogging.
So for the lent period I'm going to attempt to post something everyday. Some days I'll be away, so will have to backdate a few, but otherwise expect to see something new on here each day (until I run out of steam around March 3rd, anyway).