Author: jane

Good tapas, good atmosphere.

La Mancha on Putney High Street, London has a good selection of good quality tapas, all served in a relaxing atmosphere – if you don’t look out of the windows and see the London buses go past you could almost believe you were in Spain. Last night our tapas choices were: Patatas Bravas (an obvious choice), paella, Scallops wrapped in bacon and served with lobser sauce, Lamb kebabs and an avocado, mozarella and tomato salad. All of which were very tasty, and all washed down with a couple of San Miguels.

We got talking in the office today about Daleks, those Dr Who nasties who used to have me hiding behing the sofa (I was only about 5 at the time), and I remembered seeing a few web sites dedicated to building a Dalek last year when the shop opposite our old office had a Dalek for sale. We tried to get our company to buy one for the office reception, but it didn’t happen. Here are a couple of links which might be of interest:

• How to Build a Dalek
• Dalek Builder’s Club

Just noticed a link off the blogger front page about blogging for charity. The page reads :

“About a year ago, I blogged for 24 hours straight. It was fun, but did little more than get attention. When I decided to do it again this year, I knew it had to mean something. So I’m blogging for a cause–and so are some other folks. Here’s how it works:
The show starts on Saturday, July 28, High Noon (Pacific time). We’ll go until noon on Sunday, July 29.
Participants agree to make an entry on their personal page at least once every 30 minutes for 24 hours. Sponsors fork out for every hour the blogger manages to keep going, 24 hours max, or they decide on a flat fee instead. Each participant has chosen a favorite charity and provided a link. At the end of the marathon, sponsors make a donation to the appropriate charity.”

To find out more visit 24 Hour Blogathon, and sign up to blog, or to be a sponsor.

It’s sometimes interesting to see what people read on the tube in a morning. This morning there were 2 people reading Metro (the free London newspaper), one guy reading one of the broadsheet newspapers, a guy reading Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy”, a guy reading a biography about Tony Hancock (When the wind changed, The life and death of Tony Hancock by Cliff Goodwin), one reading a Java book (J2EE Technology in Practice) and one lady filling in London Underground refund forms (2 or 3 of them).

Every now and again, there are some more unusual books to be seen, like the Tony Hancock example this morning. A few months ago now I saw a guy reading “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler. It was a big book, much bigger than I’d expected (694 pages according to amazon). I knew the book existed – we’d learnt about it at school in history (that upset my Dad as what I called history, he remembered), but I’d expected it to be some short propaganda booklet, not a 3inch think paperback.

It’s a general election day in the UK today, and I’ve still not fully decided who to vote for yet. I will vote, but will probably decide as I walk to the polling station on my way to work. Even the Who Do I Vote For website couldn’t help me decide who I should vote for as it told me 2 of them were of equal relevance to me. I could always try and get tactical with my voting (Tactical Voter) but for my area they have no recomendation as it is a “safe” labour seat. So, if I want to vote for someone other than Labour, my vote won’t really count for much (we don’t have proportional representation in the UK yet – sign this petition). The major parties just don’t see that different any more, there aren’t huge gaps between them at the moment.

Richard is in San Francisco this week at the JavaOne conference. I spoke to him this morning and he said that the first day had gone well, although he’d forgotten how intense it all was. There are 20,000 geeks there this year, and amazingly enough he bumped into one of the guys I used to work with at Speedwing Logica many years ago. The conference lasts all week, and there are loads of different talks and events to go too.

As a fan of “The League of Gentlemen” and “Big Brother”, the “Local Brother” website appeals. Follow the progress of Pauline Campbell-Jones, Val Denton, Geoff Tipps, Tubbs Tattsyrup, Dr Matthew Chinnery, Ally Welles, Ollie Plimsoles, Hilary Briss, Barbara Dixon, Stella Hull as they all try to survive in order to win “twelvety pounds and a bag of pegs”.

Wadaiko Yamato – a Japanese drumming phenomenen – are performing at the Peacock Theatre in London at the moment. We went last night with some friends and were all extremely impressed. I didn’t know what to expect never having seen any Japanese drumming shows before but it was far more lively and humorous than I had expected. There are some very talented people in the show – and they are all very fit too.

So, if you see adverts for a Wadaiko Yamato show near you – take the chance and go and see it.

I realised today (or I guess more accurately yesterday now) that blogvoices was not running at the moment. We’ve been thinking for a while about creating bulletin boards for other areas of the site, so people can post back about their travels in the countries we’ve been to, or can agree or disagree about our gadget reviews. So, tonight we’ve been adding that functionality. At the moment it only runs from the blog and gadget pages. Soon we hope to get it running off more parts of the site. We’ve used some XML based Perl freeware software – XML Board. So, now all the comments are stored on our server, and we’re no longer forced to deal with any delays/unreliabilities of getting to an externally hosted board. We’ve rescued the comments from blogvoices and imported them as a starting point.

Take a look at our blog discussions or the gadget discussions boards.