Author: richard

On Sunday, Paul introduced us to a short cycle route that has the benefit of getting you “off road” pretty quickly. At the top of Hove park there’s a narrow route you can take up-hill which leads to the A27/Devil’s Dyke roundabout. You cross the road from there and it’s all downhill through some woods back to the London road. Short, but sometimes that’s all you need.

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Click to view a larger version of the map, which I glued together from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

“Sir Oliver’s horse came ambling home to Oliver’s abode”

I’ve been carrying that phrase around in my head for… a long time. Since Mrs Wilson, my secondary school maths teacher, put it in our heads as a mnemonic for remembering how sin, cos and tan are based on the ratios of the sides of triangles (scream if you want to go nerdier). Anyway, these last couple of days, for no obvious reason, I started wondering about the following meaningless questions:
Who was Oliver? How did he get his knighthood? What had he been doing to lose his faithful horse? Did it involve trigonometry? Maybe there’s a story there.

The main news of the day eclipsed this somewhat, but I’ll report it now…

Last year Andy dressed up in a santa costume and hit the sea on Christmas day. He made the local paper, which was kind of fun.

This year Jeremy, Andy, Ben and Kirsty all went in on Christmas Day in santa costumes. Alas, we weren’t there to witness this, but on Boxing Day (American cousins: it’s December 26th) Jeremy called with the news that a photo of Kirsty had made it into the News of the World. We later found out that a similar picture had made it into Mail on Sunday, both national papers.

At the news agent I discovered just how much they’d upped the ante: they were there on the front page of the Independent. Above the fold. On a proper grown up paper. And a fantastic photo (but not a great scan, by me):

Nice work! The photo was also used in a BBC report: Brave swimmers take festive dip.

We’ve just got back from watching Riding Giants at the DoY. It’s a “documentary detailing the origins and history of surf culture”. It’s worth catching, so go and see it. You don’t have to take our word for it:
IMDB users rate it too.

Pete H, ever vigulent, sent round this seasonal reminder to watch out for card theft:

The BBC described some cash point (ATM) trickery back in 2003, and although Barclays have made some machine modifications to reduce the risks, new cons are always in beta.

The Times Phonetography Challenge started yesterday. Send in your camera phone pictures of “What does Christmas mean to you?” to 07834 446 922 for fame and fortune (well, chance to win stuff). Disclaimer: I had a hand in parts of this.

Fair enough for the
Police get tougher over graffiti – but only when it’s rubbish. There’s some great stuff about, and the skill involved is impressive (look out for the Channel 4 “Faking it” on Graffiti next time it airs). Hmmm.. when does graffiti become a mural?

More positive consumer news… a while ago we switched from our Audi A3 petrol automatic to a manual Honda Civic diesel. (Why? 33mpg to 55mpg, amongst other reason). The Yeomans Honda in Bognor Regis were great, did us a fine deal. Recommended.

At the time we were told the servicing was every 12,000 miles. Turns out from the log book, it’s every 9,000 miles. Ouch. Called Yeomans, even though it was a word of mouth difference, the sales guy, Drew, said yes he remembers saying that, and appologized: it’s 12,000 on petrol, which is where the confusion came it. We figure over the life time of the car we’d end up doing one extra service, so Yeomans put everything right by giving us a free service to make up the difference. So… Yeomans are recommended further for fixing the problem, and they’re top of our list next time we go looking to change vehicle.

The
t-shirt folding video is life changing. You can read the instructions that go with it, if you want.

I more or less live on a major shopping street, which means I’m constantly being stopped by paid charity fundraisers.

I didn’t know they were called chuggers (charity muggers) until recently. I also didn’t know that the charity can end up with as little as 10% of the donation. The main thing that annoys me (yet also interest me) is the polished psycho warfare they use. I’m sure they have some pretty interesting training sessions, and I’ve also no doubt that someone has said that, in this modern thrusting world, the charities need to deploy the heavy sales approach. But the thing is, us consumers are getting smart to that. The chuggers don’t seem to go in for supplying a guilt trip. It’s now all I’m-your-friend handshake-handshake smile-smile. Or (from a male perspective), when you tell a female chugger that, no, I don’t have time to stop right now, you get a drop of the hip, tilt of the head, finger twirling the hair, “that’s a shame” response. Gee… either I am irresistible or — and I think we have to consider this as a realistic option — it’s just another nasty sales technique.

So apologies to any chuggers that approach me: you’ll get a polite but firm “no” just as a matter of principle regardless of your charity. I considered making a t-shirt to that effect, but realized it’d only attract them.