Yak & Natter – Page 71

Birthday blog (from yesterday)

Yesterday was my birthday (huzzah) and I have many exciting things to blog about, but for now here’s the summary.

I have a stack of Raymond Carver short stories to read,
I now have a nice looking chunk of moon, Jane found Ripping Yarns on DVD and also found me a very cool retro-looking mini DV recorder (need to find another photo, because it doesn’t look like that).

Update: This is what mine looks like

If that wasn’t “woohoo!” enough, we went out to see Brighton Bears win 107-92 against the Newcastle Eagles. I won’t post up any of the video we took during the game because I need to spend more time learning how to use the DV recorder…

This isn’t going to sound right, but one of the interval “fun things” is the Duck Chuck: people buy ducks and throw them onto the court, and if they land in just the right places prizes are won. Just imagine sitting down, not quite knowing what’s going on, and then 200 small plastic ducks flying through the air onto the court. It leaves a lasting impression, trust me.

We ate at
Picasso as part of our quest for find the very best pizza in Brighton. What we found was Pizza for £3 and a lot of students. It was fine default pizza, better than many other places with the obvious benefit of being amazingly cheap. We’ll be back there, but our quest for the very best in pizza continues…

was cycling down Preston

I was cycling down Preston Street this morning and was wondering how come it was so foggy at the bottom of the street and clear at the top. As I got closer I realised it wasn’t fog, it was smoke. And it was really nasty, smelly smoke too. Once I’d got across the traffic lights, and into the clear air again I had a look back and could see a little red mini (old style) on fire. There was one policeman there with it, and as I turned and cycled away I could hear the sirens as the fire brigade came to the rescue.

used to work on

I used to work on the corner of Spitalfields market. Jane told me about these photos: the BBC are asking for your snaps.

Well at least the

Well, at least the councillers have approved the West Pier restoration plans. The campaigners against the plans have vowed to fight on to save their seafront views. Personally, I believe if they protest too much the pier will beyond repair and will have to go – and that’s something I’d hate to see.

Following on from blog

Following on from a blog almost a year ago, Wired News are running an article on how a man was murdered in Nigeria’s consul in the Czech Republic by a guy who was conned out of his money as part of one of the Nigerian bank scams. It seems he’d be cheated out of his money, and had been visiting the Consul regularly for a year trying to recover the money he had lost.

One of my fave

One of my fave pictures of all time: the earth at night (big; there’s a smaller version). The picture was created by joining up photos from satellites, according to the NASA write up.

Yesterday went to the

Yesterday I went to the Printwear and Promotion show at the NEC in Birmingham. As I said last week, most of the conferences I’ve been to have been technical for technicians so this one was a complete change as there were lots of people selling print and embroidery machines as well as the new ranges from clothing suppliers. We went to see what was on offer for the Summer offering from Igloo Life and found some possible new suppliers to supplement what we already offer. It was a long day though, Brighton to Birmingham is a long drive when you only spend 3 hours at the show.

The BBC are doing

The BBC are doing a special holiday programme on 50 things to do before you die. Currently they’re accepting submissions from people suggesting ideas of what they’ve done or what they’d like to do – I’ve submitted two, one I’ve done and one I’d love to do.

So, the one I’ve done is see an eclipse [Hungary 1999] and the one I’d love to do is see the northern lights. I’m sure I can think of many more, but I thought two was a good start 🙂

As quick search of

As a quick search of our previous blogs will tell you, we love our Tivo. But, you can’t get them in the UK anymore – bah! Need To Know helpfully provided some information in Friday‘s newsletter of a couple of build your own alternatives Freevo and MythTV. They look kind of interesting, and I guess we’ll investigate further if anything should happen to our Tivo.

The web logs for

The web logs for this site tell us that people have been asking search engines questions like “when is pancake day” or “pancake day 2003 UK” and ending up on a page of pancake pictures from last year. Not very helpful. So, for those of your searching for this information….This year, pancake day is Tuesday 4th March (2003).

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Pancake day is always the day before Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is 40 days before Easter. And you can work out the date for Easter with some maths (including C source code. Woohoo).