20 May 2002 - A few of us ex-ISP chums (that's the International School of Paris) are playing around with getting a bit of an alumni site going. The existing offficial one doesn't seem to be up to much, so we thought it would be a good idea to do it ourselves. Hopefully, we should be able to get a thriving little community going. You can see what progress (if any) has been made by going to the ISP alumni site.
8 May 2002 - I just spent the weekend on the Isle of Wight, mountain biking. It's a great place for it. From what I can gather it has the highest concentration of bridleways in the country. Which means that without really knowing an exact route, I was able to just follow one bridleway until I reached its end and then join a different one almost straight away. And the views from the top of the Downs are very pleasant. I suppose this might be because they tend to be quite exposed without any trees blocking the view.
I did manage to give myself a fright on my way home on Monday. Heading back towards Shanklin off Ventnor Down, there is a narrow stretch of bridleway that goes for about half a mile. It's quite steep with decent visibility, so I was travelling at about 20mph. Maybe a little more. Half way down, I must have disturbed a family of rabbits and they clearly panicked because suddenly, about ten small rabbits started darting from the bank on my right across to the bushes on the left. I started braking in an attempt to avoid them. Suddenly a grey blur shot into my vision near my front wheel and I felt an impact from the side. I think one of the rabbits had run into my right foot. I managed to stop a little bit further on and made my way back to the spot where it had all happened, but I couldn't find anything. I'm optimistically hoping that the little bunny was just mildly surprised and is now happily playing in the fields with its brothers and sisters.
It's pathetic isn't it. As a frequent eater of meat (including rabbits occasionally), I would hate to think how many animals have died to satisfy my hunger. But for some reason I'm uncomfortable because it was almost me who physically killed the animal. It is a new experience to me: so far I don't think I have killed anything beyond a few flies, though I have come close to hitting a few animals whilst driving. I think it's partly the way that I felt the rabbit hit me. And the thought of what might have happened if one of the rabbits had got caught up in one of my wheels. Presumably severe damage to the rabbit and quite possibly some serious damage to myself due to the speed at which I was travelling and the rocks on the ground.
22 April 2002 - So I travelled to Leeds in my work clothes. 'Wuss' you say? The weekend in Leeds was relaxing, though perhaps too much so. I kept getting food and coffee supplied to me whilst sitting on the sofa. I felt so lazy. I think I'm getting accustomed to cooking and generally looking after myself.
Doing the goth thing at Wendyhouse was quite good fun. I don't get to do it often, but it's a friendly atmosphere and I like being able to dress up in my stranger outfits. Though perhaps my top was too transparent this time. I was wearing a blue mesh long sleeved thing and had my left nipple pinched by a girl who insisted that she saw it and couldn't help herself. I couldn't help but laugh heartily. However, in future I think I'll stick to wearing opaque clothing.
Whilst chatting to Yvette last week, she recommended a couple of books for me to read, since I have such difficultydeciding what to read all the time. Anyway, having read it at the weekend, I would recommend The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It's a bit of an aspirational parable, full of truths that we all really know already. But it is good to be reminded occasionally. I reckon that if you liked Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (by Richard Bach), then you will probably like this. It's easy to read and not very long, so the effort is small compared to the reward.
I'm now working through another of Yve's recommendations: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I have previously read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I loved. This story isn't disappointing me so far, so I might well give it a mention once I have finished.
19 April 2002 - Got rid of all that text at the top. Good riddance too. I mean ... how many times do you want to read that guff. It has been dumped under that manifesto link you can see on the left.
Anyway, I'm off to Leeds after work to see Andy and Cat and go to Wendyhouse. Note to me ... put their wedding photos on the site soon! I'm equipped with big boots, leather trousers, etc. But should I get changed before leaving work or when I get there? It would involve walking through the banking district looking rather out of place. I'd like to in order to get in the mood for the weekend, but I dread being spotted by colleagues whilst slipping quietly out of the building. They always seem rather shocked when they discover how different I sometimes look when not at work. And explaining Goth clubs to them is always hard work. Memories of explaining the Whitby 2000 photos come flooding back. Though most of the guys seemed to like the picture with the woman in the very skimpy red outfit standing in the background. Maybe I'm just a bit too self-conscious.
15 April 2002 - How cool is this? The sites I have been working on www.halifaxtreasury.com and fx.halifaxtreasury.com have got a mention on page 6 (news) of the April 2002 issue of e-FOREX. All very exciting, I'm sure you'll agree. Now I'm sure you will be dashing to the shops to see what it's all about, but I'm told that it isn't a magazine that you can get at WHSmith or other high street retailers. I'm sure this will leave you disappointed, but you'll get over it eventually.
13 April 2002 - Mountain biking near Leith Hill. A paltry number of photos from a recent ride near Leith Hill.
13 April 2002 - A view from the (wobbly) bridge. The results of walking to Waterloo from the City a couple of Fridays ago. Past St. Paul's and across the 'wobbly bridge' to the Tate Modern.
12 April 2002 - Okay so it only took me a couple of hours to write a guestbook and get it working. In case you're interested I opted for PHP and mySQL as my platform. They made life quite easy. Please don't try too hard to hack the thing though. There isn't much keeping it safe. Just a filter to remove script tags. I'll see what's worth doing to keep it safe. Since it puts stuff on the front page of my site, I don't want it looking to strange, so if I find that anyone has been shoving ugly HTML in there, I'll probably start filtering that too so that it's just pure text. We'll see how it goes. Next task is to make it look a bit better and have a bit more functionality. And I'll have to see how it goes having part of the guestbook on the front page of the site.
9 April 2002 - Tim, a friend from work is getting married on Saturday 13th. We had a few pre-wedding drinks at Revolution, a bar in Soho. A reasonably well-behaved evening as these things go, but a good time all the same. I put together a few photos of the evening for posterity.
5 April 2002 - How bad am I at updating this site? You may have noticed problems getting to it recently, but it is now available again (obviously). I'm trying to update it, but so far I'm making a mess of it. However there should be a few new features soon. One of which might even be a guestbook that works. Due to laziness, I had previously opted to use off-the-shelf scripts for it. They didn't work, so I'm writing one myself at the moment. Though I can't work out whether to put entries in a mySQL database or whether I should just add them to a text file. Thanks to this indecision and lack of recent practice with Perl or PHP, this could take a while.